Next book

OTHER PEOPLE'S MONEY

THE REAL BUSINESS OF FINANCE

Sobering and lucid. If you’re moved to keep your money in a sock after reading this, you’d have cause.

All’s not well in the counting house, nor in a capitalist system grown increasingly unequal and corrosive.

“We need a finance sector to manage our payments, finance our housing stock, restore our infrastructure, fund our retirement and support new business,” writes British economist Kay (Obliquity: Why Our Goals Are Best Achieved Indirectly, 2010, etc.). By his account, we don’t have a sector that does much of that necessary work; instead, intermediation, buying and selling abstractions rather than real things, is the new method. In fact, writes the author, lending to entities that make things, “which most people would imagine was the principal business of a bank,” makes up only about 10 percent of the sector’s business. The rest lies in intermediation, which is another way of saying that “the industry mostly trades with itself, talks to itself and judges itself by reference to performance criteria that it has itself generated.” Take securitized mortgage loans, bundled and traded like baseball cards: there’s a recipe for disaster, and in the absence of meaningful external oversight, it and other contributing factors to financial meltdown are not likely to be tamed anytime soon. Kay is no Chicken Little; his arguments are calmly made, backed by such evidence as can be teased out of the reclusive industry. In the meantime, he notes, many aspects of the financial sector, such as the lending and deposit channels, are “ripe for disruptive innovation,” just as in recent years the increased use of credit and debit cards and other electronic tie-ins to bank accounts have made cash unnecessary in most daily transactions. Kay holds forth for increased regulation that is focused “more on the interests of consumers and less on the integrity of market processes”—in other words, the more vigorous application of Dodd-Frank and other regulatory regimes that Congress is now hurriedly trying to dismantle.

Sobering and lucid. If you’re moved to keep your money in a sock after reading this, you’d have cause.

Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2015

ISBN: 978-1-61039-603-5

Page Count: 352

Publisher: PublicAffairs

Review Posted Online: July 14, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015

Categories:
Next book

THINKING, FAST AND SLOW

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

Next book

THE CULTURE MAP

BREAKING THROUGH THE INVISIBLE BOUNDARIES OF GLOBAL BUSINESS

These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.

A helpful guide to working effectively with people from other cultures.

“The sad truth is that the vast majority of managers who conduct business internationally have little understanding about how culture is impacting their work,” writes Meyer, a professor at INSEAD, an international business school. Yet they face a wider array of work styles than ever before in dealing with clients, suppliers and colleagues from around the world. When is it best to speak or stay quiet? What is the role of the leader in the room? When working with foreign business people, failing to take cultural differences into account can lead to frustration, misunderstanding or worse. Based on research and her experiences teaching cross-cultural behaviors to executive students, the author examines a handful of key areas. Among others, they include communicating (Anglo-Saxons are explicit; Asians communicate implicitly, requiring listeners to read between the lines), developing a sense of trust (Brazilians do it over long lunches), and decision-making (Germans rely on consensus, Americans on one decider). In each area, the author provides a “culture map scale” that positions behaviors in more than 20 countries along a continuum, allowing readers to anticipate the preferences of individuals from a particular country: Do they like direct or indirect negative feedback? Are they rigid or flexible regarding deadlines? Do they favor verbal or written commitments? And so on. Meyer discusses managers who have faced perplexing situations, such as knowledgeable team members who fail to speak up in meetings or Indians who offer a puzzling half-shake, half-nod of the head. Cultural differences—not personality quirks—are the motivating factors behind many behavioral styles. Depending on our cultures, we understand the world in a particular way, find certain arguments persuasive or lacking merit, and consider some ways of making decisions or measuring time natural and others quite strange.

These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.

Pub Date: May 27, 2014

ISBN: 978-1-61039-250-1

Page Count: 288

Publisher: PublicAffairs

Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014

Categories:
Close Quickview