A chilling anatomy of one bad decision followed by another—and another.
Lowenstein (Origins of the Crash: The Great Bubble and Its Undoing, 2004, etc.) probes a dangerous miscalculation made by American private and public enterprise: laying off responsibility for workers’ pensions and retirement health benefits on some unspecified future.
As baby boomers move into the retirement mainstream, the former Wall Street Journal columnist warns, the worst is yet to come. Examining how such situations evolved at General Motors, one of capitalism’s former crown jewels, and in two of the nation’s largest cities, he argues that confrontation-averse executives and pension trustees allowed hardball labor unions threatening crippling strikes to leverage benefit packages that were unsustainable from the beginning. Competitive pressures on the GM side and electoral politics in New York and San Diego also played their part in getting the unions attractive early retirement deals that, when workers began opting for them, brought crushing “future costs” closer than anyone had imagined. The GM story is perhaps the most tragic. In the late ’90s, the company found itself with some 180,000 hourly employees on its payroll—and 400,000 retirees. Unable competitively to raise prices, GM cuts its dividend; stockholders, the company’s nominal owners, begin to pick up the bill for retirees. In the cases of New York’s Transit System workers and San Diego city employees, the same syndrome was made more sordid by political infighting and backroom deals. Others simply buried their heads in the sand. Former New Jersey Governor Christine Whitman, for example, bet that pension-fund investments in a booming stock market would cover unfunded liabilities—then the market went down. Some form of paid national healthcare is inevitable for the future, says Lowenstein: “Business is global, and U.S. companies compete against foreign-based firms whose home-countries do pick up the tab.” Fixing pensions, he notes, will be even tougher, but at minimum Congress needs to regulate 401(k)s, which were “essentially developed in a social and legislative vacuum.”
A chilling anatomy of one bad decision followed by another—and another.Pub Date: May 5, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59420-167-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
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
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.
A helpful guide to working effectively with people from other cultures.
“The sad truth is that the vast majority of managers who conduct business internationally have little understanding about how culture is impacting their work,” writes Meyer, a professor at INSEAD, an international business school. Yet they face a wider array of work styles than ever before in dealing with clients, suppliers and colleagues from around the world. When is it best to speak or stay quiet? What is the role of the leader in the room? When working with foreign business people, failing to take cultural differences into account can lead to frustration, misunderstanding or worse. Based on research and her experiences teaching cross-cultural behaviors to executive students, the author examines a handful of key areas. Among others, they include communicating (Anglo-Saxons are explicit; Asians communicate implicitly, requiring listeners to read between the lines), developing a sense of trust (Brazilians do it over long lunches), and decision-making (Germans rely on consensus, Americans on one decider). In each area, the author provides a “culture map scale” that positions behaviors in more than 20 countries along a continuum, allowing readers to anticipate the preferences of individuals from a particular country: Do they like direct or indirect negative feedback? Are they rigid or flexible regarding deadlines? Do they favor verbal or written commitments? And so on. Meyer discusses managers who have faced perplexing situations, such as knowledgeable team members who fail to speak up in meetings or Indians who offer a puzzling half-shake, half-nod of the head. Cultural differences—not personality quirks—are the motivating factors behind many behavioral styles. Depending on our cultures, we understand the world in a particular way, find certain arguments persuasive or lacking merit, and consider some ways of making decisions or measuring time natural and others quite strange.
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-250-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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