This elementary guide to economics for the layperson maintains an insistently jokey style that strains to amuse but more often just lards the text with annoying verbiage. Buchholz, a member of the White House Economic Policy Council from 1989 to 1993 and now president of a consulting firm, sets out to provide an introduction to key economic concepts and thinkers. Starting with familiar subjects (the 1990 recession, inflation, government deficits, fiscal and monetary policy), he discusses the mechanisms of the free market. He then looks at some topical issues—education, environmental regulation, and health care—from an economist's viewpoint. International trade, foreign investment, and currency exchange are also covered, with a strong free-trade bias. Buchholz provides sensible but simplistic advice on personal investing and concludes with a brief history of economic thought from Adam Smith to contemporary supply-side economics. Scattered throughout are glib or unsupported statements such as: ``The Soviet Union collapsed because its rusty vicious system could not keep up with expectations for economic improvement.'' And unqualified conclusions abound: ``Smart governments know that by allowing trade, nations gently coerce their citizens to shift precious resources from low-productivity to high-productivity industries.'' Whatever useful information Buchholz does provide is smothered in deadening humor. He cannot even keep himself from calling economics the ``dismal science,'' going so far as to devote a passage to the question of whether Adam Smith himself was ``dismal.'' (Smith seems to have redeemed his humanity in Buchholz's eyes by tripping into a ``huge nauseous pool of goop'' while visiting a factory.) Like an irritating traveling companion distracting one from the scenery, this tries too hard to entertain while en route.
Pub Date: May 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-525-93902-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A deftly argued case for a new kind of socialism that, while sure to inspire controversy, bears widespread discussion.
A massive investigation of economic history in the service of proposing a political order to overcome inequality.
Readers who like their political manifestoes in manageable sizes, à la Common Sense or The Communist Manifesto, may be overwhelmed by the latest from famed French economist Piketty (Top Incomes in France in the Twentieth Century: Inequality and Redistribution, 1901-1998, 2014, etc.), but it’s a significant work. The author interrogates the principal forms of economic organization over time, from slavery to “non-European trifunctional societies,” Chinese-style communism, and “hypercapitalist” orders, in order to examine relative levels of inequality and its evolution. Each system is founded on an ideology, and “every ideology, no matter how extreme it may seem in its defense of inequality, expresses a certain idea of social justice.” In the present era, at least in the U.S., that idea of social justice would seem to be only that the big ones eat the little ones, the principal justification being that the wealthiest people became rich because they are “the most enterprising, deserving, and useful.” In fact, as Piketty demonstrates, there’s more to inequality than the mere “size of the income gap.” Contrary to hypercapitalist ideology and its defenders, the playing field is not level, the market is not self-regulating, and access is not evenly distributed. Against this, Piketty arrives at a proposed system that, among other things, would redistribute wealth across societies by heavy taxation, especially of inheritances, to create a “participatory socialism” in which power is widely shared and trade across nations is truly free. The word “socialism,” he allows, is a kind of Pandora’s box that can scare people off—and, he further acknowledges, “the Russian and Czech oligarchs who buy athletic teams and newspapers may not be the most savory characters, but the Soviet system was a nightmare and had to go.” Yet so, too, writes the author, is a capitalism that rewards so few at the expense of so many.
A deftly argued case for a new kind of socialism that, while sure to inspire controversy, bears widespread discussion.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-674-98082-2
Page Count: 976
Publisher: Belknap/Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Not only the definitive life, but a tour de force by a master.
One of history’s most prolific inventors receives his due from one of the world’s greatest biographers.
Pulitzer and National Book Award winner Morris (This Living Hand and Other Essays, 2012, etc.), who died this year, agrees that Thomas Edison (1847-1931) almost certainly said, “genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration,” and few readers of this outstanding biography will doubt that he was the quintessential workaholic. Raised in a middle-class Michigan family, Edison displayed an obsessive entrepreneurial spirit from childhood. As an adolescent, he ran a thriving business selling food and newspapers on a local railroad. Learning Morse code, he spent the Civil War as a telegrapher, impressing colleagues with his speed and superiors with his ability to improve the equipment. In 1870, he opened his own shop to produce inventions to order. By 1876, he had money to build a large laboratory in New Jersey, possibly the world’s first industrial research facility. Never a loner, Edison hired talented people to assist him. The dazzling results included the first commercially successful light bulb for which, Morris reminds readers, he invented the entire system: dynamo, wires, transformers, connections, and switches. Critics proclaim that Edison’s innovations (motion pictures, fluoroscope, rechargeable batteries, mimeograph, etc.) were merely improvements on others’ work, but this is mostly a matter of sour grapes. Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone was a clunky, short-range device until it added Edison’s carbon microphone. And his phonograph flabbergasted everyone. Humans had been making images long before Daguerre, but no one had ever reproduced sound. Morris rivetingly describes the personalities, business details, and practical uses of Edison’s inventions as well as the massive technical details of years of research and trial and error for both his triumphs and his failures. For no obvious reason, the author writes in reverse chronological order, beginning in 1920, with each of the seven following chapters backtracking a decade. It may not satisfy all readers, but it works.
Not only the definitive life, but a tour de force by a master.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9311-0
Page Count: 800
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
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