A cleareyed exposition of an important tenet of economic thought, with all its shades of meaning.
Nuanced history of a notion that, while central dogma in economics, is in the eye of the beholder.
Through the influence of libertarians like Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman, the free market today is presumed to be self-regulating, with state interference only harming it. But as Soll, a MacArthur fellow and professor of philosophy, history, and accounting, shows in this authoritative account, this is far from the views of early proponents of the free market. Cicero, for example, believed that a free market should be the natural outcome of well-meaning, well-educated agrarians coming together to trade justly, with the state aiding the process through the guidance of wise laws. This idea carried into the early modern period by way of intermediaries such as St. Augustine, who continued to view free trade as a species of ethics. “If God helped people do good, and if by their own free will they then were pious and nonmaterialistic, their possession of money and goods could be positive,” Soll glosses, before moving on to the greatest moral economist of all, Adam Smith, who “saw the free market as the product of a peaceful and even gentlemanly process of social and economic progress.” An influential precursor to Smith, Antonio Genovesi emphasized personal integrity and public trust as determinants of the value of labor and commodities, aided again by governments that advanced trade by providing protections against criminals, building roads and harbors, and the like. Conversely, Soll argues, von Hayek considered markets to be the arena of a battle between good and evil, the latter represented by the state. Friedman, whose name is most closely associated with the free market today, agreed, though it did not stop him from supporting unfree societies such as Augusto Pinochet’s Chile. Ironically, Soll concludes in this stimulating book, China is now a leading proponent of free market ideas, even as many Western powers turn to economic nationalism.
A cleareyed exposition of an important tenet of economic thought, with all its shades of meaning.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-465-04970-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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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