Fifty Years of Economic Folly--And the Stark Choices Ahead

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Dambisa Moyo's book is about economics, specifically growth, and is adorned with brush strokes that paint a rising China (followed by the other three BRIC countries, Brazil, Russia, India) overtaking the west (or just the US) in size, clout, and several kinds of agenda-setting....

The Remarkable Ways We Gain Insights

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The world is a competitive place. Species perish, organisations fail, and stuff kills folks. On the upside, some people excel, some firms flourish, and societies make permanent advancements. Examining part of how the latter side happens is the quest of Gary Klein, a research...

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Hi all. It's been a while since I posted here last. I've completed a review of Richard Carrier's "On the Historicity of Jesus" and put it on my website here: http://members.optusnet.com.au/gakuseidon/Carrier_OHJ_Review.html I've given a short extract of my review below. Any...

The Moral Limits of Markets

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The sub-title that Debra Satz, a professor of ethics at Stanford, gave to this was copied by Michael Sandel, similarly employed at Harvard, in "What Money Can't Buy" a year or so later. Your reviewer loved the latter, and this steered her to the present volume, which is more encompassing...

The Art of Outsmarting Almost Everyone

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There is a spoiler at the end of the prologue to this, which is that humans are predictable when they try to be random. Though, this reviewer was more intrigued in the opener to learn of Claude Shannon's 'Ultimate Machine', which she swiftly you-tubed. She's a fan of that already. Anyway,...

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Catherine Hakim, a British social scientist, refers to "erotic capital" as the fourth personal asset. The first three are economic capital (money, wealth), human capital (expertise, education, intelligence) and social capital (slightly ill-defined networking and influencing capability,...

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More than a bit reminiscent of "Being Wrong" (by Kathryn Schultz) to this reviewer, but predating it by a while, this book offers a theory for why mistakes get not just made but entrenched. Or rather, the incidence of mistake itself is not much touched, as if it were a random outcome. But...

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Sheena Iyengar has been studying choice for over a decade, and gets to do it at an Ivy League business school. Your reviewer didn't know this before she bought the book. She would have chosen it anyway. Which gets to the start of several well-researched aspects of the subject at...

Why our goals are best reached indirectly

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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...

Money and the Good Life

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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...

The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power

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Daniel Yergin takes the reader from the hills of Pennsylvania to the Persian Gulf and Alaska in oil's journey from providing kerosene lamps to its displacement as the critical energy source for industrial age man. (Aka Hydrocarbon Man).

The hidden psychology of value

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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...

The surprising deceptions of individual choice

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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...

Fact-checking the left's new theory of everything.

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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...

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America used to be better a long time ago because people weren't as lazy. Now, all of these people who are working two or three part-time jobs are struggling because they aren't listening and obeying their wealthier bosses.