A useful but rambling assemblage of advice about the myriad types of wealth.
A guide reflects on the nature of life’s various material and spiritual treasures.
In his book, Smith acknowledges the significance of material prosperity. In fact, he offers all manner of counsel regarding the navigation of readers’ practical affairs, from careers to home ownership. He even pauses to reflect on the advantages and disadvantages of receiving a considerable inheritance, and advocates for the importance of teenagers gaining some “financial literacy.” But the accumulation of money and property is only one aspect of wealth, a recognition that often arises later in life: “Only through practical experiences in middle-age or older is it recognized that money is not the most significant characteristic of wealth. In fact, they were most wealthy when they were in a stable situation with loving parents and childhood friends and pets—a stage of life that once passed can never be recaptured.” He sensibly reflects on several types of nonmaterial wealth, including the spiritual kind comprised of beliefs that, if nothing else, can be “psychologically comforting.” In addition, he discusses the significance of an “intangible cultural inheritance” passed on by an individual’s elders. This brief mediation—the book is under 90 pages—has the warm timbre of an avuncular lesson delivered to younger readers in need of advice while approaching the threshold of adulthood. The author’s tone is confidently knowing as well as gently solicitous. In addition, Smith offers many tidbits of thoughtful and helpful counsel. But the book meanders widely across an uneven terrain of topics—the author discusses the costs of keeping a pet, home security, and the process of buying a computer. In the spirit of comprehensiveness, he attempts to trace “life events from birth to death.” As a result, readers will get the impression that Smith is thinking out loud, leaping somewhat randomly from one lily pad of discussion to another, down a roiling stream of consciousness. This peripatetic style eventually proves a bit exasperating, and some readers may not make it to the book’s finish line.
A useful but rambling assemblage of advice about the myriad types of wealth.Pub Date: June 22, 2023
ISBN: 979-8889636090
Page Count: 90
Publisher: Pageturner, Press and Media
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2023
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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