A smart, provocative book that guides readers to better decision-making when confronting seemingly intractable problems.
Psychology meets neuroscience and self-help in this engaging study by business writer Heath (co-author: The Power of Moments: Why Certain Moments Have Extraordinary Impact, 2017, etc.).
If the fish floating down a river have three heads, then it behooves any curious-minded person to travel upstream and find out why. Just so, if half of high school students are failing in a certain district, then one can either try to throw money and words at the problem (“Stay in school, kids!”) or venture into the alien territory outside the classroom to find out how to keep them going. That’s just what happened in Chicago, writes Heath, where teachers formed interdisciplinary teams offering support to legions of at-risk students, determining that if first-year students can be kept on track, they’re likely to stay in school to the end—and wind up making at least $500,000 more over a lifetime as compared to their dropout peers. The author examines numerous turning-point moments when finding “upstream” things to fix might have led to better and different results. For example, when, in 1974, a scientific paper was published describing a disappearing ozone layer, that was the time to do something about it—not now. “Creating urgency” is one task the would-be problem-solver must address. Another is getting the right people on board to create desired effects, such as lowering teen drug use by making it outré: “What if drug and alcohol use came to feel abnormal in their world rather than normal?” A change of mindsets is rarely easy, but it can be done, and best so, by Heath’s account, by looking farther along at the chain of events than the problem itself. That habit of mind, he writes, helps explain why the incidence of death by thyroid cancer is so low in South Korea, and it also points to a central truth: “Systems have great power and permanence; that’s why upstream efforts must culminate in systems change.”
A smart, provocative book that guides readers to better decision-making when confronting seemingly intractable problems.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3472-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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