A paradigm-busting vision for the future that doesn’t shy away from the hard choices humanity might have to make to secure...
A sound economic model must include ecological sustainability, writes Cookson, a New Zealand educator, who bridges the natural sciences with economics in a quest for solutions to the planet’s most vexing problems.
Economics is the study of scarcity, but, Cookson says, most mainstream models fail to recognize the finiteness of Earth’s biosphere. A science teacher at a secondary school, Cookson earned an economics degree after his son challenged him to help bring about a better future. His debut work is an ambitious, far-ranging tome on the subject of “ecological economics,” which concludes that the planet can’t sustain the current level of human activity. With a population of 7 billion and a global economy becoming more dependent on ever-increasing consumption, Cookson says we must change course if we want to achieve widespread prosperity. He plunges into the debates on climate change, energy, food supply and international trade, probing the writings of influential thinkers like John Maynard Keynes, Milton Friedman and Rachel Carson. What emerges is a worldview that refuses to measure quality of life solely in terms of money. While policymakers often try to achieve prosperity by creating a bigger economic pie, Cookson proposes a less-is-more approach. He explores demographic strategies to slowly reduce the world population to more sustainable levels, and his economic models reject what he believes to be a harmful obsession with GDP growth, while advocating “balanced trade” between nations rather than free trade. There’s no shortage of doomsayers among futurists, but Cookson remains cautiously optimistic. His broad research, which is meticulously sourced and receptive to opposing viewpoints, succeeds at providing an introduction to a high-stakes, increasingly visible topic. The book is comprehensive and systematic in its presentation, though its heavy use of scientific formulas and supply-and-demand curves can make for arduous reading. To suggest less growth might challenge conventional wisdom, yet the book remains doubly valuable since it earnestly confronts dilemmas that threaten rich and poor nations alike.
A paradigm-busting vision for the future that doesn’t shy away from the hard choices humanity might have to make to secure its survival.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2012
ISBN: 978-1479742554
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
PERSPECTIVES
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
