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Look out for availability cascades! 26 Jul 2013 | 01:44 pm
Daniel Kahneman, in his popular book Thinking, Fast and Slow, explains the notion of an availability cascade as follows: An availability cascade is a self-sustaining chain of events, which may sta...
The four bases of political power 5 Jul 2013 | 12:20 pm
Jonathan H. Turner is Professor of Sociology at the University of California at Riverside. According to his academic website "He is committed to making sociology a hard science". In his introductory t...
The White Man's Burden - Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good 19 Jun 2013 | 07:00 pm
What do colonial imperialists, military interventionists, and foreign aid bureaucrats have in common? According to William Easterly, quite a lot. They are all in the grip of utopian ideas to transform...
Instead of the state: five books on privatization of five central government functions 3 Jun 2013 | 01:18 pm
It is often assumed that if government didn't provide a certain good or service, no one would. The five books below challenge this common assumption with regard to five different areas in which the ro...
The Moral Society - Its Structure and Effects 9 Apr 2013 | 01:30 pm
This very interesting, but little read, book by philosopher Ian Hinckfuss is sadly out-of-print (but the manuscript can be found online here). Hinckfuss is a moral sceptic and nihilist, arguing that t...
The history and standing of moral skepticism 12 Feb 2013 | 03:06 pm
Just as history is written by the winners, so too is moral philosophy written largely by the believers. Although moral skepticism has been a theoretical presence in Western philosophy for as long as a...
Pascal Boyer on the relation between religion and politics 8 Jan 2013 | 12:47 pm
The fact that religious groups are so involved in political intrigue and manage to find a political niche in most places with centralized authority is very familiar to all of us, so familiar indeed th...
The best of 2012! 2 Jan 2013 | 02:49 pm
It has been an incredible year. Here is a selection of the best books I have reviewed in 2012: 1. Richard Joyce: The Evolution of Morality There are many books on the topic of the evolution of mo...
Reclaiming Education 12 Dec 2012 | 03:04 pm
James Tooley is Professor of Education Policy at the University of Newcastle. In this interesting book, he makes a powerful case for reclaiming education from the state and giving it back to the priva...
Huemer on the psychology of authority 11 Nov 2012 | 03:48 am
Fresh out of the printing press is Michael Huemer's new book The Problem of Political Authority - An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey. I have yet to read the whole book, so I wi...
