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Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another cover

Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another

Philip Ball

1

award won

8

score

Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another

Is there a 'physics of society'? Philip Ball's investigation into human nature ranges from Hobbes and Adam Smith to modern work on traffic flow and market trading, across economics, sociology and psychology. Ball shows how much of human behaviour we can understand when we cease trying to predict and analyse the behaviour of individuals and look to the impact of hundreds, thousands or millions of individual human decisions, in circumstances in which human beings both co-operate and conflict, when their aggregate behaviour is constructive and when it is destructive. This is a deeply thought-provoking book, causing us to examine our own behaviour, whether in buying the new Harry Potter book, voting for a particular party or responding to the lures of advertisers.

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Publisher
Random House
Year
2014
ISBN-13
9781448185412
Genre
Science & Technology
Topics
Physics of societyCollective human behaviorComplex systems

Other awarded books from Philip Ball

  • Serving the Reich: The Struggle for the Soul of Physics under Hitler

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