Fine inspiration for entrepreneurs that should be required reading in any business school curriculum.
Financial journalist Davidson explores the new economy of pursuing one’s dreams instead of plodding through a thankless career.
Do what you love, and the money will follow. Davidson, a New Yorker staff writer and creator of NPR’s Planet Money podcast, takes that idea and runs with it, his book predicated on the thrilling idea that a new economy is right around the corner, one in which “our work lives and our deepest passions can merge, happily, in ways that make us better off financially and personally.” Think of a place like a certain well-known fast-food chain, one that makes it “immediately clear that you are not in a place of joy,” a place where workers are replaceable and know it. Then contrast that with someone with a rare skill set, someone who, as with one of his examples, took training as a naval aviator and retail consultant and turned that into a delicious, much-sought-after candy bar, successful even though the candy giants had a lock on the distribution chain. Another example is a woman who grew up around the people who, with callused hands and dirty boots, did the hard work of harvesting grapes, and she converted her in-depth knowledge into a marketing business positioning wines before discerning audiences of drinkers. There’s a new paradigm at work here, one that defies the old laws of supply and demand and that instead posits that price, for instance, is one of those things that a customer understands is a token of “the benefits they hope to receive: benefits based on very specialized knowledge.” Technology and interlocked global markets bring this specialized knowledge to the world in ways that could only have been dreamed of in the past. Davidson’s case studies are excellent, but the heart of the book is a set of rules worthy of committing to memory—e.g., “Pursue intimacy at scale”; “Know what business you’re in, and it’s probably not what you think.”
Fine inspiration for entrepreneurs that should be required reading in any business school curriculum.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-38-535352-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
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
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