A well-researched, engaging economic history of pandemics.
The intersection of pandemics and economics across world history is explored in this nonfiction book.
A former soldier assigned to the United States Army’s 485th Preventative Medicine Unit, co-author Kotok notes in the book’s introduction that “disease has killed more soldiers throughout all wars than swords, arrows, bullets, and bombs have.” Following the example of United States generals from George Washington to Dwight Eisenhower, who emphasized the long-term threat of disease to national security, Kotok has spent decades studying the economic impact of pandemics throughout history. Inspired by a 2020 research study released by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco (a document cited heavily throughout this work) in the wake of Covid-19, Kotok and his co-authors Englund, Erwin, and Sweet offer a timely, well-researched economic history of pandemics. Divided into five parts, the book begins with an assessment of the Federal Reserve’s response to Covid-19 before transitioning into a lengthier exploration of pandemics across history. The second section offers chapter-length historical overviews of seven pandemics, from the Bronze Age and Roman Antonine Plague through the Black Death of the Middle Ages. Part three transitions to the 20th century, with a particular emphasis on the Federal Reserve’s response to the influenza pandemics of 1918 and 1957. Parts four and five focus on Covid-19, providing readers with in-depth, data-driven analysis of the pandemic’s impact on labor, productivity, and other key economic measures. These sections also discuss the impact of stimulus assistance, which the authors suggest “cushioned the shock” to the economy while noting that the initial round of stimulus mostly tended to help larger businesses. “We are still seeing lingering impacts of the pandemic,” the authors assert from the vantage of 2025, highlighting Covid-19’s connection to inflation, the decline of small businesses, and impact on skilled workers.
While written by a team of economic scholars who emphasize the hard, quantitative data at the center of their research, the work highlights the human toll of the disease. Dedicated to both frontline healthcare professionals as well as Federal Reserve employees, the book reflects the humanistic belief that the economy exists to serve people—the authors observe that any “economy and its financial market function best when market agents are not sick and do not have disease risk on their minds.” This empathetic perspective, in addition to the erudite economic analysis and engaging historical overview, makes this an accessible work for a wide audience. The author of four previous economic books, Kotok here collaborates with Englund (chief economist for Action Economics, LLC), Erwin (a budding historian), and Sweet (a veteran copy editor in the financial industry), whose combined strengths make for an impressively interdisciplinary work backed by a myriad of scholarly footnotes (the authors are careful to moderate their analysis with dozens of full-color charts, photograph, historical art, and other visual elements found throughout the work). Englund contributes a concluding “Chart Book” that provides readers with an eye-opening visual study of Covid-19’s impact on housing, factory output, and household incomes, among other economic indicators.
A well-researched, engaging economic history of pandemics.Pub Date: Dec. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9798989362523
Page Count: 552
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Jan. 31, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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
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