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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A fun book on decision making and policy, April 1, 2009
This review is from: The Empathy Gap: Building Bridges to the Good Life and the Good Society (Hardcover)
The first thing I noticed about this book is that - to my pleasant surprise -- it is not at all a self-help book. Instead, it's a book that describes -- in entertaining and highly readable prose -- how we can effect significant improvements in well being by using social policy to make an end run around our most common human foibles.
Here I will briefly summarize each of the six chapters to give a sense of how the book unfolds.
Chapter 1 (Bridging the Empathy Gap) - introduces a theme that runs throughout the book - that empathy can be good, but can also be fickle, and we need social policies to harness its power for the good. I found myself wanting more of a sense cohesiveness to the examples. But they made more sense as I got deeper into the book.
Chapter 2 (The Trappings of Freedom) "Free will is a bit like a sheep. There really is an animal there, but it's amazingly skinny when you've shaved all the wool off." (That's my favorite quote from the book!). The argument here - familiar in social psychology but I'm betting not so in philosophy - is that much of our behavior is shaped by external forces, much more so than we ever recognize - an important premise for the proposals introduced later.
Chapter 3 (Can We Rebuild This Mind?) - here Trout urges that we should develop behavioral policies that impose external constraints to ensure that we do not fall prey to destructive biases that impede good decision making. This chapter provides a really nice summary of different cognitive biases that we are prone to - these are probably familiar to many readers already, but not everyone.
Chapter 4 (Outside the Mind) - what do hospital computer screensavers depicting colorfully germy hands, a urinal with a drawing of a life-sized fly inside, and chevron markings on roads have in common? They are each a man-made feature of the local environment that effectively corrects detrimental tendencies in behavior. This is the most entertaining chapter in the book - the examples are at times hilarious, and all fascinating.
Chapter 5 (Stat Versus Gut) anticipates the concern that behavior-shaping policies will all be expensive and complicated. Trout argues that many welfare-enhancing policies are not only simple but also money saving. This chapter is a great lesson for non-policy-wonks like me who tire of jargon-laden cost-benefit analyses. At the same time, I would have liked to see an acknowledgement that not all solutions will be simple and cheap.
Chapter 6 (The New Republic) is the final chapter, and it presses for the adoption of behavioral science based policy, to increase overall happiness and well-being. These include small scale changes that can produce big changes in the lives of individual people, like the elimination of grocery-free deserts in inner cities, and walk-to-work programs that encourage people to avoid long commutes. Trout calls for "benign social experimentation" - science backed policies that can potentially increase well-being. Some of these are seemingly small tweaks that we might not even notice but could reap huge benefits - things like using linguistics-based evidence to regulate drug names to avoid prescription related errors. But Trout doesn't shy away from more controversial topics, like handgun control, suicide prevention, and helmet laws - I was pleased to see an added layer of complexity here. This is clearly the most ambitious chapter in the book, as well as the most original and the most thought provoking as well.
Overall, the book has provoked me to look at problems that plague us individually and socially in a new light - they no longer seem as daunting and insolvable. Of course, this book is not a panacea, it's just a starting point. But its timing couldn't be better - it unabashedly embraces the notion that the time for real social and political Change has come - what distinguishes this book is that it provides a roadmap for how we can go about it. Highly recommended - there's something for everyone here.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
If only our policy makers would all read this, November 6, 2009
this is an excellent and tremendously important book all around.
briefly, it's about our capacity to empathize with others who are suffering or are worse off in general, and why it is that relying on these feelings (and trusting in the charity they supposedly effect) makes for bad policy -- not only are our emotions often short-lived, but we also possess an impressive lineup of cognitive shortcomings that allow us to ignore or redirect our empathy, or occasionally to ignore our humane feelings and "blame the victim."
the best policy, he argues, would be transform the empathy we feel for our neighbors and for others around the world into concrete, consistent government programs that can create a safety net for others in order to reduce poverty and alleviate suffering around the world. (not that the solutions are always easy to come by, but we need policies in place that will direct our better intentions into reliable, effective programs.)
is it acceptable that we have one of the highest poverty rates, especially for children, among the wealthier nations of the world? what about our infant mortality rate?
he then sets about demonstrating ways in which both "outside strategies" have proven effective, whether in the lab or in the real world -- looking at foreign government and the private sector -- and discusses ways in which the "libertarian" (used generally) perspective regarding new government intrusions are misguided, as we can already find parallels today. as a society, we have to realize our priorities and transform the empathy we feel for others who are struggling or who have limited opportunities and create "nets" and strategies -- realistically based on our actual decision-making processes, as demonstrated by cognitive and psychological research -- that will ensure that no one slips through the cracks and we can provide consistent support for our neighbors and fellow human beings.
a brief excerpt here gives an idea of what he envisions for our society: "The idea of a new demos, and a modern agora, may seem idealistic. But there is nothing pie in the sky about pools of citizens deliberating with the advice of scientists; such groups already exist. There is nothing exotic about a government Committee on Science and Technology; the House of Representatives already uses one to make law. And there is nothing utopian about a government that is aggressively humane, constantly searching for ways to make our lives more satisfying and comfortable. Whatever the fate of these positive proposals, they are not grounded in the foolish optimism that our society will improve whenever we recognize the need. Well-being programs designed for the common good must give the greatest number of people a fighting chance to be happy. A humane government steps in with social plans when our individual judgment fails us. A new twenty-first century Enlightenment of the head and heart, of rationality and empathy, can help us build and implement those social plans so that we don't fail others."
oh, let it be, let it be!
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Quit dithering while the world burns, November 29, 2009
This review is from: The Empathy Gap: Building Bridges to the Good Life and the Good Society (Hardcover)
You have biases in your thinking that hold you back from doing what is best for yourself. We are poor at saving money, constantly value our present self over our future selves, make decisions based on arbitrary starting points and we value the status quo for no other reason than 'it is the way things are'. These cognitive biases are a result of our evolutionary heritage, a patchwork of cognitive tools latched on to previous cognitive shortcuts which themselves were imperfect. Not only do these cognitive biases get in the way of thought processes and actions regarding our own lives, they inhabit our very thinking on public policy and social welfare issues. A particularly profound example used in the book is that we have more empathy for those close to us and those similar to us. A politician who if sitting next to a starving child would obviously withhold seconds so the child could eat but once around other wealthy politicians with no starving children around he would thoughtlessly pass a bill that day stripping the dinner off of the plates of millions of children. Additionally, we are notoriously short-sighted and bad at estimating future costs so we are awful at saving for retirement. So a plan like Social Security that forces society to save is an essential remedy to create a stable society where the elderly aren't homeless or hungry. After a tour-de-force of our hardwired sloppy thinking, the author spends most of the book creating prescriptions to get around our inherent weaknesses to create a better life for us all...sometimes against the will of our cognitive biases. The author terms these outside strategies. These are strategies that don't rely on individual changes, or individual willpower to overcome our biases. Instead, outside strategies are policies which give us better options where our cognitive biases won't get in the way. I found this part of the book very fascinating and I would love to read more about adoption of these outside strategies worldwide. The other idea that the author argues for is something that I have been very passionate about for years, something that I have wanted to shout from the rooftops. The author proposes the use of empirical studies on public policies to determine outcomes, based particularly on new findings in social sciences, psychology and behavioral neurology. There truly are right and wrong answers to some of our public policy questions regardless of the two-party system and the point-counterpoint nature of our media. He even suggests that we use the scientific method to experiment on 'relatively safe' public policies and measure the results. Why aren't public policies set up this way? This book is very pragmatic and the author attempts many solutions to these problems which I will leave to the reader. But this was a refreshing and unique look in to public policy debates which have reached a standstill and bogged down our advancement for too long. While we dither over our petty disputes, children starve, the uninsured die and a more perfect union slips away.
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