More diagnosis than prescription, but the epidemiological view of swollen-wallet sickness makes for highly interesting...
The First World is fat but not happy, and its consumerist ways are spreading like an epidemic to the farthest reaches of the globe.
Poverty is a reality even in America, write Harvard School of Public Health researchers Kawachi and Kennedy. But, they maintain, “in an affluent society such as the United States, there are diminishingly few things that the poor cannot afford that would make a difference between life and death.” In other words, the economic challenge most Americans face today is not having the wherewithal to get things that they need, but instead having the means to get the things they want: a second television, perhaps, or a boat, or a house in the Hamptons. However, this unprecedented success comes at a cost in terms of social equity and the distribution of goods and services around the world: 200 years ago, the difference in per-capita income between the richest nation, the United Kingdom, and the poorest, China, was a mere $1,200 (in dollars adjusted to 1990), whereas today the difference between the richest nation, the US, and the poorest, Sierra Leone, is more than 25 times that. Inequality is also on the rise within the First World, with wealth concentrated in fewer and fewer hands: in the US, “the incomes of the bottom 60 percent of households have stagnated in real terms during the last twenty-five years, whereas the rich have continued to pull ahead.” This inequality, the authors suggest, is something of a disease and in all events has not made the rich any happier, for all their shiny toys; rather, the uneven distribution of wealth yields isolation in the form of gated communities, social angst in the fear of falling behind, and bigger and bigger waistlines as Americans of all social classes become more and more indolent.
More diagnosis than prescription, but the epidemiological view of swollen-wallet sickness makes for highly interesting reading.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-56584-582-X
Page Count: 240
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2002
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
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These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.
A helpful guide to working effectively with people from other cultures.
“The sad truth is that the vast majority of managers who conduct business internationally have little understanding about how culture is impacting their work,” writes Meyer, a professor at INSEAD, an international business school. Yet they face a wider array of work styles than ever before in dealing with clients, suppliers and colleagues from around the world. When is it best to speak or stay quiet? What is the role of the leader in the room? When working with foreign business people, failing to take cultural differences into account can lead to frustration, misunderstanding or worse. Based on research and her experiences teaching cross-cultural behaviors to executive students, the author examines a handful of key areas. Among others, they include communicating (Anglo-Saxons are explicit; Asians communicate implicitly, requiring listeners to read between the lines), developing a sense of trust (Brazilians do it over long lunches), and decision-making (Germans rely on consensus, Americans on one decider). In each area, the author provides a “culture map scale” that positions behaviors in more than 20 countries along a continuum, allowing readers to anticipate the preferences of individuals from a particular country: Do they like direct or indirect negative feedback? Are they rigid or flexible regarding deadlines? Do they favor verbal or written commitments? And so on. Meyer discusses managers who have faced perplexing situations, such as knowledgeable team members who fail to speak up in meetings or Indians who offer a puzzling half-shake, half-nod of the head. Cultural differences—not personality quirks—are the motivating factors behind many behavioral styles. Depending on our cultures, we understand the world in a particular way, find certain arguments persuasive or lacking merit, and consider some ways of making decisions or measuring time natural and others quite strange.
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-250-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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