Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So MuchSendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir (Penguin)
★★★✩✩
The authors have a "big idea", another in the newly popular field of behavioural economics. The nudgers and freaks are joined by the lackies - those who live with scarcity.
The persuasive argument is this: scarcity of anything (but most perniciously money) is not on a spectrum that runs smoothly from "haves" to "have-nots". It is on an entirely different scale altogether.
Scarcity so restricts the "bandwidth" the result is genuine mental impairment. The "poor" lose cognitive function and are more susceptible to self-defeating quick fixes that serve only to entrench their misery. They are, in effect, held hostage.
Those who live with scarcity - of money, friends, time, food, sleep - may have some compensations (they are hyper-focussed on their deficit) but their feelings are often characterised by irrational distress.
Mullainathan and Shafir - an economist and a psychologist - demonstrate that the carrot-and-stick of public policy is meaningless to people whose energy is depleted. Instead they propose schemes that suit the scarcity mindset - a blend of the impulsive and the passive.
The authors successfully argue that the poor are not stuck in their circle of hell because of essential character flaws, but are saddled with a condition to which we would all succumb if stripped of life's comforts.
The Gods Of GuiltMichael Connelly (Orion)
★★★✩✩
Mickey Haller first appeared in "The Lincoln Lawyer" which became a film adaptation starring Matthew McConaughey. Confusingly, in his fifth outing, the fictional character has become minor celebrity in Hollywood as a result.
However, hard-nosed Mickey's dalliance with metafiction does not sidetrack him from his dealings with the lowlifes who seek his counsel.
The Gods Of Guilt are the jury who must decide the fate of his client, a man who allegedly murdered Mickey's wayward pal Gloria Dayton, also a client. The jury can also help Mickey towards his own redemption as he reflects on life as a failed husband, resented father and poor friend (he may be the one who put Gloria in danger in the first place).
Conflict of interest is just one of the byways this case follows, pitching Mickey up against some unsavoury forces. The book's pedantic accumulation of evidence will please armchair lawyers and the story eventually lets rip with some crowd-pleasing courtroom explosions.
The Young And Prodigious TS SpivetReif Larson (Vintage)
★★★★✩
This ambitious book - nominally for children - has be re-released to tie in with a film adaptation, starring Helena Bonham Carter.
Hailed as a "genius" work of imagination and originality when it was first published in 2009, the story has as its hero a precocious, OCD nerd - the protagonist du jour.
Young Spivet is a mapmaker and prolific notetaker who lives on an isolated ranch with his eccentric parents, his annoying sister and the memories of a dead brother. The Smithsonian want to award him a scientific prize, little knowing he is 12.
Determined to get his reward, the shy obsessive flees the ranch and heads to Washington on a journey of discovery to reconcile himself with the discordant elements of his life and his affecting brush with death.
This long, dense book is a multi-layered epic of marginalia, digressions, obscurities and diagrams. Larson finds Spivet's voice and lets it run unbroken. This requires patience from the reader who is rewarded with insight, wit and the warm tingle of hard-won sentiment.
Giles Broadbent
