“In general…it is a healthy thing to show inequality as it exists”: a door-stopping work of economic history that does just that.
Opinion-shaking economist Piketty (Paris School of Economics) burst onto the English-reading scene in 2014 with his blockbuster book Capital in the Twenty-First Century. This predecessor volume, published in France in 2001, offers and interprets the body of evidence on which much of his argument was founded. He shows, for example, that economic inequality narrows in times of crisis and war, in some cases because states become more vigorous in collecting taxes when the coffers are empty. So it was in France in the 20th century, when incomes overall followed a non-American pattern, with greater divergence in times of peace and a lessening of gaps among the classes. As Piketty follows, exhaustively, tax records and other documents to construct a portrait of the French economy, he discerns patterns that he explicates in prose—but just as often in the form of tables, which are abundant throughout the book; fully half of the tome is given over to data-clotted appendices and other backmatter. Piketty’s prose is generally nontechnical, as when he writes, “in capitalist societies, ownership of the means of production…has always been the surest path to the possibility of attaining a very high income.” So how does one become an owner? Not just through acquiring the keys to the factory, but through stock ownership, which “helps to explain why large fortunes are usually made up of stocks.” Understanding tax regimes helps one understand the inner workings of an economy, as it is clear to see through the work, and the beneficiaries are therefore reluctant to see their tax records made public, a lesson that will not be lost on American readers living under the hyperactive inequality of the here and now.
Innumerate readers need not apply, but this book is still an essential document in following the Pikettian argument developed in later books.Pub Date: May 8, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-674-73769-3
Page Count: 1280
Publisher: Belknap/Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
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Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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“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. 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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