Read Online Tailspin The People and Forces Behind America FiftyYear Falland Those Fighting to Reverse It Steven Brill 9780525432012 Books

Product details Paperback 480 pages Publisher Vintage; Reprint edition (April 2, 2019) Language English ISBN-10 0525432019

Tailspin The People and Forces Behind America FiftyYear Falland Those Fighting to Reverse It Steven Brill 9780525432012 Books Reviews

• Brill’s is one of a gazillion recent books that addresses the question, what happened to America? That it’s broken, we all know, even if we don’t always admit it to ourselves.
  
  This book, however, really is different. Brill is one of the few authors who has the legal and financial expertise to really get it right. And that he does. The problem is not social, political, racial, or patriarchal (although the latter two are real problems that must be addressed). The problem is economic. In short, the new American aristocracy are the wealthy who continue to elevate themselves above the rest of society financially and who have successfully dug moats around themselves and their children to protect their elite status.
  
  It is, in my own words, the commercialization of America. The wealthy in America have successfully constructed a false meritocracy where ‘merit without means’ has grown increasingly difficult. Class mobility, as a result, has declined and fewer and fewer of our youth can expect to live better than their parents.
  
  It’s the universal law of unintended consequences. We replaced the old-boy, inherited wealth aristocracy with a true meritocracy. The meritorious among us, however, used their newfound mobility to create a world where class mobility has been commercialized. The children of the already wealthy, as a result, who have access to private schools, tutors, SAT prep classes, violin lessons, and the latest technology, have a material advantage in climbing their own ladder of merit.
  
  What distinguishes Brill’s book is that he works harder than most authors on providing solutions, or at least finding and revealing people and institutions who have already made a difference (no, not Trump) and who offer a template for moving forward.
  
  Brill is informed across a wide spectrum of topics. He is, first and foremost, however, a journalist and it shows. The prose is easy to read but always backed up with plenty of data. At times, perhaps, just a tad too much. But that’s okay. He, more than most, makes it clear why we are all so disillusioned.
  
  This book will make you mad. And it should. Our politicians are dialing for dollars while Washington burns. And Brill has the connections and the writing skills to bring the heat into your living room.
  
  A very good book that no one will want to pick up a second time. But that’s okay. Sometimes we need a good whack to make sure we’re still awake.
• By the time they reach the end of this excellent book, readers may wonder that anything is still working in America for anyone other than the well-educated, the well-connected, and those wealthy enough to retreat to their financial and gated enclaves. (For examples, read the real estate section of the Friday edition of the Wall Street Journal.) After cataloging the depressing and interlocking shortcomings of American society over the last 50 years, Brill is still optimistic about the future, and includes many examples of people taking personal responsibility to foster the fading common good. Those who are more pessimistic than the author will recall that it took a vestigial socialist tradition, a Great Depression, and the Second World War to move America away from earlier tailspins. More recently, the organized opposition of millions of Americans to the Vietnam war failed to end that senseless conflict. Today millions of people are shocked by the level of gun violence in our country, but cannot organize around this issue to effect real change. I applaud the efforts of Brill and the many people who are challenging the system with real alternatives, but I fear that it will take a seismic cataclysm to relieve the present persistent nightmare.
• A fantastic account of every court battle, regulation, and congressional act since the 50s that's lead America to where it is today; the country with the most most wealth inequality in the developed world. Reading this, it's clear how my generation of millenials was left with nothing but the scraps of a dying nation.
• In this extensively researched book, Steve Brill concludes that “the country has gone into a tailspin since the post-war era” with, among other things, increased income inequality, a deteriorating infrastructure, a high poverty rate, mediocre health care and student achievement and a dysfunctional and money corrupted Congress. He then goes into great detail to describe how this has come about and what some people are trying to do about it.
  
  One of his key findings is that meritocracy has become the new aristocracy. In other words, top students from the top law schools began to enjoy enormous incomes by working with big businesses to generate favorable legislation and regulations and devise ways to work around tax and other laws.
  
  Brill devotes several pages to what he calls the Greening of the First Amendment which has enabled businesses to spend considerable money in political campaign and requires legislators to spend substantial time raising campaign funds. He describes instances where the enormous amount spent on lobbying has prevented appropriate regulation and legislation.
  
  Brill laments that businesses that have been found to be serious law breakers are able to get by with fines that for many are just considered a cost of doing business while no action is taken against the executives who authorized or were aware of the unlawful activities.
  
  Overall, I found most of Brill’s comments to be appropriate.
  
  Brill notes organizations trying to change things for the better, including the Bipartisan Policy Center, Better Markets, Open Secrets and Peter Edelman with Georgetown’s poverty and inequality center.
  
  Brill ends with surprising optimism. “Things may get worse before they get better,” he says. But “Americans …are going to decide enough is enough.”
• Steven Brill is a brilliant man & a superb writer - I have read everything he has written. I like to get up early & read when it is nice & quiet, but I must say this book was difficult to read more than a chapter at a time because it is so depressing. It set the tone for my day as negative. Brill delineates the greed & corruption of our congress & the business world. His facts are true & that makes it all the more disheartening. And most disheartening of all is that the only hope he provides are in the last 3 pages of the book! How I wish it was not so.