A painstaking and thoughtful depiction of macroeconomists’ limitations and pretenses.
A guide offers a critique of the contemporary failures of macroeconomics coupled with a challenge to its claim of scientific rigor.
Conway-Gordon astutely observes that professional economists not only failed to predict the global financial crisis of 2008—despite “overwhelming and growing evidence, in full, plain view”—but also never mounted a proper response to the catastrophe. In fact, macroeconomic forecasting has a largely disastrous record in the 20th and 21st centuries. But despite its repeated underperformance, the economics profession still receives “universal respect and attention.” In impressively accessible language, the author provides an analysis of both the industry’s forecasting mishaps as well as the technical reasons for its incompetence. An overreliance on suspect mathematical models, a complete lack of historical sense, and a perverse tendency toward theoretical abstraction are the principal culprits. In addition, the world’s central banking institutions blindly rely on the Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium model, which incorrectly assumes that human beings generally act rationally in their own interest and that economic cycles naturally incline toward balance. Conway-Gordon convincingly argues that modern economic theory is not only predictively suspect, but also falls far short of its claim to be a scientific discipline: “As their disastrous track-record continues to demonstrate, when it comes to recommending reliably successful policies macroeconomists are no more than witch-doctors—shamans casting their jumble of horse-feathers and chicken bones to the accompaniment of obscure mumbo-jumbo incantations, hoping to blind the credulous crowd with their opaque, pseudo-scientific pronouncements.” While the author occasionally favors stridently overheated rhetoric, his analysis overall is as sober as it is provocative. At the very least, he demonstrates the peculiar distance between the economics profession’s reputation and its historical performance. And readers do not need a sophisticated knowledge of economics to follow Conway-Gordon’s argument—he promises and delivers a nontechnical account free of complex mathematics.
A painstaking and thoughtful depiction of macroeconomists’ limitations and pretenses.Pub Date: April 16, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-97-723910-5
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Outskirts Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2021
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
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
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
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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