A clear, concise, and wise guide to retirement planning.
Attorney and investment counsel Jason presents a thorough guide to investment with a specific view toward retirement.
The author astutely observes that retirement has only become more challenging as lifespans have increased, and consequently, “your retirement planning will encompass a much longer period of time than you might first envision.” Moreover, she asserts, one can’t procrastinate and expect to prepare for retirement properly; the author notes more than once: “This is not the time to learn through trial and error.” Although these are universal truths, “retirement security” is largely about personal customization, Jason points out, as not everyone will have the same goals to achieve or the same hurdles to clear. Her aim is to help readers retire “on [their] own terms,” and to that end, she provides both a general conceptual framework to understand retirement investment, as well as specific, practical counsel regarding the formulation and execution of a retirement plan. She covers a wide swath of analytical territory—volatility and risk, diversification, the ways one should choose a financial expert to assist with investment and other areas of interest. The book concludes with self-assessment tools to build a synopsis of one’s financial health and future aspirations, and it’s a lucid, concise questionnaire that, in itself, makes this volume a worthwhile resource. Jason’s presentation is intellectually rigorous—instead of self-help-style nostrums, she furnishes concrete, actionable advice substantiated with empirical data. Moreover, despite necessary excursions into technicality, this is a thoroughly readable book that will be entirely accessible to those with a limited understanding of investment strategy. Another of its virtues is that it never dispenses hyperbolic promises and unflinchingly confronts the reality of risk: “In my experience, the most satisfied investors are those who embrace the investor’s dilemma, understanding that risk (uncertainty) and reward (high returns) are forever and always intertwined.” Overall, this is an impressively informative book that attests to the author’s 30-plus years of experience in the financial industry.
A clear, concise, and wise guide to retirement planning.Pub Date: April 28, 2022
ISBN: 9781639050628
Page Count: 228
Publisher: American Bar Association
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 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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