An accessible overview of the dismal science.
A young progressive’s take on how the economy works and what it means to ordinary consumers.
If Madeline Pendleton’s I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt speaks to the intricacies of personal finance, Scanlon’s offering ratchets up the discussion into more ethereal realms—the economy as a reflection of not just on-the-ground realities but also human emotions. The author opens her debut book with “The Deciders,” the higher-ups who build and shape economic policies that, at least in theory, “are designed to work for the collective benefit.” The Federal Reserve is among this group, with its two sometimes-conflicting missions of keeping employment high while keeping inflation low through such instruments as contractionary monetary policy. Scanlon does a good job in later sections of relating such macro issues to the vicissitudes of daily life: why, for instance, the imposition of tariffs or the relative strength of the dollar to the yuan makes Chinese trade goods more or less expensive, with the resulting knock-on effects on consumers’ pocketbooks. The discussion of recession is admirably clear, and Scanlon ably explains the causal mechanisms and the fact that from time to time, the economy needs a reset, albeit at a cost borne by ordinary people more than those with deeper resources. Throughout, the author, leaning to the left, reminds readers that the economy is ultimately about people, a matter that governments and corporations seem to have forgotten. “If the minimum wage had moved with productivity growth (as it did up until 1968),” she notes, “it would now be about $24.00 per hour”—a fact that, one hopes, will startle policymakers into taking the issue seriously. Currently, writes Scanlon, “there is no place in the United States where a minimum-wage worker can afford a two-bedroom apartment.”
An accessible overview of the dismal science.Pub Date: April 30, 2024
ISBN: 9780593727874
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Currency
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
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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