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
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
SEEN & HEARD
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.
Known for her often contentious perspectives, New York Times opinion writer Weiss battles societal Jewish intolerance through lucid prose and a linear playbook of remedies.
While she was vividly aware of anti-Semitism throughout her life, the reality of the problem hit home when an active shooter stormed a Pittsburgh synagogue where her family regularly met for morning services and where she became a bat mitzvah years earlier. The massacre that ensued there further spurred her outrage and passionate activism. She writes that European Jews face a three-pronged threat in contemporary society, where physical, moral, and political fears of mounting violence are putting their general safety in jeopardy. She believes that Americans live in an era when “the lunatic fringe has gone mainstream” and Jews have been forced to become “a people apart.” With palpable frustration, she adroitly assesses the origins of anti-Semitism and how its prevalence is increasing through more discreet portals such as internet self-radicalization. Furthermore, the erosion of civility and tolerance and the demonization of minorities continue via the “casual racism” of political figures like Donald Trump. Following densely political discourses on Zionism and radical Islam, the author offers a list of bullet-point solutions focused on using behavioral and personal action items—individual accountability, active involvement, building community, loving neighbors, etc.—to help stem the tide of anti-Semitism. Weiss sounds a clarion call to Jewish readers who share her growing angst as well as non-Jewish Americans who wish to arm themselves with the knowledge and intellectual tools to combat marginalization and defuse and disavow trends of dehumanizing behavior. “Call it out,” she writes. “Especially when it’s hard.” At the core of the text is the author’s concern for the health and safety of American citizens, and she encourages anyone “who loves freedom and seeks to protect it” to join with her in vigorous activism.
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-13605-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2019
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf