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 clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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