Sure to distress the neoliberals in the audience but a powerful case for reform in the cause of economic justice.
A sharply argued analysis of the traditional explanations for wealth and poverty in the world, offering a program for easing misery while addressing structural inequalities.
Hickel (Anthropology/London School of Economics; Democracy as Death: The Moral Order of Anti-Liberal Politics in South Africa, 2015, etc.) examines the conventional wisdom that holds that the reasons parts of the world are rich and parts poor have to do with comparative advantage, supply and demand, distribution of labor and capital, and market conditions, with the rich ones having “the right institutions and the right economic policies” and the poor ones being alms-begging basket cases because of some supposed natural order of things. While global inequality mirrors the inequality of wealth within economies, the gap is widening ever more rapidly between rich and poor countries, such that the gulf between per capita incomes in the global North and the global South “has roughly tripled in size since 1960.” Even the beginning of that era wasn’t as bad as the 1980s, a period that the Millennium Development Goals program of the United Nations overlooks, training all development specialists “to forget everything that happened before 1990.” Hickel, though, isn’t inclined to forget, and one of the things to which he ascribes at least some measure of Western wealth is unpaid labor over hundreds of years in the form of slavery, which added nearly $100 trillion to the coffers of the United States alone. “Why do poor countries have an abundance of labor in the first place?” asks the author, answering himself with the observation that under colonial rule, indigenous economies were overturned in favor of dependent ones even as their resources were carted off to the capitals of Europe and North America. Hickel proposes several remedies, including debt relief, tax rationalization, and putting an end to land grabs, all meant to level the playing field.
Sure to distress the neoliberals in the audience but a powerful case for reform in the cause of economic justice.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-393-65136-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 29, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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 readable, persuasive argument that our ways of doing business will have to change if we are to prosper—or even survive.
A well-constructed critique of an economic system that, by the author’s account, is a driver of the world’s destruction.
Harvard Business School professor Henderson vigorously questions the bromide that “management’s only duty is to maximize shareholder value,” a notion advanced by Milton Friedman and accepted uncritically in business schools ever since. By that logic, writes the author, there is no reason why corporations should not fish out the oceans, raise drug prices, militate against public education (since it costs tax money), and otherwise behave ruinously and anti-socially. Many do, even though an alternative theory of business organization argues that corporations and society should enjoy a symbiotic relationship of mutual benefit, which includes corporate investment in what economists call public goods. Given that the history of humankind is “the story of our increasing ability to cooperate at larger and larger scales,” one would hope that in the face of environmental degradation and other threats, we might adopt the symbiotic model rather than the winner-take-all one. Problems abound, of course, including that of the “free rider,” the corporation that takes the benefits from collaborative agreements but does none of the work. Henderson examines case studies such as a large food company that emphasized environmentally responsible production and in turn built “purpose-led, sustainable living brands” and otherwise led the way in increasing shareholder value by reducing risk while building demand. The author argues that the “short-termism” that dominates corporate thinking needs to be adjusted to a longer view even though the larger problem might be better characterized as “failure of information.” Henderson closes with a set of prescriptions for bringing a more equitable economics to the personal level, one that, among other things, asks us to step outside routine—eat less meat, drive less—and become active in forcing corporations (and politicians) to be better citizens.
A readable, persuasive argument that our ways of doing business will have to change if we are to prosper—or even survive.Pub Date: May 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5417-3015-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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