Urban experts survey the crisis in our cities—in 13 essays and a series of recommendations that emphasize the interwoven destinies of city and suburb, city and nation. The text is drawn from a symposium led by Cisneros (former San Antonio mayor and now Clinton's secretary of housing and urban development), who offers an introduction. The contributors generally agree that our cities can't cope alone with the problems that have been concentrated within their borders: poverty, distressed families, unemployment, undereducation, racism, insufficient affordable housing, ghetto health statistics at Third World levels, crime, drugs, an overburdened justice system—and a consequent widespread breakdown of civility and trust. There's general recognition that federal policies since WW II have combined with other forces to drain the cities of revenue and burden them with more than their fair share of expenses—and that some adjustment, such as metropolitan-area- wide tax collection and redistribution, is necessary to redress the imbalance. The point is made repeatedly that the fortunes of metropolitan areas rise and fall with the fortunes of their central cities. Individual essays range from conservative sermonizing and civic cheerleading to a blizzard of census statistics and a community organizer's prescription for creative and realistic neighborhood advocacy as taught by the Industrial Area Foundation (founded 50 years ago by Saul Alinski). Nearly all the essays are thoughtful and authoritative. The recommendations—long on ``should's'' and short on ``how's''—are on the order of region- wide planning and taxing structures, with heavy investment in ``human capital'' (schools and job training), public transportation, and urban development. The value here isn't so much for new ideas and directions or detailed blueprints as for the informed overview and validation of the policy position: that both justice and national survival require a leveling of the playing field between ailing cities and parasitic suburbs.
Pub Date: Nov. 22, 1993
ISBN: 0-393-03571-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1993
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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