Readers interested in environmental economics, inequality, and like matters will benefit from Carney’s discussion.
The U.N. Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance calls for a rethinking of capitalism “to build an economy that works for all.”
As a G-7 governor in Canada and the U.K., Carney instituted reforms that helped address the global financial meltdown of 2007 and that looked ahead at such challenges as climate change. At root, he writes, is a problem of values, that sticky realm of morality and ethics, in a time when value is perceived as determined solely by the market. Today, we live in a market society, “and this is now undermining our basic social contract of relative equality of outcomes, equality of opportunity and fairness across generations.” With that undermining and its dog-eat-dog ethos, the world has been largely unequipped to deal with the current pandemic while climate change and other crises have been fueled by a market fundamentalism that takes it as a matter of faith that markets are self-correcting, moral, and unimpeachable. This fundamentalism has expanded its reach “into spheres of life previously governed by non-market norms,” including health care, education, and criminal justice, further weakening social bonds and privileging wealth. Against this, Carney proposes an emphasis on solidarity and the enhancement of the social capital on which economic capital relies for its long-term health. The author extols corporations and leaders committed to “socially driven purpose” and urges community building and infrastructure development, including stricter regulations for carbon taxes, all overseen by the state. “Nations—not companies—must set these ground rules for markets to be fair,” he writes. It helps to have some knowledge of economics to follow the technical aspects of Carney’s argument, though it’s not a prerequisite. He writes clearly and well of the need for “a life of moral, not market, sentiments,” an argument that will send Chicago School acolytes into despair.
Readers interested in environmental economics, inequality, and like matters will benefit from Carney’s discussion.Pub Date: May 25, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5417-6870-3
Page Count: 608
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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SEEN & HEARD
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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