Gassy and patronizing. OK, boomer.
An examination of “the largest flow of generational capital ever seen in the history of humanity.”
It turns out that millennials and Gen Z are not “entitled, ungrateful, impatient good-for-nothings who complain about everything.” According to Costa, a former chairman of UBS Investment Bank, “at heart, [they’re] a deeply prophetic generation, willing to scrutinize every angle of the prism of society and call out a future that is not yet realized.” But, with the titular event looming as baby boomers age, the youngsters must be carefully mentored so that when they “inherit the financial world [they may] treat that responsibility in a grown-up way.” Adopting the portmanteau Zennial to describe both generations together, Costa alternately reassures his fellow boomers that their successors aren’t all that bad—in fact, “many…are ‘grown up’ ”—and warns them that if they don’t start engaging productively with Zennials, “capitalism dies.” While the author accepts responsibility on behalf of his generation for the “bad hand” Zennials find themselves holding, his ability to see beyond the financial sphere is limited; he lays at young people’s feet “what we’ve seen happen socially, good and bad, in the 2010s and 2020s.” What about Brexit and Trumpism? Writing to a presumed audience of “intellectually privileged” boomer peers, Costa seems unaware that even as he calls for “a world in which boomers don’t patronize Zennials,” he models exactly that throughout. The author is short on analysis and long on buzzwords. Repeatedly, we learn that the future of capitalism rests on the fusion of “Boomer hindsight [and] Zennial insight.” Costa is also weak on strategy, as he offers no concrete tools for managing the $100 trillion transfer. He does offer up “a new way of working [called] CO,” or “a shift from me to we,” gesturing at length and with much repetition to the promise of intergenerational collaboration.
Gassy and patronizing. OK, boomer.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781399407632
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Bloomsbury Continuum
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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