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THE VALUE OF EVERYTHING

WHO MAKES AND WHO TAKES FROM THE REAL ECONOMY

An accessible academic treatise worth understanding.

A British economics professor is debunking again; this time, her target is the conventional wisdom that so-called wealth creators deserve to accumulate massive riches.

In the consequential battle of perception between the makers and the takers, Mazzucato (Economics of Innovation and Public Value/Univ. Coll. London; The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths, 2015) sides with the actual makers, those who struggle in an economy tilted in favor of the ultrawealthy. The author mixes easily accessible lay language with technical jargon as she constructs her case that investment bankers, multinational pharmaceutical companies, and other billion-dollar enterprises—as well as small tech startups—actually create little of societal value but reap outsized benefits. Meanwhile, laborers continue to be shortchanged. The result is widespread income inequality. As Mazzucato builds her argument, she expresses specific incredulity about the banking sector’s self-serving statements about wealth creation. As recently as the 1970s, the author maintains, economists viewed financial institutions as merely transferring existing wealth rather than creating new wealth. The shift in emphasis caught on quickly, and suddenly, bankers were perceived as wealth creators. “If we cannot differentiate value creation from value extraction,” writes the author, “it becomes nearly impossible to reward the former over the latter.” She wants to convince those in power that so-called value-creating entities should be viewed as value-extracting entities and thus regulated accordingly. When Mazzucato cites specific corporations and individuals feeding at the trough of income inequality, readers will be able to see through the abstractions and grasp the theories dividing economists. She is especially eloquent when commenting on arrogant tech-giant billionaires such as Peter Thiel, who claims that his wealth accumulation occurred in spite of, rather than because of, government presence. Mazzucato characterizes the statements of Thiel and his ilk as “entrepreneurs good, government bad.” Actually, the author argues, national, state, and local government agencies offer countless incentives to corporate employers.

An accessible academic treatise worth understanding.

Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-61039-674-5

Page Count: 384

Publisher: PublicAffairs

Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

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

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WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR

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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