Close readers will undoubtedly learn to look carefully before leaping.
The bestselling science writer explores the elements of complex decision-making.
Whom should I marry? Should I move? Should the United States occupy Iraq? Making tough, long-term, deliberative choices, writes Johnson (Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World, 2016, etc.), is not taught in school, but it should be. In this bright, nuanced, story-filled book, he draws on the work of behavioral psychologists and neuroscientists to explain how to decide about things that really matter. “We need time to deliberate, to weigh the options, to listen to different points of view before we render a judgment,” he writes. His recurrent, fascinating example is the nine months of “debate and deliberation” that led to the successful U.S. raid on Osama bin Laden’s hiding place in Pakistan in 2011. Was bin Laden really in the compound? How to get in? (They examined 37 possible ways.) Should we capture or kill? Other examples include urban planning decisions: New York City buried its polluted Collect Pond in 1812 (rather than turn it into a public park), and within 30 years, the area became the notorious Five Points slum. In the early 2000s, the same city decided to revitalize (rather than demolish) abandoned West Side rail tracks, creating High Line Park. Johnson examines factors that make farsighted thinking challenging. Unlike simpler, pro-versus-con choices, complex decisions resemble the sort of quandaries that require environmental impact studies: “They involve multiple interacting variables; they demand thinking that covers a full spectrum of different experiences and scales; they force us to predict the future with varying levels of certainty.” Often, they involve conflicting objectives or initially unclear options. The author details techniques for surmounting such obstacles—e.g., how to map variables, predict where potential paths may lead, and make a final decision. He stresses the importance of simulations and scenario-planning and makes an interesting if overlong case for how reading novels can improve decision-making.
Close readers will undoubtedly learn to look carefully before leaping.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-59448-821-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“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
SEEN & HEARD
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
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.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 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.
bookshelf
