Engaging, occasionally unwieldy meditations on the relationship between social governance and late-stage capitalism.
A jeremiad against conventional “free market” wisdom and its reliance on oppressive, covert planning.
British economics writer Blakeley offers a passionate argument that the interconnected crises of our time are “driven by a toxic melding of public and private power,” resulting in profits and impunity for elites and in precarity for others. She connects these circumstances to the fact that “free market capitalism has never been as unplanned as its advocates have suggested.” The author meticulously unpacks this secret history of planning, noting how principles of competition and innovation have become illusory, meaning “today’s megafirms are barely constrained by the pressures of market competition.” Blakeley connects the metastasizing social immunity of massive corporations with the gradual political triumph of neoliberalism. She then argues for transformative “democratic planning,” citing attempts at alternative communities or reworked corporate structures “based on the democratic production of socially useful commodities,” featuring worker input, which corporate managers abhor. Such plans were countered by politicians like Margret Thatcher to “ruthlessly reassert the power of capital over labor.” Blakely concludes by proposing larger-scale organizing efforts, though she acknowledges that the few examples—e.g., Allende’s Chile—suggest that “any attempt to democratize an economy will encounter massive resistance from capital.” Nonetheless, the author’s tone remains optimistic. “When we frame our political project in terms of collective empowerment,” she writes, “we show that politics can’t be reduced to elections—it’s something we all do every day.” This is a complex discussion, and Blakeley’s structure alternates among dramatic flashpoints (e.g., the corporate debacles involving Enron and WeWork), narratives about disrupting public-private malfeasance, and arguments about economic theory that engage the views of many significant figures. Though these strands can seem abstract or repetitive, the author writes knowledgeably about the variety of intricacies involved.
Engaging, occasionally unwieldy meditations on the relationship between social governance and late-stage capitalism.Pub Date: March 12, 2024
ISBN: 9781982180850
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
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
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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