An exciting reassessment of the global economy that provocatively extends the frontiers of the feminist critique.
A Swedish political and economic writer shows why “feminism’s best-kept secret is just how necessary a feminist perspective is in the search for a solution to our mainstream economic problems.
Marçal, lead editorial writer for the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet, begins with the definition of the “economic man” first posited by Adam Smith and then refined by the Chicago school of economics in the 1950s. The so-called economic man is a rational individual calculating and pursuing his own self-interest, in constant competition with others. For Marçal, the one-dimensional Chicago definition is a “caricature.” Though he may not be “like us…he clearly has emotions, depths, fears and dreams that we can completely identify with.” For her, human identity can only be constructed in relation to others. The economic man is totally dependent because he must compete to prove to himself that he is worthwhile. He is also “aggressive and narcissistic. And he lives in conflict with himself,” nature, and others, defining himself by what he is not. His primary characteristic, writes the author, is “that he is not a woman. Economics has only one sex.” Where men act out of supposed self-interest, “woman has been assigned the task of caring for others, not of maximizing her own gain.” This includes cooking, cleaning, raising children, and other unpaid activities that do not result in the production of exchangeable goods. “Women's work,” she writes, “is a natural resource that we don't think we need to account for…we assume it will always be there.” However, to function well, a society must have people, knowledge, and trust, all resources made possible by unpaid domestic work. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky debunked the Chicago caricature nearly 40 years ago, but it persists. Marçal takes up the cudgels to propose that we “wave economic man off from the platform and then build an economy and a society with room for a great spectrum of what it means to be human.”
An exciting reassessment of the global economy that provocatively extends the frontiers of the feminist critique.Pub Date: June 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-68177-142-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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