by Gary Moreau ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 28, 2017
A deeply thoughtful book about business management today and the nature of thought itself.
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A discussion of the Western obsession with rational deduction and its stranglehold on the business world.
While working in China and trying to understand the country’s culture, Moreau (A Contemporary Tale of Human Connection, 2016, etc.) discovered a remarkable difference between Western and Eastern approaches to comprehending reality. Westerners cling to logical deduction, causal linearity, and binary choices. Eastern thought emphasizes inductive inference, circularity, and a harmony of opposites. Western rationality has, of course, borne considerable fruit, but it’s also often gratuitously limiting and even counterproductive. For example, an overemphasis on scientific deduction leads to false dilemmas, or the misperception that there are only two mutually exclusive choices available, while induction promotes a more holistic interpretation that prioritizes an equilibrium of competing alternatives. “This is the point of equilibrium, the center of balance between yin and yang, productivity and waste, return and loss,” writes Moreau. “It is here that all business should seek to reside, in a position of balance between data and instinct, between expectation and experience, between great innovation and folly.” The author uses this paradigm to diagnose a number of weaknesses with contemporary business management, including its narrow obsession with quantitative assessments of human behavior, a dogmatic attachment to processes that don’t work and tendentious rationalizations of them, and a deficit of intellectual diversity. Also, the insistence on deductive logic ultimately leads to a culture of intolerance and alienation. Moreau recommends his own fusion of induction and deduction—he calls it “indeduction”—which permits the two to operate independently of each other, providing a more synoptic picture than either could on its own. It’s no surprise that the author has more than 40 years of business experience. His observations are consistently nuanced and searching. Moreau adroitly braids a philosophical perspective with a managerial one, discussing Newtonian science and Taoism with as much confidence as employee reviews. The writing is unfailingly clear and avoids precisely the kind of turgid jargon he too often finds in the world of commerce. More than a guidebook for managers, this is a manifesto for an intellectually deeper—and happier—world of business.
A deeply thoughtful book about business management today and the nature of thought itself.Pub Date: June 28, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5470-7473-0
Page Count: 188
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Abhijit V. Banerjee & Esther Duflo ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 12, 2019
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
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SEEN & HEARD
by Enrico Moretti ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 5, 2012
A welcome contribution from a newcomer who provides both a different view and balance in addressing one of the country's...
A fresh, provocative analysis of the debate on education and employment.
Up-and-coming economist Moretti (Economics/Univ. of California, Berkeley) takes issue with the “[w]idespread misconception…that the problem of inequality in the United States is all about the gap between the top one percent and the remaining 99 percent.” The most important aspect of inequality today, he writes, is the widening gap between the 45 million workers with college degrees and the 80 million without—a difference he claims affects every area of peoples' lives. The college-educated part of the population underpins the growth of America's economy of innovation in life sciences, information technology, media and other areas of globally leading research work. Moretti studies the relationship among geographic concentration, innovation and workplace education levels to identify the direct and indirect benefits. He shows that this clustering favors the promotion of self-feeding processes of growth, directly affecting wage levels, both in the innovative industries as well as the sectors that service them. Indirect benefits also accrue from knowledge and other spillovers, which accompany clustering in innovation hubs. Moretti presents research-based evidence supporting his view that the public and private economic benefits of education and research are such that increased federal subsidies would more than pay for themselves. The author fears the development of geographic segregation and Balkanization along education lines if these issues of long-term economic benefits are left inadequately addressed.
A welcome contribution from a newcomer who provides both a different view and balance in addressing one of the country's more profound problems.Pub Date: May 5, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-547-75011-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2012
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