A substantial analysis of the causes and failures of government functioning.
Schuck (Emeritus, Yale Univ.; Foundations of Administrative Law, 2012, etc.) undertakes “to explain and perhaps to help solve” the myriad failures of government, in which a majority of citizens have little faith or confidence.
The author's systematic and multifaceted analysis may come as a surprise to those who accept the quick answers provided by references to “political gridlock” or the “division of power.” Schuck insists that foisting blame on government often reflects a failure by citizens to acknowledge their own roles. “The public views the federal government as a chronically clumsy, ineffectual, bloated giant that cannot be counted upon to do the right thing, much less do it well.” Achieving political support to establish policies, however, will not be sufficient to make them work. Schuck delves deep into the relations among the different elements, and he points out the inability to repeal what he considers outdated, even wasteful legislation—e.g., the Merchant Marine Act of 1920 (aka, Jones Act, regulating shipping between American ports), the World War II tax subsidy to employer health insurance contributions and formula-based federal assistance to school districts. The author also dissects the widespread mismanagement of programs and duplications of effort, and he shows how the federal government has grown fivefold since the 1960s, with an attendant growth at the state and local levels. Schuck recognizes the conflicts that arise from the division of powers, but he emphasizes overlaps between the branches and the effects each has on the others. The author presents and considers a wide variety of solutions, including transformation in the political party system and constitutional-level reforms. Ultimately, he writes, “I have shown that [the] relationship between government’s ambition and its failure is grounded in an inescapable, structural condition: policy makers’ meager tools and limited understanding of the opaque, complex social world that they aim to manipulate.”
A substantial analysis of the causes and failures of government functioning.Pub Date: April 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-691-16162-4
Page Count: 488
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
A cosmic straw man is vanquished in the fight against dangerous ideals such as social justice and equality. This is not the place to look for original ideas or honest analysis. Presumably, Sowell’s (Migrations and Cultures, 1996, etc.) goal is to entertain those who share his convictions rather than convince open-minded readers, and this audience will be pleased. “Cosmic justice” is presented as a fundamental departure from the “traditional” conception of justice, which Sowell claims has the “characteristic of a process,” rather than of a particular outcome. He conveniently forgets to mention that this “tradition” dates back only to the emergence of liberal-democratic states and that contrasting notions of procedural vs. substantive justice remain the subject of lively debate. Admitting legitimate disagreement over even something as slippery as justice would soften the blows he aims at those who think inequality and any associated oppression raises concerns a just society should address, and Sowell is not one to temper a political argument simply to maintain intellectual integrity. He is not straightforwardly defending inequality, of course, but rather is pursuing the familiar strategy of attacking measures that could alleviate it. Sowell, a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, boldly asserts that those who believe equality should be pursued through public policy “assume that politicizing inequality is free of costs and dangers.” No names are mentioned, and it is indeed hard to imagine that anyone would believe there are no costs or dangers. By stating the issue in terms of extremes, however, he ducks the real issue—the challenge of weighing costs and benefits—and avoids the need for incorporating any subtlety into his discussion. Confronted with such disingenuous blather, readers may find Sowell’s criticism of others applies well to Sowell himself: “To explain the levels of dogmatism and resistance to facts found in too many writings . . . it is necessary to explore what purposes are served by these visions.”
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-86462-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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