Complex economic and scientific theories lucidly rendered, even if the resulting picture is unremittingly gloomy.
Wall Street Journal stalwart Patterson continues his explorations of high finance with a clutch of contrarian risk takers.
Playing the market is part art, part science, and part leap of faith. Investor and statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who stands at the center of Patterson’s latest, following The Quants and Dark Pools, takes an alternate view. He assumes that the world is a series of rare black swan events (“extreme events no one could have predicted…like a sudden market crash”), and he further urges clients to think that the conventional wisdom of investing—diversified portfolio, trying to time the market—is a fool’s game. Come the pandemic, and the contrary wisdom of Taleb and company, codified as “Panic now—panic early,” proved its use. While a single “black swan” event might be survivable, a cluster of them, including disease, financial closures, supply-chain issues, inflation, and more, can break the bank. Taleb and like-minded investors bet on things going wrong and planning for worst-case scenarios. Although Taleb’s black-swan protection protocols were widely if incompletely imitated, they were not universally accepted. Patterson highlights the thought of “complexity theorist” Didier Sornette, who argues that Taleb’s notion that the future is hard, if not impossible, to predict is unnecessarily dark and who developed an alternate theory exemplified by “dragon kings” rather than black swans. No matter which image you follow, the facts are incontrovertible: Set a multipartite catastrophe such as the pandemic in motion, and huge amounts of wealth will disappear, as with one popular fund that lost 97% practically overnight, “a stark real-world example of gambler’s ruin.” If anything, Taleb, by Patterson’s account, is more pessimistic than ever, warning that climate change is going to yield a world that will make us long for the present. Throughout, the author provides deft, accessible analysis and guidance.
Complex economic and scientific theories lucidly rendered, even if the resulting picture is unremittingly gloomy.Pub Date: June 6, 2023
ISBN: 9781982179939
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
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
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.
Well-crafted memoir by the noted media mogul.
Diller’s home life as a youngster was anything but happy; as he writes early on, “The household I grew up in was perfectly dysfunctional.” His mother lived in her own world, his father was knee-deep in business deals, his brother was a heroin addict, and he tried to play by all the rules in order to allay “my fear of the consequences from my incipient homosexuality.” Somehow he fell into the orbit of show business figures like Lew Wasserman (“I was once arrested for joy-riding in Mrs. Wasserman’s Bentley”) and decided that Hollywood offered the right kind of escape. Starting in the proverbial mailroom, he worked his way up to be a junior talent agent, then scrambled up the ladder to become a high-up executive at ABC, head of Paramount and Fox, and an internet pioneer who invested in Match.com and took over a revitalized Ticketmaster. None of that ascent was easy, and Diller documents several key failures along the way, including boardroom betrayals (“What a monumental dope I’d been. They’d taken over the company—in a merger I’d created—with venality and duplicity”) and strategic missteps. It’s no news that the corporate world is rife with misbehavior, but the better part of Diller’s book is his dish on the players: He meets Jack Nicholson at the William Morris Agency, “wandering through the halls, looking for anyone who’d pay attention to him”; hangs out with Warren Beatty, ever on the make; mispronounces Barbra Streisand’s name (“her glare at me as she walked out would have fried a fish”); learns a remedy for prostatitis from Katharine Hepburn (“My father was an expert urological surgeon, and I know what I’m doing”); and much more in one of the better show-biz memoirs to appear in recent years.
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780593317877
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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