How to Lie with Statistics


Darrell Huff - 1954
    Darrell Huff runs the gamut of every popularly used type of statistic, probes such things as the sample study, the tabulation method, the interview technique, or the way the results are derived from the figures, and points up the countless number of dodges which are used to fool rather than to inform.

Freedom: Credos from the Road


Ralph Barger - 2005
    He is patriotic—a veteran who loves his country. He is independent—choosing his own path on his motorcycle, living life on his own terms. He is outspoken—he has boldly criticized injustices in American law and society despite the backlash this has evoked from the establishment. Yet the element that he finds most important, most sacred, most American, is freedom.In Freedom, Sonny articulates many of the principles he employs in his own life. Whether he is regarded as a leader, a rebel, a revolutionary, a criminal, or a soldier, Sonny's outlook has been influenced not just by school but by the military, prison, and his experiences riding with the world's most notorious motorcycle club. It was on these various journeys that he learned the lessons that are most important in his life and the qualities he respects when he sees them in others:IndependenceCustomize Yourself; Originals Don't Come Off an Assembly LineToughnessTemper the Steel to Forge a Strong BladeFairness Treat Me Good, I'll Treat You Better; Treat Me Bad, I'll Treat You WorsePresented in the form of fifty credos, this book gives Sonny Barger's perspective on how to live a life that embodies the most fundamental of American virtues: freedom.

It's Up to Us: Ten Little Ways We Can Bring About Big Change


John Kasich - 2019
    We want to live a life of purpose and meaning. We want to leave a legacy for our children and grandchildren. We want to leave the world a better place. And yet we spend so much time wringing our hands over what’s wrong and not nearly enough time fixing those things within our control.John Kasich has walked the corridors of power both in the politics, as a former leader of Congress, governor of Ohio, presidential candidate, and in the private sector, as an in-demand public speaker, best-selling author and a strategic advisor to businesses and large non-profits. Yet he’s seen that the most powerful movements have started from the bottom up. Rather than waiting on Washington, the solutions happen once we become leaders in our own lives and communities. The strength and resilience of our nation lies in each of us. That’s what this book is about.In It’s Up to Us, Kasich shares the ten little ways we each can bring about big change. Taken together, they chart a path for each to follow as we look to live a life bigger than ourselves. Taken one-by-one, they can help to lift us from a place of outrage or complacency or helplessness and move us closer to our shared American dream.

Rock Breaks Scissors: A Practical Guide to Outguessing and Outwitting Almost Everybody


William Poundstone - 2014
    People are predictable even when they try not to be. William Poundstone demonstrates how to turn this fact to personal advantage in scores of everyday situations, from playing the lottery to buying a home. Rock Breaks Scissors is mind-reading for real life. Will the next tennis serve go right or left? Will the market go up or down? Most people are poor at that kind of predicting. We are hard-wired to make bum bets on "trends" and "winning streaks" that are illusions. Yet ultimately we're all in the business of anticipating the actions of others. Poundstone reveals how to overcome the errors and improve the accuracy of your own outguessing. Rock Breaks Scissors is a hands-on guide to turning life's odds in your favor.

The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook


Niall Ferguson - 2017
    It's about states, armies and corporations. It's about orders from on high. Even history "from below" is often about trade unions and workers' parties. But what if that's simply because hierarchical institutions create the archives that historians rely on? What if we are missing the informal, less well documented social networks that are the true sources of power and drivers of change?The 21st century has been hailed as the Age of Networks. However, in The Square and the Tower, Niall Ferguson argues that networks have always been with us, from the structure of the brain to the food chain, from the family tree to freemasonry. Throughout history, hierarchies housed in high towers have claimed to rule, but often real power has resided in the networks in the town square below. For it is networks that tend to innovate. And it is through networks that revolutionary ideas can contagiously spread. Just because conspiracy theorists like to fantasize about such networks doesn't mean they are not real.From the cults of ancient Rome to the dynasties of the Renaissance, from the founding fathers to Facebook, The Square and the Tower tells the story of the rise, fall and rise of networks, and shows how network theory--concepts such as clustering, degrees of separation, weak ties, contagions and phase transitions--can transform our understanding of both the past and the present.Just as The Ascent of Money put Wall Street into historical perspective, so The Square and the Tower does the same for Silicon Valley. And it offers a bold prediction about which hierarchies will withstand this latest wave of network disruption--and which will be toppled.

The Mind of the Market: Compassionate Apes, Competitive Humans, and Other Tales from Evolutionary Economics


Michael Shermer - 2007
    Drawing on the new field of neuroeconomics, Shermer investigates what brain scans reveal about bargaining, snap purchases, and establishing trust in business. He scrutinizes experiments in behavioral economics to understand why people hang on to losing stocks, why negotiations disintegrate into tit-for-tat disputes, and why money does not make us happy. He brings together astonishing findings from psychology, biology, and other sciences to describe how our tribal ancestry makes us suckers for brands, why researchers believe cooperation unleashes biochemicals similar to those released during sex, why free trade promises to build alliances between nations, and how even capuchin monkeys get indignant if they don't get a fair reward for their work.

Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk


Peter L. Bernstein - 1996
    Peter Bernstein has written a comprehensive history of man's efforts to understand risk and probability, beginning with early gamblers in ancient Greece, continuing through the 17th-century French mathematicians Pascal and Fermat and up to modern chaos theory. Along the way he demonstrates that understanding risk underlies everything from game theory to bridge-building to winemaking.

Death, Society, and Human Experience


Robert J. Kastenbaum - 1977
    Fifteen chapters discuss subjects including the death system, causes of death, transition fro

Subjectivity: Theories of the Self from Freud to Haraway


Nick Mansfield - 2000
    Where does my sense of self come from? Does it arise spontaneously or is it created by the media or society?This concern with the self, with our subjectivity, is now our main point of reference in Western societies. How has it come to be so important, and what are the different ways in which we can approach an understanding of the self? Nick Mansfield explores how our notions of subjectivity have developed over the past century. Analyzing the work of key modern and postmodern theorists such as Freud, Foucault, Nietzsche, Lacan, Kristeva, Deleuze and Guattari, and Haraway, he shows how subjectivity is central to debates in contemporary culture, including gender, sexuality, ethnicity, postmodernism, and technology.

Redefining Reality: The Intellectual Implications of Modern Science


Steven Gimbel - 2015
    For example, the matter that comprises all stars, planets, and living things turns out to be just a fraction of what actually exists. Moreover, we think that we control our actions, but data analytics can predict, with astonishing accuracy, when we will wake up, what we will buy, and even whom we will marry.The quest to pin down what's real and what's illusory is both philosophical and scientific, a metaphysical search for ultimate reality that goes back to the ancient Greeks. For the last 400 years, this search has been increasingly guided by scientists, who create theories and test them in order to define and redefine reality. And we have developed the power to alter our own reality in major ways - to defeat diseases, compensate for disabilities, and augment our intellect with computers. Where is that trend going?Experience the thrill of this exciting quest in 36 wide-ranging lectures that touch on many aspects of the ceaseless search for reality. From the birth of the universe to brain science, discover that separating the real from the illusory is an exhilarating intellectual adventure.Scientists and philosophers are not alone in grappling, at an intellectual level, with reality. Some of the most accessible interpretations are by painters, novelists, filmmakers, and other artists whose works not only draw on the latest discoveries but also sometimes inspire them. Explore examples such as Alice in Wonderland, pointillism, cubism, surrealism, and reality TV.And since dealing with reality is an experience we all share, this course is designed for people of all backgrounds.

The Refusal of Work: Rethinking Post-Work Theory and Practice


David Frayne - 2015
    Yet for many of us, paid work is at best a frustrating experience. Some of us are burdened with too much work, while others fight the hard realities of precarious, low-paid, low-quality work amid persistent mass unemployment. So what if we rethought the whole system? That’s the ambitious challenge David Frayne takes up in The Refusal of Work. Drawing on substantial empirical research into the lives of people who are actively resisting employment—either by reducing their work hours to the minimum or by giving up work altogether—Frayne delves into the reasons that people disconnect from work, the strategies they develop for coping with not working in a society that demands work, and, perhaps most interestingly, what they do with their free time. The resulting book offers a fascinating portrait of an alternative approach to life under capitalism, and a bracing reminder that a humane and sustainable vision of social progress is possible.

Micromotives and Macrobehavior


Thomas C. Schelling - 1978
    And the subject of these stories—how small and seemingly meaningless decisions and actions by individuals often lead to significant unintended consequences for a large group—is more important than ever. In one famous example, Thomas C. Schelling shows that a slight-but-not-malicious preference to have neighbors of the same race eventually leads to completely segregated populations.The updated edition of this landmark book contains a new preface and the author's Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another


Philip Ball - 2003
    These new discoveries are part of an old tradition. In the seventeenth century the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, dismayed by the impending civil war in England, decided that he would work out what kind of government was needed for a stable society. His solution sparked a new way of thinking about human behavior in looking for the "scientific" rules of society.Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant, Auguste Comte, and John Stuart Mill pursued this idea from different political perspectives. But these philosophers lacked the tools that modern physics can now bring to bear on the matter. Philip Ball shows how, by using these tools, we can understand many aspects of mass human behavior. Once we recognize that we do not make most of our decisions in isolation but are affected by what others decide, we can start to discern a surprising and perhaps even disturbing predictability in our laws, institutions, and customs.Lively and compelling, Critical Mass is the first book to bring these new ideas together and to show how they fit within the broader historical context of a rational search for better ways to live.

Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States


Kenneth T. Jackson - 1985
    Integrating social history with economic and architectural analysis, and taking into account such factors as the availability of cheap land, inexpensive building methods, and rapid transportation, Kenneth Jackson chronicles the phenomenal growth of the American suburb from the middle of the 19th century to the present day. He treats communities in every section of the U.S. and compares American residential patterns with those of Japan and Europe. In conclusion, Jackson offers a controversial prediction: that the future of residential deconcentration will be very different from its past in both the U.S. and Europe.

Runaway World: How Globalisation Is Reshaping Our Lives


Anthony Giddens - 1999
    Extending his arguments beyond the merely economic, Giddens shows how our growing interdependence directly affects our everyday lives. Neither a cheerleading endorsement of emerging markets, nor a fearful rant on the growth of terrorism or loss of American jobs, this is a book about a world that grows smaller every day, and how those changes are affecting our culture, our traditions, our families, and our politics. Identifying globalization as a true cultural force, this eloquent and important volume is the starting point for anyone concerned about our increasingly interconnected world.