A strong argument for more thoughtfully presenting options to yield better choices.
A look at how people make decisions based on the ways in which choices are laid out before them, which are all too often haphazard.
External factors, writes Johnson, the director of the Center for Decision Sciences at Columbia Business School, influence how we make choices, but we give too little attention to “choice architecture, the many aspects of how a choice is posed that can be manipulated, intentionally or inadvertently, to influence the decisions we make.” When asked to make choices among health insurance plans on the open market, for instance, most people struggled with navigating costs versus benefits, perceived or real. In part, this is because there are so many confusing options, and in part, because people misunderstand the meanings of terms such as deductible and copay. On that note, Johnson writes, “People are much more willing to pay for insurance against a vivid risk, like cancer, than they are willing to pay for insurance that covers all diseases.” It’s not just patients, either. Doctors prescribe brand-name medications, against insurers’ pleas that they prescribe generics, because the brand names are easier to remember. A solution: When a doctor types in “Allegra,” say, the software should be programmed to translate that to “fexofenadine hydrochloride,” a choice the doctor rarely overrides with the command, “Dispense as written.” These design choices are often small but meaningful, though sometimes fraught with political weight—e.g., whose name goes first on an election ballot? Choice architecture, Johnson concludes, can be used for good, to emphasize the benefits of choosing greener sources of energy; and of course it can be used poorly, amplifying the effects of inequality. What remains is to teach designers and choosers alike that choice architecture plays a role in “changing plausible paths and changing how preferences are assembled.” The only flaw in the book—another architectural choice, one might say—is that it runs too long with overlapping case studies. Still, it’s illuminating throughout.
A strong argument for more thoughtfully presenting options to yield better choices.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-08443-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2021
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.
Well-crafted memoir by the noted media mogul.
Diller’s home life as a youngster was anything but happy; as he writes early on, “The household I grew up in was perfectly dysfunctional.” His mother lived in her own world, his father was knee-deep in business deals, his brother was a heroin addict, and he tried to play by all the rules in order to allay “my fear of the consequences from my incipient homosexuality.” Somehow he fell into the orbit of show business figures like Lew Wasserman (“I was once arrested for joy-riding in Mrs. Wasserman’s Bentley”) and decided that Hollywood offered the right kind of escape. Starting in the proverbial mailroom, he worked his way up to be a junior talent agent, then scrambled up the ladder to become a high-up executive at ABC, head of Paramount and Fox, and an internet pioneer who invested in Match.com and took over a revitalized Ticketmaster. None of that ascent was easy, and Diller documents several key failures along the way, including boardroom betrayals (“What a monumental dope I’d been. They’d taken over the company—in a merger I’d created—with venality and duplicity”) and strategic missteps. It’s no news that the corporate world is rife with misbehavior, but the better part of Diller’s book is his dish on the players: He meets Jack Nicholson at the William Morris Agency, “wandering through the halls, looking for anyone who’d pay attention to him”; hangs out with Warren Beatty, ever on the make; mispronounces Barbra Streisand’s name (“her glare at me as she walked out would have fried a fish”); learns a remedy for prostatitis from Katharine Hepburn (“My father was an expert urological surgeon, and I know what I’m doing”); and much more in one of the better show-biz memoirs to appear in recent years.
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780593317877
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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