As good and thoughtful a case as has been made for a US industrial policy—defined by businessman Dietrich as the state's purposeful allocation of resources to high-tech enterprises with the capacity to add substantive value. In his evenhanded, well-reasoned appraisal of America's inability to compete on equal terms with Japan in a host of basic and emergent fields, Dietrich (helmsman of a steel-processing and building-products firm in Pittsburgh) parts company with most latter-day Jeremiahs. Instead of amassing anecdotal evidence attesting to Japan's widening edge, he accepts the situation as a given and focuses on explaining its origins in cultural terms, comparing America's antistatist traditions as a constitutional democracy to the feudal heritage of an island nation that has an essentially homogeneous population and virtually no ethnic or regional strife. And Japan, Dietrich points out, also has cadres of able civil servants who are above politics and dedicated to advancing the country's interest. The author shows how these professionals (who command the greatest respect) employ a variety of public and private means to the end of making Japan the world's ranking economic power. By contrast, he observes, career bureaucrats in the US have precious little prestige, let alone authority; nor are political appointees able to accomplish much during their typically brief tenures. Unfortunately, Dietrich concludes, America can no longer afford its instinctive commitment to free markets and free trade, much less unfettered individualism. Indeed, he argues, the US should take its economic conflicts with Japan at least as seriously as the erstwhile cold war with the Soviet bloc. If it fails to meet this challenge, the nation risks losing significant measures of autonomy not only to Japan but also to other East Asian and European countries that have embraced the statist approach. Although less than hopeful about any immediate or meaningful change, Dietrich proposes systemic reforms that would commit the US to a coherent as well as comprehensive economic strategy. A no-nonsense audit that puts a consequential dilemma in disturbing perspective.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1991
ISBN: 0-271-00765-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1991
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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