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NATURE, CULTURE, AND INEQUALITY
A COMPARATIVE AND HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
A readable introduction to Piketty’s worldview.
A review of global inequalities of income and wealth and the factors that might reduce them.
In this slim volume, based on a 2022 lecture at the Musée du Quai Branly—Jacques Chirac in Paris, the acclaimed French economist Piketty, best known for Capital in the Twenty-First Century, draws on previous research and writings to sketch his understanding of the political underpinnings of social and economic inequality and its variations historically and across countries. Although the data show a “tendency toward greater social equality” since the late 18th century, a slowing of that trend has occurred since the late 20th century. These movements are neither inevitable nor simply a matter of personal talents or economics. Rather, reductions in inequality directly relate to political culture and, specifically, collective political mobilizations that pressure national governments to institute progressive taxation, fund education open to all social groups, and encourage both participatory governance and worker involvement in corporate governance. In presenting his argument, Piketty includes historical material from France, Sweden, other parts of Western Europe, and the U.S., and he briefly comments on gender inequality, colonial and war debt, the rise of the welfare state, and climate change. Readers familiar with the author’s earlier work will find little that is new. The book is a synthesis, as Piketty meanders from topic to topic while only briefly digging into each. Moreover, contrary to the title, the author writes little about nature and culture. Regarding nature, Piketty points to the unequal global and class responsibility for carbon emissions and suggests, equivocally, that the problems of climate change eventually “may lead to a greater demand for equality than we’ve recently seen.” As for culture, it surfaces only as a way to differentiate political systems that harbor different clusters of individualistic and collective values.
A readable introduction to Piketty’s worldview.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9781635424560
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2024
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POVERTY, BY AMERICA
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
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PERSPECTIVES
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SEEN & HEARD
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WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR
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
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