A stimulating call for government action to restore America’s standing as an industrial powerhouse.
It’s time for the government to reenergize American manufacturing and other industries with a determined program of subsidies and trade barriers, argues this sweeping economic manifesto.
Investment banker Fasteau and economist Fletcher, both members of the Coalition for a Prosperous America, present a wide-ranging critique of the economic orthodoxy that holds unfettered free trade as alwaysa blessing. In reality, they argue, America’s pro-free trade policies have led to the offshoring of crucial industries, including the production of military equipment and medical supplies that are critical to national well-being, and the replacement of stable, well-paying manufacturing jobs with low-wage service and retail jobs. They call for a comprehensive, protectionist industrial policy that would nurture “advantageous industries” that underlie an innovative, high-tech, high-wage economy, and for a monetary policy that would end the overvaluation of the dollar that produces trade deficits by making American products artificially more expensive than those of foreign competitors. The authors flesh out these ideas in intricate case studies of industrial policies around the world; they discuss China’s ruthlessly effective program of boosting exports through unfair trade practices as well as the evolution of various American industries, like the decades-long saga of the Big Three automakers’ loss of market share. They conclude with detailed policy proposals, which include leaving the World Trade Organization, raising tariffs on imports, and providing manufacturing companies with a raft of government loans and tax breaks. Fasteau and Fletcher synthesize a wealth of data and economic history into an incisive analysis of the workings and pitfalls of free trade. They convey all of this in lucid, accessible prose that manages to turn complex technical arguments into pithy, down-to-earth aphorisms. (“Growth is about turning Burkina Faso into South Korea, not about being the most efficient possible Burkina Faso forever,” they write in a tour-de-force debunking of the theory of comparative advantage.) The result is a lucid diagnosis of America’s economic decline and an ambitious, hopeful program for reversing it.
A stimulating call for government action to restore America’s standing as an industrial powerhouse.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781009243070
Page Count: 836
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
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
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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