Through 200 years of manufacturing in the South Coast communities of Fall River and New Bedford, Shaun Nichols outlines cycles of growth and decline in multiple industries, raising compelling and uncomfortable questions about regional economic development.
Book Review
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The promise — and problems — of the US construction industry
More than 80 percent of construction work was union labor after World War II, but that dropped in single generation to 20 percent. Mark Erlich takes stock of what it would take to bring that number back up — and with it make construction work again a solid path to the middle class.
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Opportunity lost
The second of two takes on the new book by the state’s governor and his former chief of staff. Read the first one here, by Republican activist Ed Lyons. ALMOST 50 YEARS AGO, Harvard Business School professor Abraham Zaleznik published a ground-breaking article whose title posed a question that scholars and practitioners have been debating […]
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Book on civil wars suggests US is entering dangerous territory
OUR NATIONAL MOOD is currently characterized by two things: anger and anxiety. Many people are angry because of the Trump presidency and his ongoing contribution to political deterioration. Others are angry because his presidency did not continue. But a wider feeling, traumatizing all except the fringes, is anxiety stemming from concern about how our national […]
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The Book of Baker
The first of two takes on the new book by the state’s governor and his former chief of staff. Here is the second, a look at the Baker playbook from Bob Massie, a former Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor and candidate for governor. IT IS QUITE rare for a governor to write a book while […]
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The Quabbin lesson of doing big things (mostly) together
BEFORE THE FLOOD Destruction, Community, and Survival in the Drowned Towns of the Quabbin By Elisabeth C. Rosenberg 232 pages, Pegasus Books TODAY IT MIGHT be hard to imagine something that would stir more controversy than a massive dam project, which would displace several towns and thousands of people, and literally inundate the local environment […]
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Reimagining a mutual aid society
WHEN SARA HOROWITZ got her first job as a labor lawyer at a firm in 1994, she writes, she assumed it “would come fully loaded. Benefits just came with a job after all, and I assumed mine would include health insurance, a retirement plan, and the protection of basic labor laws. I assumed that a […]
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Scary headlines
GHOSTING THE NEWS Local Journalism and the Crisis of American Democracy By Margaret Sullivan 105 pages, Columbia Global Reports WHEN THE OWNERS of the Middlesex News acquired the Waltham News-Tribune, the first thing they did was put new locks on the doors of our headquarters in Framingham. A daily newspaper is a 24-hour operation; I’d […]
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A blue wave in 2020?
DEMOCRATS AND REPUBLICANS encouraged (or alarmed) by Democratic gains in Virginia and Kentucky in November will want to read the new book by Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg to see if those results, and the previous outcome of the 2018 midterm election, are a harbinger of what’s to come next year. After reading RIP GOP: How […]
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Reforming capitalism to save it
IN THE FIVE YEARS since the publication of Thomas Piketty’s runaway bestseller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, rising inequality has yet to force any consensus on what to do about it, while the macro trends of globalization and automation continue to make America unequal. Now, at the start of the 2020 election cycle, actors of […]