Evil Genius (book series) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The Evil Genius book series is a collection of paperback publications published by McGraw-Hill / TAB Electronics. CHECK OUT OUR schedule. You Can't Spell America Without Me & Hasta La Vista, America. The seeds of Trump's defeat which had much to do with the pandemic and its sobering effects are well laid out in the introduction and conclusion. "[6] Kirkus Reviews calls it "A rousing call for desperately needed systemic transformation. A huge, secure, and contented middle class emerged. Anyway, about the book . It entered The New York Times Best Seller list for nonfiction at number 7, the Washington Post list at number 9, and the Los Angeles Times list at number 5. A 1998 proposal was written by the American Petroleum Institute to promote scientific uncertainty on climate change, followed by a 2002 memo by Frank Luntz that encouraged increasing climate-change-denial propaganda and recommended using climate change rather than global warming. Back. A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality study guides that feature detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, quotes, and essay topics. Fails to take a stand. Kurt Andersen ("Fantasyland," Spy Magazine, etc.) Well, as if we thought “next week can’t be any worse”, the sedition and treason of this past week has pushed the GOP from the crazed wilds of Fantasyland into the dark recesses of Insanityland. Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, "another illustration of how thoroughly the right's ideas became the governing consensus and how liberals fell down on the job by accepting—or at least not forthrightly rejecting—the instinct to blame the losers, in our extreme free-market society, for being losers, and by disclaiming social responsibility for properly helping them." FORMAT. What happens to the GOP now will remain to be seen. "[10], Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), "Hardcover Nonfiction Books - Best Sellers", "Bestsellers: The latest list from the American Booksellers Association", "Kurt Andersen Asks: What Is the Future of America? These people are truly evil and are ruled by money. He also writes for television, film, and the stage. by Kurt Andersen ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 11, 2020. … Start by marking “Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America” as Want to Read: Error rating book. The top income tax rate went from 70% to 50% in 1982, then to 38.5%, then to 28% in 1986. As EG eyes the future, our commitment to excellence will drive our continued dominance across elite gaming as we attract top talent and steadfast partnerships. Read this and learn. Reset. The main subject of the book is the excessive power granted to big business starting in the 1970s. The book provides detailed information on free-market political economics in America and the many evil geniuses that made it happen. . Our country would benefit immensely if everyone read this book. The mid-1970s are America's peak of economic quality with the national consensus still expecting the government to act on behalf of the public good. Andersen compares General Motors and AT&T in 1962 with Apple and Google in 2020: the former employed more than a million people, while the latter with revenues and profit margins twice as high employ only a quarter-million people. Usual wonderful analysis of what is going on currently and how we got here economically. I recently read a book on the morality of fossil fuels that denied the existence of catastrophic climate change and argued for increased use of carbon-emitting power sources. The Evil Genius is a 1886 novel by Wilkie Collins. 4.8 out of 5. No mention of voodoo economics or Democratic Congresses that fought back but failed. Details; Look Inside; Customer Reviews ; Author Kurt Andersen Publisher Random House Publication Date 2020-08-11 Section New Hardcover - Nonfiction / US History. He tracks the shift from a booming post WWII economy to the disastrously unequal and unfair economy of today. In "Part One: A Brief History of America", Andersen frames the development of what would become the United States as a society with an unprecedented openness to all that is new. Because I'm there. NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • When did America give up on fairness? But then the New Deal gave way to the Raw Deal. On the Gini index which provides a standard measure of inequality, America today is the most unequal of rich countries, ranking a bit lower than Haiti and a bit higher than Uruguay. Grover Norquist's Taxpayer Protection Pledge enforced hard-right orthodoxy. Andersen’s being a funny, lively writer (of Spy magazine pedigree) makes this big book a fast, pleasurable read, and near its end prescribes remedies for reclaiming a society that aspires to fairness and kindness. EViL GENiUSES. The topic of the politics of nostalgia and stagnation has much to it and definitely resonates, but it seems like there’s a bi. Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History . The big question it poses: How did we go from a period of relative prosperity, progressivism, and high standards of middle-class living (from the late 50s to mid 70s) to a society of acute political polarization and income inequality? At the same time, Americans have become overwhelmed by novelty. But the grown-ups on the right, the economic right, corporate leaders and the rest of the rich, kept their eye on the prize—less taxation, less regulation of business, greed is good—and they maintained control of the party.”, “...Libertarians fantasize that they're action heroes and entirely self-made. It tells a familiar story about the Koch brothers, federal society, Teagan tax cuts for the rich and Democrats lurching to the right. Description. Politics, in turn, became "fights over which parts of the past should or shouldn't and can or can't be recycled or restored.". 4.80. Evil Geniuses (2020) describes the rise of the economic right after the 1960s and the consequences of their policies today. Description NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - When did America give up on fairness? A longing for more comfortable, familiar times turns into a "national immersion in nostalgia". You can read all your books for as long as a month for FREE and will get the latest Books Notifications. "[9], Tom Krattenmaker in The Humanist says Evil Geniuses "demonstrates a remarkable ability to see through to the truth of the politics and culture of recent decades, and to make sense of them in a way with crucial relevance to now. The topic of the politics of nostalgia and stagnation has much to it and definitely resonates, but it seems like there’s a bit of over reliance here on the personal feeling that Andersen has about the culture stagnating and perhaps being out of the loop on actual changes and updates going on outside of his purview. Overall enjoyable and thought-provoking. [3] In January 2021, Evil Geniuses was number 14 on the bestsellers list of the American Booksellers Association.[4]. It seems as though the evil geniuses of GOP greed have mutated into a party of evil imbeciles supported by the most deplorable in the realm, with a demented ass-clown at the helm spewing seditious words and creating the greatest stress-test on this republic since the Civil War. It was far from an objective read and skewed facts against clean energy and any transition away from fossil fuels. Type New Format Hardcover ISBN 9781984801340 When did America give up on fairness? In 2011, he wrote about our ubiquitous computer culture... During the twentieth century, America managed to make its economic and social systems both more and more fair and more and more prosperous. The breadth of the research is impressive, though I think the book leans on pop culture a bit too much. Hmm. I was thinking that it reminded me of some of the same issues that were discussed in Anand Giridharadas' book, and then I saw later on that he had reviewed this book in the NYT, so I guess I was correct on that one. . This was a terrific book. The New York Times bestselling author of Fantasyland tells the epic history of how America decided that big … Whereas Sapiens by Harari is a succinct history of humankind, Evil Geniuses is a reasonably succinct political and economic history of America's last 60 years. But then the New Deal gave way to the Raw Deal. It was the riveting title and an interview of Kurt Andersen on The Hill's. Andersen takes readers on a short These people are truly evil and are ruled by money. And they are relentless. Welcome back. Antitrust efforts have been extinguished and industries have become concentrated in oligopolies. Evil Geniuses describes the economic checks and balances that were put into place to achieve a balance between fairness and security, such as unions, laws on minimum wage and child labor, regulatory agencies and antitrust laws, the non-profit Blue Cross and Blue Shield associations, and New Deal programs. "[7], A review in Religion Dispatches describes the book as "an extended mea culpa for his own inability, and the inability of culture liberals like him, to grasp what said geniuses were doing to remake the political economy" and says "Andersen deserves credit for showing how an ever-more-powerful overclass has shaped the political economy we all inhabit", but criticizes the book for failing to fully engage with the issue of racism and not addressing what it calls The Righteous Mind problem: "how the lasting legacy of Puritanism tends to undergird deference toward the wealthy while fueling reaction against the ironic counterculture that Andersen himself helped to create. People are being replaced by automation and robots and pushed into occupations that are not as easily automated but tend to pay less. Just a moment while we sign you in to your Goodreads account. It’s a good boook but hardly the whole story. A leviathan of a system requires a leviathan of a book and Kurt Andersen has obliged with Evil Geniuses, an expose of America's wrong turn from New Deal to Raw Deal and the dismantling and disempowerment of the American middle class. EXPLORE . It made me consider that Orwell's 1984 is not about the future any more, but it rather it started right on time, about where Orwell's title said it would. “The one book everyone must read as we figure out how to rebuild our country.”—Walter Isaacson, author of Steve Jobs and Leonardo da VinciDuring the twentieth century, America managed to make its economic and social systems both more and more fair and more and more prosperous. He notes that in 2018, the Wall Street Journal found that 58% of people want the government to do more to help people. But then the New Deal gave way to the Raw Deal. Good writing skills, excellent narration. The conflicts from the 1960s and the continuing Vietnam War cause distrust of the government to spread on the left while taxes and increasing regulations encourage a resistance to government on the right. ", "The Revelation of Kurt Andersen: With 'Evil Geniuses' a Media Mandarin Discovers Plutocracy", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Evil_Geniuses:_The_Unmaking_of_America&oldid=1016333404, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, This page was last edited on 6 April 2021, at 16:33. Refresh and try again. One large talking point for the ultra rich. is a modern American wit, historian and writer of the first order. Also under Clinton, in 1999 the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act repealed part of the Glass–Steagall Act of 1933, removing barriers in the market among banking companies, securities companies and insurance companies that prohibited any one institution from acting as any combination of an investment bank, a commercial bank, and an insurance company, and then the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 removed regulation of derivatives. In “Evil Geniuses,” Kurt Andersen argues that, over the past several decades, America’s political economy has been hijacked by capital supremacists, who preached and enacted a return to a … Walter Isaacson, it’s safe to say, is not afraid of tackling the really big topics. ", Anand Giridharadas's review in the New York Times says "It is a radicalized moderate’s moderate case for radical change" and summarizes the recommendations in it as "Winning back America as a country that works for Americans will be the battle of a generation, and this book raises the question of whether the left should seek to achieve that country by embracing the cabalistic power-building, linguistic cunning, intellectual patronage and media stewardship the right has employed. Skip this list. Andersen points out that distrust in the government has led to resistance to allowing the government to do anything, equating it to an unhappy marriage where divorce is impossible and one of the parties is invested in keeping the marriage unhappy. And they are relentless. To see what your friends thought of this book. All boats rose together. They tend to exempt themselves from the truism that there but for the grace of God goes each one of them, because an implicit premise of their ultra-individualism is that anybody in America can make it in their own and that unfair disadvantages either don't exist or can't be helped. All boats rose together. Liberal books Silent Spring, Unsafe at Any Speed, and The Greening of America are widely influential, and while 70% of Americans in 1968 felt that businesses fairly balance profits and public interest, by 1970 only 33% agreed with that statement. The big question it poses: How did we go from a period of relative prosperity, progressivism, and high standards of middle-class living (from the late 50s to mid 70s) to a society of acute political polarization and income inequality? Permissive approach to antitrust enforcement results in anticompetitive monopolies such as Google Facebook! 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