Reviews for Demographic Effects of Economic Reversals in Sub-Saharan Africa:

The average rating for Demographic Effects of Economic Reversals in Sub-Saharan Africa: based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-05-12 00:00:00 Dierdrei Keegan I think Martin's central thesis is correct--that the mentality of the stock market has become central to how we conceptualize a 'normal' life in global late capitalism. He focuses on some of the ways in which the rise of financial culture changes our attitude toward time by compressing the future into an impossibility and encouraging consumers to live entirely in the present through overspending, over-borrowing, and gambling economically. He also explains how a financial culture brings a changed attitude toward risk, beginning to regard risk as inevitable and therefore something that should be simultaneously always a source of anxiety and casually accepted. He presents evidence that domestic life has become increasingly structured economically, with increasing numbers of services promoting financial literacy for children, and running the home according to market principles. But the book is just not very well written. Martin is not good at defining his terms--for instance, his central term is 'financialization,' but the definitions he gives of it tend to be vague and general. There is no real distinct attempt to nail the term down specifically. More irritating for me, however, is the overabundance of floating quotes (which I tell my English 102 students to never use). Martin will give a quote from a source as an entire sentence in his book, with no introduction telling who the author is or what the textual origin of the quote is, and the quote just plunks down in the book as though it is self-sufficient. Sometimes there is a parenthetical citation giving a page number (though not an author name of source title), and sometimes there is an endnote. It's bad style.

Review # 2 was written on 2008-04-26 00:00:00 Jose Estrada "Financialization would remove the bar between the two terms [micro and macroeconomics] making global movements of finance intimate with daily life." That is Randy Martin's mordant conclusion, which, although tempered with good insights into late capitalism, is overall bleak and gray in tone. He has a nice recontextualization of economics terms, micro and macro. He writes they are usually thought of as personal and national, but they can be more accurately thought of as (microeconomic) process and (macroeconomic) structure. He talks about securitization of the labor market (Shiller) and reputations (David Bowie offering bonds on his future output), and about Jeff Gates' communitarian ownership solution. If you are confused about these terms, understand that they are financial metaphors which have colonized the spaces normally reserved for person considerations. He says financialization, like globalization but more personal, has effected four main areas of human life: our perceptions of history, of geography, of self, and of time passing. Martin's book is bleak and communistic, a visit to a kind of vacuous intellectual Leninism which will never die, so long as dissatisfaction is on earth. His conclusion: Wealth brings discontentment. But I should rather suppose that Randy Martin is viewing the world through discontented eyeglasses.