Of interest to students of ethnic and economic equity and social justice.
A survey of an economy tilted strongly in favor of the ultrawealthy, who are overwhelmingly White.
For corporate America, writes civil rights attorney Freeman, the damage wrought by systemic racism is a feature, not a bug. Addressing fellow White readers, he advances the familiar but still important observation that, shielded by all manner of psychic and social defenses and avoidance strategies, that audience has trouble discussing such issues as racial inequality and White privilege: “As a result, we, as a whole, continue to demonstrate a shocking lack of awareness about the realities of racial inequality in this country.” Among the lowest of earners, as a class, are former prisoners, who are disproportionately Black and Latinx; they also make up a large percentage of those paid at “poverty or near-poverty wages,” with fewer opportunities for advancement. Freeman takes a broad view of the relevant issues: Education is a key vehicle for economic improvement, of course, and the rush to privatize schools is meant to divert tax money from public schools to private ones. “Of the fifty wealthiest individuals listed by Forbes in 2017,” he writes, “at least forty-two of them have been directly connected to school privatization efforts.” Moreover, he notes, these individuals support not just causes and organizations, but “ecosystems of organizations” whose net effect is to support White supremacy. Other elements of this unequal system are social control by policing, harsh anti-immigrant policies, and like measures. Overall, Freeman’s book is less vigorously written than Dorothy Brown’s The Whiteness of Wealth, which covers much of the same ground in a more compelling fashion. Usefully, though, Freeman closes with the provocative call to amend the Constitution to recognize rights to education, health care, equal pay for equal work, and other public goods.
Of interest to students of ethnic and economic equity and social justice.Pub Date: April 15, 2021
ISBN: 978-1501755132
Page Count: 312
Publisher: ILR Press/Cornell Univ.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.
Well-crafted memoir by the noted media mogul.
Diller’s home life as a youngster was anything but happy; as he writes early on, “The household I grew up in was perfectly dysfunctional.” His mother lived in her own world, his father was knee-deep in business deals, his brother was a heroin addict, and he tried to play by all the rules in order to allay “my fear of the consequences from my incipient homosexuality.” Somehow he fell into the orbit of show business figures like Lew Wasserman (“I was once arrested for joy-riding in Mrs. Wasserman’s Bentley”) and decided that Hollywood offered the right kind of escape. Starting in the proverbial mailroom, he worked his way up to be a junior talent agent, then scrambled up the ladder to become a high-up executive at ABC, head of Paramount and Fox, and an internet pioneer who invested in Match.com and took over a revitalized Ticketmaster. None of that ascent was easy, and Diller documents several key failures along the way, including boardroom betrayals (“What a monumental dope I’d been. They’d taken over the company—in a merger I’d created—with venality and duplicity”) and strategic missteps. It’s no news that the corporate world is rife with misbehavior, but the better part of Diller’s book is his dish on the players: He meets Jack Nicholson at the William Morris Agency, “wandering through the halls, looking for anyone who’d pay attention to him”; hangs out with Warren Beatty, ever on the make; mispronounces Barbra Streisand’s name (“her glare at me as she walked out would have fried a fish”); learns a remedy for prostatitis from Katharine Hepburn (“My father was an expert urological surgeon, and I know what I’m doing”); and much more in one of the better show-biz memoirs to appear in recent years.
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780593317877
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
SEEN & HEARD
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