A surprisingly absorbing foray into the optimization of product flow.
A survey of the logistical innovations that bring a product to your doorstep with the tap of a keyboard.
In his first book, Wall Street Journal technology columnist Mims follows the trail of a USB device, an everyday piece of computer equipment, from its construction in a Vietnamese factory (and back even further, to the extraction of the elements that went into making its intricate interior) to its arrival at a buyer’s home. This device is only one of “100 billion—the number of parcels shipped every year, worldwide, as of 2020.” The author goes on to recount the lives of the people in the global supply chains that make it possible for the designers to get their inventions—also well explored—to market. Mims also chronicles the relevant history, from the scientific management theories of Frederick Taylor (and the alienation left in their wake) to the construction lines of Henry Ford (ditto) and the “centuries of experience, craft, and technology accumulated by sailors and naval architects” that allow a crew of 30 to 40 individuals to pilot a vessel three football fields long, stacked with thousands of containers, across entire oceans. Mims writes in a digestible style that conveys a pleasing you-are-there quality, and he does not shy away from describing the vast economic inequalities involved in the movement of commodities and the indifference of many managers toward their workers—from injuries to psychological impacts—since they can be trained in hours and discarded if they do not hit their “make rate.” Inevitably, there is plenty of predictive analytics, load-balancing algorithms, fulfillment engines, and dynamic route planning—right down to a minimum of left turns for delivery trucks. Remarkably, Mims makes docking a cargo vessel and loading conveyor belts, and even making that left turn, well worth close examination.
A surprisingly absorbing foray into the optimization of product flow.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-06-298-795-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harper Business
Review Posted Online: July 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2021
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
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