Dour.
Is the state of public intellectualism in decline, or is Posner just really smart and terribly grumpy?
The answer: a bit of the former, a lot of the latter. Anyone who watches cable news knows the punditocracy has lowered the requirements of admission, as volume has replaced reason in public debates. The proliferation of cable channels and other media outlets has created a booming need for talking heads, but these heads often fail to talk as intelligently as they should. Posner (An Affair of State, 1999, etc.) strings together a slew of charts and graphs to document empirically the decline, meticulously counting and then comparing the number of scholarly citations of a public intellectual’s works versus the number of media citations. (In a dazzling display of his math skills, Posner also asserts that U¹(t,b)–U2(t,d)=Z¹>0, but there he’s just showing off.) Of course, Posner is right in many of his assertions, especially his argument that much of the decline is due to academics who write outside of their discipline, but he’s also a bit of a crank, one not above taking a few underhanded swings at his personal foes. Sure, it might be clearly demonstrated that Camille Paglia deserves ridicule, but Martha Nussbaum? If Nussbaum represents the decline of the American intellectual, then we’re in pretty good shape. Likewise, Posner rightly savages the self-serving antics of Paul Ehrlich and Edward Said, but he tosses Lani Guinier into the mix as well, with not much of a hint as to what she did to deserve his opprobrium. To his credit, Posner does achieve a left/right balance in his attacks, positioning himself somewhat above the ideological fray, and his analyses of such figures as Stephen Jay Gould and Noam Chomsky are detailed and articulate. The jeremiad closes with a few impractical suggestions for improvement that will never be adopted. It takes the wind out of a reviewer’s sails when the author predicts one’s criticisms; predicting them, however, does not entail that he doesn’t deserve them.
Dour.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-674-00633-X
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.
Known for her often contentious perspectives, New York Times opinion writer Weiss battles societal Jewish intolerance through lucid prose and a linear playbook of remedies.
While she was vividly aware of anti-Semitism throughout her life, the reality of the problem hit home when an active shooter stormed a Pittsburgh synagogue where her family regularly met for morning services and where she became a bat mitzvah years earlier. The massacre that ensued there further spurred her outrage and passionate activism. She writes that European Jews face a three-pronged threat in contemporary society, where physical, moral, and political fears of mounting violence are putting their general safety in jeopardy. She believes that Americans live in an era when “the lunatic fringe has gone mainstream” and Jews have been forced to become “a people apart.” With palpable frustration, she adroitly assesses the origins of anti-Semitism and how its prevalence is increasing through more discreet portals such as internet self-radicalization. Furthermore, the erosion of civility and tolerance and the demonization of minorities continue via the “casual racism” of political figures like Donald Trump. Following densely political discourses on Zionism and radical Islam, the author offers a list of bullet-point solutions focused on using behavioral and personal action items—individual accountability, active involvement, building community, loving neighbors, etc.—to help stem the tide of anti-Semitism. Weiss sounds a clarion call to Jewish readers who share her growing angst as well as non-Jewish Americans who wish to arm themselves with the knowledge and intellectual tools to combat marginalization and defuse and disavow trends of dehumanizing behavior. “Call it out,” she writes. “Especially when it’s hard.” At the core of the text is the author’s concern for the health and safety of American citizens, and she encourages anyone “who loves freedom and seeks to protect it” to join with her in vigorous activism.
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-13605-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2019
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