Precisely the sort of levelheaded, serious discussion our political leaders appear so unwilling to conduct.
A former chairman of the Social Security Advisory Board offers some straight talk about our tottering retirement system.
To add to our current economic anxieties, along comes Schieber (co-author: Fundamentals of Private Pensions, 2010, etc.), warning our children and grandchildren about their golden years turning to dross because of the reluctance of political leaders to grapple with a retirement system that cannot be sustained. He begins by identifying the components of the “system”—Social Security, employer-sponsored pensions (both public and private sector), personal savings, retiree health insurance and the part-time jobs people take as a bridge to retirement—and traces the history and development of each. He goes on to demonstrate how the system has been shaped by changing demographics and economics, the political response to the needs and desires of workers and the regulatory structure installed to administer and monitor private and public retiree programs. For more than 40 years the author has helped shape retirement policies, and he’s not bashful about inserting his own authoritative voice and considerable experiences into his history. The discussion necessarily gets deep into the weeds—analysts and policymakers will welcome the thoroughness—but general readers will appreciate Schieber’s efforts to warm the material with quotations from Sophocles, Confucius, Dickens, Churchill, Lewis Carroll and even Mae West, and to demystify the arcana with a plethora of table, charts and graphs, and a useful glossary. The author brings us up to 2010, surveys our precarious footing and makes recommendations for repairing our broken system. Even those who disagree with his prescriptions for reform—he forthrightly calls, for example, for immediate sacrifice by the boomers, would allow individual accounts as an element of Social Security, believes health-benefit plans should be taxable—will be forced to confront the dire facts. There’s time to fix our retirement system, he insists, but not much.
Precisely the sort of levelheaded, serious discussion our political leaders appear so unwilling to conduct.Pub Date: March 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-19-989095-8
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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