A fresh look at some of the mostly deeply held dogmas of economics, exploding many along the way.
A skillfully conducted tour of the role of price, once unmoored from reality, in adding chaos to an already chaotic world.
According to the efficient-market hypothesis, “the taken-for-granted orthodoxy of the economics profession,” the market will sort things out when it comes to setting prices, thanks to the ebb and flow of supply and demand, and prices themselves represent a gathering of bits of information “that create a spontaneous order all around us.” Yet, writes sociologist Russell, even as we live in a world governed by prices, this spontaneous order often dissolves into disorder. Part of the problem lies in the workings of modern “global finance capitalism,” in which prices are a function of the futures market—and those futures are now functions of derivatives, which dissolve the link between prices and real goods and instead trade in intangibles. The author begins with the example of bread, the price of which can be closely indexed to social chaos in places like 18th-century France—“in the eighty years before the Revolution, twenty-one were rocked by bread riots”—and the modern Middle East, with Egypt being both a leading importer of wheat and a polity unnaturally susceptible to spikes in bread prices and resulting social problems. Russell goes on to closely examine the dangers of speculation. Consider this curious case: Thanks to overly sensitive algorithms, with any news concerning the actress Anne Hathaway, the trading firm Berkshire Hathaway enjoys gains or suffers losses. Countries that are resource-rich are similarly blessed or cursed. “Oil-exporting countries are twice as likely to have outbreaks of civil war,” Russell writes, and when you peg the entire economy on the price of a barrel of oil, when prices fall, you get disasters such as Venezuela, “an allegedly socialist state that has its people living as pure market beings.”
A fresh look at some of the mostly deeply held dogmas of economics, exploding many along the way.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-385-54585-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2021
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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