A provocative exposé of how our attention, behavior, and desires have been co-opted by the “choice box”—a curated set of options that offer a false sense of agency while funneling us down pre-determined paths controlled by a select fewChoice boxes are all around us, but chances are you’ve never noticed them. Every time you click on a recommended video, rate an Uber driver, run a Google search, or invest in your 401k, you may think you’re the one calling the shots—b...

This is a book about choices. Not the kind you make when you decide who to marry, whether to quit your job, or when to go for a hike. It’s about the kind that hardly existed a hundred years ago but now govern our lives. The kind that have architects.Choose Your Captivity exposes the hidden forms of designed choice that, by determining the options made available to us, are deployed to steer our attention, behaviour and desires, influencing everything from what we eat to whe...

How did Americans come to quantify their society’s progress and well-being in units of money? In today’s GDP-run world, prices are the standard measure of not only our goods and commodities but our environment, our communities, our nation, even our self-worth. The Pricing of Progress traces the long history of how and why we moderns adopted the monetizing values and valuations of capitalism as an indicator of human prosperity while losing sight of earlier social and moral metrics ...

A provocative exposé of how our attention, behavior, and desires have been co-opted by the “choice box”—a curated set of options that offer a false sense of agency while funneling us down pre-determined paths controlled by a select fewChoice boxes are all around us, but chances are you’ve never noticed them. Every time you click on a recommended video, rate an Uber driver, run a Google search, or invest in your 401k, you may think you’re the one calling the shots—b...

In his satiric poem Don Juan, Lord Byron refigures the legend as a man easily seduced by women, rather than as a dangerous womanizer. When the first two cantos were anonymously published in 1819, they were criticized for being immoral. They were also immensely popular. Byron only completed 16 cantos, leaving the 17th unwritten when he died in 1824. Don Juan is commonly considered to be his masterpiece.

Haters are not your problem. . . .Ignoring them is.Eighty percent of companies say they deliver outstanding customer service, but only 8 percent of their customers agree. This book will help you close that gap by reconfiguring your customer service to deliver knockout experiences.The near-universal adoption of smartphones and social media has fundamentally altered the science of complaints. Critics (“haters”) can now express their displeasure faster ...

Lou Dobbs's bestselling exposé of the silent assault on the living standards of ordinary AmericansMillions of TV viewers have known Lou Dobbs for years as the Walter Cronkite of economics coverage, and now the anchor has become the preeminent champion of the common man and the good of the national interest, who tells uncomfortable truths in a voice that can't be ignored. In this incendiary book, he presents a frontline report on the betrayal of America's middle cla...

Meet the Billionaires: the 1,645 men and women who control a massive share of global assets worth $6.5 trillion. Darrell West reveals what the other 99.99998% of us need to know.With rich anecdotes and personal narratives, West goes inside the world of the ultra wealthy. Meet U.S. billionaires such as Sheldon Adelson, Michael Bloomberg, David and Charles Koch, George Soros, Tom Steyer, and Donald Trump-as well as international billionaires from around the globe.The growing po...

According to super pollster John Zogby, whom The Washington Post calls “the maverick predictor,” the conventional wisdom about the United States–that we’re isolated from the world, politically fragmented, and inclined toward material pleasure–isn’t just flawed; it may be 180 degrees from the truth. In this far-reaching and illuminating look at contemporary American life, Zogby reveals nothing less than The Way We’ll Be. Drawing on thousands of in-depth surveys conducted e...

In America today, you can connect to your ethnic heritage in dozens of ways, or adopt an identity just for an evening. Our society is not a melting pot but a salad bar--a bazaar in which the purveyors of goods and services spend close to $2 billion a year marketing the foods, clothing, objects, vacations, and events that help people express their (and others') ethnic identities. This is a huge business, whose target groups are the "hyphenated Americans"--in other words, all of us.A...

The old saying does often seem to hold true: the rich get richer while the poor get poorer, creating a widening gap between those who have more and those who have less. The sociologist Robert K. Merton called this phenomenon the Matthew effect, named after a passage in the gospel of Matthew. Yet the more closely we examine the sociological effects of this principle, the more complicated the idea becomes. Initial advantage doesn't always lead to further advantage, and disadvantage doesn't n...

This book reflects the current thinking and research on how consumers’ perception of product risks and benefits affects their behavior. It provides the scientific, regulatory and industrial research community with a conceptual and methodological reference point for studies on consumer behavior and marketing. The contributions address various aspects of consumer psychology and behavior, risk perception and communication, marketing research strategies, as well as consumer product regulation....