A well-intentioned work with some worthy ideas, but spread much too thin.
A scattered invocation of the better future that will come when we give up on the idea of progress.
“Like it or not, each of us is caught up in a giant biosphere classroom where we are learning the lesson that each and every act we engage in requires some change, no matter how trifling, in the natural world we inhabit,” writes Rifkin, noting that as a species we’ve done more than trifling damage to the world. As he enumerates, if we each ate 300 trout per year, then those trout would have had to eat 90,000 frogs, which in turn ate 27 million grasshoppers. Given that we eat cows, chickens, and pigs, and not so many trout, our food chain is a kind of economic transaction with “a long entropic tail.” Blame it on a system that assumes that nature is there for our convenience and the point of life is to accrue profit by being efficient actors in the marketplace. Against this, sounding like Charles Reich, Rifkin intones such mantras as “Biophilia is the next evolution of empathic consciousness.” That’s all well and good, but while we’re learning to love our fellow creatures, the world is rapidly disintegrating, and one wonders whether there’s enough time to become resilient—adaptable, that is—enough to embrace the author’s program. Among its tenets: The natural world must be restored, climate change has to be fought, communities need to become “peerocracies,” and children should be educated in such a way that “the natural biophilic impulse embedded in a child’s genetic makeup be expressed and flourish in preschool and continue to mature throughout the schooling experience.” It’s a big program, and Rifkin tries to say too much in too few pages; this book is less on point than some of his previous ones, especially Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of Cattle Culture.
A well-intentioned work with some worthy ideas, but spread much too thin.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-09354-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
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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