Geisst (Finance/Manhattan Coll.) attempts a comprehensive history of Wall Street. Unfortunately, this amorphous subject poses problems that are not overcome. ``Wall Street'' is an umbrella term for the financial community centered in New York City, not a single endeavor located at a specific address. Given the role of private investment in a capitalist economic system, it is also inextricably linked to government finance, all sectors of the domestic economy, and economic activity worldwide. This makes Wall Street difficult to define, let alone document over time, but Geisst nevertheless plunges forward with a general survey. The result is an account that remains on the surface yet will often be inaccessible to those without some knowledge of the market; this compendium of information lacks any framework to guide the reader through events. To make matters worse, the broader political environment is sometimes misrepresented: How can one characterize the Smoot-Hawley tariffs of the 1930s as ``the very opposite of Republican [Party] principles'' when Republicans had championed protective tariffs for the preceding 60 years? The most disconcerting quality of this volume, however, is a function of Geisst's effort to combine honest description with a proWall Street perspective. For example, President Truman's suspicions ``that financiers had been conspiring to rig the underwriting business in their own favor'' are characterized as his ``bias against Wall Street,'' despite Geisst's extensive accounts of financiers doing precisely what Truman suspected. Even stranger is the assertion that the dismissal of a government case alleging collusion on Wall Street proved that investment bankers are ``vital to the economy''; vital they may be, but drawing this conclusion here is certainly a non sequitur. A history of Wall Street educating the general public about this important and often confusing institution is a worthy goal— and one not yet achieved.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-19-511512-0
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1997
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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