In Review: Book Reviews from Dollars & Sense
Note: Not all reviews are available online.
Order back issues here.
Subscribe to the print edition.
Donate to support our work.
A Pall on Our Economy
A review of End This Depression Now!, by Paul Krugman (W.W. Norton, 2012.).
By Steven Pressman | July/August 2012
Paul Krugman’s wit, incisiveness, and uncanny ability to present economic ideas clearly have made him a public intellectual as well as a New York Times columnist.
End This Depression Now!, as Krugman freely admits, contains little that will be new to followers of his blog and his Times column. It pulls together and fleshes out many previous arguments. Its broader goal is to influence public opinion and to persuade policymakers to adopt more expansionary economic policies. A worthwhile endeavor indeed!
As we enter the sixth year of our current slump, U.S. unemployment still exceeds 8%. Brief sightings of substantial economic improvement invariably turn out to be mirages. Austerity has become fashionable throughout the world. Policymakers focus on controlling inflation, restoring business confidence, and cutting budget deficits rather than dealing with high unemployment.... Read more »
-
Torn in the USA
A review of Someplace Like America: Tales from the New Great Depression. By Dale Maharidge, with photographs by Michael S. Williamson and a foreword by Bruce Springsteen. University of California Press, 2011.
By Steven Pressman | March/April 2012
Economics is called the dismal science for good reason. But economists can be Pollyannas compared to journalists.
Someplace Like America documents the consequences of a 30-year war against average Americans. It is a powerful story of the abandonment of the American worker.
Dale Maharidge began interviewing the unemployed during the early-1980s recession. With photographer Michael Williamson, he spent time in Youngstown, Ohio, documenting its decline after the steel mills closed. They also rode the rails with hobos and interviewed homeless families living in tents throughout America. He likened their experiences to the Joads in John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath after their Oklahoma home was foreclosed on, and they headed west in search of work and the American Dream. ... Read more »
-
An Occupational Hazard
Review of Retirement Heist by Ellen E. Schultz. Portfolio/Penguin, 2011.
By Steven Pressman | January/February 2012
People involved with the movement begun by Occupy Wall Street are rightly incensed about indefensible corporate behavior. But when a writer for the Wall Street Journal gets angry about corporate malfeasance, that is man-bites-dog news.
Ellen Schultz has covered corporate pensions for the Journal since 1990. Retirement Heist replicates and extends her award-winning reportage.
The retirement crisis, as Schultz points out, has nothing to do with an aging population or poor returns on employee pension funds. Rather, the real problem is that corporations have plundered worker pensions to improve their bottom line, increase company stock prices, and boost executive pay.
In case after case, Schultz documents the many ways corporations have cut retirement benefits and movingly describes their consequences. The result is a tale of worker abuse by the top .1% (yes, Occupy Wall Street forgot the decimal point)..... Read more »
-
Goin’ for Broke
A review of Broke, USA by Gary Rivlin (New York: HarperCollins, 2010).
By Steven Pressman | January/February 2011
Gary Rivlin’s illuminating but uneven book introduces us to dozens of people who make money by lending to the poor, and to others who battle these predatory lenders.
Their stories come from dozens of interviews conducted by the author and revolve around six industries—check-cashing outlets, rent-to-own shops, pawnbrokers, payday loan stores, tax preparers offering tax refund advances, and subprime mortgage lenders. Collectively, these industries make $150 billion in revenue per year; an average low-income family spends $3,800 annually on their services, around 15% of its meager income.
Many of the individual stories are gripping and reveal the inner workings of businesses that lend to the poor. They clearly show how the enormous rewards from predatory lending inevitably lead to exploitation of the poor. ... Read more »
-
The Will to Power
A review of Power Hungry by Robert Bryce (New York: PublicAffairs, 2010) and Conquering Carbon by Felicia Jackson (London: New Holland Publishers, 2009).
By Steven Pressman | November/December 2010
As the 2007 Stern Review and many other studies make clear, few issues today are more pressing than greenhouse emissions and climate change. The Northern Hemisphere just suffered its hottest summer on record while BP decimated the Gulf of Mexico in pursuit of oil.
The two books under review here take very different approaches to this problem. One argues for natural gas and nuclear energy to support America’s appetite for power, the other for limiting energy consumption and carbon emissions using pollution permits.
Power Hungry is a frustrating book. Its tone constantly shifts from scholarly to glib. ... Read more »
-
The Fall and Rise of Hotel Worker Unionism
A review of Restoring the Power of Unions: It Takes A Movement by Julius Getman (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2010).
By Steve Early | September/October 2010
The remaking of the Hotel and Restaurant Employees (HERE) union over the past 40 years began in New Haven, Conn., where current UNITE HERE president John Wilhelm, a product of Sixties’ student activism, was fortunate to have both an unusual mentor and a faithful Boswell. In 1969, two years after graduating from Yale, Wilhelm was doing SDS-influenced community organizing in New Haven. While taking a break from his paid job as a laundry delivery driver, he noticed “a weird ad” in the newspaper. It read: “Labor leader trainee wanted, long hours, low pay, must be single.” Sorting through the few replies, including Wilhelm’s, was Vincent Sirabella, a charismatic union militant with a 9th-grade education and a passion for organizing the unorganized. Sirabella chose Wilhelm to be his apprentice HERE business agent (even though he was already married). Before accepting, Wilhelm consulted his “Movement” colleagues; they warned him that unions were “racist, misogynist, imperialist, and hopeless.” ... Read more »
-
The Underpants Gnomes of Wall Street
A review of The End of Wall Street by Roger Lowenstein (New York: Penguin Books, 2010).
By Steven Pressman | July/August 2010
In a famous South Park episode we encounter the underpants gnomes, who sneak into people’s homes and steal their underwear. This outlandish behavior follows from their simple business plan: “1: Collect Underpants, 2: ? [sic.], 3: Profit.”
As we gain perspective on the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression, store shelves abound with books seeking to explain how bankers have morphed from the conservative and prudent gnomes of Swiss legend to the underpants gnomes of South Park.
Roger Lowenstein’s contribution is good, but somewhat disappointing, especially given that his book on the rise and fall of Long Term Capital Management, When Genius Failed, has deservedly become the classic account of that episode of financial folly. He writes too little about the outright fraud committed by financial institutions, and there is nothing on the human suffering from foreclosures, unemployment, or the decimation of communities ... Read more »
-
Minding the Gap
A review of The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010).
By Steven Pressman | May/June 2010
When I began reading The Spirit Level in early 2010, large U.S. financial institutions were rewarding their senior executives with multimillion-dollar bonuses. At the same time, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that average real weekly earnings for non-supervisory workers fell 1.6% in 2009. This figure excludes the millions of Americans who lost their jobs and their weekly earnings last year. The country with the most unequal income distribution in the developed world has become even more economically polarized.
To my professional embarrassment, most economists pay scant attention to income inequality. They see each person’s income as an appropriate reward for their productive activity. They even view income inequality as healthy because it creates incentives for people to innovate, work hard, and produce more. On the other hand, government programs that seek to reduce inequality, and the progressive taxes that support them, are viewed as disincentives for citizens to be productive and successful. ... Read more »
-
The Defective Society
A review of The Economics of Integrity by Anna Bernasek (HarperCollins, 2010).
By Steven Pressman | March/April 2010
In book publishing, as in comedy, timing is of utmost importance.
John Kenneth Galbraith described his insecurities surrounding publication of The Affluent Society: “I feared it would be dismissed as another semi-socialist case for public spending.... Then in the autumn of 1957, the Soviets sent up the first Sputnik. No action was ever so admirably timed. ... I knew the book was home.”
Unfortunately, The Economics of Integrity appears amidst reports of serious defects with the brakes, accelerator pedals, and electrical system on millions of Toyotas. Since Toyota figures prominently in this book, it is likely that it will be dismissed as another case for ethical behavior. This would be too bad, because this is a very good book.
Bernasek astutely notes that economists ignore cooperation and focus mainly on choices made by individuals to enhance their own welfare. ... Read more »
-
Pillaging Villains of the Financial Crisis
A review of It Takes a Pillage: Behind the Bailouts, Bonuses and Back-room Deals from Washington to Wall Street by Nomi Prins (John Wiley & Sons, 2009).
By Steven Pressman | January/February 2010
It Takes a Pillage focuses on our current economic crisis—who to blame and how to prevent future crises. There are many people to blame.
Near the top of my list, and Prins’, is Hank Paulson, CEO of Goldman Sachs before being made Treasury Secretary by President Bush.
At Goldman and the Treasury, Paulson pushed for deregulating U.S. financial institutions. As late as the summer of 2008, he insisted that bailing out financial institutions was always a bad idea. And, oh yes, Paulson was the one who let Lehman go belly up.
Then he had a change of heart. He pressed Congress for money to bail out large financial institutions. He arranged the deal that let Bank of America buy Merrill Lynch. On the last day of the Bush administration, he gave $20 billion in TARP money to Bank of America. ... Read more »