A polemic aimed at what conservative economist and author Sowell (Hoover Institution, Ethnic America, The Economics and Politics of Peace) calls the "civil rights vision." The original intention of civil rights legislation, Sowell says, was to guarantee equality of opportunity; but the civil rights establishment, made up of an elite looking for more work, has extended and twisted that intention in the direction of equality of outcome. When civil rights advocates look at statistics showing income-disparities or under-representation in jobs, they immediately assume discrimination is the cause and turn to affirmative action, or some other adjustment, to redress the wrong. In rebuttal, Sowell presents a barrage of statistics and arguments to show that disparities can have complex causes. If blacks are discriminated against because of color, then why do West Indian blacks earn 94 percent of the national average, while blacks generally earn only 62 percent as much? Sowell settles on cultural factors, though he doesn't say what they might be; typically, he just mentions other "likely" explanations, such as selective migration—claiming that the only important point is that color isn't all-decisive. This example, familiar to readers of his books, shows Sowell's readiness to play fast-and-loose with numbers. Another typical argument follows: if discrimination is the cause of economic inequality, then how explain the economic advances of victimized overseas Chinese? The economic status of women, Sowell argues, follows from their tendency to go into publishing or teaching rather than law or hard sciences—because, with an eye on childbirth, they have to plan their careers around periods of inactivity. It's a familiar polemical tactic to set up a monolithic opponent, and then offer a series of discrete arguments to fragment the opposition. That's what Sowell does here, and it's fair to say that he makes no attempt to figure out what his absent straw-man would say in response. In a final chapter, however, Sowell responds to his critics in a very personal and emotional way: he didn't just make use of his race for advancement, then turn his back on his fellow-blacks. Against charges that he relies on principles of innate racial inferiority, he answers that he stresses complexity. (As the examples above show, his cultural approach can easily be confused with the innate view.) And, while he labels his opponents elitists who seek government programs to advance their own interests, Sowell manages elitist snipes of his own—like this double whammy: one critic is disparaged as "a professor of education" (one) at an "undistinguished university" (two). No surprises here, but Sowell's skin is thinning.
Pub Date: April 18, 1984
ISBN: 0688062695
Page Count: 158
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1984
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
SEEN & HEARD
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