A startling case study of how unchecked corporate power affects world affairs—and all of us.
Two award-winning New York Times investigative reporters take down the world’s leading consulting firm, counsel to mega-corporations, dictators, and union-busters everywhere.
“There is no secret society shaping every major decision and determining the direction of human history. There is, however, McKinsey & Company.” So wrote one former McKinsey employee of an organization whose consultants develop strategies to market share and evade legal culpabilities, playing all sides of the field whenever possible. For example, write Bogdanich and Forsythe, McKinsey counseled Purdue Pharmaceutical to boost market sales of OxyContin by organizing sales contests among reps and making claims that patients using the drug would be happier, “a suggestion health officials called ludicrous.” During the Trump years, McKinsey was also awarded millions of dollars in contracts with federal agencies specifically charged with monitoring drugs. Indeed, when Alex Azar left his job as president of Eli Lilly, the authors allege that he went to McKinsey in search of job-seeking advice and soon found employment as the secretary of Health and Human Services. The conflict-of-interest bindings with baneful substances are one thing, but it gets worse. In one damning scene, the authors depict McKinsey helping Disneyland get around the ugly accidental death of a young customer on a ride at the same time the company sought to lay off high-paid maintenance workers who could keep the contraptions running safely. Even more disturbing are the authors’ revelations about McKinsey’s work to improve the reputation of the Saudi regime, taking advantage of “a political phenomenon the royal family wanted desperately to ward off: the Arab Spring,” which was “potentially an extinction-level event for the royal family.” The company, the authors show clearly and disturbingly, suggested the regime give the impression of modernizing by, say, allowing women to drive while cracking down on dissent—which likely led to the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi within the Saudi consulate in Turkey in 2018.
A startling case study of how unchecked corporate power affects world affairs—and all of us.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-385-54623-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2022
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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