Highly recommended, sobering reading for anyone interested in the economic future, for good and bad.
A gimlet-eyed look at developments in the global economy, in which interesting and sometimes ominous things are happening.
Former Economist editor Davies opens his account in Aceh, Indonesia, where, following the 2004 tsunami, devastation was met with surprising elasticity on the part of local entrepreneurs, such as one who “ignored advice to relocate away from the coast and instead returned quickly to his village to rebuild his life.” Responding immediately to disasters is a hallmark of an agile economy, and, as other economists have noted, disaster can be a strange kind of positive externality, since it provides opportunities to rebuild with newer and better methods and materials. Glasgow conversely suffered because it was slow to rebuild following World War II, like much of Britain, leading other nations to surpass it in such things as shipbuilding and making autos. Davies examines nine places that illustrate economic choices for failure or success, from the disaster economies of a Syrian refugee camp and a Louisiana prison to a modern Japanese town whose population is rapidly aging and the capital of Estonia, a nation at the forefront of modern technology. His case studies represent challenges that include natural disaster, economic inequality, and the rise of robotics and artificial intelligence and their displacement of human workers. Lessons abound, including the remarkable fairness with which Acehnese gold traders repurposed traditional methods of finance and “provided its entrepreneurs with rapid access to cash.” Contrast this with the predatory nature of the Chicago School economics visited on Chile after the military coup of 1973, with Milton Friedman et al. delighting in an experimental setting “untroubled by democracy.” Chile’s economy finally grew, becoming a success story, at a price: Inequality is extreme, and services such as health care are delivered only to those who can afford them. Davies concludes that a decade hence, given the trends he remarks on, most people on Earth will live in “an urban society that is old, technologically advanced and economically unequal.”
Highly recommended, sobering reading for anyone interested in the economic future, for good and bad.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-17048-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
Snowden’s book likely won’t change the minds of his detractors, but he makes a strong case for his efforts.
The infamous National Security Agency contractor–turned–leaker and Russian exile presents his side of the story.
Snowden opens with an argument he carries throughout the narrative: that revealing secrets of the U.S. intelligence community was an act of civic service. “I used to work for the government,” he writes, “but now I work for the public.” He adds that making that distinction “got me into a bit of trouble at the office.” That’s an understatement. A second theme, equally ubiquitous, is that the U.S. government is a willing agent of “surveillance capitalism, and the end of the Internet as I knew it.” The creative web fell, replaced by behemoths like Facebook and Google, which keep track of users’ comings and goings, eventually knowing more than we do about ourselves and using that data as a commodity to buy and sell. Corporations lust for the commercial possibilities of targeted advertising and influence-peddling. As for governments, that data is something that on-the-ground spies could never hope to amass. Snowden insists that he did not release NSA and CIA secrets willy-nilly when he leaked his trove of pilfered information (“the number of documents that I disclosed directly to the public is zero”); instead, it went to journalists who he trusted would act as filters, revealing the newsworthy to the public. Most of those secrets remain unpublicized even as Snowden also insists that he held much material back. He is good at describing the culture of the intelligence community and especially its IT staff, who hold the keys to the kingdom, with access to data that is otherwise available only to a tiny echelon of top brass. The secrets are generally safe, he writes, only because “tech people rarely, if ever, have a sense of the broader applications and policy implications of the projects to which they’re assigned." He was an exception, and therein hangs most of his tale.
Snowden’s book likely won’t change the minds of his detractors, but he makes a strong case for his efforts.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-250-23723-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
An astonishing true saga of incarceration that would have surely faced rejection if submitted as a novel on the grounds that...
A man who spent four decades in solitary confinement for a crime he did not commit tells his shocking story.
Born in 1947 in the “Negro” wing of a New Orleans hospital, Woodfox helped his family eke out survival through petty crimes. Though he showed academic potential, he left high school before graduation, spending his time on streets patrolled by mostly white police officers, who “came through our neighborhood picking up black men for standing on the corner, charging them with loitering or vagrancy, looking to meet their quota of arrests. Once in custody, who knows what charges would be put on those men.” Arrested at 18, the author entered Angola penitentiary, where his defiance and his affiliation with a nonviolent chapter of the Black Panther Party led to racist, sadistic guards targeting him. When a white prison guard was mysteriously murdered while on duty, prison officials framed Woodfox for the killing despite his detailed presentation of evidence that another inmate had committed the crime. The bulk of the book chronicles the author’s solitary confinement over the next 40 years. In many cases, inmates subjected to these brutal conditions slowly lose their sanity and sometimes commit suicide. Woodfox explains how he overcame those odds despite relentless despair. Through a series of unusual occurrences, public-interest lawyers and other prison reformers learned about his treatment. The activists began building a two-pronged case, advocating for a declaration of innocence regarding the murder and seeking an end to Woodfox’s solitary confinement. Though the author is obviously not an impartial source, that understandable bias mingles throughout the narrative with fierce intelligence and the author’s touching loyalty to fellow prisoners also being brutalized. Nearly every page of the book is depressing because of the inhumane treatment of the prisoners, which often surpasses comprehension. But it’s an important story for these times, and readers will cheer the author’s eventual re-entry into society.
An astonishing true saga of incarceration that would have surely faced rejection if submitted as a novel on the grounds that it never could happen in real life.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2908-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
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