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. “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. “America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less-well, dismal.Ī thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted. 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. 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 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. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. 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. “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. Ardent trust-busters may disagree, but Aral’s arguments are clear and stimulating, and as the presidential election nears, the book could hardly be timelier.Ī useful, data-rich analysis of how we use social media-and how it uses us. For all this, Aral argues that leviathans like Facebook don’t need to be broken up but could be reined in by laws that, for example, would increase data portability and allow people to take data shared online to other networks just as they can take their phone numbers to new carriers. Anyone who cheered Twitter’s decision to label fake-news tweets should consider two facts: Such labels can also cause readers to distrust true news and create an “implied truth effect” that leads readers to believe that anything not labeled false is true. Anyone who fears that Russia might use Facebook to disrupt the 2020 presidential election, he suggests, is right to do so-but they should also worry about China and Iran. Aral also includes a fair amount of material that will hold interest mainly for marketers or other professional persuaders-e.g., “Digital ads don’t work nearly as well as they’re advertised.” The author shines, however, when he validates or challenges many popular beliefs about social media. As the author shows how social networks use “psychological, economic, and technical hooks” to lock in and manipulate people, he makes some points covered in books such as Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget. Such attention-grabbing facts abound in this survey of what the author calls “the Hype Machine,” or “the real-time communications ecosystem created by social media,” and how it is changing behavior. In 2018, Aral and two colleagues made headlines when they published a study that found that lies travel faster than truth online. The head of MIT’s Social Analytics lab warns that Facebook and other social media titans are controlling our behavior-and that breaking up the behemoths won’t solve the problem.
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