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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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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