Obliquity tries to be a bit bigger than it really is, though actually it is up-front about this. In the acknowledgements, John Kay informs the reader it was a newspaper article later fluffed out into a book. This stayed with your reviewer as she leafed through twenty odd chapters, few of them more than ten pages each, with a quite a few blank-page divisions included in a sub-200 total. But since she missed the original incarnation, it's probably a good thing that a more lasting record was created. Several Malcolm Gladwell books could perhaps usefully have remained as "New Yorker" stories, except that she then wouldn't have read those either.
Also--having something repeated to you over and over (in as many different ways as one author...
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Book Reviews
A selection of book reviews by Forum Members.
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This is a book that seeks to unmask neoclassical economics as an imposter: the study of the allocation of scarce resources is uprooted by the Skidelskys--in their manifesto to switch out scarcity for abundance. (It's a perception thing, don't you know). At the same time, modern liberalism is somewhat trashed too. The essence of the attack on both disciplines is that of public neutrality--neutrality between different concepts of right and good (ethics) and want and need (economics). It is to the authors' credit that they proceed to do this without antagonising this reviewer--who holds such ideas of impartiality quite dear to her heart. That's because much of the text is very interesting, gorgeously written, and their approach is novel...
To understand some of the modern myths about oil and its influence on industrial, social, economic, and political existence, The Prize offers a wide ranging narrative into how oil got to where it is now as the critical commodity of the industrial age. Whether it will be displaced, as coal was, by other energy sources Yergin introduces, but he provides no crystal ball. The book originally ended a bit after Saddam Hussein's first defeat by a President Bush. The latest edition provides a coda to cover the second time a President Bush did something similar, and more lasting to Mr Hussein.
The greatest value in Yergin's presentation is his broad understanding of the world's geopolitical history, albeit with a Western Slant. You get...
It is fairly well understood that prices of £9.99 sell more stuff. And even that the public knowledge of this factoid doesn't make it go away. However when so many more pricing quirks are collected together--quirks that demonstrate, broadly, that people do not behave optimally even if it is worthwhile for them to do so--then it does rather make the reader question whether anything that she thought she knew about choice revealing preference (per Paul Samuelson) is actually true.
Pop-economics and pop-psychology books are quite abundant. Some of them even mix the two in differing concentrations. This reviewer has read many titles in that nexus as it is a favourite of hers, and she would place "Priceless" towards the psych end. That is...
Tom Slee's book initially stood out to this reviewer as "Naomi Klein via game theory". At its core it wishes to highlight life, wealth and, well, quality inequality as a social ill, and then diagnose the disease as caused by too much choice. The first chapter bears more than a slight resemblance to anti-free-market texts, even coining its own moniker "MarketThink". But, abruptly, there is a switch--the reader is informed that dispassionate game theory will uncover the cause of inefficient effect. She is also assured that Slee does not think choice is good or bad, just that it often doesn't give us what we want.
It is an interesting and novel take, and "prisoner's dilemma" enthusiasts (such as this reviewer) will enjoy another...
Although the present review was written fully five years after "The Spirit Level" (by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett) was published, the rebuttal of its subject followed that original within a year. Christopher Snowdon has produced a volume about half the length of its nemesis predecessor, and spends the first half of its pages engaged in "fact checking the left's new theory of everything", per its subtitle. This reviewer provided her summary of the original book here, in slightly more timely fashion than she has this time, but before Snowdon's reply appeared.
The same disppassionate approach that Wilkinson and Picket use--almost mimicking it actually--is employed in the fact-checking half of this text. Just as the reader had...
The book isn't without merit, but it reads like he is so out of touch. He makes a good point that marriages are a great way for poor people to get economy of scale on housing costs and other living expenses for example. However, he doesn't see the bigger picture.
Our infrastructure and regulatory system today makes social mobility very, very difficult. Our culture and ethics are declining because our economic prospects are declining, not the other way around. He's really, truly oblivious to the problems facing the average person.
There are 18 year old orphans, who upon turning 18, find themselves homeless while they still need to graduate high school. What does Murray say to them?
This reviewer wondered whether Scarcity should be a movie sequel to Scarface, except that Tony Montana was killed off in the original. Hence it is behavioural economics instead. She also wondered whether it was really a whole book in itself, rather than what could have been a chapter out of any number of other texts in the genre. In other words, there is a slight exercise in manufacturing abundance, she suspects. And why not.
The authors are impressively-credentialled Harvard economics and Princeton psychology professors respectively, relatively new on the scene (well, a decade or two) yet making waves. So somewhat ambitiously they open and close this 2013 book with the descriptor "a science in the making"; or at least, perhaps...
Kathryn Schulz has pounced on a gap in the market, and in popular perception, and constructed a thesis about the importance of error woven together with stories advertised as Malcolm Gladwell style by one review. Not quite, according to this reviewer, but a decent effort. Throughout, the author presents the offering as analysis rather than self-help, though she attempts valiantly to tease out unifying inferences from error studies, which is a vast field of academic literature, and she concentrates on how wrongness feels, how it arises, and what can (and should not) be done with it.
Being wrong feels bad. That’s why we associate it with evil—the reverse of righteousness if you like. And that’s also why institutions are set up with the...
Part biography (of John von Neumann), part history (of the RAND corporation and landmark moments of the cold war, with cameos from Bertrand Russell and others), and part (about half) pure and applied game theory, this is an entertaining and absorbing book.
The title comes from the best-known and most baffling of two-player, two-choice confrontations (there are three others which formally rank as dilemmas--where individual gain opposes public good--the next best known being "chicken").
Any in-depth treatment of these conceptions normally buries all but the geekiest reader in payoff matrices and jargon such as: symmetric, asymmetric, non-zero/zero sum, co-operate and defect . . . usually too deeply and for too long, before rescuing...
She's probably in the minority, but this reviewer winced a little on seeing that the most prominent accolade for Tim Harford on the cover of "Adapt" was "Britain's Malcolm Gladwell". Because her impression of the latter writer is that of a genius, unimaginatively retrofitting the same thesis and analysis format onto different (and successively more pedestrian) ideas. Actually, Harford's two previous books (which she owns) are both pop-economics which attempt to make the dismal science more relevant in everyday social spheres and the second was probably an effort to squeeze more juice out of the first. It did, too. This reviewer was happy for more.
But Adapt is a change of direction, (perhaps mimicking its own content?). Nominally a...
A song that influenced this reviewer's musical tastes when she was quite young, by Laurie Anderson, has the lyric: "'Cause when love is gone / There's always justice / And when justice is gone / There's always force / . . . ". Thinking about this often led her to ponder if that ranking--which she supposed was one of ability to prevail--was correct. And it further made her tend to view various approaches to justice as intellectual efforts to out-compete the other two modes of social arrangement mentioned in that lyrical excerpt, which she regarded as a worthy goal, because (per Faithless in 2001) there is "Not Enuff Love", and because force hurts.
Something of the same consideration seems to strike Amartya Sen. In particular he eschews...
An excellent, well reseached work on what America was really like prior to the arrival of Europeans from the late 15th century onward.
Sheds some light on the latest research, archeological discoveries and also interprets old facts in new contexts.
The book is also refreshingly non-Eurocentric in its evaluation of American civilizations and will be quite an eye-opener to many.
I found it especially fascinating to read that, based on latest research, the life-expectancy and overall quality of life even in Native American societies in North America (the example taken are the tribes in the New England area) was superior to that of 17th century Europe, even though technology was less advanced.
And another thing that blew my mind: The...
A damning, well written, book about how the NFL tried for years to ignore or suppress the awareness of the concussion problems players were having
Fought disability claims of retired players by dragging out the process through various way hoping the players would die.
Forming a committee of scientists connected to the NFL, of which the chairman and most of the members had no experience the relevant field. Found a scientific journal with an editor-in-chief with ties to the NFL, churned out papers that with large chunks ghostwritten to support the NFL's view that there was a problem. Some of the committee members didn't even read each paper, only their section, even though they were authors!
Dissenting reviews recommending declaring...
"Someone is staring at you in 'Personal Growth'" is a line spoken by well-meaning Carrie Fisher to the unrequited Meg Ryan in 1980's chick-flick When Harry Met Sally. This reviewer remembers that, mostly because of how novel she thought it would be (at the time, she was fourteen) to have whole sections of bookshop actually labelled as such--she had never seen one. Since then, self-help texts have exploded, and she found she doesn't actually care for them much (particularly if they are 'Sunday Times Bestseller' or whatever). She worried that "Quiet" would be such a book, more geared towards making introvert readers (she is one, ISTP) feel OK about themselves, than containing critical analysis and sceptical insight. But having encountered...
Dan Ariely quite likes writing about irrationality. Likes designing tests for it too, and outlining the results in non-technical form and the positing of explanations and theories. This book is almost the same as his previous one which this reviewer borrowed from a friend and read overnight a few years ago. In fact--if she was being unkind--she would say this is a fairly thinly disguised effort to publish more of the same. The "upside" part of the title--comes across as being woven in to the end of each chapter as a sort of afterthought. A more substantive difference from Predictably Irrational is the author's significantly more open account of his serious accident with a magnesium flare and the enduring and heart-wrenching consequences...
A monograph rather than a book, and a rather dry, academic text to cover in a review. But this work from 1992 is actually one of the clearest expositions of Sen’s rather unique theory of social justice (Rawls with a twist, if you will) and—even more importantly—contains a model of evaluating the morality of social arrangements in general that is simple, logical and something this reviewer has not seen explained quite the same way by anyone else.
This is done straight off the bat in the first chapter. Sen asks “Why equality” and then “Equality of what?”. It does not seem to get more first-principles than this. Except that the first question actually—brilliantly—dissolves into the second one, such as to form a nexus for the ethics of all...
Rather reminiscent of the excellent “Collapse” by Jared Diamond, but this work prefers to sweep away all points of Diamond’s thesis of why societies collapse—environmental damage, overpopulation, hostile (and friendly actually) neighbours—for the single determinant of extractive institutions. By this the authors mean the negative-sum dynamic of an elite organizing economic and political activity for its own benefit and closing down opportunities for the rest to change this. In contrast, inclusive institutions are defined in the text as (i) centralized and (ii) pluralistic. If the first of these conjures ideas of planning and coercion (which it did at first to this reviewer), then appropriate clarification is provided: economic and...
Ha-Joon Chang has the gift of making difficult subjects easy to laypeople to understand.
He makes a rational spirited attack on what he feels is the hypocrisy of the developed countries, the ridged ideology of the free market economists which drive agencies like the IMF.
Most chapters are filled with history lessons on how developed countries in the early days engaged in tariffs, capital controls, intellectual property theft and hard limits on foreign ownership. At least until their industries had matured to level of competing in the global market. Then changed the tune, started lecturing all the developing countries through the IMF and other agencies not to do any of those things. Usually, the countries that followed the IMF advice...
Not really about globalisation per se, Stiglitz instead has some highly rational "Washington Dissent" with the IMF/World Bank and its interventions in East Asia, Russia and Latin America in the late 1990s. Delivered with all the insider authority of a former Chief Economist and Nobel laureate to boot.
This book's main message is that the IMF/WB complex has a one-size-fits-all approach to any crisis, characterised by the shock therapy (a term much later popularised by Naomi Klein) of sudden capital account and trade liberalisation coupled with deeply contractionary monetary policy and fiscal spending cuts with rapid privatisation of state controlled firms. The expected result is intended to be a rush of private, foreign capital, an...
This reviewer had high hopes for this book--which advertised itself as an analysis of the causes of income/wealth inequality as well as of the economic and political impacts--and is written by a Nobel laureate.
It has none of the charts and estimation coefficients with which "The Spirit Level", a flagship analysis of distributional inequity from a few years ago which captured many hearts and minds--including hers--is adorned. Unfortunately, those are replaced with polemicism. References to "the 1%" or "the financial wizards who brought the world to the brink of ruin" or the rich who "resist taxes" drip from almost every page, which really started to grate after about 50 pages. This reviewer tried to block it out as her hopes faded...
This reviewer never read many books about the financial crisis of 2008 (and beyond). Having been up-close to it, and working on "Lehman Sunday" (14 Sept 08) netting out derivatives positions with that institution for her then employer (it worked out just fine), she was for a long time put off by the proliferation of diagnoses from others, as well as having no ready means to narrow the choice of accounts down. (She has read "Whoops" by John Lanchester, a novelist, and "Fool's Gold"--more about JPM and CDOs--by Gillian Tett, journalist, and now this one by an academic).
Fault Lines is itself about various adverse incentive structures in parts of the world that were--as it happened--critical in setting off the perfect storm of last...
This reviewer always learns plenty from Niall Ferguson's books, but she feels that excessive effort is made to shape a thesis into an absorbing story, such that it usually ends up (to her) as so meticulous and precise as to strain credibility--beyond being one of several thousand possible variations or interpretations. This is probably because most of his books were TV series at the same time (and why they make for quite decent ones of those).
To get the plot, the back cover is sufficient--six institutions/eras explain why the west (defined in the text) out-competed the rest from unpropitious starting conditions five centuries ago. The list of killer apps looks broadly like a capitalist manifesto, which is not a surprise knowing the...
The opening intro to this book was deceptively pedestrian to this reviewer: providing a laundry-list of things money can buy (helpfully called commodities whenever the emphasis is supposed to be that it should not be able to)--none of which greatly surprised her or gave her instinctive cause to take up arms.
In the same intro the moral objections--Sandel offers two--to unfettered marketisation of everything are outlined too. One is fairness: simply put "the more that money can buy, the more affluence matters". The other is corruption, and in particular the lowering of the valuation metric for a good (or action) from one of civic virtue to self-interest.
Similarly, this reviewer did not expect she would be dazzled much by the...
My book review for the book by Pim van Lommel on Near Death Experiences.
When dealing believers of woo-woo, skeptics often ask themselves (and each other), "how can people believe that stuff?" and "why is it so hard to persuade these people they're wrong, when we have the facts right here?" For compelling answers to these questions, read this book.
Tavris and Aronson have written a very accessible introduction to cognitive dissonance, which is the tension that occurs when a person tries to hold two inconsistent "cognitions" (ideas, attitudes, beliefs, or opinions). Dissonance is an uncomfortable state, the more so when one of the cognitions is an important element of one's identity. The mind works to reduce dissonance, and it tends to do so in a way that preserves one's own concept of who one is.
The...
I found this book really interesting for its use of jokes to explain philosophical concepts, including common logical fallacies. The jokes for the most part are not that funny, but make for memorable points in remembering all the information given in the book.
One side effect of the book is understanding more about what makes jokes themselves funny. While delving into Kant's analysis of a priori and a posteriori knowledge, the authors show the conflicts causing jokes to make people laugh.
This wonderful book starts with a discussion of the cuckoo bird who will place one of its eggs in the nest of another bird with similar, yet smaller, eggs. The other bird will then devote its attention to the cuckoo egg since it is bigger. supernormal stimuli, such as this example can be found easily in the animal kingdom... But what about humans?
Examples of supernormal stimuli are discussed in many areas including, health, fitness, sexual attraction, and television viewing. A earlier book by this author called Waistland covers more examples in the fitness and diet arenas. Both books are great reads.
Deirdre Barrett was one of the speakers at TAM2012.
After reading this book I called the Secular Coalition for America and am now an active participant. The book is, in my opinion, a call to action (and action needs to happen). Mr Faircloth names names and discusses various laws and policies which violate the seperation of church and state. Child care, boy scouts and many many more. I have purchased this book 7 times as I keep giving them to others. A great read and a great call to action.
I found this book interesting, not just for the subject of memory enhancement, but for the great writing style, and intelligence that the author brings forth in the writing.
Joshua Foer was assigned to cover the memory championships one year, and while talking to a couple of competitors, learns the tricks involved. When told that anyone could do it, he decided to try.
The book goes into detail about his research, and people he meets along the way. He discusses studies performed on memory and explains a lot of what goes on in the learning process.
There is even a section where he talks about his encounters with a so called savant, and his research to expose the fraud. This gave me the impression that the author tends to use more...
Sachs’ book is ostensibly the most liberal and left-leaning of its decade’s crop of mainstream discussions of development economics. Before this reviewer read it she was more aware of the criticisms of calls to "double aid" than she was of the arguments, and to some extent it stands alone where most other writers fear to venture. As if to compensate for other shortage of support, its title is by far the most positive too, tending to be surrounded by a number of other works that explain why either little, or nothing can be done to improve the plight of the sixth of the world’s population utterly left behind by two centuries of enrichment.
After a shortish textbook-style intro to international development, in which Sachs sketches out...
"Don’t do it" seems to be the message directed at aid agencies, western governments, transnational (Bretton Woods) organisations and NGOs—in respect of the majority of all their respective efforts to help the poor. While the first tragedy of the world’s poor is poverty itself, Easterly’s "second tragedy" is the failure of $2.3 trillion spent on foreign aid in fifty years to have delivered many obvious basics. By page 5 the author admits that no particular remedy will be forthcoming from this text either, since the book’s motto is, at its simplest: "the big answer is that there is no big answer".
Almost as early on, the subject is framed as planners versus searchers being the bad and the good methods of helping development in...
This reviewer had to read Bottom Billion through a couple of times because she found it unusually packed with knowledge. Not to mention cool-headed, analytical in high measure, and usefully lacking in political polemic which made it all the more readable.
Amid the evidence of falling poverty levels and the spread of prosperity that is happily affecting large parts of the world's population, the text focuses on the poorest sixth for whom living standards have always been wretched and have unquestionably failed to improve in the last four decades, if not worsen. Collier calls this group "Africa +" and counts 58 nations, whose combined GDP tallies up somewhere short of Belgium's, but he omits to provide a list (to avoid self-fulfilling...
The sensational part about this book is that its author hails from Africa (Zambia) and is calling for the curtailment of foreign aid to the continent. So if she's doing that, then it must be right, right? And Messrs Sachs, Collier, Geldof and [Bono's last name] have all got things wrong and/or they are probably merely scalping a bit of moral high ground?
Of course, accepting such a silly premise at face value would be folly and in no part of the book (except the poor preface from Niall Ferguson) does Moyo really try to push such grounds for her credibility. But it's not exactly kept secret from the reader either. Moyo's degree from Harvard and eight years at Goldman Sachs are probably to be politely excused (as in not detracting from...
Mostly, this book explains why the market of its title—that of doing good for society or corporate social responsibility (CSR)—is small, and should be small, at least relative to some contemporary hype. And mostly it does this by placing corporate virtue in what this reviewer regards as its correct place—alongside an array of business strategies that differentiate firms and appeal to some constituent stakeholders and turn off others. Ostensibly it walks a middle ground between enthusiasts who claim that CSR is, or can be, and probably should be for all, and rigidly market driven advocates who see CSR as nothing but a fortunate coincidence (for society) when it coincides with seeking profits. But the truth argued by the author is...
It's pretty funny that 14 years after this book was released and became popular, The Da Vinci Code suddenly took the world by storm and everyone was talking about how Jesus had married Mary Magdalene and went to France, etc. This book is about many of the same topics, although not in the same way.
This book isn't about how these conspiracies are true, instead they are about people who insist that it's true despite all contrary evidence. This book is a fantastic read with a great theme (the search for the BIG SECRET to life and history). The occult references are endless, but the confusion is part of the appeal.
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A powerful, thought-provoking book. A great introduction into the fascinating world Network Science. Michael Nielson explains how the Internet is amplifying collective intelligence and making real world problems easier to solve.
For example, the author demonstrates how through communication via the Internet, mathematicians were able to find a new combinatorial proof to the density version of the Hales–Jewett theorem.
After reading it, you'll realize that coming to the JREF forums isn't a "waste of time," but an amazing consciousness-raising experience. It's an opportunity to gain the knowledge that other members have acquired throughout their lifetimes.
The author calls a spade a spade in ways that no politician ever would (if they knew the mic was on, that is)--voters are not just rationally ignorant, they are irrationally daft. And that includes you.
In precis: rational ignorance is not the cause of democratic folly, because via the wisdom of crowds, the smartest non-ignorant voter on every issue would prevail over the randomised noise, and the result would be policymaking at its finest. Instead, the errors are not random, but reflect the insidious working of Caplan's four main biases that voters have: 1) the market does not know best all that often, 2) foreigners are foes, 3) jobs are better than efficiency and 4) yesterday was better than today. Apparently these systematic biases...
This book's title would ordinarily have led this reviewer to believe she was about to read an anti-business tirade about the subjugation of government and democracy to the superior power of big business, replete with lists of how many corporations had market capitalisation as big as medium sized countries' GDP (which is to compare stock with flow anyway), yet were not answerable to the public, but had tentacles reaching deep into the pockets of executive branches of governments, and must be felled urgently.
In fact the book does indeed cover this subject matter, but in a most welcome rational manner, and with the correct perspective and the most appropriate remedies put forward.
First off, the golden age of the 1950s and 60s...
This reviewer picked up "Sway" at a shop in order to complete a three-for-two deal ("It's free, yippee, and that should make me more happy about paying cover price for the other two shouldn't it, huh?") and wondered whether its contents would illuminate the irrational bias that she was probably conforming to. Let's see.
The book is a quick read--180 pages (not including end-notes--those don't count) of not that many words each, with one or two pages blank for each chapter separation. So not great value for the advertised price (It took her a couple of hours to read cover-to-cover, ex end-notes). But is it good? Not all that really. Irrationality always seems to mean heuristics and biases. The names of them get shuffled around a bit...