An impassioned call to all Americans to fight for equal representation.
In our endangered democracy, the nation’s citizens deserve to be heard.
In his latest critique of American democracy, Lessig (Law and Leadership/Harvard Law School; Fidelity and Constraint: How the Supreme Court Has Read the American Constitution, 2019, etc.), host of the podcast Another Way and co-founder of Creative Commons, focuses on a crisis that he sees as “much more fundamental” than the current president: “unrepresentativeness.” This lack of representation has several causes: the structure of the Senate, with two representatives from every state, no matter the population; the winner-take-all system in the Electoral College, which negates the choice of many voters and impels candidates to focus on swing states; campaign funding that gives wealthy contributors hefty influence; gerrymandering, which usually benefits extremists of both parties; and voters who lack a shared reality and “are divided and ignorant (at least about the other side) and driven to even more division and ignorance” by media that seek to make profits rather than to inform. “The consequence together is thus not a democracy that always bends to the rich,” Lessig argues persuasively. “It is a democracy that cannot bend, or function.” The author’s many proposals to improve representation are less convincing than his analysis of problems. His suggestions range from giving every citizen “speech credits” or “democracy coupons” to fund political campaigns to paying voters to watch long, “wonderful and hilarious” political ads. Lessig deems the Senate “the hardest circle to square,” admitting that some of his ideas—reforming the filibuster and allocating votes for leadership based on population—are unlikely to happen. As far as the Electoral College, the author advocates that states’ electors should reflect the national popular vote; or, if not, then Congress should allow electors to cast fractional votes. To engage the electorate, Lessig proposes “a congressional jury” made up of randomly chosen citizens to examine both sides of a public issue and make recommendations that, he asserts, a congressman would be morally bound to consider.
An impassioned call to all Americans to fight for equal representation.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-294571-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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