An intriguing mixture of challenging ideas and Utopian solutions to the broader issues regarding social welfare currently...
Former BusinessWeek assistant managing editor Nussbaum (Innovation and Design/Parson School of Design; Good Intentions: How Big Business and the Medical Establishment Are Corrupting the Fight Against Aids, 1990, etc.) makes the case that the future of American capitalism lies in unleashing creativity.
The author believes that students can be trained to become creative and that it is a skill that can be assessed. He combines lessons from the “personal growth movement of the 1960s and ’70s” and observations about how successful enterprises harness creativity and team effort (e.g., Google, Apple and Facebook). Nussbaum also proposes supplementing the standard IQ measure with what he calls a creativity quotient. In the author's view, today's dominant model of capitalism, based on the hegemony of “efficient market theory” (which makes short-term profit the main criteria for investment), was responsible for the recent recession and has “taken a devastating toll on innovation.” The author compares this to the period from 1933 to 1976, “a time when business leaders were responsible not simply to shareholders, but to many stakeholders.” The author believes that in order to compete globally, American business must pick up from the 1990s, when U.S. global hegemony was based on the inventiveness of Silicon Valley and futurists predicted major advances in biotechnology and nanotechnology. He offers a radical model for investment in technology startups based on local sources of financing and the possibilities of broad-based online social networking. Such an economy would embrace risk-taking, see uncertainty as opportunity and require minimal government intervention. Education would be transformed to emphasize hands-on creative activity, and students would be encouraged to wed ideas to their implementation.
An intriguing mixture of challenging ideas and Utopian solutions to the broader issues regarding social welfare currently under debate.Pub Date: March 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-0062088420
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Harper Business
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2013
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
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
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