A forcefully developed and documented contribution to our further understanding of high-level criminality in lightly...
A groundbreaking study of the psychology and motivations of white-collar criminals.
Using interviews, correspondence, and phone calls over seven years with, among many others, Bernie Madoff, Enron’s chief financial officer Andrew Fastow, and Tyco’s Dennis Kozlowski, Soltes (Business Administration/Harvard Business School) provides special insight into insider trading, violations of financial reporting requirements, and pyramid schemes. In his impressive debut, the author has gathered in one place the thoughts and reflections of this group of criminals, many of whom have become well-known thanks to extensive media exposure. Soltes begins with a theoretical discussion of the roots of human behavior in an intriguing attempt to discern how propensities for ethical misconduct and criminal behavior occur. The subsequent discussions with the perpetrators concern their crimes, motives, and rationalizations. The author refutes the contention that white-collar criminality is distinct from criminality at large as essentially a race- or class-driven argument. He emphasizes instead how the business environment and the incentives for management to succeed foster white-collar crime. Management decisions, he insists, involve moral choices since they involve “the potential to help or harm another person.” Soltes prefers to “consider the possibility that illegal business decisions—moral decisions in their own right—are actually made much like any other kind of decision.” The interviewees’ rationalizations and “euphemistic labeling” are quite illustrative. Fastow, Enron’s financial wizard, said, “I was doing exactly what I was incentivized to do. We wouldn’t have gone through all this trouble if we just wanted to cheat. We were finding ways to get around the rules but going through a complex process to find the loopholes to allow us to do it.” Madoff preferred to view the fraudulent scheme for which he was convicted as “something closer to oversight than to recklessness.” The author also discusses the regulations related to white-collar crime and corrects some popular misconceptions—about insider trading, for example.
A forcefully developed and documented contribution to our further understanding of high-level criminality in lightly regulated free markets.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61039-536-6
Page Count: 464
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
A tour-de-force of true crime reportage.
Godfrey reconstructs a horrific murder with a vividness found in the finest fiction, without ever sacrificing journalistic integrity.
The novel The Torn Skirt (2002) showed how well the author could capture the roiling inner life of a teenager. She brings that sensibility to bear in this account of the 1997 murder of a 14-year-old girl in British Columbia, a crime for which seven teenage girls and one boy were charged. While there’s no more over-tilled literary soil than that of the shocking murder in a small town, Godfrey manages to portray working-class View Royal in a fresh manner. The victim, Reena Virk, was a problematic kid. Rebelling against her Indian parents’ strict religiosity, she desperately mimicked the wannabe gangsta mannerisms of her female schoolmates, who repaid her idolization by ignoring her. The circumstances leading up to the murder seem completely trivial: a stolen address book, a crush on the wrong guy. But popular girls like Josephine and Kelly had created a vast, imaginary world (mostly stolen from mafia movies and hip-hop) in which they were wildly desired and feared. In this overheated milieu, reality was only a distant memory, and everything was allowed. The murder and cover-up are chilling. Godfrey parcels out details piecemeal in the words of the teens who took part or simply watched. None of them seemed to quite comprehend what was going on, why it happened or even—in a few cases—what the big deal was. The tone veers close to melodrama, but in this context it works, since the author is telling the story from the inside out, trying to approximate the relentlessly self-dramatizing world these kids inhabited. Given most readers’ preference for easily explained and neatly concluded crime narratives, Godfrey’s resolute refusal to impose false order on the chaos of a murder spawned by rumors and lies is commendable.
A tour-de-force of true crime reportage.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-1091-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
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