A well-reasoned, evenhanded account of the cost we’ve paid at home for chasing terrorists abroad.
The war on terror comes home to roost.
Beck was 14 when the Twin Towers collapsed in 2001, an event that his Philadelphia school’s administrators overlooked in the interest of pursuing a regular learning day of quizzes and lectures. Once home, he was bombarded, like everyone else, with images of “the most visually spectacular attack in the history of armed conflict.” Soon enough, the country mostly united in its resolve to hunt down the terrorists, the images would grow more obscure, and “the war grew difficult to see.” By Beck’s account, the global war on terror has proven at every point an unwinnable boondoggle with numerous ill effects, not least the rise of the security state in the U.S. A case in point, Beck writes, is the new World Trade Center, built atop the ashes of the old one, “a dead zone” of “bollards, surveillance booths, and sally ports” that, while impeding the heavy foot traffic of the old WTC, does nothing to protect the place against a committed suicide bomber. The post-9/11 militarism that swept America, Beck conjectures, “did nothing to make people safer, and it didn’t make people feel safer, either.” Indeed, the gloomy pallor of paranoia was perfectly in keeping with an ever more unequal economy and the renewal of the 1960s-era culture wars, with anyone who dared question American policy canceled, from Susan Sontag to Bill Maher to the Dixie Chicks. Beck makes some long reaches that turn out to be quite reasonable, upon further reflection. For one, is it any surprise that social media corporations should join the security state in furthering technologies meant to aid in “knowing as much as possible about as many people as possible following September 11”?
A well-reasoned, evenhanded account of the cost we’ve paid at home for chasing terrorists abroad.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9780593240229
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
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 clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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