A thorough account of the mortgage industry without the personality it promises.
In her debut, Copley sheds light on the volatile mortgage lending industry and attempts to illustrate how it has changed since she entered the field in the 1980s.
Copley began her career in the mortgage industry with the noble goal of helping people secure a home. However, she soon confronted the ethical black hole at the center of the unstable industry: loan officers regularly rubber stamped adjustable rate mortgages and loans to clients whom they knew would soon be unable to pay. Having worked in all levels of mortgage process—loan processor, real estate, loan originator, appraiser and underwriter—Copley comes across as trustworthy and knowledgeable, and she clearly wants to educate her readers. She details everything they might want to know in layman’s terms, like the role of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the route, from originator to underwriter, loans take before being finalized. Yet the detailed explanations are not balanced with an equally compelling narrative—despite the title, there’s almost no “life” in the book. She introduces co-workers by pseudonym and offers a few sentences about their looks or work ethic. None affect the writer in a memorable way; even the people closest to her—her first husband, a skiing partner who had cancer, her parents—receive one or two tidy sentences. When Copley suspects her colleagues are pleased by her dismissal, it produces two curious, penetrating questions: Who is Copley, and why do her co-workers dislike her? She doesn’t attempt to address those self-exploring issues with any depth; not that the answers would necessarily reflect her well-informed description of the industry’s outrageous behavior at the root of its collapse. Instead, the book stands as a competent though bland educational source for those interested in mortgage banking complexities on a corporate level.
A thorough account of the mortgage industry without the personality it promises.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2011
ISBN: 978-1461055419
Page Count: 446
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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A readable, persuasive argument that our ways of doing business will have to change if we are to prosper—or even survive.
A well-constructed critique of an economic system that, by the author’s account, is a driver of the world’s destruction.
Harvard Business School professor Henderson vigorously questions the bromide that “management’s only duty is to maximize shareholder value,” a notion advanced by Milton Friedman and accepted uncritically in business schools ever since. By that logic, writes the author, there is no reason why corporations should not fish out the oceans, raise drug prices, militate against public education (since it costs tax money), and otherwise behave ruinously and anti-socially. Many do, even though an alternative theory of business organization argues that corporations and society should enjoy a symbiotic relationship of mutual benefit, which includes corporate investment in what economists call public goods. Given that the history of humankind is “the story of our increasing ability to cooperate at larger and larger scales,” one would hope that in the face of environmental degradation and other threats, we might adopt the symbiotic model rather than the winner-take-all one. Problems abound, of course, including that of the “free rider,” the corporation that takes the benefits from collaborative agreements but does none of the work. Henderson examines case studies such as a large food company that emphasized environmentally responsible production and in turn built “purpose-led, sustainable living brands” and otherwise led the way in increasing shareholder value by reducing risk while building demand. The author argues that the “short-termism” that dominates corporate thinking needs to be adjusted to a longer view even though the larger problem might be better characterized as “failure of information.” Henderson closes with a set of prescriptions for bringing a more equitable economics to the personal level, one that, among other things, asks us to step outside routine—eat less meat, drive less—and become active in forcing corporations (and politicians) to be better citizens.
A readable, persuasive argument that our ways of doing business will have to change if we are to prosper—or even survive.Pub Date: May 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5417-3015-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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