Rationing: It's a word and idea that people often loathe and fear.
Health care expert Henry Aaron has compared mentioning the possibility
of rationing to "shouting an obscenity in church." Yet societies in fact
ration food, water, medical care, and fuel all the time, with those who
can pay the most getting the most. As Nobel Prize-winning economist
Amartya Sen has said, the results can be "thoroughly unequal and nasty."
In Any Way You Slice It, Stan Cox shows that rationing is not just a
quaint practice restricted to World War II memoirs and 1970s gas station
lines. Instead, he persuasively argues that rationing is a vital concept
for our fragile present, an era of dwindling resources and environmental
crises. Any Way You Slice It takes us on a fascinating search for
alternative ways of apportioning life's necessities, from the goal of
fair shares for all during wartime in the 1940s to present-day water
rationing in a Mumbai slum, from the bread shops of Cairo to the
struggle for fairness in American medicine and carbon rationing on
Norfolk Island in the Pacific. Cox's question: Can we limit consumption
while assuring everyone a fair share?
The author of Losing Our Cool, the much debated and widely acclaimed
examination of air-conditioning's many impacts, here turns his attention
to the politically explosive topic of how we share our planet's
resources.
