Do people always act rationally and in their own best interests? Thaler and Sunstein do not believe so. They are convinced that psychological factors often stop people from making the best decisions. Their 2008 work argues that governments should ‘nudge’ citizens to make better choices in all sorts of areas, from eating habits, to health, to financial planning. They also argue, however, that such interventions must not restrict freedom of choice, since ‘nudges’ can have a significant effec...

When it was published in 2008, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness quickly became one of the most influential books in modern economics and politics. Within a short time, it had inspired whole government departments in the US and UK, and others as far afield as Singapore. One of the keys to Nudge’s success is Thaler and Sunstein’s ability to create a detailed and persuasive case for their take on economic decision-making. Nudge ...

Pierce Egan's renowned 19th-century comic novel adapted by Dan Tetsell is a rollicking real tour of the sprawling post-Regency Metropolis in the years before the Victorians turned up and made everything boring.Comedy drama showing the 'fast life' of Regency London, starring Mark Gatiss, Greg Wise and James Bachman and Geoffrey McGivern as Pierce Egan.We travel through Londo...

Howard Zehr is the father of Restorative Justice and is known worldwide for his pioneering work in transforming understandings of justice. Here he proposes workable principles and practices for making Restorative Justice possible in this revised and updated edition of his bestselling, seminal book on the movement. (The original edition has sold more than 110,000 copies.)Restorative Justice, with its emphasis on identifying the justice needs of everyone involved in a crime, is a wor...

British social reformer Robert Owen once declared that "man is the creature of circumstances." A century and a half later, his famous words still ring true. While many adopt a fatalist approach, believing that their lot in life is inevitable, in fact a number of highly complex social factors determine the outcome of our socioeconomic status and integration into society. It may seem unfair, but the conditions into which we are born largely determine the various courses that our lives take. In...

Herrnstein & Murray's The Bell Curve is a deeply controversial text that raises serious issues about the stakes involved in reasoning and interpretation.The authors’ central contention is that intelligence is the primary factor determining social outcomes for individuals – and that it is a better predictor of achievement than income, background or socioeconomic status. One of the major issues raised by the book was its discussion of 'racial differences in intelligence,' and its con...

2020 Finalist for Book of the Year Award, North American Society of Social and Political Philosophy (NASSP)This book examines the philosophical, motivational, and practical challenges of education theory, policy, and practice in the twenty-first century. There is a loud and persistent drum beat of support for schools, for citizenship, for diversity and inclusion, and increasingly for labor market readiness with very little critical attention to the assumptions underlying these agen...

Oriented toward the introductory student, The Inequality Reader is the essential textbook for today's undergraduate courses. The editors, David B. Grusky and Szonja Szelenyi, have assembled the most important classic and contemporary readings about how poverty and inequality are generated and how they might be reduced. With thirty new readings, the second edition provides new materials on anti-poverty policies as well as new qualitative readings that make the scholarship more aliv...

The Dutch anthropologist Geert Hofstede is recognized as a pioneer in the fields of international management and social psychology – and his work is a perfect example of the ways in which interpretative skills can help solve problems and provide the foundation for strong thinking and understanding both in business and beyond.Hofstede’s central achievement was setting up an efficient interpretative framework for understanding the cultural differences between one country and another....

Schools and Societies provides a synthesis of key issues in the sociology of education, focusing on American schools while offering a global, comparative context. Acknowledged as a standard text in its first two editions, this fully revised and updated third edition offers a broader sweep, stronger theoretical foundation, and a new concluding chapter on the possibilities of schooling. Instructors, students, and policymakers interested in education and society will find all quantit...

Despite the persistent data gaps, a large amount of empirical evidence on the state of gender equality has been gathered worldwide, especially during the last few decades. This international data-gathering activity over the last decade largely revolved around the UN's 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Still, many other global, regional, and national initiatives and empirical programs have also contributed to the pool of available gender data. This book represents a concise overvie...

In six new essays, philosopher and award-winning author Joseph Heath explores the connection between principles of justice and the institutional arrangements required to achieve them. Topics include the significance of status inequality, the question of open borders and immigration, the stigmatization of self-control failure, and debates over racial inequality in the United States. Ultimately, Cooperation and Social Justice reveals that one cannot think about questions of social j...