An alarming but not alarmist book that deserves serious attention from economists and policymakers.
The supply chain is broken—and it’s not likely to get fixed, at least not as we know it.
It may comfort gun control advocates to know that, in the words of one industry spokesperson, “5.56 ammunition for an AR-15 used to be about 33 cents a round. Now you’re looking at closer to almost a dollar a round.” Blame it on a failed supply chain, and blame that failure on the Trump administration since things began to unravel with the trade war with China. Granted, writes Rickards, it was a mistake to admit China into the World Trade Organization in the first place, and in any event, “stretching supply chains to reach cheap labor in China exponentially increases the risk of adverse outcomes on the way.” The author argues persuasively that the supply chain suffers other weak points. Though it has always been with us, its so-called scientific management has not, and innovations such as just-in-time inventory invite disaster when they run off track. Combine such disasters with stacked-up shipping containers, truckers not moving loads because they’re busy protesting pandemic restrictions, and hoarding behavior, and your local Costco begins to look like East Berlin. What’s more, writes Rickards, our current bout of inflation is a direct result of supply chain disruption, and it’s likely to get worse before it gets better—and might even become deflationary in the end. Given that “Apple works with suppliers in forty-three countries on six continents to source the materials and parts that go into an iPhone,” it’s essential to get things right. Rickards offers an eminently sensible (though costly and surely difficult) solution. Remove regimes such as China and Iran from the global “College of Nations,” establish a “Supply Chain 2.0” that “involves bringing commodity inputs and manufacturing back to the United States and allied countries,” limit trade to “trusted partners,” and rebuild the economy from scratch.
An alarming but not alarmist book that deserves serious attention from economists and policymakers.Pub Date: Nov. 29, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-54231-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Portfolio
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
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
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.
Well-crafted memoir by the noted media mogul.
Diller’s home life as a youngster was anything but happy; as he writes early on, “The household I grew up in was perfectly dysfunctional.” His mother lived in her own world, his father was knee-deep in business deals, his brother was a heroin addict, and he tried to play by all the rules in order to allay “my fear of the consequences from my incipient homosexuality.” Somehow he fell into the orbit of show business figures like Lew Wasserman (“I was once arrested for joy-riding in Mrs. Wasserman’s Bentley”) and decided that Hollywood offered the right kind of escape. Starting in the proverbial mailroom, he worked his way up to be a junior talent agent, then scrambled up the ladder to become a high-up executive at ABC, head of Paramount and Fox, and an internet pioneer who invested in Match.com and took over a revitalized Ticketmaster. None of that ascent was easy, and Diller documents several key failures along the way, including boardroom betrayals (“What a monumental dope I’d been. They’d taken over the company—in a merger I’d created—with venality and duplicity”) and strategic missteps. It’s no news that the corporate world is rife with misbehavior, but the better part of Diller’s book is his dish on the players: He meets Jack Nicholson at the William Morris Agency, “wandering through the halls, looking for anyone who’d pay attention to him”; hangs out with Warren Beatty, ever on the make; mispronounces Barbra Streisand’s name (“her glare at me as she walked out would have fried a fish”); learns a remedy for prostatitis from Katharine Hepburn (“My father was an expert urological surgeon, and I know what I’m doing”); and much more in one of the better show-biz memoirs to appear in recent years.
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780593317877
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 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.
