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THE SUSTAINABLE ECONOMY

THE HIDDEN COSTS OF CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE PATH TO A PROSPEROUS FUTURE

Activists, students, and policymakers stand to learn much from this deep dive into environmental economics.

Devine argues that coming to grips with a changing climate involves not just environmental matters, but economic ones as well.

The problem of climate change, writes the author, is a market failure, which means that the marketplace is “not optimally allocating goods and services.” Part of the problem is that the marketplace is the arena for buying and selling, whereas the environment provides a great many of its services—the air we breathe, the fish in the sea, the sun that nourishes our crops—for free. The predatory capitalism that has emerged in recent years has made significant efforts to monetize those free services, and, as Devine acknowledges, the poor are the first to suffer from their loss. One of the central goals of the “sustainability economics” that he advocates is an equitable distribution of environmental services and greater effort on the parts of wealthy countries to assist developing nations. It helps to have a command of at least Econ 101 to follow some of Devine’s subsequent arguments, but the text is mostly accessible. Some of the articles of faith of classical capitalist economics falter when put up against this sustainability economics: The marketplace does not know everything, Devine insists, which is anathema to the libertarians in the crowd, and instead—further anathema—some of the heavy lifting in bringing equity to the marketplace and improving the environment falls on government, which, for the author, is not a word to be spat out in contempt. The principal difference between standard “neoclassical” economics and the sustainability model is that “in the former, biophysical reality gets short shrift; in the latter, biophysical reality rules.”

Activists, students, and policymakers stand to learn much from this deep dive into environmental economics.

Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-307-27717-6

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Anchor

Review Posted Online: July 15, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020

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POVERTY, BY AMERICA

A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.

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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

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THE NEW GEOGRAPHY OF JOBS

A welcome contribution from a newcomer who provides both a different view and balance in addressing one of the country's...

A fresh, provocative analysis of the debate on education and employment.

Up-and-coming economist Moretti (Economics/Univ. of California, Berkeley) takes issue with the “[w]idespread misconception…that the problem of inequality in the United States is all about the gap between the top one percent and the remaining 99 percent.” The most important aspect of inequality today, he writes, is the widening gap between the 45 million workers with college degrees and the 80 million without—a difference he claims affects every area of peoples' lives. The college-educated part of the population underpins the growth of America's economy of innovation in life sciences, information technology, media and other areas of globally leading research work. Moretti studies the relationship among geographic concentration, innovation and workplace education levels to identify the direct and indirect benefits. He shows that this clustering favors the promotion of self-feeding processes of growth, directly affecting wage levels, both in the innovative industries as well as the sectors that service them. Indirect benefits also accrue from knowledge and other spillovers, which accompany clustering in innovation hubs. Moretti presents research-based evidence supporting his view that the public and private economic benefits of education and research are such that increased federal subsidies would more than pay for themselves. The author fears the development of geographic segregation and Balkanization along education lines if these issues of long-term economic benefits are left inadequately addressed.

A welcome contribution from a newcomer who provides both a different view and balance in addressing one of the country's more profound problems.

Pub Date: May 5, 2012

ISBN: 978-0-547-75011-8

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Review Posted Online: April 3, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2012

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