Rescue: From Global Crisis to a Better World

by Ian Goldin

An optimistic vision of the future after Covid-19 by a leading professor of globalisation at the University of Oxford.

Covid-19 left us at a crossroads: should we go back to 'normal', or use the lessons learned during the pandemic to shape a new society?

But what does life after a pandemic look like, and how do we build a better, more hopeful future?

Ian Goldin, Professor of Development and Globalisation at the University of Oxford, provides an urgently needed roadmap that reveals how the pandemic could lead to a better world: from globalisation to the future of jobs, income inequality, and climate change.

Rescue is a bold call for an optimistic future and one we all have the power to create.

Genres: Nonfiction, Science, Economics

321 pages, Hardcover

Published May 1, 2021

About the author

Ian Goldin is a professor at the University of Oxford in England. He took up his most recent position as director of Oxford Martin School at the University of Oxford, in September 2006. He is the Oxford University Professor of Globalisation and Development, and holds a professorial fellowship at Balliol College, Oxford.

Reviews

[Nathan Tooley · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this book, Goldin is in no doubt about how to solve the world's economic problems. For him, Robin Hood was an amateur, and played only small stakes. Goldin, on the other hand, plays big. Both he and Robin Hood believe that taking from the rich and giving to the poor is an axiom of their approaches to global economics, but unlike the low-level robbing hood of Sherwood Forest Goldin prefers to think in terms of trillions of dollars.

In support of his proposals for taxing the hell out of people who work - for present purposes let's call them "perpetrators" - and giving their wealth to those who either don't or won't work - let's call them "victims" - Goldin marshals the kind of evidence one would expect of a Guardian journalist rather than an Oxbridge university professor. That is to say, if there's an economic problem then we should simply cherchez le financier to find the problem. Capitalism MUST be at the heart of the world's problems, the journalist might say. One would hope that an Oxford professor might have more to say than this.

Thus in Chapter One in a sub-section entitled "Taxes and Benefits Reduce Inequality" one might expect Goldin, as a prominent academic, to offer some new insights into the decades-old - and often very sophisticated - economic debates over redistributive policies and tax rates and their impact on productivity and employment, and on other fairly important elements in the global economy. But no. Goldin chooses instead to pick up on, and simply reproduce, social media gossip, and without any interrogation.

One example used by Goldin is Guardian columnist Robert Reich's bizarre suggestion on Twitter that : "Jeff Bezos could give every Amazon employee $105,000 and still be as rich as he was before the pandemic..." Thus Goldin, instead of offering Reich an Economics 101 lesson, simply reproduces the sentiment. And he does so in all seriousness! Here was an opportunity for him to enlighten both Reich and his own readers on how value does not reside simply in a dollar amount declared in Amazon's financial statements or in assumptions drawn from a perusal of Bezos's tax returns. Value is a function of stock purchases and sentiment and confidence and investment-fund purchases and capital gains and sales. This would include sales that would have an impact on pensions and retirement plans of other non-Amazon workers via their retirement fund's asset managers' previous canny purchases of Amazon stock). If Bezos were to do as Reich and Goldin suggest, and distribute billions in gifts to his employees, with the resulting collapse of Amazon's share price and the loss of billions of dollars in value, Bezos would probably be fired by his own Board for idiocy. This is all quite apart from the simple fact that Bezos is not sitting at home on top of a very large pile of cash. His net worth is calculated in relation to a vast and intricate network of assets and instruments and future values and present values and internal rates of return, not to mention one or two investments in market-sensitive equities.

Goldin's opportunity to provide a lesson in economics here is abandoned in favour of simply repeating a twitter-gossip undergraduate comment. This is deeply disappointing. And such examples permeate this book.

Goldin's text relies very heavily on footnotes tracking what The Guardian and New York Times and other like-minded mainstream journalists have purportedly "found" to support their contention that global capitalism sets out with a simple mission: to crush the poor - including those poor who are enjoying the lavish pleasures of ivy-league-quality full-time education. For an Oxbridge academic writing a book with the portentous title Rescue: From Global Crisis to a Better World one would expect some serious and detailed and in-depth ACADEMIC research, rather than casual invocations of anecdotes and questionable data from cub reporters on the ground (or, more likely, at their desks), and from spurious quantitative "studies" devoid of multivariate analysis.

There are many other examples of this sloppiness in research, but let's take just one more as illustrative.

In Chapter 2, in the sub-section entitled "Prospects for Youth", Goldin bewails the catastrophic economic prospects of the new generation, bringing into play the plight of students carrying student-loan debts and unable to find employment (read: 'the kind of employment they think they are entitled to'). In return for the privilege of studying at elite universities - studying one's preferred discipline, whether it be gender studies or post-colonial studies or critical race theory or (in rare cases) STEM subjects - many students enter the job market knowing that they carry a student-loan debt equivalent to a home mortgage. Now few people would simplistically dismiss this plight as merely the plight of the privileged: it is actually a very real concern for the individuals involved. Some of them try to manage the problem in advance of graduation by seeking - while they are still students - part-time work, or work-experience that will contribute to their biographical resumes and help them market their skills and experience to prospective employers when they graduate from college. Good for them. Other students either don't choose to seek such employment or summer work-experience, or are unfortunate enough to fail in securing such work or experience - so they have to carry the burden and hope they can find employment upon graduation. Goldin proclaims the difficulties - including the suggestion that the unacceptable wealth of perpetrators like Bezos is the primary cause of pain and suffering and impoverishment among victims. But he does not do so on the basis of researched evidence and analysis. Instead, he gives us a few examples such as this one:

"One of those who felt fortunate to find a job was Mariel Sander, who graduated from Columbia University, New York, without enjoying the celebratory rites of passage, as the pandemic reached its peak in May 2020. The only job she could find was as a temporary morgue worker, helping carry dead bodies off hospital beds into refrigerated trailers."

This is sloppy reportage of the facts. And it is a significant distortion of truth in order to fabricate an argument more generally about dispossessed students. The real Mariel Sander did not find, after graduation, that the "only job she could find was as a temporary morgue worker". On the contrary, Sander was one of those enterprising students who - not yet graduated- decided that instead of spending her final weeks at Columbia University "going to parties, taking a modern dance class and road-tripping over spring break", to rather exercise her social conscience and add to her biographical resume an impressive stint as a volunteer worker in a morgue. This was work that was both philanthropically motivated (aiding hospitals during the pandemic) and remunerative at $25 an hour, and - above all - of significant relevance to her subsequent career. Her neuroscience and English majors equipped her for her current high profile in the workplace (a google search provides ample information about her current important work and her considerable talent) - a profile that owes a great deal to the publicity from her work experience in the morgue (in collaboration with the The New York Times she published a diary of that work during May 2020: https://tinyurl.com/u2dwk7w6 Sander graduated only AFTER that experience, so Goldin's suggestion that this menial labour was the only work she could find after graduating is disingenuous, to say the least.

The entire book reflects this kind of sloppy research and reporting, with many examples of arguments that suggest the main source of research material for the book was Twitter or The New York Times or The Guardian or other mainstream media journalists obsessed with the perceived unfairness of entrepreneurial wealth and the perceived victimisation of those who have not created wealth.

A topic as important as this requires more than mere undergraduate sloganeering about the evils of capitalism and the need for massive distribution of wealth from those who create it to those who don't have it.

[Arthur Holmes · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good reference material and packed full of evidence of the impact of the pandemic, but there is no analysis beyond surface level description of what “must be done” to improve the post-pandemic world. Pages are spent providing background of certain phenomena (one example being 3 pages spent explaining why people live cities) with only one or two lines spent on what to do about the changes. The evidence is also almost totally Atlantic-centric, with stories from Europe, the UK and the US dominating discussion. For an expert on globalisation I expected more than just passing reference to the ‘global south’. The Parliamentary Labour Party tactic of telling stories of individuals’ plights is also grinding at times, even if I agree that more needs to be done in academia to link theoretical concepts to everyday experience. I do think he is generally correct in the direction of his thinking, and he’s collaborated a great deal of evidence of certain trends, but it’s not exactly the blueprint for a brighter future that it sells itself as.

[Linda Dyer · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've seen the decline in demand for office space in the desert, and in Europe. What used to be bustling down town Pasadena, and Riverside, more in California and big cities of Europe too. Poor workers remain locked into living in the inner city and so low cost housing looks like it'll take the place of office buildings that used to pay landlords higher rents. Rescuing cities is essential if our economies and societies are to thrive. Goldin writes that apathy and individualism allow our politics and social media to be overrun by populists, angry extremists, fake new and bad ideas. The pandemic has shown that competence in leadership and government matters. That international institutions matter. The richest countries with the most sophisticated expertise have been overwhelmed by the virus and much poorer ones with little expertise have been able to fight back.

Adrianna Huffington captions that it is, “essential reading”. I think that ngry populists won’t put up with reading this thinking. Goldin is Prof of Globalisation and Development at the U of Oxford,
and he writes from the perspective of England (Boris Johnson’s), and it parallels home (Trump's) closely.

[Sonja van der Westhuizen | West Words]

Ian Goldin believes we are at a crossroads and Covid created the perfect opportunity for the world to reassess the way we do things and to adapt accordingly. Goldin is a Professor of Globalisation and Development at Oxford University and therefore no better person to facilitate this discussion. Will we continue what we’ve been doing for decades, facing more and more crises, whether environmental or health or will we see the light and use this opportunity to create a better world?

Full review: https://westwordsreviews.wordpress.co...

[Rufus Gould · Rating 2 out of 5]

Covid recovery expectation.

A lot of facts and figures to start.
Doesn’t really go into much detail about recommendations

Repetitive