Mattioli tears away the Amazon curtain and finds a culture of ruthlessness, greed, and disdain for the law.
A compelling study of the tech behemoth’s bid to control whatever it touches.
Amazon has infiltrated our lives, and the U.S. economy, to a degree that no other company ever has. Mattioli, a Wall Street Journal reporter who has covered Amazon since 2019, brings great expertise to her first book. She readily acknowledges that the company provides convenience, product range, and low prices to shoppers, but she believes that it is now doing more harm than good. There are already several books and a wealth of articles explaining how Amazon overpowers small companies through unfair practices, manipulates the tax system, and abuses its employees, but Mattioli examines some new aspects through interviews with former and current employees. Many of her sources requested anonymity, which is understandable given Amazon’s penchant for retribution. The real value of this book, however, is in the chapters about regulating the corporation. Legislation stalled in Congress, but a lawsuit has been brought by the Federal Trade Commission, which aims to break the giant into separate entities, working on the principle that much of Amazon’s power stems from its domination of numerous connected sectors. For its part, Amazon argues that it constantly works to benefit consumers, but the focus of the FTC case is its anti-competitive market operations. The case is still underway, and while Mattioli is a supporter of the lawsuit, she points to the massive lobbying power of Amazon, as well as its legion of lawyers and PR specialists. Another lawsuit involves the Prime program, claiming that “Amazon purposefully signed up consumers…without their understanding and made it very hard to cancel.” Even if there is no firm conclusion, Mattioli has done much to reveal the snarl behind the smiley-face logo.
Mattioli tears away the Amazon curtain and finds a culture of ruthlessness, greed, and disdain for the law.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780316269773
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
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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