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FREEDOM STREET

A solid guide for advisers that encourages a life that’s about more than financial returns.

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A veteran of the world of finance offers insights for others in the profession.

In this debut business book, Danner offers his fellow financial advisers recommendations for building a successful career, achieving work-life balance, and developing a strategy for transitioning their clients to new advisers when they’re ready to retire. Danner, the founder of advisory firm Freedom Street Partners, describes his career progression from entry-level employee to business owner along with the philanthropic interests and personal goals he achieved at the same time. The book offers suggestions to others in the industry looking to build a profitable business with high income potential while also making time for family and other interests as well as giving back to their communities. The suggestions include both conceptual advice, such as developing self-awareness and evaluating life priorities, and concrete recommendations, such as developing and automating a process for staying in touch with clients as often as necessary. In the book’s final chapters, Danner discusses how those who have established their own businesses should plan for a retirement process that allows continuity for clients and financial stability for retiring advisers but also a sense of personal satisfaction and fulfillment. The book is aimed at a narrow audience of financial advisers and is thus able to make assumptions about background knowledge, socio-economic status, and career goals that would not be applicable to a wider readership, but in this context, it allows the text to be concise. Danner does an excellent job of encouraging his colleagues to focus on the personal elements of their profession—for instance, by understanding how often and in what context each client prefers to hear from their adviser—and to see themselves as members of a broader community. The author strengthens his recommendations by including stories about advisers he’s mentored, showing how others have successfully implemented his tips. His passion for his business and his charitable work is evident throughout, making him a credible voice for others in the same field.

A solid guide for advisers that encourages a life that’s about more than financial returns.

Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-5445-2216-6

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Lioncrest Publishing

Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2022

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THINKING, FAST AND SLOW

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

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GOOD ECONOMICS FOR HARD TIMES

Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.

“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.

It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.

Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.

Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0

Page Count: 432

Publisher: PublicAffairs

Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019

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