Inspiring examples of responsible capitalism.
How to invest for a better world.
Decrying the fact that most venture capitalists “worship in the church of greed,” Klein and Kapor, founders of the impact investment firm Kapor Capital, offer myriad examples of businesses they have supported that are focused on doing good—specifically, on closing “gaps of access, opportunity, or outcome for low-income communities and/or communities of color.” An impact investment firm, the authors explain, aims to get a substantial return on their investments by funding entrepreneurs “whose own life experiences compel them to create companies and build wealth that will solve the difficult problems that they personally had to overcome.” Not surprisingly, those people come from underrepresented groups, including immigrants and children of immigrants, racial minorities, women, and individuals who identify as queer. At Kapor Capital, write the authors, “every person involved in making the fund’s investment decisions is a person of color.” They profile an impressive assortment of ventures responding to social, political, economic, and environmental problems, including Bitwise and Career Karma, companies helping people from underrepresented communities train for and secure jobs in the tech industry, notoriously dominated by White males from Stanford and Harvard; BlocPower, which uses a highly sophisticated software system to identify energy efficiency or inefficiency in low-income neighborhoods; Aclima, which aims “to close equity gaps in race, the environment, economics, education, and health by quantifying disparity as it relates to the quality of air people breathe; and Honor, which uses technology to make home health care more accessible and equitable. “What’s wrong with the larger ecosystem of mainstream tech and venture capital,” the authors assert, is that “its mission is to solve problems for the rich, and its players believe they’re smarter than the experts.” Although the authors address venture capitalists, they urge employees, consumers, and shareholders to join their efforts to make a positive impact.
Inspiring examples of responsible capitalism.Pub Date: March 14, 2023
ISBN: 9780063268517
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harper Business
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2023
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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