A clear and detailed map for the navigation of murky financial terrain.
Reichental conducts a comprehensive tour of the obscure world of cryptocurrency.
According to the author, founder of the global business and tech advisory firm Human Future, the foundation of the “fourth industrial revolution,” powered by “hyper-connectivity, digitalization, and data,” will be cryptocurrency and blockchain, its “technological architecture.” He furnishes a remarkably thorough introduction to the “cryptocurrency ecosystem,” explaining its historical evolution while sketching its possible future. Reichental covers all the bases, including an impressively accessible synopsis of the technological aspects of cryptocurrency (especially blockchain), detailing the ways in which this “trustless system” is designed to provide a secure alternative to any central banking system. The author’s approach is both theoretical and practical—in addition to giving an overview of the basic ideas, he also discusses buying and selling cryptocurrency and commodities such as non-fungible tokens. Reichental aims to educate the reader rather than advocate for the promise of cryptocurrency, and he roundly succeeds at this; while his enthusiasm for the subject is plain, he diligently documents its dangers (“And make no mistake, the risks right now are extraordinarily high”). The author is especially astute detailing the volatility of cryptocurrency as a financial asset, and he explains, with meticulous care, the significance of the recent FTX scandal for the industry. Reichental consistently addresses, with admirable intellectual balance, the advantages and disadvantages of every new invention, as when he demonstrates his restraint while commenting on NFTs: “Many argue it’s as valid to collect a digital art piece with the artist’s digital signature as, say, a signed baseball card or a signed print of a painting. Detractors see a superficial and temporary marketplace that naive enthusiasm is overinflating.” The entire book is written in this manner: unfailingly evenhanded and satisfyingly informative. For the novice in search of a lucid primer or the more seasoned veteran interested in well-organized summary, this is a helpfully instructive reference.
A clear and detailed map for the navigation of murky financial terrain.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2023
ISBN: 9781636100401
Page Count: 320
Publisher: ClydeBank Media LLC
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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