Both a convincing discussion and a call to reformative action for LGBT equality across economic sectors of the world.
A treatise on how restricting LGBT rights negatively impacts global economies.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Queer Action/Queer Ideas series, economics professor Badgett presents a persuasive case for LGBT rights within financial arenas and how those promote broader liberties. Drawing from a wealth of research studies, the author scrutinizes the tangible losses from unfair discriminatory practices. Her argument centers around the conviction that LGBT inclusion and unilateral equality are critical to the long-term prosperity of businesses and the economy. While LGBT discrimination erodes community morale incrementally over time, the same is true “from an economic perspective”—eventually, “it adds up.” Examining education, employment, and health care, for example, Badgett clearly outlines the tremendous humanitarian benefits of workplace equality, anti-bullying school regulations, and other initiatives that pave the way to greater economic growth, improved employee retention and productivity, diversified workforces, and a healthier populace. She describes how these ideas are already gaining momentum around the world, with global brands proudly aligning with their LGBT employees with respect to fairness practices and tolerance regulations. The author is at her analytical best in her discussions of the toll inequality takes on commerce. She shows how exclusionary practices rob businesses of vital personnel and damage reputations, citing World Bank studies, interviews, and personal anecdotes from local sources alongside countries like Canada, India, South Africa, and the Philippines. In the final chapter, Badgett offers logical action items for business leaders and prospective activists as well as for readers already involved in social reform advocacy. Though the opinions and language of economists and human rights advocates may differ, the base-line goals are inclusion and equality for the LGBT community. The author’s concise, sound arguments demonstrate why it is necessary to “expand freedom and equality” across the globe.
Both a convincing discussion and a call to reformative action for LGBT equality across economic sectors of the world.Pub Date: May 19, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8070-3560-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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
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