It's not easy being green but, here, Hawken (Growing a Business, 1987, etc.) proposes a utopian scheme that, for all its good intentions, could make the process even harder. Proceeding from the assumption that the environmental depredations of profit-making enterprises ``are destroying life on earth,'' the author offers grim warnings on the status quo's presumptive perils. Among other vague and unsourced claims, he asserts: ``Given current corporate practices, not one wildlife reserve, wilderness or indigenous culture will survive the global economy.'' Bolstering his worst-case scenario with evidence that's longer on anecdotal vignettes than scientific data, Hawken goes on to present a three-point program in aid of what he calls a ``restorative'' economy. Among other recommendations, he calls for eliminating waste by recycling all resources; mandating the use of solar energy over fossil fuels; and encouraging diversity. Informed by an apparent antipathy toward big business, conspicuous consumption, mass production, and other of capitalism's hallmarks, the Hawken agenda envisions some decidedly radical solutions to the problems of an advanced industrial society. Cases in point range from cutting Fortune 500 companies down to size through imposing controls on markets (which, though effective at setting prices, fail in Hawken's view to reckon costs like pollution); nurturing smaller firms with government-supplied incentives; and levying penalty taxes on, say, farmers who use chemical (as opposed to organic) means of cultivation. Nor does Hawken much care for competition (``expensive and degrading for all involved''), advocating instead an interdependent private sector ``that co- evolves with the natural and human communities it serves.'' High-minded—if sometimes highhanded—prescriptions that will appeal to Hawken's large readership—as well as to, no doubt, Chicken Littles everywhere.
Pub Date: Nov. 17, 1993
ISBN: 0-88730-655-1
Page Count: 246
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1993
Essential reading for citizens of the here and now. Other economists should marvel at how that plain language can be put to...
A French academic serves up a long, rigorous critique, dense with historical data, of American-style predatory capitalism—and offers remedies that Karl Marx might applaud.
Economist Piketty considers capital, in the monetary sense, from the vantage of what he considers the capital of the world, namely Paris; at times, his discussions of how capital works, and especially public capital, befit Locke-ian France and not Hobbesian America, a source of some controversy in the wide discussion surrounding his book. At heart, though, his argument turns on well-founded economic principles, notably r > g, meaning that the “rate of return on capital significantly exceeds the growth rate of the economy,” in Piketty’s gloss. It logically follows that when such conditions prevail, then wealth will accumulate in a few hands faster than it can be broadly distributed. By the author’s reckoning, the United States is one of the leading nations in the “high inequality” camp, though it was not always so. In the colonial era, Piketty likens the inequality quotient in New England to be about that of Scandinavia today, with few abject poor and few mega-rich. The difference is that the rich now—who are mostly the “supermanagers” of business rather than the “superstars” of sports and entertainment—have surrounded themselves with political shields that keep them safe from the specter of paying more in taxes and adding to the fund of public wealth. The author’s data is unassailable. His policy recommendations are considerably more controversial, including his call for a global tax on wealth. From start to finish, the discussion is written in plainspoken prose that, though punctuated by formulas, also draws on a wide range of cultural references.
Essential reading for citizens of the here and now. Other economists should marvel at how that plain language can be put to work explaining the most complex of ideas, foremost among them the fact that economic inequality is at an all-time high—and is only bound to grow worse.Pub Date: March 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-674-43000-6
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Belknap/Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
SEEN & HEARD
A deftly argued case for a new kind of socialism that, while sure to inspire controversy, bears widespread discussion.
A massive investigation of economic history in the service of proposing a political order to overcome inequality.
Readers who like their political manifestoes in manageable sizes, à la Common Sense or The Communist Manifesto, may be overwhelmed by the latest from famed French economist Piketty (Top Incomes in France in the Twentieth Century: Inequality and Redistribution, 1901-1998, 2014, etc.), but it’s a significant work. The author interrogates the principal forms of economic organization over time, from slavery to “non-European trifunctional societies,” Chinese-style communism, and “hypercapitalist” orders, in order to examine relative levels of inequality and its evolution. Each system is founded on an ideology, and “every ideology, no matter how extreme it may seem in its defense of inequality, expresses a certain idea of social justice.” In the present era, at least in the U.S., that idea of social justice would seem to be only that the big ones eat the little ones, the principal justification being that the wealthiest people became rich because they are “the most enterprising, deserving, and useful.” In fact, as Piketty demonstrates, there’s more to inequality than the mere “size of the income gap.” Contrary to hypercapitalist ideology and its defenders, the playing field is not level, the market is not self-regulating, and access is not evenly distributed. Against this, Piketty arrives at a proposed system that, among other things, would redistribute wealth across societies by heavy taxation, especially of inheritances, to create a “participatory socialism” in which power is widely shared and trade across nations is truly free. The word “socialism,” he allows, is a kind of Pandora’s box that can scare people off—and, he further acknowledges, “the Russian and Czech oligarchs who buy athletic teams and newspapers may not be the most savory characters, but the Soviet system was a nightmare and had to go.” Yet so, too, writes the author, is a capitalism that rewards so few at the expense of so many.
A deftly argued case for a new kind of socialism that, while sure to inspire controversy, bears widespread discussion.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-674-98082-2
Page Count: 976
Publisher: Belknap/Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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