A tool for seeing our financial future in a brand-new light.
Oberst offers a compelling framework for predicting our economic future.
First introduced in 2013, the author’s model for understanding financial events provides a framework in which crises like the Great Depression can be analyzed through generational economics. The use of “Financial Life Cycles” could potentially also be projected to anticipate future periods of economic upheaval. To this end, Oberst’s “Financial Time Machine” examines megatrends including births, marriages, life expectancy, student debt, productivity, and globalization to determine the impacts of debt, wealth generation, and workforce departures on different age groups. The author then guides readers through creating this model for themselves, using the visual example of a ruler (and, for added nuance, an automobile dashboard with dials representing financial factors). While Oberst, a former management consultant, provides evidence that this model can play a role in anticipating financial shifts, he acknowledges that less predictable factors can also influence economic swings, including the role of immigration in compensating for a flagging birthrate and the effects of disasters like the Covid-19 pandemic. Considering the variables in our midst, including high national debt and low personal savings, it is the author’s assessment that the financial future of the United States is unfavorable, and Oberst calls for a swift reform of government spending. Drawing on the analogy of an over-leveraged family struggling to manage new expenses, the author notes that uncurbed national spending and the long-term cost of Medicare could create a financial spiral that will burden future generations. Thorough and easy to follow, the text will fascinate readers hoping to understand the trends that influence our future. Oberst asserts that The Financial Time Machine can also demystify the economic landscapes of other nations, offering an intriguing geopolitical lens for those interested in global power. And while this is not a book about personal budgeting, knowledge of how the behavior of same-age cohorts shapes access to wealth and resources is valuable for any economics enthusiast. An informative work with exciting implications, this book puts predictive power into readers’ hands.
A tool for seeing our financial future in a brand-new light.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2023
ISBN: 9781736627150
Page Count: 388
Publisher: Global Future Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 31, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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
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