A buckle-your-seatbelts, swiftly moving tour of the new economic landscape.
Economist and social commentator Cowen (Economics/George Mason Univ.; An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies, 2012, etc.) urges us to prepare for “the age of genius machines.”
The good news for the coming decades: Who you know, where you’re from or where you went to school will matter less than ever before when it comes to finding remunerative, satisfying work. Be advised, though: We’re headed for a “hyper-meritocracy,” where only the 10 to 15 percent of us whose skills complement intelligent machines will find that happy niche in a polarized labor market. To explain the shape of the future, Cowen looks to the world of freestyle chess, where collaboration between even a minimally competent player and a computer is already sufficiently powerful to reliably defeat a grandmaster. From the highly regularized environment of this game and others, he extrapolates a freestyle future where new technologies increasingly alter our interactions with each other and our world. A sprightly, widely allusive stylist, Cowen points to numerous present-day examples—we already live in a world where Google is the most frequently consulted “doctor,” where Match.com guides many love lives, where GPS directs our travels—to help sketch the contours of the future. He examines the implications of this new man/intelligent-machine alliance for the workplace in many sectors of our economy, where self-motivators and team workers will be especially prized; for education, where professors will become more like impresarios; and for science, where problems will become too complex for any single person to solve. This new world of work will feature vast income inequality—Cowen too readily dismisses the prospects for deep social unrest this may engender—and will leave much of the nation looking like today’s Texas, where the mix of cheap housing, plentiful jobs and lower-quality public services have accounted for the Lone Star boom, despite the national recession.
A buckle-your-seatbelts, swiftly moving tour of the new economic landscape.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-525-95373-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
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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