Astute advice for businesspeople and educators.
A unique popular math book.
Most writers in this genre proclaim that math is fun or warn that math can fool you, but Heath, a professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business, and science writer Starr have another fish to fry. Even though “nobody really understands numbers” and most efforts to talk about them fail, the authors do a good job showing otherwise. In 22 short chapters, they deliver a painless, ingenious education in how to communicate statistics and numbers to people who find them confusing. One of the authors’ most striking examples of statistics in action shows that, in one test, 34% of White and 14% of Black job applicants without criminal records received a callback. When applicants revealed a drug felony conviction and prison term, 17% of Whites and 5% of Blacks were called back. It takes a second, write the authors, to realize the real significance of those numbers: White job applicants who have served jail time are more likely to get a job than a Black applicant with a clean record. The nearest star is 4.25 light-years away from Earth, a number comprehensible only to astronomers. As the authors show, comprehension is easier with a picture: “Imagine shrinking the solar system down to the size of a quarter. You leave a quarter at the goalpost of a soccer field and walk toward the goalpost at the other end of the field. When you reach it, drop another quarter to represent the solar system of our nearest neighbor.” With comparisons, the more bizarre, the better. That livestock produce 14.5% of global greenhouse gases is a boring statistic. Instead: China and America are No. 1 and No. 2 in gas production. No. 3 is represented by all of the world’s cows. Packed with tables, anecdotes, and amusing facts, the narrative makes math accessible.
Astute advice for businesspeople and educators.Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982165-44-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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