A provocative case, and one that those who feel undervalued in the present economy will surely appreciate.
A sharply argued thesis that one effect of all-powerful corporations is the suppression of wages for working people across the board.
Productivity has risen markedly since 1980, writes Barcelona-based economist Eeckhout, “yet what most workers get in exchange for producing that output has not kept up.” Indeed, wages have fallen, especially for “unskilled workers” and those without a college education. Even skilled professionals are losing ground. Meanwhile, corporations such as Amazon and Google have become near monopolies. The labor share of the economy, as Eeckhout puts it formally—though this book requires no background in economics to understand—was about 65% in 1980 and is below 58% today. “A decline of seven percentage points—or 10 percent—may seem tiny,” he adds, “but that includes the earnings of…top earners, and not just the low-paid workers.” Given the inequalities in today’s winner-take-all economy, workers understandably feel that they have no stake in the game and no vested interest in seeing that the system is maintained, giving rise to political unrest. In a novel, intriguing argument, Eeckhout holds that Amazon and other monopolies could well afford to lower their costs, which would mean more volume, yet they keep their prices high in order to curb demand and keep labor costs down while maintaining market power. The author notes that whereas the two largest retailers before the Depression, Sears and A&P, had a market share of just 3%, Walmart and Amazon today “account for 15 percent of retail sales.” Yet antitrust regulators, as well as politicians of all stripes, are silent. Eeckhout proposes that existing antitrust laws be brought to bear to force higher wages as well as to pry data from the hands of corporations and back into the purview of the consumers who generate it.
A provocative case, and one that those who feel undervalued in the present economy will surely appreciate.Pub Date: June 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-691-21447-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2021
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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