An eye-opening look at a battle of corporate titans that shows few signs of slowing down.
Timely report on the ongoing clash between Walmart and Amazon for domination of the online marketplace.
When Amazon branched out from its initial bookselling business to become an online store for everything, it was bound to come up against the then-mightier Walmart empire. The trouble was, writes business journalist Del Rey, Walmart’s executives were “consumed by the massive revenue and profits associated with its Supercenters, and mostly ignorant to the threat and promise of the internet.” That uncomfortable position was antithetical to the operating premise of founder Sam Walton, who favored a decentralized system where local stores sold goods appropriate to the marketplace. On the other hand, Jeff Bezos’ growing empire had no practical constraints; it could sell everything, and its development of the Prime option of paying an annual fee for quick shipping outflanked anything Walmart could offer. Doug McMillon, a new Walmart CEO, turned some aspects of the business around to the extent that it was Amazon’s turn to play catch-up, including a grocery delivery service that Amazon abandoned only to start over by acquiring Whole Foods. In the end, both conglomerates fought each other in pricing wars that in the long term would have been unsustainable. Today, Del Rey writes, drastic cost-cutting is less common. While in one instance Amazon’s price for a 12-pack of diet soda was $10 more than Walmart’s, getting the latter would involve driving to the store, while the former would arrive at one’s door. Convenience versus price remains an issue, but regardless, the author concludes, surrendering the marketplace to a pair of mega-corporations doesn’t make for a healthy economy: “Outside forces—whether they be regulators, new startups, or labor groups—will still be necessary to apply pressure where the rivalry alone is not producing the best outcomes.”
An eye-opening look at a battle of corporate titans that shows few signs of slowing down.Pub Date: June 20, 2023
ISBN: 9780063076327
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harper Business
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
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: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
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