Review of: Worldchanging : a user’s guide for the 21st century
I had high hopes for this $75 megabook which has received rapturous reviews. Unfortunately, the experience of reading it was a bit marred by the fact that the library removed the dust jacket for my circulating copy.
Judging the book strictly by the interior, this is the only book I ever remembering seeing with the name of the design firm on the cover, and to be frank I don’t think they added enough value to deserve that. The layout is not that exotic — rectangular grid with half-page or quarter page color photos. I see much more beautifully designed book interiors every day in my son’s library of Dorling Kindersley dinosaur books.
On the substantive side, there are many interesting ideas in here, but I found that on subjects where I know the literature, they made unwarranted assumptions, and on subjects where I don’t know the literature, not enough of their ideas were good enough. For example, they state that humans appropriate 50% of net primary productivity. I just read the 1982 Vitousek article that established this proposition, and their estimate of (then) 40% of NPP rests on the assumption that humans divert substantial percentages of NPP from other “natural” uses. Excuse, me, we’re natural! The NPP appropriation numbers are impressive enough –20% or more even with conservative assumptions — that they don’t need to be exaggerated.
Conversely, on a subject I found interesting — “money” and worldchanging — there was a credulous argument that socially responsible investing beats other portfolio strategies. Unfortunately, it doesn’t. What *does* beat the market, as the New York Times recently reported, is inside information — fund managers who had “old school ties” to corporate insiders averaged 20% returns on those companies as opposed to 11% for managers who didn’t have old school ties.
Not a bad read, but not worth the investment unless it’s as a gift for someone who likes feeling “green” more than feeling rigorous.
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Tags: My Ann Arbor Library Feeds, What's New for Book-Lovers
