 | Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals by John Gray
Buy new: $10.88 / Used from: $6.64 faults of the humanistic drive for "progress"
|
 | Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin by Stephen Jay Gould
Buy new: $10.85 / Used from: $0.87 evolution not as progress, but as the expansion or contraction of variation within a system of adapting agents
|
 | How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer
Buy new: $16.50 / Used from: $12.89 p166, "both reason and feeling have strengths and weaknesses, and different situations require different cognitvie strategies. How we decide should depend on what we're deciding." This is the book Gladwell's "Blink" coulda/shouda been.
|
 | Status Anxiety by Alain De Botton
Buy new: $10.20 / Used from: $3.49 western culture has brought great personal wealth yet has wrought new psychological challenges to dealing with high/low status.
|
 | Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
Buy new: $11.75 / Used from: $10.94 yup, individuals' environments contribute much to personal success. go figure.
|
 | The Consolations of Philosophy by Alain De Botton
Buy new: $10.17 / Used from: $3.12 nice intro to the ideas of socrates, epicurus, seneca, montaigne, schopenhauer, and nietzsche and their relevance to modern life
|
 | Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia by John Gray
Buy new: $10.20 / Used from: $2.22 the end of the cold war wasnt the "end of history" but rather a resumption of age-old conflicts
|
 | The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain De Botton
Buy new: $17.16 / Used from: $15.50 in a developed, affluent society, work is a mere diversion, yet beauty can be found in it
|
 | Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work by Matthew B. Crawford
Buy new: $15.17 / Used from: $8.95 in defense of "manual" labor, an indictment of commoditized knowledge work
|
 | Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism by George A. Akerlof
Buy new: $16.47 / Used from: $12.00 5 animal spirits that drive the economy...
1) confidence
2) fairness
3) fraud & corruption
4) money illusion - inflation/deflation
5) making sense of reality using stories
|
 | On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not by Robert Burton
Buy new: $10.17 / Used from: $4.59 author argues that the "feeling of knowing" that we have when we're sure we know something has roots deep in our limbic system and can thus trick us into holding onto false beliefs even in the face of contrary conscious reasoning
|
 | Heresies: Against Progress and Other Illusions by John Gray
Buy new: $12.24 / Used from: $9.85 more criticism of western liberal humanism, and the particular goal that the "american way" be spread around the world
|
 | False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism by John Gray
Buy new: $13.95 / Used from: $2.43 does the economy work to better society, or does our society work simply to improve the economy?
|
 | The Misbehavior of Markets: A Fractal View of Financial Turbulence by Benoit Mandelbrot
Buy new: $9.66 / Used from: $6.99 the behavior of financial systems appear to follow power laws, not normal distributions
|
 | Ancestral Roots: Modern Living and Human Evolution by Timothy Clack
Buy new: $38.00 / Used from: $14.27 more discussion of the clash between our pre-historic/savannah-optimized bodies and our modern/urbanized environment
|
 | Complexity: A Guided Tour by Melanie Mitchell
Buy new: $19.77 / Used from: $11.55 chaos, complex adaptive systems, and complexity science explored
|
 | The Revenge of Gaia: Earth's Climate Crisis & The Fate of Humanity by James Lovelock
Buy new: $11.48 / Used from: $5.15 forget sustainable development, it's time for sustainable retreat
|
 | Nature: An Economic History by Geerat J. Vermeij
Buy new: $27.95 / Used from: $15.90 evolution/adaptation of biological systems and economic systems
|
 | The Housekeeper and the Professor: A Novel by Yoko Ogawa
Buy new: $10.08 / Used from: $7.48 math professor with a 90-minute short term memory introduces housekeeper and son to wonders of math and building social bonds
|
 | The Intelligent Universe: AI, ET, and the Emerging Mind of the Cosmos by James N. Gardner
Buy new: $17.15 / Used from: $15.00 why is our universe so finely tuned to be life-friendly? gardner postulates a universe evolving towards higher intelligence and capacity for cosmogenesis
|
 | It Takes a Genome: How a Clash Between Our Genes and Modern Life Is Making Us Sick by Greg Gibson
Buy new: $18.24 / Used from: $7.99 guess what, our genome hasnt yet evolved to our rapidly changing, modern environment
|
 | Why We Make Mistakes: How We Look Without Seeing, Forget Things in Seconds, and Are All Pretty Sure We Are Way Above Average by Joseph T. Hallinan
Buy new: $16.47 / Used from: $11.66 more on the limits of human perception, judgement, and decision-making
|
 | Lecturing Birds on Flying: Can Mathematical Theories Destroy the Financial Markets? by Pablo Triana
Buy new: $19.77 / Used from: $13.55 financial models fail, tinkering and hands-on experience win
|
 | Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller: Oil and the End of Globalization by Jeff Rubin
Buy new: $17.16 / Used from: $12.95 what happens to globalization if/when energy demands become too costly
|
 | Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software by Steven Johnson
Buy new: $11.21 / Used from: $4.94 aka, complex adaptive systems and their ubiquitous nature
|
 | Embracing the Wide Sky: A Tour Across the Horizons of the Mind by Daniel Tammet
Buy new: $18.00 / Used from: $0.89 autism as starting point for understanding scope and reach of the human mind
|
 | Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath
Buy new: $17.16 / Used from: $10.02 ideas are more memorable when they're: (S)imple, (U)nexpected, (C)oncrete, (C)redible, (E)motional, and use (S)tories.
|
 | The Bottom Line: Observations and Arguments on the Sports Business by Andrew Zimbalist
Buy new: $22.45 / Used from: $16.20 an occasionally interesting collection of news/journal articles about the economics of sport. sections on stadium financing and the dual amateur/professional aspect of college athletics are the best of the lot.
|
 | Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts about Alternative Medicine by Edzard Ernst
Buy new: $17.13 / Used from: $10.19 big surprise, most beneficial claims of alternative medicine can be attributed to the placebo effect
|
 | The Empathy Gap: Building Bridges to the Good Life and the Good Society by J. D. Trout
Buy new: $7.05 / Used from: $3.00 more on human decision making and policy implications
|
 | Everything Bad is Good for You by Steven Johnson
Buy new: $10.20 / Used from: $1.64 increasing complexity of today's video games/tv/movies demand more cognitive muscle
|
 | Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy by Martin Lindstrom
Buy new: $16.47 / Used from: $11.24 brief tour of some recent brain scan studies of people's buying behavior. extremely light reading.
|
 | Exotic Preferences: Behavioral Economics and Human Motivation by George Loewenstein
Buy new: $31.35 / Used from: $44.16 the gap theory of curiosity and other tales of econ
|
 | Investigations by Stuart A. Kauffman
Buy new: $25.00 / Used from: $7.57 |
 | Natural Security: A Darwinian Approach to a Dangerous World
Buy new: $40.42 / Used from: $31.84 |
 | Thanks!: How the New Science of Gratitude Can Make You Happier by Robert Emmons
Buy new: $16.50 / Used from: $9.00 |
 | A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Godel and Einstein by Palle Yourgrau
Buy new: $11.70 / Used from: $5.00 |
 | Quantum Evolution: How Physics' Weirdest Theory Explains Life's Biggest Mystery (Norton Paperback) by Johnjoe McFadden
Buy new: $12.21 / Used from: $7.38 |
Listmania!
