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A review by sjgrodsky
Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America by Barbara Ehrenreich
4.0
Ehrenreich is a fantastic prose stylist, with a wicked sense of sarcasm. I so get how many of the privileged white males she interviewed might have felt her incisive intelligence as threat to their comfortable self image.
And I CERTAINLY get her complaints about the annoyingly cheerful attitudes of medical professionals. I got a taste of that when taking my father to endless appointments during the last few years of his life. That sugary “how are we DOING today?” made me want to reply with a few choice insults. But of course i could not alienate the nurse whose good will I might need later. I could only fume.
Ehrenreich does offer an answer to a question no other journalist has addressed. Remember the housing bubble of 2008-9, when so many people bought houses they could not afford?
I understood that buyers would buy more house than they could afford if allowed. But in a more normal environment, sober underwriters looked at your financial health and refused to loan. You weren’t allowed to buy more house than you could sustain.
But what changed, I wondered, so that mortgage lenders were willing to finance loans that were nonsense? Mortgage lenders did not suddenly forget all the analytical tests they had been applying for decades.
Ehrenreich thinks that mortgage lenders were infected with the same relentless optimism and “positive thinking” that she documents elsewhere. She blames positive thinking for the real estate bubble.
I think positive thinking is only partly to blame, responsible for perhaps 10 percent. The other 90 percent is that frequent culprit, greed, aided by irresponsibility.
Because it used to be that YourTown Bank would loan money to you. You worked hard and diligently paid back your four percent loan. The bank made money, the loan analyst was appreciated for a savvy decision, everyone was happy.
But when loan analysts became loan brokers, that changed. The broker made a commission when he sold a loan. The loan got packaged with thousands of others and sold to someone else. The loan analyst had no responsibility and every incentive to sell as many loans as possible, sensible or not.
The “don’t be negative” criticism was applied to those who were being responsible. It was a way of tamping down deserved criticism. But it wasn’t the cause of the real estate bubble.
And I CERTAINLY get her complaints about the annoyingly cheerful attitudes of medical professionals. I got a taste of that when taking my father to endless appointments during the last few years of his life. That sugary “how are we DOING today?” made me want to reply with a few choice insults. But of course i could not alienate the nurse whose good will I might need later. I could only fume.
Ehrenreich does offer an answer to a question no other journalist has addressed. Remember the housing bubble of 2008-9, when so many people bought houses they could not afford?
I understood that buyers would buy more house than they could afford if allowed. But in a more normal environment, sober underwriters looked at your financial health and refused to loan. You weren’t allowed to buy more house than you could sustain.
But what changed, I wondered, so that mortgage lenders were willing to finance loans that were nonsense? Mortgage lenders did not suddenly forget all the analytical tests they had been applying for decades.
Ehrenreich thinks that mortgage lenders were infected with the same relentless optimism and “positive thinking” that she documents elsewhere. She blames positive thinking for the real estate bubble.
I think positive thinking is only partly to blame, responsible for perhaps 10 percent. The other 90 percent is that frequent culprit, greed, aided by irresponsibility.
Because it used to be that YourTown Bank would loan money to you. You worked hard and diligently paid back your four percent loan. The bank made money, the loan analyst was appreciated for a savvy decision, everyone was happy.
But when loan analysts became loan brokers, that changed. The broker made a commission when he sold a loan. The loan got packaged with thousands of others and sold to someone else. The loan analyst had no responsibility and every incentive to sell as many loans as possible, sensible or not.
The “don’t be negative” criticism was applied to those who were being responsible. It was a way of tamping down deserved criticism. But it wasn’t the cause of the real estate bubble.