British television executive Balen (Kenneth Clarke, not reviewed) displays both understanding and incredulity in his account of the infamous 18th-century trading scandal.
It was a remarkable story of fraud and political fixing, but it might have been worse, Balen writes; it could have spelled the doom of an entire economic system. The stupendous share-trading shenanigans he deliciously dissects could easily have besmirched and destroyed a mighty swath of English nobility: lords, ministers, MPs, and even King George IV sold their influence for a slice of the tainted pie. Balen makes the dirty doings fairly easily to digest, but readers will have to pay close attention to understand the queer world of share-trading and the sheer transparency of the fraud. The South Sea Company’s ships, he notes, “had not sailed anywhere near the South Seas” in 1720, and many saw through the scheme quickly enough to get out with their money. But the company had the king's imprimatur, the ear of people who could make things happen, and the political clout to close down other speculative operations that were siphoning off funds that might have been invested in South Sea. Ultimately, investors wanted to cash out, but of cash there was little, even though the paper debts they owed were still in effect. The roller-coaster ride ended when the whole foundationless edifice crashed, but the financial conflagration was contained, and the blue-blooded perps stood ready for another day of business. Canny Robert Walpole guided the post-crash inquiry in such a fashion as to screen important players, protect the established order, and secure a seat of power for himself.
Sound familiar?Pub Date: May 12, 2003
ISBN: 0-00-716177-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | GENERAL BUSINESS | BUSINESS | WORLD | HISTORY
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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. 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
Categories: BUSINESS | LEADERSHIP, MANAGEMENT & COMMUNICATION | PSYCHOLOGY
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For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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