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. Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less-well, dismal.Ī neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer. 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. The magnum opus of America's magnificent reptile. Louisiana then gave the Society two thousand alligators on the hoof (and in the marsh) that took Society personnel three years to transplant to adjoining states. When Louisiana decided to allow a limited hunting season on alligators (they had become so numerous they were turning up at golf courses, car washes, swimming pools, and carports), the Audubon Society responded with nationally publicized outrage. Glasgow's well-told account of the 40-year controversy about the protection of alligators is filled with delicious anecdotes. After the Civil War, he tells us, alligators became a symbol of the Deep South, appearing on the official seal of New Orleans, proliferating by the thousands in roadside gator farms and wrestling exhibitions from Florida to Louisiana, and becoming common town-pets-such as ``Old Hardhide,'' who lived in a caged pool in the center of Ponchatoula, Louisiana, for 21 years. Glasgow (curator, Louisiana State Museum) traces years of alligator mythology in 19th-century French romances, Victorian poetry, Mark Twain's tall tales, and the stories of Joel Chandler Harris. When early explorers came to the Gulf Coast, they found the natives not only worshiping the alligator (a 700-foot-long effigy still exists at Grand Lake, Louisiana) but eating alligator meat with relish-a custom taken up by Acadians arriving in the 1760's, who fixed ``cocodrie'' into soups, and continued today as a gourmet delicacy (by 1984 the meat became more valuable than the hides). Marvelously entertaining account of the natural history of the American alligator, and of the worship, medicine, commerce, and art it has inspired.
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