Students of population biology, gerontology, and finance alike will find value in these pages.
Wharton School professor Guillén examines demographic, economic, and climatic trends to project a vision of the world 10 years hence.
Forecasting the future is always a project fraught with peril, as the authors of The Limits to Growth might tell you. Yet some trends of the present seem bound for a harvest of ineluctable results. The number of hungry people will grow in the next decade, but so, too, will obesity; by the author’s projections, 50% of Americans will be obese in 2030. This speaks to another growing trend: inequality, a neat solution for which seems unlikely. Even so, Guillén prophesies that middle-class markets will grow in Asia at a much faster clip than in Europe and North America while Africa, which now has the world’s fastest-growing populations, will be on the brink of either disaster or a renaissance that will finally bring it wealth. “For better or worse,” he writes, “its fortunes will matter globally.” Regarding the issue of population, the world will be older almost everywhere. Interestingly, Guillén links the success of Airbnb and other aspects of the “sharing economy” to older persons who want to remain in their homes but find them large enough to offer rooms to rent. Bearing the financial weight of this increasingly older population will be millennials and Gen Z’ers, many of whom, ventures the author, will not be able to accumulate much wealth over their working lifetimes. Some of the seemingly intractable problems of today—immigration and climate change, foremost among them—will not be fixed until the conversations surrounding them become fact-based. As Guillén notes, immigration is a net benefit to society, and “there’s a great need for a calm debate about the best policies to determine the volume, timing, and composition of immigration so as to maximize the opportunities for both the origin and the destination countries and so that globalization does not leave millions of people behind as they lose jobs and their communities decline.”
Students of population biology, gerontology, and finance alike will find value in these pages.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26817-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
