Tag
Economics
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The “Emotional Economy” of Parenting: A Conversation with Nina Bandelj
“I am an observer of how intellectual ideas travel and enter into everyday life, or how they come to be performed by families in ways that give those ideas a reality of their own.”
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A World of Connections and Inequality: A New History of the 19th Century
The 19th century poses special problems for historians and social scientists. If conventional views of the march of history are correct, the world should have become modern over this period. Following upon the political revolutions in France, Haiti, and North and South America and the Industrial Revolution, the 19th century should have produced a definitive…
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All Eyes On Brazil
With the 2014 FIFA World Cup now well under way, and the Olympics coming in 2016, Brazil is assuming its place on the world stage. The current tournament has generated more coverage of the country—and its far-flung corners—than ever before. Be it David Beckham’s trip into the Amazon for BBC television, or writers “slumming” it…
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Zero-Sum Urbanism
Cities are big news these days, but in different ways than they used to be, when the talk was of riots, crises, and closings. Now a surfeit of urban books chime in with words like “triumph,” “great,” and “creative” in their titles. Their authors offer up lessons to help already successful cities stay on top…
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Masters of Reinvention
For the first 40 years of his life, Albert O. Hirschman was a little-known accessory to world-historic events. Born in Berlin in 1915, he was a refugee from Nazi Germany who wound his way through Europe’s anti-fascist movements, US wartime intelligence, the Marshall Plan, a McCarthyist investigation, and the World Bank’s first foray into Third…
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RiteCheck 12
The sky is inky black when my alarm clock gongs at 5:30 a.m. By the time I’ve showered and left the house, it’s 6:20, and I hunch my shoulders against January’s cold, hurrying the two blocks from my still quiet house in Park Slope to the 7th Avenue F train stop. The bright light of…
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Hollowgram
Make a left at the corner, head down the road about six miles, make a couple of quick rights, and you’re there: the plant of Thomson-Shore, printer of Dave Eggers’s new novel, A Hologram for the King. At least, that’s where you’ll be if you start out from the spot where I am typing these…
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Virtual Panel on Chrystia Freeland’s Plutocrats
Chrystia Freeland’s Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-rich and the Fall of Everyone Else (Penguin, 2012) was published to high acclaim and controversy in the fall. At the live Public Books panel in December, Freeland joined three distinguished scholars of economic inequality to discuss the causes and consequences of the new global super-rich…
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Coming of Age on the Council Estate
In recent months, three of Britain’s most important writers have published new novels. J. K. Rowling’s earnest The Casual Vacancy, Martin Amis’s comic Lionel Asbo, and Zadie Smith’s ambitiously experimental NW differ from one another in a good many ways, but they converge in their focus on a single subject: council housing. Like public housing…
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The Alchemy of Finance
For a few years in the late 1990s, the myth of a New Economy was everywhere. The old economy, with its pesky booms and busts, was a thing of the past, replaced by a new era of infinite prosperity powered by globalization, the Internet, and—most of all—the stock market. Lured on by the promise of…
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The American Dream Outsourced: India and the Genre of Growth
For much of the twentieth century, the conjugation of “India” and “economic growth” invoked either despair or derision. The phrase “Hindu rate of growth”—coined by economist Raj Krishna to distinguish India’s nominal 3.5 percent average rate of growth between 1950 and the 1980s from that of the dynamic “tiger” economies, South Korea and Taiwan—captured both…
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Time to Occupy Silicon Valley? The New Tech Capitalists
Within 25 years, a life of “possibility,” including clean water, energy, education, information/communication, health, and freedom, will be attainable for all. So claims Abundance, a book that cites and has been glowingly reviewed by some of the most brilliant and successful science and technology entrepreneurs on the planet. And yet, in its rush to breathlessly…
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The Anti-Revolutionary Science
Speaking to Occupy Wall Street protesters at Zuccotti Park in New York City last October, the Columbia economist Jeffrey Sachs placed himself squarely on their side, saying, “You are doing a magnificent job. This is how history is made. This is how this country is going to turn. Anything I can do, I’m going to…
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The Great [National] Novel
When Capital was published in Great Britain earlier this year, it was immediately heralded as the first important novel about the recent financial crisis. And this made sense since its author, John Lanchester, had already published, in addition to three other novels, an unusually cogent account of that crisis, I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and…
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Rhythms of Risk: The Rise, Fall, and Rise of Silicon Alley
Dubbed “Silicon Alley” in the mid 1990s, New York’s tech scene at the turn of the millennium was a nexus of youth, cool, and well-paid creative jobs for geeks, artists, and writers. When it contracted, in 2002 many 20-something workers faced not only their own lay-offs, but what felt like the demise of an entire…
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Dollars and Sex
House of Holes, Nicholson Baker’s celebrated return to dirty fiction, conjures an alternate sexual universe, where a broad range of heterosexual men and women (and one detached male body part) find deep, gushing satisfaction with one another, largely unconstrained by the anxieties, frustrations, and misunderstandings that bedevil modern sexuality. Slipping out of their unfulfilling lives…
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The Rise of Finance
In a February 2011 interview, the United States Treasury secretary insisted that the future of the American economy depends upon the continued growth of its financial sector. “I don’t have any enthusiasm,” said Timothy Geithner, for “trying to shrink the relative importance of the financial system in our economy as a test of reform, because…
