Word: schellinger
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Thomas C. Schelling, a 2005 Nobel-prize-winning economist and distinguished university professor emeritus at the University of Maryland, wrote “Micromotives” in the late seventies to explain collective human behavior. The book, comparable to Malcolm Gladwell’s recent work “The...
Unfortunately, the organization of the book does not allow for such philosophizing. The first half of the book outlines general forms of human behavior within an economic context, while the second half of the book applies those concepts to real-life behavior. While the examples Schelling provides—such...
Schelling offers many examples of human behavior in the first half of the book and discusses critical mass, or the idea that people base their actions, among other things, on the number of people who will take part in the action. Anyone interested in the nitty-gritty of such processes...
The second half of the book is more purely illustrative than instructive. It seems as though a separate book should be written for the three issues he discusses, namely neighborhood racial tensions, social interaction, and gene selection. The social interaction section especially, is more math-heavy; while it is nothing...
In short, the book is informative, but just not very enjoyable. Schelling makes several attempts at humor, some of them hysterical, and some of them atrocious (“winnings and losings add to zero [less than what one must pay for sandwiches]”). At least the blame...