Fine history and equally fine economics, though the author offers more questions than answers.
A sweeping study of “how the poor countries of the world have struggled over the decades to escape their condition of impoverishment.”`
Allawi, former prime minister of finance for Iraq and author of The Crisis of Islamic Civilization, is a fine writer, scholarly and opinionated yet evenhanded. By 1945, he writes, few denied that the imperial powers had exploited colonies mercilessly and that the decolonization movement was unstoppable. The author delivers a chronological account of what followed: American hegemony, the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the continued rise of the U.S. as a global superpower. Familiar events and political figures appear, but Allawi emphasizes efforts to aid developing nations and introduces a large cast of economists, many unknown to general readers, whose widely varied ideas influenced government policy. Readers may be disappointed to learn that numerous expensive 20th-century campaigns to eliminate poverty have yielded unimpressive results. The 1980s triumph of the free market, driven by the policies of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and the 1990s collapse of the Soviet Union, did not improve matters. As the 21st century began, economists puzzled over rare exceptions, including the four “Asian Tigers”—Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Singapore—who rose to prosperity despite expert warnings against government interference in the free market. Their governments interfered with great success. Then the floodgates opened, and world poverty plummeted, but this was “mainly accounted for by the incredible expansion of the Chinese economy.” Experts still struggle to explain how a nation ruled by a one-party system with little concern for human rights has produced this miracle. Allawi delivers insightful theories but has no favorite, and he avoids joining colleagues in their predictions—many now 30 years old—of China’s imminent collapse.
Fine history and equally fine economics, though the author offers more questions than answers.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780300214284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
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
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.
Well-crafted memoir by the noted media mogul.
Diller’s home life as a youngster was anything but happy; as he writes early on, “The household I grew up in was perfectly dysfunctional.” His mother lived in her own world, his father was knee-deep in business deals, his brother was a heroin addict, and he tried to play by all the rules in order to allay “my fear of the consequences from my incipient homosexuality.” Somehow he fell into the orbit of show business figures like Lew Wasserman (“I was once arrested for joy-riding in Mrs. Wasserman’s Bentley”) and decided that Hollywood offered the right kind of escape. Starting in the proverbial mailroom, he worked his way up to be a junior talent agent, then scrambled up the ladder to become a high-up executive at ABC, head of Paramount and Fox, and an internet pioneer who invested in Match.com and took over a revitalized Ticketmaster. None of that ascent was easy, and Diller documents several key failures along the way, including boardroom betrayals (“What a monumental dope I’d been. They’d taken over the company—in a merger I’d created—with venality and duplicity”) and strategic missteps. It’s no news that the corporate world is rife with misbehavior, but the better part of Diller’s book is his dish on the players: He meets Jack Nicholson at the William Morris Agency, “wandering through the halls, looking for anyone who’d pay attention to him”; hangs out with Warren Beatty, ever on the make; mispronounces Barbra Streisand’s name (“her glare at me as she walked out would have fried a fish”); learns a remedy for prostatitis from Katharine Hepburn (“My father was an expert urological surgeon, and I know what I’m doing”); and much more in one of the better show-biz memoirs to appear in recent years.
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780593317877
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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