A BOOK REVIEW BY NOVELIST GARY SHTEYNGART
Spoiler: ... a 'dull, insight-free doorstop of a book:'
Walter Isaacson’s insight-free doorstop makes at least one thing clear: the richest man in the world has a lot of growing up to do
#ElonMusk #BookReview #Muskvirus #Muskville #Billionaire #narcissist #WalterIsaacson #biography
... Walt Rostow, who was, along with Kuznets, one of the field’s most influential early thinkers, understood growth as the foundation of the postwar world order. His Stages of Economic Growth, published in 1960, was unsubtly subtitled ‘A Non-Communist Manifesto’. According to what is now called the ‘Rostovian’ account, growth wasn’t just the solution to domestic instability in advanced industrial economies and the remedy for the backwardness of ‘traditional’ (non-industrial) societies; it was also the antidote to socialism. There was no need for revolution: the managed markets of postwar capitalism would eventually, peacefully, deliver the fruits of modernisation – a non-violent, self-reinforcing alternative to expropriation and collectivisation. It wasn’t clear, however, how traditional societies would respond to the inevitable disruption associated with integration into the global economy. ‘How,’ Rostow asked, ‘should the traditional society react to the intrusion of a more advanced power: with cohesion, promptness and vigour, like the Japanese; by making a virtue of fecklessness, like the oppressed Irish of the 18th century; by slowly and reluctantly altering the traditional society, like the Chinese?’ ...
This reviews three recent books:
Tomorrow’s Economy: A Guide to Creating Healthy Green Growth
by Per Espen Stoknes.
MIT, 360 pp., £15.99, April, 978 0 262 54385 9
Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World
by Jason Hickel.
Windmill, 318 pp., £10.99, February 2021, 978 1 78609 121 5
Post Growth: Life after Capitalism
by Tim Jackson.
Polity, 228 pp., £14.99, March 2021, 978 1 5095 4252 9
The Case for Degrowth
by Giorgos Kallis, Susan Paulson, Giacomo D’Alisa and Federico Demaria.
Polity, 140 pp., £9.99, September 2020, 978 1 5095 3563 7
Archive / Paywall: https://archive.ph/2022.08.10-151410/https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n16/geoff-mann/reversing-the-freight-train
HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32416815
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n16/geoff-mann/reversing-the-freight-train
#Growth #Degrowth #LimitsToGrowth #SimonKuznets #WaltRostow #PerEspenStoknes #TimJackson #JasonHickel #GiorgosKallis #SusanPaulson #GiacomoDAlisa #FedericoDemaria #Books #BookReview #LRB #LondonReview
Going Nowhere, Slow: The Aesthetics and Politics of Depression by Mikkel Krause Frantzen
In Going Nowhere Slow, Mikkel Frantzen looks at depression not only in its personal aspect, but through the intertwining of the inside and outside. While most of the literature tends to focus on the psychological aspect, this work brings the phenomenological, and existential tradition to bear on the problem of depression. The author’s claim is that we can’t understand depression in isolation from a broader political, economic and cultural horizon. Depression is understood here as a cronopathology, a sickness of and about time. Drawing from Mark Fisher’s idea of Lost Futures, the author theorises that the increase in depression can be understood in terms of that loss. It became harder and harder for most people to imagine any hopeful version of the future.
The only antidote we have is “care”. This is not the empty meaningless ‘how are you?’ Or the vague and dumb insistence on positivity. This care is born out of understanding of the other and of the shared human predicament.
#philosophy #bookreview #mentalillness #depression #literature #books
