Dense with information, free of jargon, and a powerful argument against an increasingly unsustainable economic system.
A sweeping economic history of the to-some-sacrosanct doctrine of capitalism and those arrayed against it over the years.
Cassidy, a staff writer at the New Yorker and author of the excellent How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities, sounds a subtle theme in his characterization of capitalism as it has developed over the past four centuries or so: It has always relied on compulsion. “Left to himself he cannot survive a single day,” wrote Friedrich Engels, a justly important figure in this account, of the industrial worker. “The bourgeoisie has gained a monopoly of all means of existence in the broadest sense of the word.” Karl Marx would join with Engels to dissect the employer-worker nexus, which “is disguised by a seemingly voluntary market transaction.” Sometimes that transaction is not even as voluntary as all that; as Cassidy writes, industrial capitalism was built on colonial capitalism, which in turn rested on the foundation of slavery. The resulting economy of commodities such as sugar and cotton created a global system entwined with empire. And, Cassidy writes, sometimes unwaged labor took a different form, as with the domestic work that “typically has been unpaid and carried out by women,” and without which, he adds, echoing the Italian immigrant activist Silvia Federici, capitalism “couldn’t operate.” Cassidy’s narrative takes the British East India Company as its opening case study, with its practice of monopsony (in which “a single large buyer can exploit its leverage over many small sellers who have no alternative to dealing with it”). With many stops along the way to take in Luddism, the theories of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, the formation of labor unions, dependency theory, and the like, he concludes with modern critics such as Thomas Piketty, who notes that the unequal accumulation of mega-wealth can be fixed: “Social democracy is not a finished product.”
Dense with information, free of jargon, and a powerful argument against an increasingly unsustainable economic system.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780374601089
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
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
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
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