Tomorrow is the day!
Amazon tells me that they will deliver Thomas L Friedman's new book to me tomorrow. I ordered Hot, Flat, and Crowded back when the title was still Red, White, and Green. Can it possibly be as good as The World Is Flat? I can't wait to find out.
Thomas L Friedman, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution -- and How It Can Renew America (2008) 438 pages.
Sway is a short, crisp, amusing, and informative book about the psychology of decision making.
Nudge is a long, crisp, amusing, and informative book about the psychology of decision making.
Sway is written from the point of view of you, the decision maker. It warns of the importance of being aware of the ways you may be swayed, especially by those who are not benign.
Nudge is written from the point of view of the "choice architect" who has to create a driver's license application form, choose where to place which food in a cafeteria, or design an employee stock savings plan.
Thaler and Sunstein, the authors of Nudge, consider themselves paternalistic libertarians who feel it's appropriate to put the fruit at eye level in the junior high cafeteria and the cake and cookies above eye level and at the end of the table. Their point is you must display the food in some order and it's more useful to all of us when the healthy choices are more easily available than the french fries.
Both of these books are worth reading. If you're serious about increasing organ donations, preventing another disaster like the sub-prime crisis, improving the government drug plan for seniors, and other important situations where a small nudge might make a big difference for the better, then Nudge is for you. If you just want a very quick and very amusing overview of how we are fooled by salesmen and politicians and how we fool ourselves, Sway is just the ticket.
Not that I want to influence what you read . . .
Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior (2008) by Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman 3.5 stars / 5 stars
Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (2008) by Richard H Thaler and Cass R Sunstein 4 stars / 5 stars
Where to begin? This book by Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, is so bizarre in its accusations that it's difficult to know which of her charges to begin dismembering first.
Klein's theory is that Milton Friedman's Chicago School economic theories are the motivating factor in the Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq. These theories are also the reason the situation in New Orleans was allowed to deteriorate. They account for takeovers in South American countries in the mid-twentieth century by right-wing dictators seen by the author to have been encouraged by the US government.
She claims that the administration's seeming incompetence in Iraq was intentional. The result of the chaos in Baghdad, she claims, was like applying electroshock therapy to mental patients, creating such a sense of disruption and confusion that the individual (or the country in this case) becomes a clean slate, wide open to the changes the doctor (or the administration) wishes to make. She refers to a purported CIA program in the 1950s in which torture of mental patients at McGill University was undertaken to determine how best to interrogate prisoners as the blueprint for the Iraq invasion.
And the reason for this shock therapy in Iraq? So that administration cronies could move in and rebuild all that had been purposely destroyed and thereby reap great financial reward. So that electricity, phone service, and other utilities could be "sold off" to private investors. So that Milton Friedman's ideas about economics could prevail.
Having read slightly more than the man in the street about Milton Friedman and his economic theories, I can say without hesitation that when writing this drivel Klein was on some controlled substance. LSD maybe? What bunk.
This is a guest blog by my niece Ann.
I read Maxed Out: Hard Times, Easy Credit, and the Era of Predatory Lenders by James Scurlock, and I very much enjoyed it.
A number of years ago, I was driving up on the north shore of Long Island (the Gold Coast, Gatsby Country), and thinking to myself, "How is it that so many people can afford to drive around in stupidly expensive cars? And why are the estates vanishing from here, being replaced by awful little McMansions? I couldn't figure out how it could be that there was so much discretionary income out there. While Long Island does have money, it just seemed like it was over the top.
Well, the years went by, the economy boomed some more, and then one day the housing bubble, just like the tulip bubble in 17th century Holland went south. People looked around at their $650,000 houses and realized that they were living next door to me and my 1997 Chevy van. And that maybe it really wasn't worth what their "banker" had told them, especially since they owed $700,000 on it.
Maxed Out goes through all of this, and parses out how it is that people wind up in debt, and what the forces are that cause it. Scurlock does this without blaming anyone, or screaming "GREED!!" at anyone. He does come down hard on the lack of regulation of the banking industry and how lax the lending rules have become.
If you've tried to figure out why it is that people who should be able to avoid debt don't, or why it is that credit card companies want to extend credit to people who live in a double-wide, it's a book worth reading. Unlike many financial/economic books, it's very accessible and not at all dry. It's a good intro to the larger topic of "why is our economy a mess, and is there any hope?"
Scurlock has a movie out of the same name and I think I'm going to have NetFlix get it for me.