Why am I passionate about this?

I’m a professor at The University of Michigan, external faculty at The Santa Fe Institute, and an editor of Collective Intelligence. As a theorist, I build mathematical and computational models and frameworks. My research explores the functional contributions of diversity – different ways of thinking and seeing – on group performance, a topic I explore in my book The Difference. Recently, I’ve become interested in how to build ensembles of markets, democracies, hierarchies, self-organized communities, or algorithms so that societies prosper. That agenda drives the books I have chosen for this list.


I wrote

The Model Thinker: What You Need to Know to Make Data Work for You

By Scott E. Page,

Book cover of The Model Thinker: What You Need to Know to Make Data Work for You

What is my book about?

This book contains descriptions and applications of two dozen models to improve the reader’s abilities to reason, explain, design, communicate,…

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The books I picked & why

Book cover of The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Scott E. Page Why did I love this book?

Jacobs provides a broad, theoretical account of the characteristics of successful cities based on detailed observational analysis grounded in statistics. A journalist, Jacobs goes deep into the weeds on the functions of sidewalks, parks, and neighborhoods demonstrating the limits of categorizing and then counting. Her analysis highlights the necessity of mingled diversity - spaces used in multiple ways by diverse people at different times - in creating vibrant cities. In a seminal paper titled More is Different, the physicist Phillip Anderson described how emergent phenomena cannot be exhibited in a system’s constituent parts: wetness does not exist in water molecules; culture cannot reside in a single person, and as Jacobs so brilliantly explains, the life of city also does not exist in the parts, that is, in the parks, schools, businesses, and neighborhood. Instead, it emerges through the messy, beautiful interactions among the people who occupy those spaces.

By Jane Jacobs,

Why should I read it?

13 authors picked The Death and Life of Great American Cities as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In this classic text, Jane Jacobs set out to produce an attack on current city planning and rebuilding and to introduce new principles by which these should be governed. The result is one of the most stimulating books on cities ever written.

Throughout the post-war period, planners temperamentally unsympathetic to cities have been let loose on our urban environment. Inspired by the ideals of the Garden City or Le Corbusier's Radiant City, they have dreamt up ambitious projects based on self-contained neighbourhoods, super-blocks, rigid 'scientific' plans and endless acres of grass. Yet they seldom stop to look at what actually…


Book cover of A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction

Scott E. Page Why did I love this book?

A Pattern Language provides formalism, philosophical depth, and architectural detail to the question of how features or attributes of spaces make people and communities feel alive.  Alexander and colleagues describe two hundred and fifty-three numbered patterns supported by provocative drawings and gorgeous photographs. The patterns form a language to build living buildings and cities. Neighborhoods that team with life tend to include street cafes (pattern #88), small public squares (pattern #61), and the occasional carnival (pattern #58). As does Jacobs, Alexander and colleagues emphasize human scaling while adding in the need to balance order and beauty with evidence of human messiness. Though patterns vary in their universality, the sentences they construct ring true. Think for a moment of a room that heightens your sense of being alive. Odds are that light enters from exactly two sides (pattern #159), that the chairs are not all alike (pattern #251), and that the room contains things – pictures, books, photographs,  from someone’s life (pattern #253).   

By Christopher Alexander,

Why should I read it?

5 authors picked A Pattern Language as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

You can use this book to design a house for yourself with your family; you can use it to work with your neighbors to improve your town and neighborhood; you can use it to design an office, or a workshop, or a public building. And you can use it to guide you in the actual process of construction. After a ten-year silence, Christopher Alexander and his colleagues at the Center for Environmental Structure are now publishing a major statement in
the form of three books which will, in their words, "lay the basis for an entirely new approach to architecture,…


Book cover of The Limits of Organization

Scott E. Page Why did I love this book?

The core question in social science may well be this: markets or central planning? This short book contains one person’s take on that big question. That person, Ken Arrow, many believe to be the greatest economic theorist of the past hundred years. His clarity, constraint, and curiosity inspire awe. Arrow, who derived the fundamental welfare theorems of economics,  describes the advantages markets as only he can without being blind to their shortcomings; markets reward selfishness and fail to include any defensible distribution of income. His rich, prescient analysis of formal organizations goes far beyond the standard transaction costs logic and includes remarks on path dependence, communications costs, and the difficulty of determining optimal organizational structures.  

Though central, the markets versus central planning reading obscure Arrow’s profound observations on invisible institutions: trust, ethics, and morality. Much to contemplate here including his observation that informational asymmetries limit the value of considering the welfare of others when taking individual actions. 

By Kenneth J. Arrow,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked The Limits of Organization as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The tension between what we wish for and what we can get, between values and opportunities, exists even at the purely individual level. A hermit on a mountain may value warm clothing and yet be hard-pressed to make it from the leaves, bark, or skins he can find. But when many people are competing with each other for satisfaction of their wants, learning how to exploit what is available becomes more difficult. In this volume, Nobel Laureate Kenneth J. Arrow analyzes why - and how - human beings organize their common lives to overcome the basic economic problem: the allocation…


Book cover of The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty

Scott E. Page Why did I love this book?

This book embeds historical accounts of successful and unsuccessful countries within a framework that posits the need for balance between freedom and authoritarianism. Acemoglu and Robinson see societies not as in equilibrium, but as constantly in flux. Rather than seeing a choice between freedom (or free markets) and government, they see a tussle. History consists of the state and the people engaged in a Red Queen Game, each trying to outpace the other with liberty hanging in the balance. Rather than guaranteed through constitutional decree, liberty, and the economic and social success it promotes, is a tenuous, contingent, and precious thing, whose survival depends on a society’s ability to mobilize, and echoing Arrow’s account of the importance of invisible institutions, on the ideas people in that society carry around in their heads.

By Daron Acemoglu, James A. Robinson,

Why should I read it?

5 authors picked The Narrow Corridor as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

"Why is it so difficult to develop and sustain liberal democracy? The best recent work on this subject comes from a remarkable pair of scholars, Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson. In their latest book, The Narrow Corridor, they have answered this question with great insight." -Fareed Zakaria, The Washington Post

From the authors of the international bestseller Why Nations Fail, a crucial new big-picture framework that answers the question of how liberty flourishes in some states but falls to authoritarianism or anarchy in others--and explains how it can continue to thrive despite new threats.

In Why Nations Fail, Daron…


Book cover of The Tyranny of the Ideal: Justice in a Diverse Society

Scott E. Page Why did I love this book?

This book challenges the notion that we should rely on the ideal as a guidepost. Set aside whether we could decide on an ideal; Gaus, a philosopher, makes a four-part argument against pursuing it. First, how could we contemplate the incomprehensible number of possible institutional, legal, and organizational configurations? We couldn’t. Second, the components of those configurations interact, resulting in a rugged landscape: the path to the ideal would not be entirely uphill, that is, it would require sacrifices. Hence, the book’s title. Third, owing to the interactions among choices, we cannot evaluate collective well-being in alternative configurations with any accuracy. What hubris to assume that we could. And finally, the landscape responds to our positioning, as we adapt our physical, organizational, and institutional (both formal and invisible) environments, we alter what we can achieve and what we desire.

By Gerald Gaus,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Tyranny of the Ideal as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In his provocative new book, The Tyranny of the Ideal, Gerald Gaus lays out a vision for how we should theorize about justice in a diverse society. Gaus shows how free and equal people, faced with intractable struggles and irreconcilable conflicts, might share a common moral life shaped by a just framework. He argues that if we are to take diversity seriously and if moral inquiry is sincere about shaping the world, then the pursuit of idealized and perfect theories of justice-essentially, the entire production of theories of justice that has dominated political philosophy for the past forty years-needs to…


Explore my book 😀

The Model Thinker: What You Need to Know to Make Data Work for You

By Scott E. Page,

Book cover of The Model Thinker: What You Need to Know to Make Data Work for You

What is my book about?

This book contains descriptions and applications of two dozen models to improve the reader’s abilities to reason, explain, design, communicate, act, predict, and explore the world. I often describe the book, and the free online course on which it is based, as like a trip to a museum. Each model, like a museum exhibit, provides a lens on the world, and, though the model can be appreciated and contemplated in isolation, the most profound learning comes from applying multiple models to a context or problem such as inequality or the spread of a pathogen. Many model thinkers better grasp the complexity of our social world and are more likely to proceed with humility and a willingness to learn.

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Defection in Prague

By Ray C Doyle,

Book cover of Defection in Prague

Ray C Doyle Author Of Lara's Secret

New book alert!

Why am I passionate about this?

I have been writing for many years, and my main preference is political thrillers with criminal overtones. I first became interested in politics when I worked at several political conferences in the 60’s and 70’s. I have been involved in several criminal cases, including my own, and within my family, I have a nephew in the police force. For many years I have had the opportunity to mix with the upper tiers of society as well as the criminal classes and this has given me great insight into creating my characters and plots.

Ray's book list on mysteries with complicated plots and risky characters

What is my book about?

Pete West, a political columnist, travels to Prague to find a missing diplomat, later found murdered. He attempts to discover more about a cryptic note received from the diplomat and is immediately entangled in the secret Bilderberg Club’s strategy to form a world federation.

Pete meets a Czechian agent who wants asylum. She has a murdered EU Commissioner’s diary containing clues to the civil unrest planned by the club, encrypted in algebraic chess notations. West seeks answers and links up with retired MI6 officer Tosh. While escaping would-be captors, they decode enough chess moves to reveal the anarchy of the…

Defection in Prague

By Ray C Doyle,

What is this book about?

Pete West, a political columnist, travels to Prague to find a missing diplomat, later found murdered. He attempts to discover more about a cryptic note received from the diplomat and is immediately entangled in the secret Bilderberg Club’s strategy to form a world federation.

Pete meets a Czechian agent who wants asylum. She has a murdered EU Commissioner’s diary containing clues to the civil unrest planned by the club, encrypted in algebraic chess notations. West seeks answers and links up with retired MI6 officer Tosh. While escaping would-be captors, they decode enough chess moves to reveal the anarchy of the…


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