A well-written account of a corporate American juggernaut and its implications for society as a whole.
A detailed examination of the retail behemoth.
By the early 2000s, Walmart was often cited as the worst example of “a race-to-the-bottom brand of capitalism,” eliminating competition and chronically underpaying its huge workforce. Then, starting in 2015, Walmart implemented a series of measures, from pay increases to expanded opportunities for its employees, that prompted even skeptics to rethink the company’s image as a bastion of unfettered corporate evil. Wartzman, most recently the author of The End of Loyalty: The Rise and Fall of Good Jobs in America (2017) and a longtime critic of Walmart, wanted to explore the company’s complex journey and image. When Sam Walton opened the first Walmart in Arkansas in 1962, he emphasized low prices, quality products, and serving rural areas; the company went public in 1970 and went on to become one of the nation’s biggest retailers. Walton engendered employee loyalty through profit sharing and stock options, but he also intentionally kept wages low and vehemently opposed efforts to organize labor. After he died in 1992, both outsiders and employees felt the company abandoned any dedication to taking care of its employees in favor of solely cutting costs. Over time, the company improved efforts to be sustainable, was rightfully praised for its efforts during Hurricane Katrina, and expanded worker training; yet “where it had the most direct control—deciding how much to pay its workers—it hadn’t moved an inch.” In 2016, Walmart finally raised its minimum hourly wage to $10 after decades of pressure from labor efforts. Even with the increase, writes the author, “the average full-time employee at the company was still going to be making less than $26,000 a year.” Wartzman’s investigation of the company in all its complexity is thoroughly researched, and he deftly and meaningfully connects the issue of chronically low wages at Walmart to a larger undervaluation of the labor of millions of Americans.
A well-written account of a corporate American juggernaut and its implications for society as a whole.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5417-5799-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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