A tough, blunt, insightful examination of money matters.
A sweepingly comprehensive overview of personal finance.
Barbera’s handbook of fiscal literacy begins with a stark opening sentiment: “There is no independence without financial independence.” He’s not here to tell his readers what they should do with their money, only what they could do, always keeping in mind that the fundamentals of money management never change. This book provides a primer on those fundamentals, everything from balance sheets to quarterly reports to profit and loss statements, IPOs, mutual funds, cryptocurrency hedge funds, and all manner of stocks. While always acknowledging that “math is remorseless,” Barbera seeks to “demystify financial wealth” by carefully explaining the potential risks and rewards of all the things people can do with their money. He’s careful to consistently remind his readers that he is not offering a one-size-fits-all set of instructions; rather, he encourages them to take stock of themselves and their own financial needs and wants. Each aspect of finance and investment is first described and then analyzed for its inherent strengths and weaknesses, and all of this is offered in clear, opinionated prose that’s always knowledgeable but never overbearing. The author’s realistic perspective is especially sharp when it comes to investing in the stock market; he notes that “panic is a terrible emotion to act on,” and he holds a dim view of so-called market expertise. “One of the worst things you can do is buy and sell and buy and sell some more,” he writes. “When you attempt to guess what the market will do…you might just as well gaze into your crystal ball.” Barbera is likewise frank about his own preferences (“I’ve flat-out said that I don’t like annuities, won’t buy gold, and don’t care much for bonds”), neatly separating his likes and dislikes from the advice he’s dispensing. The combination results in a sense of intense reliability—readers looking for a solid financial grounding should look here.
A tough, blunt, insightful examination of money matters.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2025
ISBN: 9781947431577
Page Count: 219
Publisher: Mentoris Project
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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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