Contains some wishful thinking, but many readers will appreciate this admirable effort in pursuit of a more perfect union.
A call to alter the ways of governmental policymaking that hinder democracies from reaching their full potential.
It’s easy to critique the shortcomings of democratic political systems but much more challenging to offer plausible remedies. Coad admirably takes on this daunting task, though some readers might prefer to see more illustrative examples employed throughout the text. However, when Coad does provide examples, they are well-chosen and effective—in particular, the sections on climate change and oil and gas prices—and his writing style is accessible even when discussing complex economic issues. The first half of the book could serve as required reading for an advanced high school civics class or an introductory level college course in political science, where students can fill in perceived gaps by researching or extrapolating their own examples of flawed public policy strategies. The centerpiece of the text consists of 10 guiding principles for a socially efficient government “acting in the best interests of all of its citizens” and a network of governmental agencies that would rely upon trained experts in a given field to propose and evaluate legislation. In fact, Coad faults unqualified legislators for the sad state of affairs in many democratic governments: gross misconceptions, politically expedient decisions, unproductive ideological battles and political gridlock. As Coad writes: “To produce efficient policy requires a high level of expertise, which is far, far beyond the knowledge and ability of any individual voter, politician or political party.” While an emphasis on competition, efficiency, flexibility, transparency and accountability among these largely autonomous agencies sounds appealing, the possibility that truly independent experts—with reduced conflicts of interest—could collect and interpret data with fewer biases isn’t entirely convincing. Nevertheless, Coad returns to more solid ground in the three final chapters on free market capitalism, the Great Recession and social responsibility before reiterating his 10 principles in the appendix.
Contains some wishful thinking, but many readers will appreciate this admirable effort in pursuit of a more perfect union.Pub Date: Dec. 21, 2012
ISBN: 978-1480012028
Page Count: 232
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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