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 Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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