An engaging outing for financial policy wonks that should also serve as a warning to economic policymakers.
An investigation of the back-and-forth between advocates of a strong dollar and those of a weak one.
The U.S. dollar has long been weaponized, writes financial journalist Mohsin, most lately by the Biden administration using dollar-based sanctions against Iran and Russia. The result is precarious: “The dollar is no longer there for the greater good but for those who align with America.” In 2001, some 73% of central bank foreign exchange funds were held in dollars, but that figure is now below 60%. Part of the problem is that administrations, apart from using the dollar as a weapon, have also not been able to decide whether the dollar should be strong or weak: Trump, for instance, initially held out for a weak dollar to increase the desirability of American goods abroad, but when foreign investors went fleeing, he changed his mind and bellowed demands for a strong dollar. Fortunately, he had a competent, if too compliant, treasury secretary in Steven Mnuchin, and the logic that “if the government was invested in keeping its currency strong, investors would have more reason to feel confident in bonds issued by the United States” held. However, if investors do flee, where will they go? There have been fears that the dollar will no longer be the world’s chief currency, fears that have a basis in reality, but the leading competitors have even greater problems: The euro represents too small a market; the yuan, a state that few trust. Though knowing something about fiscal policy will help readers, Mohsin is a capable interpreter of the interaction between finance and politics. It’s a messy business: Every time Congress dithers about the debt limit, foreigners begin to doubt the soundness of the dollar, which could turn out to have disastrous consequences.
An engaging outing for financial policy wonks that should also serve as a warning to economic policymakers.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780593539118
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Portfolio
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
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
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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