Enjoyable, eye-opening pop science.
A wry, sometimes-arch look at flaws in the chain of reasoning that lead us to make ineffective choices, especially at the macro level of social reasoning.
Everything you know is wrong—and then some. As Smithsimon (Sociology/Brooklyn Coll.; September 12: Community and Neighborhood Recovery at Ground Zero, 2011, etc.) writes, that is certainly the case with our way of looking at large-scale processes of causation. His predecessor Emile Durkheim once noted that “we explain social facts with other social facts”—e.g., the Great Recession was the result of a housing bubble that was the result of wildcat lending to people who should not have had mortgages. But such artifacts of storytelling—and we are storytelling creatures, Smithsimon writes—are often lacking; they miss key ingredients and key facts. He writes, perhaps a touch contrarily, that in this respect we are not the rational individuals we think ourselves to be but instead often irrational actors who fall apart once outside of a group. This is nothing new. Dan Ariely, among others, has been making the same sort of observations about economic behavior, and Malcolm Gladwell has made a sizable fortune on the foibles of humans and their incomplete, too-hasty thinking about this and that. Smithsimon lacks the storytelling ease of those two interpreters, but his book has much value all the same as an exercise in creative thought. He makes an interesting though not ironclad connection, for instance, between rising obesity and rising economic insecurity; instead of combating weight problems in isolation, we might do better “to attack the conditions of insecurity, and let people and their bodies adapt to the new conditions of security.” Other connections may seem a touch more remote—leaded gas and teen pregnancy?—but they often yield fascinating results, including the note that people who can tell causal stories about such things as climate change tend to take causation more seriously than those who cannot.
Enjoyable, eye-opening pop science.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-61219-676-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: Nov. 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2017
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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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