A gripping and thought-provoking look at what currency truly means in the modern world.
A historical evaluation of the nature and future of money.
According to Schreiber, the founder and CEO of international freight marketplace Freightos, currency, as we currently understand it, is the result of a tragic mistake: the decision of President Richard Nixon to decouple the value of U.S. currency from gold: “Would people still trust and desire money,” Schreiber asks, “when it no longer had any guaranteed underlying value?” In his view, the answer to that question has clearly been answered in the affirmative, and he cites a wide array of economists and other monetary experts who’ve held forth on the topic since 1971, right down to the unprecedented modern moment: “Never has monetary policy been more confusing than during the Covid-19 pandemic,” he writes, “during which the Fed printed close to two trillion dollars of brand-new money.” In order to illustrate his view of money’s history, he effectively imagines a small tropical island populated by a few hundred people and follows some of them as they embody different stages of economic development over the course of human history, including private ownership, barter, investment, and so on. The educational depictions of these stages are interspersed with Schreiber’s own analysis of the slow, gradual migration of economy away from “commodity money” (money comprising objects or materials like gold, with an intrinsic value) to a bewildering but engaging demonstration of what Schreiber calls valueless “bank money”: “People say ‘I have $100 in my checking account,’ but in fact what they have is a statement that the bank owes them $100.” In this way, the author uses vivid, accessible prose to demystify a whole battery of financial concepts, including global trade, and, toward the end of the book, cryptocurrency. Ultimately, he paints an alarming picture over the course of this narrative, but he does so in a way that readers will find incredibly informative.
A gripping and thought-provoking look at what currency truly means in the modern world.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2021
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 247
Publisher: Zedess Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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