It’s a tragic fact that life often recapitulates high school, that one’s place in the pecking order seldom changes, whether playground meat or prom king. Prinstein (Clinical Psychology/Univ. of North Carolina), a self-described “psychology nerd,” observes that the course of one’s popularity through life is firmly established way back in first grade. However, he notes repeatedly, there are two kinds of popularity: one is an indicator of status and thus highly variable, while the other is likability, which “captures those we feel close to and trust, and the people who make us happy when we spend time with them.” Confusing the two categories, by Prinstein’s account, is a good way to make oneself unhappy, as with one popular girl who, invited to all the right parties, began to ingest everything on hand at those festivities, earning herself an alcohol dependency. As the author writes, there are actual physiological reasons for seeking status, things that happen in the ventral striatum that reward us for success in the brain’s “emotional salience” network. Unfairly, the popular kids often live longer than the unpopular ones, perhaps as a consequence of the latter’s being “isolated, disconnected, lonely” and made mean by “hostile attribution bias,” the tendency to blame our problems on others. Prinstein closes his discussion with an enumeration of the qualities of likability, including self-reflection, taking turns in conversation and other activities rather than dominating them, and not disrupting the group in naked self-interest. A word for the downtrodden: the author suggests that the better kind of popularity is not necessarily inborn—i.e., people can change their own luck by cultivating these and other qualities.

Though repetitive, an eye-opening look at the ways of the world—at least the world as the cool kids know it.

Pub Date: June 6, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-399-56373-7

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: May 23, 2017

Categories:

PSYCHOLOGY | BUSINESS | LEADERSHIP, MANAGEMENT & COMMUNICATION | GENERAL BUSINESS

- BOOK REVIEW
LIKE ABILITY
by Lori Getz & Mitch Prinstein

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GOOD ECONOMICS FOR HARD TIMES

by Abhijit V. Banerjee & Esther Duflo ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 12, 2019

Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.

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“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.

It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.

Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.

Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0

Page Count: 432

Publisher: PublicAffairs

Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019

Categories:

- SEEN & HEARD
Bill Gates Shares His Summer Reading List

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MASTERY

by Robert Greene ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 13, 2012

Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...

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Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.

The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.

Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.