The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. “Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues. Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds. 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. 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. Kahneman largely avoids jargon when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. 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. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. 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. 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. There’s much for the alarmist here but food for thought for the calm investor, too.Ī psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking. Among its components are bonds and land, of course, but also, not surprisingly, “physical gold and silver…(coins and bars, no numismatics)” and, more surprisingly, museum-quality fine art. He concludes, in the more sober and less conspiracy-minded portion of this double-edged book, with a view of what a well-structured, wealth-preserving portfolio might look like in a time when wealth creation is ebbing but wealth extraction-from your pocket, that is-is rising. The author argues that the complex global financial system is now largely immune to analysis by the static tools of classical economics “complex systems,” he rightly remarks, “behave in a completely different manner from equilibrium systems.” Number crunching begins to look like a secondary tool to the wind-reading skills of psychological forecasting: who’s going to freak out first, and when? Examining such things as Bayesian probability (the “theorem is messy, but it’s still better than nothing”), scaling metrics, and density functions, Rickards makes a good case to get smarter to how people actually think, which is seldom logical and seldom smart. Never mind that the author does indeed urge on his readers the thesis that the elite, whoever they may be-George Soros, to be sure, but Christopher Dodd?-have three things on their agenda: “world money, world taxation, and world order.” The conspiracy theory stuff never goes away, but when Rickards’ text settles down into its nerdier tropes, it gets interesting, if a little daunting. Even so, the subtitle of this latest may be a touch more breathless than the contents really call for. Granted, financial consultant Rickards ( The New Case for Gold, 2016, etc.) has been crying Ragnarök for a long time. Can owning a Chagall keep the wolf from the door? In a time of a predatory capitalism that is beginning to feed on itself, that and a knowledge of complexity theory might get you more than a cup of coffee.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |