A thoughtful and exacting discussion of the economic future.
Brews gives a historical account of the engines of economic productivity and delivers a prognosis regarding the future of American and global economies.
Prior to 1800, per the author, humanity suffered through “over 150,000 years of stumbling around,” making painfully slow progress toward overcoming the persistent problems of scarcity. This “millennia of human struggle” was followed by 250 years of breakneck economic gains so impressive that the living standards enjoyed by the American middle class in the mid-20th century were superior to what French nobility experienced at the end of the 18th century, a striking point made by Brews in this intellectually lively study. To anatomize these quantum leaps and better comprehend “the human struggle for productivity in all its dimensions,” the author employs an epochal mode of analysis that divides history into three eras: the Pre-Industrial Era (before 1800), the Industrial Era (1800–1950), and the Post-Industrial Era (beginning 1950). Each time period is personified by the author as a human type: Respectively, there are “failures,” “followers,” and “leaders.” The failures of the Pre-Industrial Era—in which, Brews asserts, there was virtually no progress—are largely attributed to a dearth of usable capital and freedom. The members of the subsequent Industrial Era solved these problems and made mass production and consumption possible, partly by shouldering the “deferred gratification and sacrifice” necessary for long-term investments. The Post-Industrial Era is characterized by innovation, its chief product the computer, which allowed for a sweeping transformation not only of economies, but also the very nature of work itself. However, cautions the author, there are still great challenges to progress, including mounting inequality and the considerable threat posed by global warming. These, though, are manageable menaces, Brews avers—the United States could use higher rates of taxation to redistribute wealth and curb consumption, though these shifts would require a “recalibration” of the nation’s social contract.
Brews’ empirically rigorous study deftly manages to combine a panoramic historical survey with a granular account of the machinations of productivity. While the subject matter is inherently complex and the text often technically formidable, his explanations are consistently accessible to even readers with limited backgrounds in economics. Predictions of any kind are always to be taken with a grain of salt, but the author presents his persuasively, without the grating push of dogmatic certainty. There is an astute political dimension to his analysis; for example, “As other nations join the post-industrial world, democracy’s dominance over other regime types may be where convergence occurs. All industrialized nations today are democracies, and no autocracy is yet fully industrialized. Time will tell if China or other autocracies will industrialize and remain nondemocratic.” Much of the writing on economics today falls into two categories: prohibitively dense academic studies or more popular works that indulge in extravagant simplifications and reductions. Brews’ book belongs to a rare third category: analysis that is serious without being indecipherable and that comments pragmatically on the hurdles that must be cleared for a bright future. This is a valuable contribution to the literature on productivity for experts and novices alike.
A thoughtful and exacting discussion of the economic future.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9781646871650
Page Count: 420
Publisher: Ideapress Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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