Meticulously argued and guaranteed to raise the blood pressure of the average American taxpayer.
A business law expert shines a pitiless light on the subprime mortgage meltdown that kicked off the Great Recession.
Remember the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s? Taub (Business Law/Vermont Law School) certainly does, and she spends the first part of her narrative exposing the roots of the 2008 mortgage crisis, revisiting the tale of Harriet and Leonard Nobelman, whose innocent purchase of a Dallas-area condo culminated in a 1993 Supreme Court decision that prevented them from modifying their home mortgage through bankruptcy. Victims of a land-flip–based investment scam, the Nobelmans were, finally, “too small to save.” Meanwhile, all the decision-makers who, in a dizzying series of transactions, fueled the Nobelman mortgage received government support, and very few suffered negative consequences. In the second part of the book, Taub traces the housing bubble and mortgage crisis of the new century, which by 2013 saw 5 million homes lost to foreclosure and another 10 million still left underwater. Despite the drag of this negative equity on the fortunes of Main Street, Wall Street appears to be doing just fine. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Taub finds the same players and practices that brought us the S&L debacle again responsible. She blisters the “legal enablers” who, by their acts or omissions, failed to corral predatory practices and wild speculation. She tells of regulators asleep at the switch and rating agencies beholden to their subjects, of acts by Congress and state legislatures, federal courts and various rule-making agencies, all of which favored the big and powerful financial players. She concludes by dispelling some of the absurd myths surrounding the entire debacle, among them that “nobody saw it coming,” that “there was not widespread fraud and abuse,” and that the real fault lies “with greedy homeowners who borrowed money and did not pay it back.”
Meticulously argued and guaranteed to raise the blood pressure of the average American taxpayer.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-300-16898-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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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