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FOOLED BY THE WINNERS

HOW SURVIVOR BIAS DECEIVES US

An eye-opening account of an irrational mistake with broad ramifications.

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A panoramic study focuses on survivor bias, a pervasive failure of reason that deeply distorts people’s views of the world.

According to Lockwood, survivor bias—a “cognitive failure” that involves a myopic overemphasis on success to the relative exclusion of failure—encourages all kinds of inferential missteps. “We are misled because we focus on the winners, the successes, and the living and lose sight of those who have lost, the failures, and the dead. By failing to adjust for survivor bias, we reach the wrong conclusions,” the author asserts. Psychologically, the tendency toward survivor bias results from an excess of optimism, the inclination to “attribute success to skill rather than luck,” to believe in the power of expert effort over the vagaries of chance. Lockwood supplies a sweeping account of the expressions and effects of the bias, ranging from the pharmaceutical and financial industries to war. For example, drug companies routinely oversell the efficacy of their products by excluding contradictory data, just as hedge funds overstate their performances by neglecting to mention their numerous failures. Moreover, survivor bias “warps our view of the past”—this explains why the horrors committed by Hitler’s Germany are so well documented in comparison to those by Mao’s China. The author’s account is impressively comprehensive, though the wide-ranging scope of the study doubles as a vice since he’s committed to assessing an array of topics beyond his expertise. For example, his discussion of President Harry S. Truman’s decision to drop two atomic bombs on Japan is historically superficial and unconvincing. Nevertheless, Lockwood sets out to provide an accessible introduction to survivor bias, one shorn of academic jargon and instead reliant on “concrete, real-world examples,” and in this he roundly succeeds. Further, he makes a compelling case for the ubiquity of the error, one that has far-reaching consequences, causing both sloppy reasoning and the opportunistic exploitation of individuals and groups.

An eye-opening account of an irrational mistake with broad ramifications.

Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-62634-880-6

Page Count: 296

Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group Press

Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2021

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  • New York Times Bestseller

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ABUNDANCE

Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.

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  • New York Times Bestseller

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

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THE JAILHOUSE LAWYER

An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.

A memoir on the making of a literal “jailhouse lawyer.”

Wrongfully arrested and convicted of murder in New Orleans, which at the time had “the highest rate of wrongful convictions in the nation, with nearly all the victims being Black men who…grew up poor,” Duncan served for 23 years in Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison and other institutions. He might have done his time at the Orleans Parish Prison, but, he writes, he wanted access to Angola’s more extensive law library. Well before being transferred there, he petitioned the Louisiana Supreme Court for a law book, a motion denied because it had not first been adjudicated in a lower court. A sympathetic judge gave him a copy all the same, and Duncan was off to a career as an inmate advocate, regularly filing petitions and lawsuits on his own behalf and that of his fellow prisoners—the first suit being “over the jail’s failure to provide him with a high-fiber diet,” soon followed by motions to provide mental health treatment, end beatings and arbitrary punishments, and improve medical care. Known as the “Snickers Lawyer” for taking payment in candy, he became a self-taught expert on constitutional issues. Naturally, he recounts, he was targeted by guards and wardens for his legal activism, even as he proved essential to Angola’s population; in time, too, he found a few unlikely allies among the staff. Duncan’s well-told story is full of fraught moments of abuse both physical and judicial, though it has something of a happy ending in that, after earning a law degree after his release, he was exonerated of the crime and has since been fighting for other prisoners to “have meaningful access to the courts.”

An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.

Pub Date: July 8, 2025

ISBN: 9780593834305

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Penguin Press

Review Posted Online: April 17, 2025

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025

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