An engaging, optimistic plan for addressing nihilistic corporate greed.
A debut financial book offers a diagnosis of what’s wrong with modern business—and some ideas as to how to fix things.
In this work, Chambliss contends that one of the central activities of companies—to maximize profits for shareholders—has become an insane, greed-motivated mania that’s hurting not only society at large, but also the businesses themselves. His governing metaphor is a stool, with shareholder profits being only one leg, with employee well-being, customer service, and broad communities being the other three. According to the author, companies started lengthening one leg of the stool at the expense of the others, actually turning on employees, customers, and communities in order to continue this shareholder primacy. “This, of course, is really bad for the stool,” he writes with the direct clarity that characterizes the whole book. He cites statistics about the United States’ staggering wealth gap that will be familiar to anybody who follows economic news—like the fact that the top 1% of Americans account for nearly 20% of all income, “a concentration not seen since the Roaring Twenties, right before the Great Depression.” And he deftly details the destructive ripple effects of this imbalance, reflected not only in the tendency of such concentrated wealth to warp national politics in its favor, but also in the role it plays in eroding the middle class. “As economic inequality increases,” he writes bluntly, “so does political inequality.” The author’s framing and summarizing of the current nightmare of shareholder primacy are concise and accessible, and the note of personal optimism he sounds throughout is much appreciated considering the dark tidings he’s relating. The steps he proposes to fix things—essentially applying Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics to companies—seem fanciful when facing the juggernaut of greed he describes. But readers will nevertheless feel encouraged to make the changes they can.
An engaging, optimistic plan for addressing nihilistic corporate greed.Pub Date: March 9, 2022
ISBN: 979-8985448702
Page Count: 270
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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