Book picks similar to
Weighing Goods by John Broome
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The Choice of Hercules: Pleasure, Duty and the Good Life in the 21st Century
A.C. Grayling - 2007
He shows us how much more people can understand about themselves and their world by reflecting on today's moral challenges. Above all, he explores the idea that certain demands and certain pleasures are necessary, not just because of their intrinsic merits but because of what they do for each other. The Good Life or the good life? With exceptional clarity and unrivaled prose, Grayling addresses the everyday ethical choices which confront us all.
Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction
Philip E. Tetlock - 2015
Unfortunately, people tend to be terrible forecasters. As Wharton professor Philip Tetlock showed in a landmark 2005 study, even experts’ predictions are only slightly better than chance. However, an important and underreported conclusion of that study was that some experts do have real foresight, and Tetlock has spent the past decade trying to figure out why. What makes some people so good? And can this talent be taught? In Superforecasting, Tetlock and coauthor Dan Gardner offer a masterwork on prediction, drawing on decades of research and the results of a massive, government-funded forecasting tournament. The Good Judgment Project involves tens of thousands of ordinary people—including a Brooklyn filmmaker, a retired pipe installer, and a former ballroom dancer—who set out to forecast global events. Some of the volunteers have turned out to be astonishingly good. They’ve beaten other benchmarks, competitors, and prediction markets. They’ve even beaten the collective judgment of intelligence analysts with access to classified information. They are "superforecasters." In this groundbreaking and accessible book, Tetlock and Gardner show us how we can learn from this elite group. Weaving together stories of forecasting successes (the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound) and failures (the Bay of Pigs) and interviews with a range of high-level decision makers, from David Petraeus to Robert Rubin, they show that good forecasting doesn’t require powerful computers or arcane methods. It involves gathering evidence from a variety of sources, thinking probabilistically, working in teams, keeping score, and being willing to admit error and change course. Superforecasting offers the first demonstrably effective way to improve our ability to predict the future—whether in business, finance, politics, international affairs, or daily life—and is destined to become a modern classic.
Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals
Tyler Cowen - 2018
Through history, economic growth, in particular, has alleviated human misery, improved human happiness and opportunity, and lengthened human lives. Wealthier societies are more stable, offer better living standards, produce better medicines, and ensure greater autonomy, greater fulfillment, and more sources of fun. If we want to continue on our trends of growth, and the overwhelmingly positive outcomes for societies that come with it, every individual must become more concerned with the welfare of those around us and in the world at large and most of all our descendants in the future. So, how do we proceed? Tyler Cowen, in a culmination of 20 years of thinking and research, provides a roadmap for moving forward. In this new book, Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals, Cowen argues that our reason and common sense can help free us of the faulty ideas that hold us back as people and as a society. Stubborn Attachments, at its heart, makes the contemporary moral case for economic growth and delivers a great dose of inspiration and optimism about our future possibilities. As a means of practicing the altruism that Stubborn Attachments argues for, Tyler Cowen is donating all earnings from this book to a man he met in Ethiopia earlier this year with aspirations to open his own travel business.
Affluence Without Abundance: The Disappearing World of the Bushmen
James Suzman - 2017
A hunting and gathering people who made a good living by working only as much as needed to exist in harmony with their hostile desert environment, the Bushmen have lived in southern Africa since the evolution of our species nearly two hundred thousand years ago.In Affluence Without Abundance, anthropologist James Suzman asks whether understanding how hunter-gatherers like the Bushmen found contentment by having few needs easily met might help us address some of the environmental and economic challenges we face today. Vividly bringing to life a proud and private people, introducing unforgettable members of their tribe, Affluence Without Abundance tells the story of the collision between the modern global economy and the oldest hunting and gathering society on earth. In rendering an intimate picture of a people coping with radical change, it asks profound questions about how we now think about matters such as work, wealth, equality, contentment, and even time.Not since Elizabeth Marshall Thomas's The Harmless People in 1959 has anyone provided a more intimate or insightful account of the Bushmen or of what we might learn about ourselves from our shared history as hunter-gatherers.
Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive
Bruce Schneier - 2012
We don't do a chemical analysis on food we eat.Trust and cooperation are the first problems we had to solve before we could become a social species. In the 21st century, they have become the most important problems we need to solve — again. Our global society has become so large and complex that our traditional trust mechanisms no longer work.Bruce Schneier, world-renowned for his level-headed thinking on security and technology, tackles this complex subject head-on. Society can't function without trust, and yet must function even when people are untrustworthy.Liars and Outliers reaches across academic disciplines to develop an understanding of trust, cooperation, and social stability. From the subtle social cues we use to recognize trustworthy people to the laws that punish the noncompliant, from the way our brains reward our honesty to the bank vaults that keep out the dishonest, keeping people cooperative is a delicate balance of rewards and punishments. It's a series of evolutionary tricks, social pressures, legal mechanisms, and physical barriers.In the absence of personal relationships, we have no choice but to substitute security for trust, compliance for trustworthiness. This progression has enabled society to scale to unprecedented complexity, but has also permitted massive global failures.At the same time, too much cooperation is bad. Without some level of rule-breaking, innovation and social progress become impossible. Society stagnates.Today's problems require new thinking, and Liars and Outliers provides that. It is essential that we learn to think clearly about trust. Our future depends on it.
Elements of the Philosophy of Right
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel - 1821
Hegel's last major published work, is an attempt to systematize ethical theory, natural right, the philosophy of law, political theory and the sociology of the modern state into the framework of Hegel's philosophy of history. Hegel's work has been interpreted in radically different ways, influencing many political movements from far right to far left, and is widely perceived as central to the communication tradition in modern ethical, social and political thought. This edition includes extensive editorial material informing the reader of the historical background of Hegel's text, and explaining his allusions to Roman law and other sources, making use of lecture materials which have only recently become available. The new translation is literal, readable and consistent, and will be informative and scholarly enough to serve the needs of students and specialists alike.
Napoleon: His Life and Legacy | The True Story of Napoleon Bonaparte (Short Reads Historical Biographies of Famous People)
Jack Hughes - 2016
Did his dictatorship crush the French Revolution, or carry its ideals to their logical conclusion? Was he a conqueror-tyrant who sought war for the sake of glory, or was he forced into conflict to defend his beloved France? Was he a throwback to sixteenth-century “absolute monarchs,” or the great modernizer of nineteenth-century Europe? Or was he all of these things at once? In this compact, highly readable biography, Jack Hughes examines these questions and more. He traces Napoleon’s history back to the bloody hillsides of Corsica, from his rise as a young artillery officer to the summit of greatness. We see at how Napoleon’s rule forever changed a continent, but also how his overreach led to his shocking fall from power. To understand the story of Napoleon, Hughes persuasively shows, is to understand Europe itself—both in Napoleon’s era and today. "If you want a thing done well, do it yourself." - Napoleon Bonaparte Buy Now to Discover:
Napoleon’s tactics at Austerlitz, Waterloo, and other crucial battles.
How the French conquest of Corsica shaped Napoleon’s childhood.
Napoleon’s troubled marriage to the faithless Josephine.
The French invasion of Egypt and discovery of the Rosetta Stone.
The sale of Louisiana to the United States.
Napoleon’s 1814 suicide attempt.
The daring escape from Elba that allowed Napoleon to make his final stand.
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The Gardens of Democracy: A New American Story of Citizenship, the Economy, and the Role of Government
Eric Liu - 2011
Liu and Hanauer view democracy not as a machine, but as a garden. A successful garden functions according to the inexorable tendencies of nature, but it also requires goals, regular tending, and an understanding of connected ecosystems. The latest ideas from science, social science, and economics—the cutting-edge ideas of today--generate these simple but revolutionary ideas:True self interest is mutual interest. (Society, it turns out, is an ecosystem that is healthiest when we take care of the whole.)Society becomes how we behave. (The model of citizenship depends on contagious behavior, hence positive behavior begets positive behavior.)We’re all better off when we’re all better off. (The economy is not an efficient machine. It’s an effective garden that need tending. Adjust the definition of wealth to society creating solutions for all.)Government should be about the big what and the little how. (Government should establish the ideas and the goals, and then let the people find the solutions of how to make it happen.)Freedom is responsibility. (True freedom is not about living some variant of libertarianism but rather an active cooperation a part of a big whole society; freedom costs a little freedom.)The Gardens of Democracy is an optimistic, provocative, and timely summons to improve our role as citizens in a democratic society.
Ethics: Discovering Right and Wrong
Louis P. Pojman - 1990
And, of course, along the way you'll master the basics of ethical philosophy.
Law's Empire
Ronald Dworkin - 1986
Law's Empire is a full-length presentation of his theory of law that will be studied and debated--by scholars and theorists, by lawyers and judges, by students and political activists--for years to come.Dworkin begins with the question that is at the heart of the whole legal system: in difficult cases how do (and how should) judges decide what the law is? He shows that judges must decide hard cases by interpreting rather than simply applying past legal decisions, and he produces a general theory of what interpretation is--in literature as well as in law--and of when one interpretation is better than others. Every legal interpretation reflects an underlying theory about the general character of law: Dworkin assesses three such theories. One, which has been very influential, takes the law of a community to be only what the established conventions of that community say it is. Another, currently in vogue, assumes that legal practice is best understood as an instrument of society to achieve its goals. Dworkin argues forcefully and persuasively against both these views: he insists that the most fundamental point of law is not to report consensus or provide efficient means to social goals, but to answer the requirement that a political community act in a coherent and principled manner toward all its members. He discusses, in the light of that view, cases at common law, cases arising under statutes, and great constitutional cases in the Supreme Court, and he systematically demonstrates that his concept of political and legal integrity is the key to Anglo-American legal theory and practice.
Rambam's Ladder: A Meditation on Generosity and Why It Is Necessary to Give
Julie Salamon - 2003
Rambam's Ladder, written by Julie Salamon, the bestselling author and New York Times culture writer, is a book that will inspire every reader to get a toehold on the ladder and start climbing. In eight chapters, one for each rung, the book helps us navigate the world of giving. How much to give? How do we know if our gifts are being used wisely? Is it bettter to give anonymously? Along the way, Rambam's Ladder will help all of us make our lives, and the lives of those around us, better.
Would You Kill the Fat Man?: The Trolley Problem and What Your Answer Tells Us about Right and Wrong
David Edmonds - 2013
Unless the train is stopped, it will inevitably kill all five men. You are standing on a footbridge looking down on the unfolding disaster. However, a fat man, a stranger, is standing next to you: if you push him off the bridge, he will topple onto the line and, although he will die, his chunky body will stop the train, saving five lives. Would you kill the fat man?The question may seem bizarre. But it's one variation of a puzzle that has baffled moral philosophers for almost half a century and that more recently has come to preoccupy neuroscientists, psychologists, and other thinkers as well. In this book, David Edmonds, coauthor of the bestselling Wittgenstein's Poker, tells the riveting story of why and how philosophers have struggled with this ethical dilemma, sometimes called the trolley problem. In the process, he provides an entertaining and informative tour through the history of moral philosophy. Most people feel it's wrong to kill the fat man. But why? After all, in taking one life you could save five. As Edmonds shows, answering the question is far more complex--and important--than it first appears. In fact, how we answer it tells us a great deal about right and wrong.
The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America
Amy Chua - 2014
Yale Law School professors Chua (the Tiger Mom herself) and husband Rubenfeld argue that the triumph of certain cultural groups in America--e.g., Mormons in business and the highly paid Chinese Americans and Jews--results from three principles: members of such groups believe the group is exceptional, still feel they must prove themselves, and work for future goals instead of immediate satisfaction.
Beyond Rain of Gold
Victor Villaseñor - 2011
In the process of ensuring that his family’s saga would be published as the authentic, true account it was, Villaseñor forged a sacred bond with his father and his indigenous ancestors, who were guiding him from the Other Side. The book eventually became a national bestseller and an enduring favorite of millions of readers. Yet the story doesn’t end there. Villaseñor’s connection with the Spirit World continued to deepen, awakening him to the ongoing miracles inherent in everyday living. He discovered that his life had suddenly taken on a magical quality, with events occurring that transcended the boundaries of what is normally considered “reality.” A series of mystical encounters with Spirit convinced Villaseñor that not only is there no firm line between life and death—but that the time has come in our collective “human-story” to usher in a new era of abundance, peace, and harmony on our beloved Mother Earth and among all of humanity! Similar to Carlos Castaneda’s body of work, this exciting, raw, and honest book courageously delves into altered states of consciousness that exist alongside ordinary reality . . . ultimately revealing the Spiritual Wisdom that is available to each and every one of us. Beyond Rain of Gold will truly transform the way you see the world—
on both a personal and planetary level!