The People's Economics

The first 3 chapters are available as a Kindle sample (in the UK at least) Chapter 1 is about the Enlightenment, but made it clear that progressisn't automatic - we must beware of going backwards. The second chapter introduces the reader to entropy, evolution and information, and argues why they pl...

What does a philosopher do? Think about things? Well anyone can do that. But how do real philosophers distinguish themselves from the armchair kind. It seems that they have two choices. One is to be part of an institution, to claim just to teach philosophy. The other is to emphasis your difference ...

Many conisder the decades following the end of World War II to be the golden age of capitalism. High growth, increasing equality,plenty of money for public works. So what went wrong? Would it have been possible to continue on the same track. It is being argued that Keynesian stimulus is what is nee...

In the first chapter Coopersmith lists the advantages of the principle of least action. One that I find important is the ability to link together different viewpoints. For instance the underlying models in Newtonian gravity and General Relativity look totally different, but in many situations their...

The book tells of how the rise of financial trading, such as the Dutch tulip mania, or the selling of shares in overseas trading companies, led to the need for some sort of options trading. The Black-Scholes equation is presented as the finding of an exact formula for options prices, something whic...

Chapter 1 starts with an account of the life of Captain Every (or Avery) and his crew, who turned pirate, captured a ship belonging to the emperor of Mughal India, also kidnapping the Emperor's daughter. Every then set up a base in Madagascar, leading to the legend of a pirate kingdom. Rennie looks...

The book starts off with a couple of pages of acclaim from well known people, but more noticable to me was the people also bought list on Amazon which is full of books I'm interested in, predicting that this should be my sort of book. Cities seems to be able to go on forever, while companies and or...

I've heard of the Black-Scholes equation, but I'm interested in finding more about it. How much is it related to the Gaussian model of risk, whose widespread use was blamed for the 2008 financial crisis, and of which Henri Poincaré had given his 'Panurge's sheep' warning a century before in 1908? A...

How do you make sure that everyone has equal opportunities? It's a tricky question, since the paths people can follow are limited and there needs to be some way of selecting who gets through. One way of dealing with this is to allow everyone to take part in competitive testing, but while this may b...

Looking for this book on Amazon gets rather confusing. The book I've got is called What We Cannot Know: From Consciousness to the Cosmos, the Cutting Edge of Science Explained , but it also seems to have the title What We Cannot Know: Explorations at the Edge of Knowledge . I read the Kindle sample ...