A clear-minded account of the link between self-employment and culture—and where the path leads.
A thoughtful examination of the myths, reality, and cultural dimensions of self-employment.
Waterhouse, a history professor at the University of North Carolina and author of Lobbying America and The Land of Enterprise, focuses his research on the practice and politics of business in America. In his latest book, he engagingly explores how the idea of self-employment has developed and evolved. The U.S. has always had small businesses, but Waterhouse identifies the 1970s as a turning point. Before that, the emphasis had been on the regular paycheck, but after a protracted economic slowdown and rounds of layoffs, the idea of self-employment took off—although it was often a necessity more than a choice. Over the next few decades, increasing numbers of women started their own businesses after realizing that corporate advancement was unlikely. Bad jobs, stagnant wage growth, and inequality pushed the trends, but the reality is that self-employment often requires long hours for a small, unstable income. In fact, outright failure is common. Nevertheless, the precepts of freedom and self-reliance connect to deep themes in American culture. The arrival of the internet added the element of tech-driven disintermediation and generated an array of exciting new opportunities. It also created the gig economy, which provides many advantages but can easily lead to exploitation and fraud. Waterhouse makes a strong argument that gig workers should receive a decent, assured income and legal protections, although he admits that this would be difficult to do. “Our national culture remains fixated on the emancipatory potential of the individual business owner, the risk-taker, the Shark Tank entrepreneur,” he concludes. That is not entirely a bad thing, but the author shows us ways in which to think more deeply about what the gig economy means.
A clear-minded account of the link between self-employment and culture—and where the path leads.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2024
ISBN: 9780393868210
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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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