Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another : Being an Enquiry Into the Interplay of Chance and Necessity in the Way that Human Culture, Customs, Institutions, Cooperation and Conflict Arise

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Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004 - 644 Seiten
"Is there a 'physics of society'? Ranging from Hobbes and Adam Smith to modern work on traffic flow and market trading, and across economics, sociology, psychology, Phillip Ball shows how much we can understand of human behaviour when we cease to try to predict and analyse the behaviour of indiviuals and look to the impact of hundreds, thousands or millions of individual human decisions, whether in circumstances in which human being co-operate or conflict, when their aggregate behaviour is constructive and when it is destructive. By perhaps Britain's leading young science writer, this is a deeply thought-provoking book, causing us to examine our own behaviour, whether in buying the Harry Potter book, voting for a particular party or responding to the lures of advertisers."

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Inhalt

Lesser Forces
38
The Law of Large Numbers
58
The Grand AhWhoom
99
Urheberrecht

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