A thoroughly researched look at how new analytical tools can help policymakers of all political stripes solve old problems.
This collection of essays, edited by Jolin and Medina, calls for the implementation of data-driven public policies.
The editors and authors of this book believe that the public’s faith in the efficacy of policymaking, both at the federal and state level, will be improved by harnessing modern data analytics. Taken together, these essays offer a counter to right-wing cynicism toward public interventions and the perception that progressives throw good money after bad within ineffective social programs. One example of effective policies cited in the book is the state of Maryland’s 2024 ENOUGH Act, which helped to streamline the distribution of nearly $50 million in childhood anti-poverty funding toward the most effective programs in the state’s system. In Ohio, state leaders harnessed data and quantitative analysis to better allocate resources related to its water infrastructure. Known as the H2Ohio initiative, the program has enabled the state to target phosphorus runoff from farms and to protect hundreds of wetlands. Mississippi’s Literacy-Based Promotion Act mandated the use of phonics-based instruction for young readers. As a result, the state improved dramatically in its scores on national reading assessments, particularly in underprivileged communities. Collectively, the essays make a robust case for the use of data to implement evidence-based policy solutions. Rather than speaking in abstract terms about this potentially esoteric topic, the authors in this collection offer tangible examples of the ways in which different states have made use of statistical analysis to shape government interventions. In some ways, this reliance on technology is nothing new in administrative governance, and some of the essays cover the degree and specificity of data that’s now available through artificial intelligence, keeping this collection up to date. The book’s bipartisan lens will help it appeal to readers regardless of their political affiliation.
A thoroughly researched look at how new analytical tools can help policymakers of all political stripes solve old problems.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2026
ISBN: 9781633311466
Page Count: 218
Publisher: Disruption Books
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“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.
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. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. 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. 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 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.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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