An eye-opener that will startle readers, the book offers grist for policy makers and others battling to preserve a shred of...
Turow (Communication/Univ. of Pennsylvania; Niche Envy: Marketing Discrimination in the Digital Age, 2006, etc.) warns that today’s advertising industry is secretly reshaping our world—and not for the better.
Using the Internet, writes the author, marketers and media now peek, poke, analyze and tag us, gathering data for “one of history’s most massive stealth efforts in social profiling.” Turow shows that advertiser efforts to understand consumer buying impulses now involve many digital tracking tools as well as companies like BlueKai and Rapleaf, which follow people on and across websites to learn what they care about and who their friends are. Once collected, customer information analyzed so marketers can divide people into targets and waste, writes the author. Targets are desirable consumers; waste has no value. When companies “track people without their knowledge, sell their data without letting them know what they are doing or securing their permission, and then use the data to decide which of these people are targets or waste, we have a serious social problem.” All these privacy-breaching and social-profiling activities are legal and unregulated, and all are becoming standard practice among media buyers in top advertising firms. As a result, the industry has information on the social backgrounds, locations, activities, and social relationships of hundreds of millions. Turow traces the history of advertising’s evolving relationship with the Internet, debunks arguments that the consumer is king in the new media environment and says advertisers are segregating people and customizing content on the basis of assigned reputations. The practices persist despite the fact that 79 percent of respondents in a 2005 survey said they are nervous about websites having information about them.
An eye-opener that will startle readers, the book offers grist for policy makers and others battling to preserve a shred of privacy in America.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-300-16501-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2011
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
SEEN & HEARD
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.
Known for her often contentious perspectives, New York Times opinion writer Weiss battles societal Jewish intolerance through lucid prose and a linear playbook of remedies.
While she was vividly aware of anti-Semitism throughout her life, the reality of the problem hit home when an active shooter stormed a Pittsburgh synagogue where her family regularly met for morning services and where she became a bat mitzvah years earlier. The massacre that ensued there further spurred her outrage and passionate activism. She writes that European Jews face a three-pronged threat in contemporary society, where physical, moral, and political fears of mounting violence are putting their general safety in jeopardy. She believes that Americans live in an era when “the lunatic fringe has gone mainstream” and Jews have been forced to become “a people apart.” With palpable frustration, she adroitly assesses the origins of anti-Semitism and how its prevalence is increasing through more discreet portals such as internet self-radicalization. Furthermore, the erosion of civility and tolerance and the demonization of minorities continue via the “casual racism” of political figures like Donald Trump. Following densely political discourses on Zionism and radical Islam, the author offers a list of bullet-point solutions focused on using behavioral and personal action items—individual accountability, active involvement, building community, loving neighbors, etc.—to help stem the tide of anti-Semitism. Weiss sounds a clarion call to Jewish readers who share her growing angst as well as non-Jewish Americans who wish to arm themselves with the knowledge and intellectual tools to combat marginalization and defuse and disavow trends of dehumanizing behavior. “Call it out,” she writes. “Especially when it’s hard.” At the core of the text is the author’s concern for the health and safety of American citizens, and she encourages anyone “who loves freedom and seeks to protect it” to join with her in vigorous activism.
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-13605-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2019
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