An eye-opening collection of thoughtful essays from a broad spectrum of young African-Americans whose economic and sociopolitical positions go against the grain of conventional liberal wisdom. Even more remarkable, there are contributions from precious few of the older guard; the exceptions: Associate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who weighs in with a rueful 1991 piece published in Policy Review and Shelby Steele (The Content of Our Character, 1990), the subject of a wide-ranging interview he granted two of the editors. In large measure, most of the more than two dozen entries represent original efforts by young academics, attorneys, business people, journalists, and legislative aides, staking out right-of-center stands on a host of issues. Cases in point range from crackdowns on crime through an end to affirmative action, lower taxes, personal initiative, religious observance, self-reliance, smaller government, and welfare reform. Without gainsaying the achievements of civil-rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., these Young Turks do not shy from taking on today's establishment and what they consider to be its insistence on entitlements, victimhood status, and the debilitating effects of institutionalized bigotry. Not too surprisingly, several contributors are at pains to link the conservative canon to the family values and sense of community that sustained African- Americans during their extended time of trial. Nor are at least two correspondents reluctant to challenge progressive positions on abortion and homosexuality. In brief, then, the editors (all affiliated with the David Institute, a California-based social-research group) offer a provocative compilation of fresh new voices that effectively puts paid to any notion that all blacks are in the ideological camps of either Louis Farrakhan or Jesse Jackson.
Pub Date: June 30, 1997
ISBN: 0-275-95342-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Praeger
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1997
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
BOOK REVIEW
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
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