A thoughtful and exacting discussion of the economic future.
Brews gives a historical account of the engines of economic productivity and delivers a prognosis regarding the future of American and global economies.
Prior to 1800, per the author, humanity suffered through “over 150,000 years of stumbling around,” making painfully slow progress toward overcoming the persistent problems of scarcity. This “millennia of human struggle” was followed by 250 years of breakneck economic gains so impressive that the living standards enjoyed by the American middle class in the mid-20th century were superior to what French nobility experienced at the end of the 18th century, a striking point made by Brews in this intellectually lively study. To anatomize these quantum leaps and better comprehend “the human struggle for productivity in all its dimensions,” the author employs an epochal mode of analysis that divides history into three eras: the Pre-Industrial Era (before 1800), the Industrial Era (1800–1950), and the Post-Industrial Era (beginning 1950). Each time period is personified by the author as a human type: Respectively, there are “failures,” “followers,” and “leaders.” The failures of the Pre-Industrial Era—in which, Brews asserts, there was virtually no progress—are largely attributed to a dearth of usable capital and freedom. The members of the subsequent Industrial Era solved these problems and made mass production and consumption possible, partly by shouldering the “deferred gratification and sacrifice” necessary for long-term investments. The Post-Industrial Era is characterized by innovation, its chief product the computer, which allowed for a sweeping transformation not only of economies, but also the very nature of work itself. However, cautions the author, there are still great challenges to progress, including mounting inequality and the considerable threat posed by global warming. These, though, are manageable menaces, Brews avers—the United States could use higher rates of taxation to redistribute wealth and curb consumption, though these shifts would require a “recalibration” of the nation’s social contract.
Brews’ empirically rigorous study deftly manages to combine a panoramic historical survey with a granular account of the machinations of productivity. While the subject matter is inherently complex and the text often technically formidable, his explanations are consistently accessible to even readers with limited backgrounds in economics. Predictions of any kind are always to be taken with a grain of salt, but the author presents his persuasively, without the grating push of dogmatic certainty. There is an astute political dimension to his analysis; for example, “As other nations join the post-industrial world, democracy’s dominance over other regime types may be where convergence occurs. All industrialized nations today are democracies, and no autocracy is yet fully industrialized. Time will tell if China or other autocracies will industrialize and remain nondemocratic.” Much of the writing on economics today falls into two categories: prohibitively dense academic studies or more popular works that indulge in extravagant simplifications and reductions. Brews’ book belongs to a rare third category: analysis that is serious without being indecipherable and that comments pragmatically on the hurdles that must be cleared for a bright future. This is a valuable contribution to the literature on productivity for experts and novices alike.
A thoughtful and exacting discussion of the economic future.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9781646871650
Page Count: 420
Publisher: Ideapress Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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