An analytically rigorous and movingly impassioned introduction to a major national issue.
An astute study of the mounting student debt crisis in the United States, including its principal causes and possible remedies.
MacDonald, the author of Think Like a Dog(2019) and a corporate turnaround specialist, observes that the steady accumulation of student debt in America has become unsustainable. In 2018, the total amount surpassed $1.5 trillion with no signs of significant abatement. This staggering figure has caused extraordinary damage, both economically and socially. Homeownership has significantly diminished, and college graduates are putting off marriage and major purchases; they’re also seeking higher-paying jobs, which is a blow to the public-service sector. In this book, the author furnishes a meticulous and accessible account of the ballooning costs of college education, including the steep decline in government aid per student and the ever increasing budgets that are allocated to university administrators. MacDonald also ably sketches a synopsis of the history of tuition assistance from its beginnings as a function of private patronage to its transformation by the GI Bill following World War II. First-person accounts of struggles with college debt add a touching human element to his analysis by poignantly illustrating the real-world consequences of the crisis. One 18-year-old contributor tells of how the pinch of her financial aid predicament made her first week of college a “mental hell,” as her inability to pay for school made her feel “completely out of control.” MacDonald doesn’t limit his study to grim diagnoses of problems, though; he also expertly discusses the ways in which some colleges are conscientiously responding to the issue by, for example, offering no-loan financial aid packages. The author lucidly notes that the crisis is not merely a financial one, but also a societal one, in that it “limits an individual’s future choices” as well as the “availability of education as a path to a better life for many Americans.”
An analytically rigorous and movingly impassioned introduction to a major national issue.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-253-05143-1
Page Count: 262
Publisher: Indiana Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 11, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Welcome reading for anyone concerned with real rigged elections.
Tired of the lies about the 2020 election? Buckle up: Trump is just warming up, and his allies may be getting craftier.
“This is not a book about January 6, 2021. It is a book about January 6, 2025,” write legal scholars Lessig and Seligman. We are lucky, Lessig suggests, that John Eastman and his fellow plotters “picked the dumbest possible strategy for pursuing what we feared they were trying to accomplish”: namely, trying to convince Mike Pence that he had the constitutional authority to refuse to certify the results by which Joe Biden won the presidency. One might argue that the second dumbest strategy was to send an army of fascist goons to the Capitol to try to enforce Eastman’s argument. However, Lessig and Seligman argue, there are holes in the Constitution wide enough to drive a burning dumpster through, and they might allow an interested party to falsely claim victory in a closely contested race and win the election. The authors presume that any such gaming-the-system effort will come from MAGA Republicans, though they add that a Democrat could easily use the same tactics. Readers may need a law degree to follow some of the arguments, but others are quite accessible. One argument that Lessig has been mounting for some time, for instance, is that the winner-take-all method employed by most states for electoral votes needs to be replaced with an apportionment system so that the Electoral College count will align with the popular vote. On that score, the authors warn, the prospect of rogue electors—or more, rogue governors who control those electors—is very real, and numerous other threats could enable someone smarter than the last bunch to mount “a cataclysmic attack on our democracy.”
Welcome reading for anyone concerned with real rigged elections.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2024
ISBN: 9780300270792
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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