Our societies have become increasingly polarised, both materially and psychologically. Our youth are riven with anxieties. Most people expect their children’s lives to be worse than their own. This reflects a staggering failure across business, politics, and public institutions. Fortunately, an intellectual revolution has begun that is resetting our course: you can become part of it. My own life has straddled these increasingly bitter tensions. My parents left school at 12, and we lived in a city whose industry moved to Korea so the jobs evaporated. The lives of my relatives collapsed, but by fortune’s wheel, I became a professor at Oxford, Harvard, and Paris. We can reverse such cruel divides: I want to share what I have learned from my work and my life to show how we can do it.
I wrote...
The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties
From world-renowned economist Paul Collier, a candid diagnosis of the failures of capitalism and a pragmatic and realistic vision for how we can repair it.
Deep new rifts are tearing apart the fabric of the United States and other Western societies: thriving cities versus rural counties, the highly skilled elite versus the less educated, wealthy versus developing countries. As these divides deepen, we have lost the sense of ethical obligation to others that was crucial to the rise of post-war social democracy. So far these rifts have been answered only by the revivalist ideologies of populism and socialism, leading to the seismic upheavals of Trump, Brexit, and the return of the far-right in Germany. We have heard many critiques of capitalism but no one has laid out a realistic way to fix it, until now.
In a passionate and polemical book, celebrated economist Paul Collier outlines brilliantly original and ethical ways of healing these rifts--economic, social, and cultural--with the cool head of pragmatism, rather than the fervor of ideological revivalism. He reveals how he has personally lived across these three divides, moving from working-class Sheffield to hyper-competitive Oxford, and working between Britain and Africa, and acknowledges some of the failings of his profession.
The Upswing is the culminating triumph of Robert Putnam’s work on ‘social capital’, - the glue that binds people into a community. Although his book charts the trajectory of an American tragedy – the erosion of community in America over the past 60 years, it comes with an uplifting message. He shows that America has climbed out of a society rabid in self-obsession before. That upswing began around 1900 and was build bottom-up, as people came together, community-by-community. What happened then – an ‘inflection point’ in which new ideas and brute shocks combined to change the downward trajectory, is underway once again. Putnam, a top professor at Harvard, is the world’s most distinguished political sociologist, but don’t be alarmed: Upswing is a joy to read.
'The most important book in social science for many years' Paul Collier, TLS Books of the Year
The Upswing is Robert D. Putnam's brilliant analysis of economic, social, cultural and political trends from the Gilded Age to the present, showing how America went from an individualistic 'I' society to a more communitarian 'We' society and then back again, and how we can all learn from that experience.
In the late nineteenth century, America was highly individualistic, starkly unequal, fiercely polarised and deeply fragmented, just as it is today. However, as the twentieth century dawned, America became - slowly, unevenly, but…
Don’t be by the weirdest title in the world, this is another landmark book and it perfectly complements The Upswing. Combining deep social history, - Europe in the Early Middle Ages – with revolutionary research on evolutionary biology, it shows how a distinctive inflection point fortuitously broke the otherwise universal practice of kin-group mating. This gradually released parts of Europe into forging the purposive social capital that Putnam celebrates. Nor need you be deterred by Heinrich’s polymath credentials – he currently heads Harvard’s Department of Evolutionary Biology, but could equally hold chairs in Anthropology or Economics – he writes beautifully for a general audience.
'A landmark in social thought. Henrich may go down as the most influential social scientist of the first half of the twenty-first century' MATTHEW SYED
Do you identify yourself by your profession or achievements, rather than your family network? Do you cultivate your unique attributes and goals? If so, perhaps you are WEIRD: raised in a society that is Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic.
Unlike most who have ever lived, WEIRD people are highly individualistic, nonconformist, analytical and control-oriented. How did WEIRD populations become so psychologically peculiar? What part did these differences play in our history, and what do…
Tyranny is the landmark book that is moral philosophy’s contribution to the inflection point. Its fundamental concept of ‘contributive justice’ magnificently supersedes Rawls’ dated ‘distributive justice’. To give you a glimpse of two profound works, Rawls invoked some moral gymnastics involving a hypothetical withdrawal from society to a veil of ignorance about a hypothetical lottery of how a hypothetical national cake might be cut up. Sandel places us firmly back in our society and focuses on the agency needed for the moral duty to contribute to the baking of our national cake. Sandel, again at Harvard, is the most famous philosopher in the world, his superb online lectures have been so downloaded that they have triggered complaints from lesser philosophers fearing redundancy. Tyranny will shift your moral compass, but don’t be scared.
A TLS, GUARDIAN AND NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR 2020
The new bestseller from the acclaimed author of Justice and one of the world's most popular philosophers
"Astute, insightful, and empathetic...A crucial book for this moment" Tara Westover, author of Educated
These are dangerous times for democracy. We live in an age of winners and losers, where the odds are stacked in favour of the already fortunate. Stalled social mobility and entrenched inequality give the lie to the promise that "you can make it if you try". And the consequence is a brew of anger and frustration that has…
It’s time for some economics. I am embarrassed to say that following the Global Financial Crisis my profession has fallen into acute disarray, its models have proved to be utterly inadequate. Radical Uncertainty in the landmark book explains why this was the case. Economists had reduced all unknowns to quantifiable probabilities, which could then be inserted into models and managed by diversification and insurance. Unfortunately, the world is not like that: with disturbing frequency, people, businesses, and societies are hit by ‘unknown unknowns’ like COVID. Managing uncertainty requires an approach quite alien to economics, its priorities being the resilience of strategies such as built-in redundancy, and rapid recovery that comes from decentralised experiments around a common purpose. Kay was once Britain’s boy-wonder of mathematical economics; King was once a top professor of finance who became the Governor of the Bank of England. Heroically, they have recanted the ideas they once taught. Fortunately for the lay reader, they know how to write.
Some uncertainties are resolvable. The insurance industry's actuarial tables and the gambler's roulette wheel both yield to the tools of probability theory. Most situations in life, however, involve a deeper kind of uncertainty, a radical uncertainty for which historical data provide no useful guidance to future outcomes. Radical uncertainty concerns events whose determinants are insufficiently understood for probabilities to be known or forecasting possible. Before President Barack Obama made the fateful decision to send in the Navy Seals, his advisers offered him wildly divergent estimates of the odds that Osama bin Laden would be in the Abbottabad compound. In 2000,…
The rise of the selfish society was given massive impetus by Milton Friedman’s 1970 dictum that the sole responsibility of business was to maximise profits for shareholders. ‘Greed is good’ spread through business schools, and by the 1990s their students had risen to the boardrooms, - a corporate contagion. Reimagining Capitalism is therefore heartening in its message, its timing, and its provenance. Its message is the categorial refutation of Freidman: when profit becomes the purpose, instead of simply necessary for the sustainability of a larger purpose, it blights lives and ruins businesses. Its timing coincides with the American Business Forum – over 180 of America’s top CEOs – rescinding their endorsement of the Friedman mantra, which for nearly thirty years they had endorsed. The inflection point is upon capitalism. Its provenance could not be more impeccable: Rebecca Henderson holds the highest rank of chair – University Professor - at Harvard Business School. Business’s pope has pronounced Friedman a heretic.
A renowned Harvard professor debunks prevailing orthodoxy with a new intellectual foundation and a practical pathway forward for a system that has lost its moral and ethical foundation. Free market capitalism is one of humanity's greatest inventions and the greatest source of prosperity the world has ever seen. But this success has been costly. Capitalism is on the verge of destroying the planet and destabilizing society as wealth rushes to the top. The time for action is running short.
Rebecca Henderson's rigorous research in economics, psychology, and organizational behavior, as well as her many years of work with companies around…
The constellation we know as Taurus goes all the way back to cave paintings of aurochs at Lascaux. This book traces the story of the bull in the sky, a journey through the history of what has become known as the sacred bull.
Each of the sections is written from the perspective of the mythical Taurus, from the beginning at Lascaux to Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, and elsewhere. This is not just a history of the bull but also a view of ourselves through the eyes of the bull, illustrating our pre-literate use of myth, how the advent of writing and the urban revolution changed our view of ourselves, and how even bullfighting in Spain is a variation on the ancient sacrifice of the sacred bull.
The constellation we know as Taurus goes all the way back to cave paintings of aurochs at Lascaux. In I Am Taurus, author Stephen Palmer traces the story of the bull in the sky, starting from that point 19,000 years ago - a journey through the history of what has become known as the sacred bull. Each of the eleven sections is written from the perspective of the mythical Taurus, from the beginning at Lascaux to Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, Greece, Spain and elsewhere. This is not just a history of the bull but also an attempt to see ourselves through…
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