Fine history and equally fine economics, though the author offers more questions than answers.
A sweeping study of “how the poor countries of the world have struggled over the decades to escape their condition of impoverishment.”`
Allawi, former prime minister of finance for Iraq and author of The Crisis of Islamic Civilization, is a fine writer, scholarly and opinionated yet evenhanded. By 1945, he writes, few denied that the imperial powers had exploited colonies mercilessly and that the decolonization movement was unstoppable. The author delivers a chronological account of what followed: American hegemony, the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the continued rise of the U.S. as a global superpower. Familiar events and political figures appear, but Allawi emphasizes efforts to aid developing nations and introduces a large cast of economists, many unknown to general readers, whose widely varied ideas influenced government policy. Readers may be disappointed to learn that numerous expensive 20th-century campaigns to eliminate poverty have yielded unimpressive results. The 1980s triumph of the free market, driven by the policies of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and the 1990s collapse of the Soviet Union, did not improve matters. As the 21st century began, economists puzzled over rare exceptions, including the four “Asian Tigers”—Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Singapore—who rose to prosperity despite expert warnings against government interference in the free market. Their governments interfered with great success. Then the floodgates opened, and world poverty plummeted, but this was “mainly accounted for by the incredible expansion of the Chinese economy.” Experts still struggle to explain how a nation ruled by a one-party system with little concern for human rights has produced this miracle. Allawi delivers insightful theories but has no favorite, and he avoids joining colleagues in their predictions—many now 30 years old—of China’s imminent collapse.
Fine history and equally fine economics, though the author offers more questions than answers.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780300214284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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