A conversation between two very smart people, well worth listening in on.
Noted political economist meets noted political philosopher in this discussion of inequality and its cures.
First, the good news from French political economist Piketty: Inequality is at lower levels than it was a century ago in most places. That, he hastens to add, “is less true in the US, but even in the US it is true as compared to 100 years ago.” In conversation with Sandel at the Paris School of Economics in May 2024, Piketty does most of the talking, though Sandel certainly holds his own. That conversation could not be more timely, for in it the two diagnose what led to the outcome of the 2024 presidential election: Obama’s bailout of the banks in the 2008 crash “dashed the high hopes for a revival of progressive or social democratic politics that his candidacy had inspired,” while formerly Democratic strongholds that went over to Donald Trump in 2016 did so as a measurable reaction to loss of jobs to China. The alienation of the working class remains firm. Says Piketty, “You cannot just blame the right-wing populists, blame their ‘deplorable’ voters, their deplorable leaders”: no, he holds, the Democrats abandoned their core in favor of urban elites, and the winning argument is about jobs, not identitarian politics. Sandel and Piketty kick around some interesting leveling mechanisms, including the thought that elite universities should admit top-level students into a pool from which, say, two thousand entries enter any given school by lottery, eliminating at least some built-in inequalities. Sandel goes on to note that while only some 38% of Americans have four-year college degrees, almost no one in Congress lacks one, meaning the working class is essentially unrepresented politically. They have a fix, and it’s both surprising, intriguing, and worth trying.
A conversation between two very smart people, well worth listening in on.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9781509565504
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Polity
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2025
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
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
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