August 31
We could fill an entire year of reading groups with this topic. A lot of material, but with a lot of fun stuff in it. Pick your winners!
Overall
- Roy F. Baumeister (1991). Meaning of Life.
- Baumeister is one of those unique social scientists, able to “connect the dots”. This is his attempt to cover a broad set of topics around life’s meaning (e.g., self-identity, work, love, religion, happiness, death, or parenthood).
- Will Durant (2014). Fallen Leaves: Last Words on Life, Love, War, and God.
- Durant is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and philosopher and author (together with his wife Ariel) of an incredible 11 volumes of The Story of Civilization. When he offers his wise reflections and life insights and recommendations, you had better listen!
- Arthur Schopenhauer (1932). The Wisdom of Life.
- A reflection on reputation, pride, rank, honour, and fame. Alain de Botton (in The Consolations of Philosophy) gives a wonderful overview of Schopenhauer’s life. According to Schopenhauer, humans lacked gentleness and humility, and so he preferred a close relationship with his poodle. He was fond of polygamy: “Of the many advantages of polygamy, one is that the husband would not come into such close contact with his in-laws, the fear of which at present prevents innumerable marriages. Ten mothers-in-law instead of one!”. He adopted a very rigid daily routine. In 1820 “he attempts to gain a university post in philosophy in Berlin. He offers lectures on ‘The whole of philosophy, i.e. the theory of the essence of the world and of the human mind.’ Five students attend. In a nearby building, his rival, Hegel, can be heard lecturing to an audience of 300. Schopenhauer’s assessment of Hegel’s philosophy: ‘[I]ts fundamental ideas are the absurdist fancy, a world turned upside down, a philosophical buffoonery… its contents being the hollowest and most senseless display of words ever lapped up by blockheads, and its presentation…being the post repulsive and nonsensical gibberish, recalling the rantings of a bedlamite’” (p. 176).
- Umberto Eco 34(2016). Chronicles of a Liquid Society.
- A large variety of notes and digressions on ideas that came to Eco’s mind (mostly based on a regular column called “La bustina di Minerva”). His final book.
- Paul Frijters with Gigi Foster (2013). Economic Theory of Greed, Love, Groups, and Networks.
- The book covers key elements of our discussion this month. Andrew Oswald praises the book as “the most remarkable book I have read in the last decade”. For a book review see here 😉.
- Paul Seabright (2010). The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life.
- Everyday life in its power, need, strangeness, and fragility.
- Douglas T. Kenrick (2011). Sex, Murder and the Meaning of Life.
- According to Sapolsky,“Kenrick writes like a dream”, and Pinker names Kenrick as one of the most important scientists studying the evolutionary shaping of human drives and emotions. The titles of the book chapters are appealing: Standing in the Gutter; Why Playboy Is Bad for Your Mental Mechanism; Homicidal Fantasies; Outgroup Hatred in the Blink of an Eye; The Mind as a Coloring Book; Subselves; Reconstructing Maslow’s Pyramid; How the Mind Warps; Peacocks, Porsches, and Pablo Picasso; Sex and Religion; Deep Rationality and Evolutionary Economics; Bad Crowds, Chaotic Attractors, and Humans as Ants. Steve visited Kenrick recently in Arizona and can give you more insights into Kenrick’s mind and personality (below he attended his lecture).
- Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson (2018). The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life.
- Pulitzer Prize winner Steven Pearlstein says about the book: “Charles Darwin, Dan Kahneman and Malcolm Gladwell walk into a bar… It’s no joke!”. The book explores why we hide our motives and provides a large number of examples in our everyday life (consumption, art, charity, education, medicine, religion, politics, conversation, laughter, or body language).
- George C. Homans (1951). The Human Group.
- Economists and experimentalists are just discovering small groups. It is therefore a must to dig into Homans’ classic analysis on human groups.
Love, Sex and Mating
- Helen Fisher (2004). Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love.
- Anthropologist Fisher looks at being in love, love among animals, scanning the brain in love, lust, romance and attachment, who we choose, the evolution of romantic love, rejection, despair and rage, and very importantly making romance last. She is an outstanding public speaker and it is therefore worth checking out her TED talks: talk 1, talk 2
- Robin Dunbar (2012). The Science of Love.
- From “Now We Are One” to “Sleeping with the Devil”, from “Truly, Madly, Deeply” to “Love and Betrayal Online”. Love is not just about passion and pain but also survival.
- Jared Diamond (1997). The Evolution of Human Sexuality.
- Diamond: “Reading this book will not teach you new positions for enjoying intercourse”. Nevertheless, Diamond explores how human sexuality came to be. He explores interesting questions such as Why don’t men breast-feed their babies35? Why are humans doing sex at the wrong time (recreational sex)36? What are men good for? Using a comparative perspective he helps us to understand what it means to be a mammal and how different we are in relation to other animals or mammals37. Several examples, including those from the world of birds, are very valuable and entertaining38.
- Geoffrey Miller (2000). The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature.
- The human mind’s impressive abilities evolved, similar to a peacock’s tail39, not just as survival machines but as courtship machines: “Every one of our ancestors managed not just to live for a while, but to convince at least one sexual partner to have enough sex to produce offspring. Those proto-humans that did not attract sexual interest did not become our ancestors, no matter how good they were at surviving” (p. 3).
- David M. Buss (2016). The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating.
- “Although I am aware of the cliché that if you give someone a hammer everything looks like a nail, I’ve come to believe that human mating strategies permeate nearly every human endeavour. I see them everywhere. They shape status hierarchies among women and foster sexual treachery among men. They delay male puberty early in life while causing premature death at the other end – both products of mate competition. They unite people in love’s embrace and drive mates apart with jealous rages and sexual infidelity. Human sexual psychology is deeply embedded in the fabric of our social endeavors, in all of its glorious and disturbing manifestations” (p. ix).
- Kenneth E. Boulding (1981). A Preface to Grants Economics: The Economy of Love and Fear.
- A different book from the others: from micro to macro. What elements of the social system make some conflicts creative and fruitful and others destructive and damaging to all parties? The way in which things come to hold together and fall apart requires an understanding of the idea of a “grant”; a one-way transfer. Kenneth Boulding was one of the most eclectic social scientists of the 20th century. He came from a generation of English scholars that didn’t need a PhD, he was a John Bates Clark medallist who was also President of the American Economic Association fifty years ago, but he was more than just an economist40. Last year, the American Economic Association Meeting organised a panel session entitled “Kenneth Boulding and Future Directions of Social Science”. The session raised questions about why Boulding is little known among economists, and why he had little influence on economics (or whether he had an influence but economists are unware of the sources). You will find the abstract here. The most interesting question that the event asked is whether there are other directions in Boulding’s work that can serve as indicators as to where economics and social science will be heading in the future. This book could be one of those indicators and roadmaps!
Power, Networks, Influence, and Reputation
- John Kenneth Galbraith (1983). The Anatomy of Power.
- Kenneth Boulding (1999).Three Faces of Power.
- Many scholars have written about power (e.g., Bertrand Russell, Max Weber, Robert Dahl, Harold D. Lasswell, Jürgen Habermas, Talcott Parson, or Michel Foucault) but Galbraith’s and Boulding’s structured analyses of power stand out.
- Niall Ferguson (2018). The Square and the Tower: Network and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook.
- Ferguson’s most recent book: “The book is about the uneven ebb and flow of history. It distinguishes the long epochs in which hierarchical structures dominated human life from the rarer but more dynamic eras when networks had the advantage, thanks in part to changes in technology. To put it simply: when hierarchy is the order of the day, you are only as powerful as your rung on the organizational ladder of a state, corporation or similar vertically ordered institution. When networks gain an advantage, you can be as powerful as your position in one or more horizontally structured social groups” (xx).
- Thomas Schelling (1980). The Strategy of Conflict.
- Commitment in order to influence! According to Schelling maybe his most important idea that he had and the book Strategy of Conflict his most important scholarly contribution (see here an interview (Harvard Kennedy School Oral History), Chapter 22: Contributions to Scholarship and Public Policy, 1:06:06-1:09:27).
- Robert Cialdini (2016). Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade.
- From Influence to Pre-Suasion, Cialdini’s new book on influence. His note: “Pre-Suasion seeks to add to the body of behavioural science information that general readers find both inherently interesting and applicable to their daily lives”.
- Kenneth H. Craik (2009). Reputation: A Network Interpretation.
- Expanding from social network to reputation network, this is an exploration of the interconnected facets of reputation.
- Howard Gardner (2006). Changing Minds: The Art and Science of Changing Our Own and Other People’s Minds.
- Even before the book was published, Gardner was surprised to receive a phone call from the office of Ralph Nader, who was launching his campaign for president… Next came invitations from an advertisement agency, an academic-corporate collective seeking to change the fast-food eating habits of obese Americans, and a high-level commission on national security, charged with altering the beliefs and work habits of their officers. Well, there is certainly a demand for Changing Minds 😉…
- Erving Goffman (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.
- Schelling about Goffman: “He was the damn best observer of people I have ever known”. He recollects what Goffman once said to him: “A woman can be undressed in front of her sister; a women can be undressed in front of her husband; but a woman cannot be undressed in front her sister and husband” (see conversation here, min. 14:50-22:25). He is also one of most cited social science scholars (more than 250,000 citations on Google Scholar). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life is his most cited one (more than 50,000 citations).