edited by Janet Byrne ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 17, 2012
An educational, highly useful primer on what’s broken and how to fix it.
A succinct body of essays by knowledgeable, sympathetic observers on the grievances of the Occupy Wall Street protestors.
Byrne (A Genius for Living: The Life of Frieda Lawrence, 1995) organizes the collection into three parts: “How We Got There,” “Where We Are Now” and “Solutions.” Economists Paul Krugman and Robin Wells give a crisp historical overview on how the excoriated “1 percent” quadrupled its real income between 1979 and 2007, leaving America as unequal as it had been on the eve of the Great Depression and unable to implement an adequate government policy because of the recent Congressional paralysis. Philip Dray reminds readers of the “enduring and seminal” legacy of protest movements preceding OWS, such as the Great Rail Strike of 1877 and the spontaneous lunch-counter sit-ins by black students in Greensboro, N.C., in 1960. Michael Hiltzik finds a good lesson in the Townsend movement of 1933, which demanded government attention to the concerns of the aged. Unsurprisingly, the machinations of Wall Street dominate many of the essays: John Cassidy delves into what was good about Wall Street (addressing the capital-raising needs of their clients) and how it went terribly dysfunctional (exploiting instantaneous trading movements), while the reform of the tax system garners vigorous responses, such as those from Peter Diamond and Emmanuel Saez. Joel Bakan severely scrutinizes the “psychopathic personhood” of corporations, and Eliot Spitzer proposes income-contingent loans for struggling students. Some of the most fleshed-out essays put the OWS protests into a wider worldwide perspective—e.g., Nouriel Roubini’s simplified economics tutorial on the toll of globalization; and Robert M. Buckley’s daring assessment of the parallels between OWS and the pan-European uprisings of 1848. Other notable contributors include Pankaj Mishra, Barbara Ehrenreich, Paul Volcker, Robert Reich, Scott Turow and Jeffrey Sachs.
An educational, highly useful primer on what’s broken and how to fix it.Pub Date: April 17, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-316-22021-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Back Bay/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2012
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by Janet Byrne
by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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by Abhijit V. Banerjee & Esther Duflo ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 12, 2019
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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