An enlightening study of the people who play the game of risk and win.
A thought-provoking examination of how society has become increasingly divided between the risk-tolerant and the risk-averse.
Silver is the founder of FiveThirtyEight, a polling firm known for its careful, erudite perspectives and predictive statistics. (He left in 2023.) He is also a successful gambler, especially in the rarified world of high-stakes poker. In his latest, the author brings his interests together to delve into the nature of risk, a subject he touched on in his bestselling 2012 book, The Signal and the Noise. The risk game, notes Silver, is not just about assessing the likelihood of an event but also the possible gains from an unlikely event happening. Good gamblers—who include, in Silver’s analysis, hedge fund managers, arbitrageurs, and venture capitalists—do not win the big pot by playing it safe but by backing their own judgment against conventional wisdom. However, they do not charge blindly forward; in fact, they usually have a great affinity for numbers, trends, data, and complexity. In short, they calculate the risks and the rewards of any given venture and, when as certain as possible, go all in. The members of this group comprise an “ecosystem” he calls the River. “Most Riverians aren’t rich and powerful. But rich and powerful people are disproportionately likely to be Riverians compared to the rest of the population,” he writes. Delving further into the political landscape, the author notes that they are opposed by another group, the Villagers, whom Riverians believe “are too paternalistic, too neurotic, and too risk-averse.” It is an interesting model of polarization, although it begins to fall apart if pushed too far, especially given that many Riverians begin the game on third base. Still, Silver provides a clever look into a unique realm.
An enlightening study of the people who play the game of risk and win.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2024
ISBN: 9781594204128
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 8, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2024
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
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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