A New Age–tinged work urging a more mindful financial practice.
In this debut inspirational work, Mitchell challenges readers to incorporate spiritual beliefs into their economic decisions.
Most people probably wouldn’t use the adjective “sacred” when talking about money; for the author, that’s a problem. “Our society separates the inner, spiritual self and the outward world of money, economics, and finances,” laments Mitchell in her introduction. “Using our money, our resources, and our commitment to the Earth, we can bring this spiritual connection to our finances, and to our choices to help create a new world…” Raised to believe that women had little value outside of their traditional duties, the author came, as an adult, to see herself as an engine of community development. She and her CPA husband, Paul, began making small loans to friends and neighbors who could not get them elsewhere, learning as they did the power of money—and the power of people. Mitchell sees the dominant economic model—for people, corporations, and countries—as “Me, More, Mine.” She asserts that everyone should adopt a more collaborative and moral model, which the author calls “Us, We, and the Earth.” Using affirmations, exercises, and anecdotes from her personal life, Mitchell demonstrates how financial thinking can become an extension of one’s spiritual practice, to the benefit of one’s mind, soul, and pocketbook. The author’s prose is always encouraging, and the language she uses is unlike anything you are likely to hear in an econ class: “Release what no longer serves you and set an intention to plant new seeds in your money garden. Now is a powerful time to die to the old to make room for the new. Winter is a wonderful time to ponder what you want to sow in your money and in life for the coming year.” This is more a book about holistic spiritual living than economics per se, and Mitchell’s brand of spirituality (there are a lot of candles and incense and invocations of the Goddess) may turn off some readers. For the right kind of free spirit, however, the author’s message will ring true.
A New Age–tinged work urging a more mindful financial practice.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2024
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Empower Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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: 288
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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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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