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
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
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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