Lively and impeccably written—a welcome addition to the way-the-world-works literature.
A spirited tour of six material things on which our lives depend.
Sky News economics editor Conway, an inhabitant of the “ethereal world” in which ideas and services are bought and sold, opens his account with an eye-opening visit to a Utah gold mine where an entire mountain range is being removed in the quest for earthly riches. That hugely destructive pit is a comparative scratch in the ground, though, compared to a vast Chilean copper mine that “can produce comfortably more copper each year…as the amount of gold produced by every mine on the planet since the beginning of time.” Gold is somewhat inconsequential, while copper is essential to electronics. So is sand, one of the six commodities Conway examines in rich detail without his prose ever sliding into the miasmas of the dismal science. Sand contains silicon, which yields computer chips and “the fiber optics from which the internet is woven.” Silicon combines with cement and asphalt to make buildings and roads; iron provides the infrastructure of the built material world; salt yields hydrogen chloride, another component of computer chips and even solar panels; and oil is implicated in just about everything, including greenhouse-grown vegetables that feed the world. Even in an energy and material regime weaned from fossil fuels, Conway argues, fossil fuels will play a part—and getting that weaning accomplished, he adds, “will mean building untold new energy capacity across the world: solar panels, wind turbines and nuclear plants, a rate humankind has never before achieved.” Yet, he adds at the conclusion of this erudite exploration, which ably describes how his chosen commodities interact, it’s not an impossibility, thanks to his sixth element: lithium, the basis for the batteries that may lead the way to a renewable energy future. Of course, copper and glass will be involved, too.
Lively and impeccably written—a welcome addition to the way-the-world-works literature.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9780593534342
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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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