Books with category 🪙 Economics
Displaying 2 books

Everybody Lies

Insightful, surprising, and with ground-breaking revelations about our society, Everybody Lies exposes the secrets embedded in our internet searches, with a foreword by bestselling author Steven Pinker. While people often lie to friends, lovers, doctors, pollsters—and to themselves—in Internet searches, they confess their truths, revealing secrets about sexless marriages, mental health problems, and even racist views.

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, an economist and former Google data scientist, presents what might be the most important dataset ever collected. This unprecedented database of secrets offers astonishing insights into humankind. For example, anxiety does not increase after a terrorist attack, crime levels drop when a violent film is released, and racist searches are no higher in Republican areas than in Democrat ones.

Stephens-Davidowitz reveals information that can be used to change our culture and addresses the questions we're afraid to ask that might be essential to our well-being—both emotional and physical. Everybody Lies is insightful, funny, and always surprising, exposing the biases and secrets deeply embedded within us, at a time when things are harder to predict than ever.

Utopia for Realists

2017

by Rutger Bregman

Universal basic income. A 15-hour workweek. Open borders. Does it sound too good to be true? One of Europe's leading young thinkers shows how we can build an ideal world today.

After working all day at jobs we often dislike, we buy things we don't need. Rutger Bregman, a Dutch historian, reminds us it needn't be this way—and in some places it isn't. Rutger Bregman's TED Talk about universal basic income seemed impossibly radical when he delivered it in 2014. A quarter of a million views later, the subject of that video is being seriously considered by leading economists and government leaders the world over. It's just one of the many utopian ideas that Bregman proves is possible today.

Utopia for Realists is one of those rare books that takes you by surprise and challenges what you think can happen. From a Canadian city that once completely eradicated poverty, to Richard Nixon's near implementation of a basic income for millions of Americans, Bregman takes us on a journey through history, and beyond the traditional left-right divides, as he champions ideas whose time have come.

Every progressive milestone of civilization—from the end of slavery to the beginning of democracy—was once considered a utopian fantasy. Bregman's book, both challenging and bracing, demonstrates that new utopian ideas, like the elimination of poverty and the creation of the fifteen-hour workweek, can become a reality in our lifetime. Being unrealistic and unreasonable can in fact make the impossible inevitable, and it is the only way to build the ideal world.

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