Sowell here fills in some of the background on ethnic groups he surveyed in his 1994 Race and Culture. Paradoxically, perhaps (because the author has seldom lacked the courage of his resolutely conservative convictions), the result wants for the impact a more rigorous analysis of its frequently fascinating anecdotal detail could have provided. While the world grows both smaller and more fragmented by the day, Sowell observes that globally dispersed ethnic groups continue to play important roles in countries foreign to their heritage. In aid of this premise, the author canvases six peoples—Germans, Japanese, Italians, Chinese, Jews, and Indians—who have made themselves commercial/cultural forces beyond their homelands. While these transnational tribes have vastly different pasts, the author (a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution) suggests they share certain adaptive attributes, including a passion for education, industriousness, family ties that bind, and a sense of mutual dependence that helps them adjust to sociopolitical or economic change without significant loss of unity. He draws largely on historical narratives and statistical data (much of which is ten or more years old). Thus, he recounts how Jews, prior to the 1948 establishment of Israel, gained an economic foothold as minority middlemen in nations throughout Europe, the Middle East, the Americas, and even Asia. At the same time, entrepreneurial Indians, unable to prosper in the subcontinent's crowded, caste-ridden milieu, flourished in the diamond trade, entertainment, finance, and high-tech enterprises that place a premium on engineering skills in venues far from the mother country. By contrast, Sowell points out, over 80 percent of 36 million overseas Chinese have made their way in Asia, closer to their ancestral homes than most expatriate groups. But Sowell reaches precious few conclusions about the implications of mankind's chronic mobility. In consequence, his fact-filled text falls well short of its potential to inform, let alone enlighten.
Pub Date: April 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-465-04588-X
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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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