Good ammunition for contrarians and well grounded in scholarly research.
Just say no: an examination of how the naysayers in the audience can help individuals and organizations make better decisions.
In our lives and work, most of us go along to get along, admonished by adages about rocking the boat and getting hammered down if imitating a nail. But, urges psychologist Nemeth (Psychology/Univ. of California), that’s not the best approach. “We benefit,” she writes, “when there are dissenting views that are authentically held and that are expressed over time.” One of her cases in point is the movie Twelve Angry Men, with Henry Fonda as a juror who refuses to give in to the will of the majority to convict. The movie is used in the psychology classroom as a prime example of how a person with conviction can sway doubters, and it “demonstrates the art of influence, which includes timing, an observation of subtle cues from others, and knowing when to talk and when to listen.” Another case in point is the example of the devil’s advocate, appointed in the Catholic hierarchy to say, “yeah, but” when a person is considered for sainthood. By implication, every organization might do well to shake off the cobwebs and have someone throw up doubt whenever a major decision is being discussed. Even the Supreme Court values dissent, writes Nemeth, since it “has been found to increase what is called the integrative complexity of the Court’s decisions”—i.e., dissent forces an examination of all sides of an issue and the trade-offs involved in making one choice over another. Unanimity, in that view, is bad. Not much of the book centers on the workaday business world, where being a reliable spoilsport can get a person not valued but removed. However, with the necessary adjustments, it’s easy to see that this largely academic argument could be made accessible for laypersons.
Good ammunition for contrarians and well grounded in scholarly research.Pub Date: March 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-465-09629-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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