Like it or not, there’s much to behold in this exhaustively researched, intellectual assessment of human preference.
The science behind the choices we make.
After insightfully scrutinizing vehicular driving habits, Vanderbilt (Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do, 2008, etc.), a contributing editor for Wired UK, Outside, and Artforum, now explores what compels our selection process in everything from movies and music to munchies and the “chromatic sweet spot” of a favorite color. “We are faced with an ever-increasing amount of things to figure out whether we like or dislike,” writes the author, “and yet at the same time there are fewer overarching rules and standards to go by in helping one decide.” Throughout the book’s entertaining chapters on the partiality of items like foods, Netflix movies, songs, and online social interactivity, Vanderbilt examines the methodology and psychological nature of the “taxonomy of taste.” He notes that while websites like Yelp and YouTube enable users to quick-grade products, services, and media-driven experiences and partake in their popularity and likability, these sites also incorporate algorithms that ingeniously weed out fake reviews, which can skew results and overall impressions. Supporting theories on taste development and personal bias, the author interviewed anthropologists on dog breeding and a host of psychologists and psychology professors, who fascinatingly discuss the sensory influences of dessert and a hypothesis attesting that repeated exposure reinforces likability. In his exploration of the predictability, instability, and malleability of our partialities, Vanderbilt also spent quality time with opinionated competition judges and at a beer festival, where, in matters of flavor and variety, the pairings and possibilities were endless. In a conclusive closing section, the author seeks to clarify the multilayered dynamics of predilection, and though he has produced an extremely convincing effort, he admits that examining this subject remains a “maddeningly elusive and idiosyncratic enterprise.”
Like it or not, there’s much to behold in this exhaustively researched, intellectual assessment of human preference.Pub Date: May 10, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-307-95824-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Feb. 27, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2016
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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