An entertaining and instructive blend of economic theory and personal remembrance.
Irwin, an agricultural economist, with Peterson, a veteran university writer, recollects a risk-taking youth and defends futures market speculation.
Irwin grew up on his father’s farm in Bagley, Iowa. Before he became a farmer, Irwin’s father managed grain elevators, and as a result he always keenly followed the agricultural markets. From him, the author inherited a deep intellectual interest in the workings of the market, particularly in the category of agricultural futures (“I was a market nerd from a young age”). He attended Iowa State University—his father planned for him to become a “superfarmer,” but Irwin became fascinated by agricultural economics, a subject in which he would earn a doctorate from Purdue University. Irwin tells three parallel stories in this eclectic memoir: his wild risk-taking as a youth, the nature of futures speculation as a kind of rationally managed embracing of risk, and his own experience as an agricultural economist defending futures speculation. This last element forms the core of the memoir: As a counterpoint to the popular caricature of futures speculators as “villains” who befoul the market through their “sinister manipulations,” he accessibly presents them as necessary and largely helpful participants in the market. “Futures markets are not mere curiosities, for they sit at the very heart of our economy. They function as a critical nerve center for the market economy and are important to everyone. Futures markets set the prices for some of the most important commodities in our global economy…” In the main, Irwin convincingly argues, they assist the market in the management and distribution of risk, inject much-needed liquidity, and, since they must contend with considerable exposure to financial danger, they enhance the market’s overall rationality. Irwin’s outline of the futures market is remarkably clear and should be comprehensible even for those with a modest background in economics. The text is written in an engaging, personal, anecdotal style that adds a human element to material that, by its very nature, threatens to become academically dry; it’s hard to imagine a more enjoyably readable book about the subject.
An entertaining and instructive blend of economic theory and personal remembrance.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9798987642474
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Ceres Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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