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. This means that whether or not folks on Main Street want to see the next Transformers movie is increasingly irrelevant to the folks who run Hollywood.ĭepth of detail and shrewd illustrative examples make this a must-read for anyone interested in the movie business.Ī psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking. Those audiences do not get our comedies, sports or dramas rooted in American history they do get action pictures, and they continue to love 3-D, even as the U.S. For years a steady 20 percent of the market for a Hollywood film, international sales now constitute 70-80 percent. The reasons for the transition are simple: the collapse of the DVD market, which had represented about 50 percent of studio profits before online streaming began to kill it, “created a desperate need for a new area of growth”-and that new area turned out to be international. What makes it different is her savvy interviews with key players who observed this transition and her use of Paramount, where she went to work in 1998, as a case study. This is fairly common knowledge, but Obst’s book is more than the complaints of someone left out of “the New Abnormal” (so christened, she remarks, “because Hollywood, let’s face it, is never actually normal”). Movies for adults can only be made as independent films with tiny budgets or with the backing of big stars and directors. Now, she writes, studios depend on “tentpoles” based on familiar comic books, fairy tales or video games, laden with special effects and presented in 3-D. When the author arrived in Hollywood in the early 1980s, it was still possible to make smart commercial films based on original screenplays, like Sleepless in Seattle and The Fisher King, both produced by Obst. Journalist-turned-producer Obst ( Hello, He Lied: And Other Truths from the Hollywood Trenches, 1996) casts a sharp eye over recent developments in Tinseltown.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |