First-rate financial history and an admirable effort to wrestle a world-changing series of events between covers.
What happens when the walls of Wall Street come crashing down? Donald Trump, for one thing. A long but not oppressive study blending politics, economics, and history.
Tooze (History/Columbia Univ.; The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931, 2014, etc.), whose previous book won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, examines the “first crisis of a global age” as it played out in an increasingly interlocked financial world. One driver was the deregulation of financial institutions, which was not confined to the United States. As the author notes, deregulation was central to the British plan to convert London into ground zero for “many of the most fast-paced global transactions” that were remaking the world. Tooze complicates the usual narratives. While many writers, especially on the right, have pegged the financial meltdown on the subprime mortgage crisis, agencies such as Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae in fact kept loans to high standards, and that aspect of the larger financial crisis proved more symptom than cause. Still, those mortgages worked to distort the market, and “when you distort the market, crises are inevitable.” One unintended effect of the rattling of capital was the strengthening of Russia, whose “new prosperity was associated not with independence from the world economy but with entanglement in it,” and China, whose economy responded “in directions that the Beijing leadership had been struggling to counteract.” Some of the broader consequences were more profound, including a schism between globalists and protectionists in the U.S. and Europe—a schism that, by Tooze’s account, resulted a decade later in Brexit, the election of Trump (whose “objectionable personality and outlandish policy proposals now had to be weighed against the more basic political question of who could do what for whom”), and the rush to once again deregulate the very forces that had set off the crisis in the first place.
First-rate financial history and an admirable effort to wrestle a world-changing series of events between covers.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-670-02493-3
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
PROFILES
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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