Gates’s writing is strong–hopefully he’ll apply himself more seriously to his next subject.
Gates elaborates upon the age-old advice of parents to children–get a job–in this winsome if somewhat desultory treatise on political economy.
Regretting his youthful disdain for work and money, here the author makes a case for both. Hunter-gatherers and farmers, he notes, can hardly avoid the consequences of idleness, which leads quickly to starvation. Economies inevitably develop and diversify, a growing division of labor requires the performance of specialized tasks and trade for the necessities of life, and money replaces self-evident use value with mysterious exchange value. Gates extols the usefulness of money as a medium of exchange, appreciates the modern consumer cornucopia and, on a basic Darwinian note, explains that “those who adopted industry had better ‘reproductive success.’” He also appraises the discontents of work life. People often feel that their identities are bound up in their work, he observes, but they also feel alienated from their apparently pointless jobs as cogs in the corporate machine. Rising salaries don’t seem to bring more happiness either; the careerist rat race for wealth and status is unhealthy and leaves little time for family or personal fulfillment. The author offers his own resumé as a compromise solution: refusing promotion offers, he has settled on “a dead-end data entry job and part-time waitering,” which feeds the kids and leaves room for family, books on tape and other pursuits. Gates is an engaging if slightly aimless writer, citing Plato and Marx one minute and tossing out budget and investment tips the next. His Stoic combination of pragmatism and renunciation ultimately strikes a chord. His defense of remunerative employment makes the book a great graduation present from anxious parents to slacker offspring, while his defense of untaxing, ambitionless employment makes it a good graduation present from slacker offspring to anxious parents.
Gates’s writing is strong–hopefully he’ll apply himself more seriously to his next subject.Pub Date: March 31, 2005
ISBN: 1-933037-60-1
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
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
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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