A rigorous, thorough work that should help finance students prepare for major changes.
A panoramic textbook covers an international financial landscape newly drawn by crisis, technology, and transformation.
According to Burke, the financial cosmos has radically changed since the global crisis of 2008. In the wake of the pressures of Covid-19, the “public institutional infrastructure” is poised to continue its transformation. The structure provided by the Bretton Woods Conference during World War II has been collapsing, and major institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization are “warped” versions of their former selves. In addition, there is a shift underfoot to a less unipolar world, one in which Brazil, Russia, India, and China ascend to economic prominence, leaving G7 nations imperiled. Meanwhile, fintech, the rise of artificial intelligence, and the growing popularity of cryptocurrency function as agents of disruption in this “environment of incessant change.” As the author astutely observes, fiscal institutions and forms of financial regulation are not immutable, and any approach to understanding them must account for their susceptibility to change: “Central banks and financial services institutions are human creations and are not the function of tentatively valid scientific generalizations. Therefore, they may be changed and replaced to serve the public good, without becoming public institutions.” Nevertheless, Burke doesn’t assume that everything will change, resisting the current fashion to announce the grand reinvention of everything; for example, he predicts that the United States dollar’s hegemony will persist unabated in the foreseeable future.
This is an academic textbook designed to be used for classroom instruction and so the chapters are appropriately (and impressively) synoptic, each ending with a helpfully concise conclusion and an assemblage of discussion questions for students. The material explored is, as readers might expect, technically forbidding. But Burke manages not only to provide remarkably accessible treatments of complex subjects, but also furnishes useful illustrative tools like graphs and charts as well as a bibliography pointing the way to further study. The book is admirably comprehensive: Readers will find discussions of Bitcoin and economic inequality, monetary theory, and the repercussions of online banking. In addition, Burke is unafraid to challenge existing orthodoxies, showing a refreshing lack of intellectual piety for academic conventions. For example, he meticulously demonstrates the empirical weaknesses of the widely accepted “financial circular flow model” as an account of the role of banks and explains why some dominant theories about money are indefensible. Money, he asserts, is “surely one of the most perplexing inventions of human society.” Additionally, the United Nations is portrayed as an obstacle to a more multipolar world, attached to “vested interests rooted in history.” Burke is not immune to the allure of the occasional banality—after comparing the wealth of Jeff Bezos to a Vietnamese shrimp-peeling worker, he muses: “A question arises: for whom then does the financial system toll? The question is immensely complicated but prosaic observations enlighten.” It’s unclear what enlightenment is delivered here, especially disappointing since the discussion he presents of financial inequality in the context of an assessment of economist Thomas Piketty’s “analytical historical narrative” is empirically judicious. But overall, this is a textbook that should be widely adopted—Burke examines all the relevant major issues in a way that considers the new demands and opportunities of a rapidly shifting world.
A rigorous, thorough work that should help finance students prepare for major changes.Pub Date: July 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-3-03-063966-2
Page Count: 236
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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: 288
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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