by Mario Fabbri translated by Mario Fabbri , Alan Nixon ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A
The author uses bold strokes to sketch a contrarian view that lay readers will easily grasp, but economists are unlikely to...
An independent scholar critiques mainstream economics and proposes an original explanation for the rise of service-sector employment.
By “imaginary,” Fabbri (The Downfall of Nations, 2016, etc.) means “the growing part of the economic system that claims to be ‘productive’ and is not.” The “real” economy means tangible goods—agricultural and manufactured products. The text minimizes jargon and is free of mathematical formulas but contains a dozen simple graphic illustrations. The author opens with a chart showing U.S. per capita gross domestic product growing at an “incredibly stable rate of about 1.9% per year for 170 years.” Deriding economists’ “tradition of ignoring what they are unable to explain,” Fabbri devotes a third of his book to proposing psychological, sociological, and physical/time constraints that create a “speed cap for assimilating new forms of consumption.” As technology-driven productivity growth outpaces consumptive capacity and eliminates workers, society invents new, unproductive jobs for them in the imaginary economy. In the second section, the author discusses how this phenomenon operates at micro and macro levels and can stimulate or harm economic development. The final section explores how the imaginary economy produces inefficiencies and irrational thinking. Fabbri displays broad economic fluency, quoting diverse sources, including Thomas Malthus, Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek, and Paul Samuelson. He identifies the Swiss historian Simonde de Sismondi as advocating moderate economic growth 120 years before John Maynard Keynes formulated his monetary theories. Curiously, the author never mentions Allan Fisher, Colin Clark, or Jean Fourastié, pioneers of three-sector theory—economic development’s progression from raw materials to manufacturing to services. Fabbri, a gifted storyteller, advances his arguments primarily through parables. The text, translated from the Italian by the author and Nixon, reads easily. Fabbri blends logic and humor to inform and entertain. Alas, his anecdotal approach and narrative brio can carry his new conception only so far. His disdain for mathematical economics (one essay is titled “On the futile use of mathematics in economic theories”) precludes testing or proving his concept, much less developing it for predictive purposes.
The author uses bold strokes to sketch a contrarian view that lay readers will easily grasp, but economists are unlikely to embrace his ideas without more quantitative evidence.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 165
Publisher: La fabbrica delle illusioni srls
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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