Scattershot fearmongering.
An alarmist manifesto against big government, big tech, big finance, big education, and all the other putative enemies of the private purse.
“They are coming after your livelihood, aka your path to wealth,” writes Roth, author of The War on Small Business. Who are they? The “new financial world order,” which aims to make sure that you lose and “the wealthy and powerful” win. And how will this nefarious cabal pull it off? For one thing, by forcing such things as “mandatory vaccines and masking,” which of course are just plots to make government bigger. For another, by accruing debt that makes the dollar weaker and then ceding American hegemony in the global market, a process that began with the abandonment of the gold standard. You don’t even own the software on your cellphone and computer thanks to these evildoers, who have replaced plain per–mark version ownership with subscriptions. One day you won’t even own a car thanks to Uber and similar companies. Dare speak up, and you’ll wind up on some blacklist, such as a journalist banned from PayPal—though, Roth doesn’t add, the supposed journalist wasn’t shy of saying nice things about Hitler and often supporting radical right talking points—and the Canadian truckers who protested having to be vaccinated against Covid-19 in order to enter the U.S. In support of her various scarecrow theses, Roth adduces such luminaries as Tucker Carlson, Glenn Beck, and Peter Thiel, whose like-minded utterances are invariably “tremendous” or “fantastic.” Her targets are of the broad-side-of-the-barn variety: There’s Amazon, of course, which “wants to be entrenched in every facet of your life”; every institution of higher learning in the land, “cheered on by the useful idiots saying that you must go to college”; and, naturally, every company that has bought into the environmental, social, and corporate governance model.
Scattershot fearmongering.Pub Date: July 18, 2023
ISBN: 9780063304932
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Broadside Books/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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