A painfully convincing history of how both political parties decided that worldwide free trade was a good thing.
A new world order.
As the last century ended, a popular Washington consensus held that the market had all the answers and that bringing China into the global trading system would cement a peaceful future. That seemed to work out until it didn’t. It’s a discouraging story skillfully told by Lynch, global economics correspondent for the Washington Post. He reminds us that America’s industrial production has been declining since the 1950s and that automation, not foreign competition, remains the biggest factor. Obsessed with cutting costs, American businesses were already moving to Mexico and other nations, but everyone thrilled to China, which had discarded “Maoist idiocy” to open a titanic market to world entrepreneurs. The world was getting richer, and the world’s richest nation could only benefit by trading in this immense, supposedly free market. Giving President Clinton most of the credit, Lynch describes his 1990s crusade for globalization. Business leaders and congressional Republicans were enthusiastic. Labor unions and Democrats were not, but many were won over by promises of government benefits and retraining for laid-off workers. This never happened. Almost everyone agreed that a free market would bring democracy to China; increasingly prosperous citizens would demand it as they had in other nations (Spain, Taiwan, South Korea, Chile). This also didn’t happen, but globalization did make the U.S. wealthier. From 2000 to around 2015, inflation and prices were low, but the 2.4 million jobs lost created great resentment, along with the feeling that China was playing dirty and muscling in on our status as world leader. The political climate soon turned uniformly anti-China. Lynch dismisses President Trump’s solutions, which emphasize tariffs and jingoism. Lynch’s own proposals for international cooperation and a generous safety net are political poison today.
A painfully convincing history of how both political parties decided that worldwide free trade was a good thing.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2025
ISBN: 9781541704060
Page Count: 416
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.
Helbig and Norman present a game plan for making leadership more responsively human.
In this expanded update to The Psychological Safety Playbook: Lead More Powerfully by Being More Human (2023), the authors provide “practical strategies for responding to resistance, sparking change, embodying the change we want to see, and moving forward deliberately,” specifically in a business setting. They suggest ways to encourage what they call “changemakers” through the use of five key “plays” from their playbook: Communicate Courageously, Master the Art of Listening, Manage Your Reactions (“shift from automatic reaction to conscious response to stay better connected to yourself and others”), Embrace Risk and Failure, and Design Inclusive Rituals. The goal is to ensure that organizational cultures promote psychological safety, guided by leaders who “walk the talk” by emphasizing their own humanity at every turn. (“We must be the first to share our own failures with our teams, which will start to make it possible for others to do the same.”) This call for example-setting is sounded throughout the book as Helbig and Norman urge their target audience (leaders and would-be leaders) to go beyond mere instruction and instead embody the qualities they want to see in their subordinates, such as continuous learning, active curiosity, and self-reflection. Each chapter includes a detailed “Recommended Reading” section and text with extensive numbered and bulleted points formatted to make the core concepts more immediately digestible. The authors effectively employ clear and empathetic prose to assure readers that psychological safety is slow to build and quick to break, observing that such safety requires steady attention and delivers outsize payoffs as a result. They refreshingly ground a great deal of the material in psychology and neuroscience, pointing out, for instance, that research has demonstrated that the parasympathetic nervous system responds to honest appreciation, which improves creative thinking. Some wistful readers might consider some of the authors’ suggestions beyond the reach of their own organizations, as when group facilitators are advised to “gently intervene when someone dominates the conversation,” but hope springs eternal.
A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.Pub Date: May 19, 2026
ISBN: 9798993550503
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Crazy Idea Press
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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