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
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.
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…
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 colleaguesemphasize 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).
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,…
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.
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…
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.
"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.
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.
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…
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.
I’ve always been fascinated by group dynamics, large and small. Why things functioned well, why they didn’t. It’s possible my ability to empathize and use humor as a consensus-builder is the reason I was elected president of a homeowners association, a music production association, and even an agricultural group. Books were not particularly involved in this fascination! But in recent years, experiencing the breakdown of civility and trust in our political and cultural discourse, I’ve taken a more analytical view of the dynamics. These books, in their very different ways, have taught me lessons about life, understanding those with different beliefs, and finding ways to connect and move forward.
We’ve all experienced the overwhelming level of political and social divisiveness in our country. This invisible “virus” of negativity is, in part, the result of the name-calling and heated rhetoric that has become commonplace among commentators and elected leaders alike.
My book provides a clear perspective on the historical and modern-day causes of our nation's divisive state. It then proposes easy-to-understand solutions—an action plan for our elected leaders and citizens as well. Rather than a scholarly treatment of a complex topic, the book challenges us to take the obvious steps required of those living in a free democracy. And it…
Uniting the States of America: A Self-Care Plan for a Wounded Nation
Lyle Greenfield's "Uniting the States of America―A Self-Care Plan for a Wounded Nation" is a work of nonfiction and opinion. Incorporating the lessons of history and the ideas and wisdom of many, it is intended as both an educational resource and a call-to-action for citizens concerned about the politically and culturally divided state of our Union. A situation that has raised alarm for the very future of our democracy.
First, the book clearly identifies the causes of what has become a national crisis of belief in and love for our country. How the divisiveness and hostility rampant in our political…
