Book picks similar to
Collected Papers of Kenneth J. Arrow, Volume 3: Individual Choice Under Certainty and Uncertainty by Kenneth J. Arrow
academic
decision-theory
philosophy
social-choice
Rational Choice in an Uncertain World: The Psychology of Judgement and Decision Making
Reid Hastie - 1988
They describe theories and research finding from the field of judgement and decision making in a non-technical manner, using anecdotes as a teaching device. Intended as an introductory textbook for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, the material not only is of scholarly interest but is practical as well.
The Pearls of Love and Logic for Parents and Teachers
Jim Fay - 2000
Book by Fay, Charles, Fay, Jim, Cline, Foster W.
America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy
Francis Fukuyama - 2006
Here he explains how, in its decision to invade Iraq, the Bush administration failed in its stewardship of American foreign policy. First, the administration wrongly made preventive war the central tenet of its foreign policy. In addition, it badly misjudged the global reaction to its exercise of “benevolent hegemony.” And finally, it failed to appreciate the difficulties involved in large-scale social engineering, grossly underestimating the difficulties involved in establishing a successful democratic government in Iraq.Fukuyama explores the contention by the Bush administration’s critics that it had a neoconservative agenda that dictated its foreign policy during the president’s first term. Providing a fascinating history of the varied strands of neoconservative thought since the 1930s, Fukuyama argues that the movement’s legacy is a complex one that can be interpreted quite differently than it was after the end of the Cold War. Analyzing the Bush administration’s miscalculations in responding to the post–September 11 challenge, Fukuyama proposes a new approach to American foreign policy through which such mistakes might be turned around—one in which the positive aspects of the neoconservative legacy are joined with a more realistic view of the way American power can be used around the world.
Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked
Adam Alter - 2017
We obsess over our emails, Instagram likes, and Facebook feeds; we binge on TV episodes and YouTube videos; we work longer hours each year; and we spend an average of three hours each day using our smartphones. Half of us would rather suffer a broken bone than a broken phone, and Millennial kids spend so much time in front of screens that they struggle to interact with real, live humans. In this revolutionary book, Adam Alter, a professor of psychology and marketing at NYU, tracks the rise of behavioral addiction, and explains why so many of today's products are irresistible. Though these miraculous products melt the miles that separate people across the globe, their extraordinary and sometimes damaging magnetism is no accident. The companies that design these products tweak them over time until they become almost impossible to resist. By reverse engineering behavioral addiction, Alter explains how we can harness addictive products for the good—to improve how we communicate with each other, spend and save our money, and set boundaries between work and play—and how we can mitigate their most damaging effects on our well-being, and the health and happiness of our children.
The Karate Way: Discovering the Spirit of Practice
Dave Lowry - 2009
Here, Dave Lowry, one of the best-known writers on the Japanese martial arts, illuminates the complete path of karate including practice, philosophy, and culture. He covers myriad subjects of interest to karate practitioners of all ages and levels, including: • The relationship between students and teachers • Cultivating the correct attitude during practice • The differences between karate in the East and West • Whether a karate student really needs to study in Japan to perfect the art • The meaning of rank and the black belt • Detailed descriptions of kicks, punches, evasions, and techniques and the philosophical concepts that they manifest • What practice means and looks like as one ages • How the practice of karate aims toward cultivating character and spiritual development After forty years studying karate and the budo arts, Lowry is an informative and reliable guide, highlighting aspects of the karate path that will surprise, entertain, and enlighten.
Marx's Das Kapital For Beginners
Michael Wayne - 2011
Marx’s Das Kapital For Beginners is an introduction to the Marxist critique of capitalist production and its consequences for a whole range of social activities such as politics, media, education and religion. Das Kapital is not a critique of a particular capitalist system in a particular country at a particular time. Rather, Marx ‘s aim was to identify the essential features that define capitalism, in whatever country it develops and in whatever historical period. For this reason, Das Kapital is necessarily a fairly general, abstract analysis. As a result, it can be fairly difficult to read and comprehend. At the same time, understanding Das Kapital is crucial for mastering Marx’s insights to capitalism. Marx’s Das Kapital For Beginners offers an accessible path through Marx’s arguments and his key questions: What is a commodity? Where does wealth come from? What is ‘value’? What happens to work under capitalism? Why is crisis part of capitalism’s DNA? And what happens to our consciousness, our very perceptions of reality and our ways of thinking and feeling under capitalism? Understanding and learning from Marx’s work has taken on a fresh urgency as questions about the sustainability of the capitalist system in today’s global economy intensify.
The Poverty of Theory
E.P. Thompson - 1978
Although he was throughout his life interested in the philosophy of history and in various theoretical formulations, he concerned himself with these mainly in private reading and private discussion. Why then did he write this essay? He had read the works of Louis Althusser and found very little in them to affect his work. When Althusser appeared on the scene he made little impact on practising historians. For some reason however, he suddenly became a major force among graduate students and some young historians and literary scholars. Most historians would have been prepared to wait for the new influence to demonstrate its validity in the production of innovative work in history; not only did this not happen, but Althusser's followers - even some of the historians among them - began to declare that history was a non-discipline and that its study was of no value. It was the influence that Althusser's writings were having on scholarship that made Edward take on the uncongenial task of putting the case for history against his closed system.'The result is a major critique of Althusserian Marxism, or 'theoretical practice', entering closely into questions of epistemology and of the theory and practice of the historian. Around this detailed polemic, Thompson develops a constructive view of an alternative, socialist tradition, empirical and self-critical in method, and fully open to the creative practice evidenced by history - a tradition sharply opposed to much that now passes as 'Marxism'. In converging shafts of close analysis and Swiftian irony, the author defoliates Althusser's arcane, rationalist rhetoric and reinstates 'historicism', 'empiricism', 'moralism' and 'socialist humanism' in a different Marxist inheritance.The title of this essay echoes The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx's annihiliating attack on Proudhon, which, like Engels' Anti-Duhring, is a work read long after its subject has been consigned to oblivion.
Zen and the Art of Disc Golf
Patrick McCormick - 2014
McCormick carefully argues, it can be a window that shows us how we interact with the world. The way we play is the way we live. This book is about the sport of Disc Golf, but it also is about so much more than throwing a disc at a basket. For the passionate practitioner, Disc Golf becomes a meditation, and practicing not only has the potential to make us better players, but better people as we begin to focus on what we are doing on the course that is working or not working versus what we are doing at home or in the office. "Zen and the Art of Disc Golf" is about becoming the best players we can be and in turn becoming the best possible version of ourselves through cultivation of attitude, focus, determination, and mental strength. It is about mastering the mind, body, and spirit in such a way that we score better and live better. Inside this book you will learn: -What Disc Golf can teach us about life and success -The secret formula for success on and off the course. -How to create the proper attitude and focus to become better Disc Golfers and in turn live better lives. -How visualization improves our game and our lives. -Who you need to be playing with on the course. -How to hit more chains and less trees. -How to take yourself off autopilot and elevate your scores and your game. -The 3 sides of Disc Golf and how to balance them. Most importantly, after reading this book you will walk away ready to Ace holes and Ace life. Disc Golf is life. Life is good.
Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action
Pierre Bourdieu - 1994
He thereby explains the philosophical principles that have led to his social science research and the idea of the human that guides his choices there. With the lucidity allowed by retrospect, Bourdieu brings out the fundamental theories of his greatest books, notably Outline of a Theory of Practice and The Logic of Practice (Stanford, 1990), and, with an eye to the future, presents the first results of his most recent work on the state, the anthropological moorings of the economy, and male domination.Bourdieu's theory is both a philosophy of science dedicated to revealing the objective relations that shape and underpin social life, and a philosophy of action that takes account of agents' dispositions as well as the structured situations in which they act. This philosophy of action is condensed in a small number of key concepts—habitus, field, capital—and it is defined by the two-way relationship between the objective structures of social fields and the incorporated structures of the habitus.All in all, this book should be an indispensable introduction to Bourdieu's work, not only to students and scholars in sociology, anthropology, political science, and philosophy, but throughout the social sciences and humanities generally.
Television
Jacques Lacan - 1974
Uses essays and an interview to document the theories of Lacan that resulted in his expulsion from the International Psychoanalytic Association."
Price Theory
Milton Friedman - 1962
The former deals with how the economic problem is solved, while the latter deals with how the economic problem should be solved. The effects of price or rent control on the distribution of income are problems of positive economics. The desirability of these effects on income distribution is a problem of normative economics.Within economics, the major division is between monetary theory and price theory. Monetary theory deals with the level of prices in general, with cyclical and other fluctuations in total output, total employment, and the like. Price theory deals with the allocation of resources among different uses, the price of one item relative to another.Prices do three kinds of things. They transmit information, they provide an incentive to users of resources to be guided by this information, and they provide an incentive to owners of resources to follow this information. Milton Friedman's classic book provides the theoretical underpinning for and understanding of prices.Economics is not concerned solely with economic problems. It is a social science, and is therefore concerned primarily with those economic problems whose solutions involve the cooperation and interaction of different individuals. It is concerned with problems involving a single individual only insofar as the individual's behavior has implications for or effects upon other individuals. Price Theory is concerned not with economic problems in the abstract, but with how a particular society solves its economic problems.
Moral Fiber - A Practical Guide to Living Our Values
Shawn Vij - 2019
Taking an innovative and secular approach to business Ethics, moral fiber shows us how living our values unlocks a more purposeful life and career. This book helps us to re-discover the inherent core values, such as fairness, respect, compassion, and honesty, and then how to genuinely Act on them daily.This practical guide is filled with tips, tales, and tools to identify and eliminate toxic behaviors and motivators, as well as priceless lessons from top industry leaders and powerful research from academics. TESTIMONIALS“[Shawn] shares with us how compassion, gratitude and wisdom opens our inner door, unlocking a more purposeful life and career.” — HIS HOLINESS THE DALAI LAMA“Moral Fiber takes us on a beautiful journey of how capitalism and compassion must co-exist to improve our human condition.” — JOHN MACKEY, CO-FOUNDER AND CEO, WHOLE FOODS MARKET“At a time of great uncertainty, Moral Fiber is a welcome tonic and an authentic reminder of how having capitalism with compassion elevates us all.” — JENNIFER REINGOLD, FORMER MANAGEMENT WRITER, FORTUNE MAGAZINE, FAST COMPANY AND BUSINESSWEEK“Moral Fiber drops us head-first into a world of awakening.” — THOMAS DONALDSON, PROFESSOR OF BUSINESS ETHICS, WHARTON SCHOOL, UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA“In Moral Fiber, Vij creatively shows us how our core values can be a key to personal happiness and professional success.” — HOWARD C. CUTLER, M.D., NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLING AUTHOR OF THE ART OF HAPPINESS
Adieu to Emmanuel Lévinas
Jacques Derrida - 1997
For both thinkers, the word adieu names a fundamental characteristic of human being: the salutation or benediction prior to all constative language (in certain circumstances, one can say adieu at the moment of meeting) and that given at the moment of separation, sometimes forever, as at the moment of death, it is also the a-dieu, for God or to God before and in any relation to the other. In this book, Derrida extends his work on Levinas in previously unexplored directions via a radical rereading of Totality and Infinity and other texts, including the lesser-known talmudic readings. He argues that Levinas, especially in Totality and Infinity, bequeaths to us an "immense treatise of hospitality," a meditation on the welcome offered to the other. The conjunction of an ethics of pure prescription with the idea of an infinite and absolute hospitality confronts us with the most pressing political, juridical, and institutional concerns of our time. What, then, is an ethics and what is a politics of hospitality? And what, if it ever is, would be a hospitality surpassing any ethics and any politics we know?As always, Derrida raises these questions in the most explicit of terms, moving back and forth between philosophical argument and the political discussion of immigration laws, peace, the state of Israel, xenophobia—reminding us with every move that thinking is not a matter of neutralizing abstraction, but a gesture of hospitality for what happens and still may happen.
The Culture of Education
Jerome Bruner - 1996
In a masterly commentary on the possibilities of education, the eminent psychologist Jerome Bruner reveals how education can usher children into their culture, though it often fails to do so. Applying the newly emerging "cultural psychology" to education, Bruner proposes that the mind reaches its full potential only through participation in the culture--not just its more formal arts and sciences, but its ways of perceiving, thinking, feeling, and carrying out discourse. By examining both educational practice and educational theory, Bruner explores new and rich ways of approaching many of the classical problems that perplex educators.Education, Bruner reminds us, cannot be reduced to mere information processing, sorting knowledge into categories. Its objective is to help learners construct meanings, not simply to manage information. Meaning making requires an understanding of the ways of one's culture--whether the subject in question is social studies, literature, or science. The Culture of Education makes a forceful case for the importance of narrative as an instrument of meaning making. An embodiment of culture, narrative permits us to understand the present, the past, and the humanly possible in a uniquely human way.Going well beyond his earlier acclaimed books on education, Bruner looks past the issue of achieving individual competence to the question of how education equips individuals to participate in the culture on which life and livelihood depend. Educators, psychologists, and students of mind and culture will find in this volume an unsettling criticism that challenges our current conventional practices--as well as a wise vision that charts a direction for the future.
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
Jared Diamond - 1997
one of the most important and readable works on the human past published in recent years."Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a national bestseller: the global account of the rise of civilization that is also a stunning refutation of ideas of human development based on race.In this "artful, informative, and delightful" (William H. McNeill, New York Review of Books) book, Jared Diamond convincingly argues that geographical and environmental factors shaped the modern world. Societies that had a head start in food production advanced beyond the hunter-gatherer stage, and then developed writing, technology, government, and organized religion—as well as nasty germs and potent weapons of war—and adventured on sea and land to conquer and decimate preliterate cultures. A major advance in our understanding of human societies, Guns, Germs, and Steel chronicles the way that the modern world came to be and stunningly dismantles racially based theories of human history.Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science, the Rhone-Poulenc Prize, and the Commonwealth Club of California's Gold Medal