Big ideas worth attention.
Insights into two important questions: Why has the world suddenly become so wealthy, and why is there vast inequality between nations?
In 1798, Thomas Malthus wrote that when societies produced a food surplus, the rise in living standards was always temporary because the population also rose and consumed it, so living conditions reverted to the subsistence level. However, soon after his death, living standards rose steadily. Since then, life expectancy more than doubled, birth rates plummeted, and per capita income skyrocketed with no end in sight. Traditional scholarship gives the Industrial Revolution credit, but Brown University professor Galor argues persuasively that the move away from Malthusian theory had less to do with the steam engine than “human capital.” During most of history, laborers put their children to work and earned extra income, which encouraged them to have more children. Consequently, populations rose. By the 19th century, jobs often required workers who could read and calculate. Since so many people were uneducated (“literacy rates over most of human existence were insignificant”), some businesses joined the growing movement for free, compulsory, universal education. Children became human capital that increased in value as they became skilled at higher-paying jobs. With so much invested in each schoolchild, who brought in no income, parents had fewer children. When school attendance rises, fertility drops, and this is happening around the world, even in developing nations. Poverty is declining, and prosperity is increasing to the point where environmental degradation is a persistent problem. Regarding his second theme, Galor explores inequality without delivering a firm explanation of why some societies prosper. That the quarrelsome, fragmented nations of Europe led the way, while other empires stagnated, has produced a sizable amount of scholarship, to which Galor makes a modest contribution. Diversity has long been praised as a promoter of growth, profit, and creativity. The author astutely examines how it can also lead to political instability and social conflict, showing how multicultural societies that don’t work diligently to promote coexistence suffer for it.
Big ideas worth attention.Pub Date: March 22, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-18599-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
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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