Additional Resources

While the Syllabus section includes all the resources you’ll need for each class, I’m including additional books, papers, videos, etc which might be relevant to many of the topics we’ve covered. These are all optional, cover a range of themes, and for your consideration at any time, not just this class.  Quite a few of these are very big, very deep, and very complex works, not textbooks but still require some commitment to get through.

I do not know if any of the books are available through the college, so I’ll just use Amazon and other commercial links.  I’ll add resources over the duration of the course, and if any of you have ideas for works that you’d like to share, please do send to me to review.

This list also includes a number of websites, and those sites themselves contain references and links to countless additional resources.

 

General Works

Blueprint:  The Evolutionary Origins of A Good Society, by Nicholas Christakis

When we think about changing for society for the better, we often have implicit ideas about human nature, good or bad.  Generally, we lean to the bad, which of course makes positive societal change hard.  This book comes at things differently.   From the summary:  For too long, scientists have focused on the dark side of our biological heritage: our capacity for aggression, cruelty, prejudice, and self-interest. But natural selection has given us a suite of beneficial social features, including our capacity for love, friendship, cooperation, and learning. Beneath all of our inventions — our tools, farms, machines, cities, nations — we carry with us innate proclivities to make a good society.

The Dawn of Everything:  A New History of Humanity, by David Graeber and David Wengrow

For the anthropologists and philosophers among us :).     This book explores some of the same themes as Blueprint.   From the summary:

A dramatically new understanding of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution—from the development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state, democracy, and inequality—and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation.

For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike—either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself.Drawing on pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what’s really there. If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organization did they lead to? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful, hopeful possibilities, than we tend to assume.The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual range, animated by curiosity, moral vision, and a faith in the power of direct action.

Prosocial.world

David Sloan Wilson is an evolutionary biologist who has begun to explore how evolutionary principles might be applied to cultural and social advancement.  Both his personal website and this one — which is more programmatic and practical — contain fascinating essays, videos, and interviews.

Seventeen Rooms

This expansive website and its associated activities is a partnership between the Center for Sustainable Development at Brookings and The Rockefeller Foundation. Seventeen Rooms is an experimental method for advancing the economic, social, and environmental priorities embedded in the world’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).  The Brookings Institute is a major US think-tank.  It’s an interesting exploration of how experts from a very wide range of disciplines try to come together to solve these problems.

A Design Driven Guide for Entrepreneurs, by Rhea Alexander et. al.    The other resources in this subsection are mostly deep academic works or policy resources.  But here’s a practical perspective.   From the summary:  Authored by a multidisciplinary team of practicing design strategists, business leaders, academics, and entrepreneurs, this hands-on guide models strategic design as a mindset for starting up in a VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity) world: framing problems, applying methods, identifying opportunities, and creating pathways forward through futures and systems thinking. Carefully curated case studies of young impact-driven entrepreneurs along with resources, including action-based frameworks, diagrams, and templates for founders to replicate, and a reader’s checklist to enable the transformation of daily practice, will open new dimensions that amplify the global shift towards a more regenerative world and a multiverse of possibilities.

 

Climate

The Carbon Almanac, by many authors, including myself.  For anyone who accepts anthropogenic climate change but wonders what they as an individual could possibly do to make a difference either personally or in their work, this is a great book to get started with.  The website is filled with other resources too.

Project Drawdown.   The Project Drawdown initiative is generally considered one of the finest authoritative sources of climate solutions available today.

Heading for Change.   Heading for Change is a hybrid investment-philanthropic fund established in 2023 by the late Suzanne Biegel, who was a pioneer in what’s called “gender-smart investing”, particularly for women climate entrepreneurs all over the world.  HfC was established with the goal of “accelerating proven climate and biodiversity solutions with women as agents of change.”

As you can read in her bio on the website, she dedicated her life and career to making finance more inclusive, impactful, and effective.  Suzanne was one of my closest friends starting back in the 1980’s, and while her loss is still painful, she leaves a legacy that represents a model for entrepreneurs and investors to follow.

 

 

Health

The Great Escape:  Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality by Angus Deaton.  Deaton is a Nobel Prize-winning economist who has spent his career studying the relationships between poverty, health, capitalism, and inequality over the past 250 years.

 

Education

(to come)

Finance and Economics

The Future of Money, by Eswar Prasad.

From the summary:   This is an in-depth look at how accelerating financial change, from the end of cash to the rise of cryptocurrencies, will transform economies for better and worse.

Money and finance are on the verge of dramatic transformations that will reshape their roles in the lives of ordinary people. This book provides a compelling and authoritative guide to the promise of Fintech and the perils of cryptocurrencies, though it’s far more than just a book about crypto. The author foresees the end of cash, as central banks develop their own digital currencies to compete with Bitcoin and Facebook’s Diem.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century, by Thomas Piketty.   Published in 2013, this massive book was perhaps the first study ever to use historical data — primarily in Europe but also the United States — from the past 300 years to develop a thesis about the structural roots of inequality.  In essence, he argues that inequality is a feature of the current system, not a bug.  That said, he offers a range of political solutions, primarily around tax policy. Technical, but still somehow gripping.

Winners Take All, by Anand Ghiridharadas.   This is a short, savage, take-no-prisoners book that examines the history of post-Andrew Carnegie capitalism and how the business elite have used philanthropy as a form of self-interest and self-protection to maintain a status quo of inequality.  It’s long on critique and very short on solutions — and of course subject to counter-arguments —  but the author (a writer for The New Yorker), leaves readers with an indelible description of the economic and political systems we live in today.

Caring Economics: Conversations on Altruism and Compassion, Between Scientists, Economists, and the Dalai Lama, by Tania Singer, Matthieu Ricard, and The Dalai Lama.   From the summary:

Can the hyperambitious, bottom-line-driven practices of the global economy incorporate compassion into the pursuit of wealth? Or is economics driven solely by materialism and self-interest? In Caring Economics, experts consider these questions alongside the Dalai Lama in a wide-ranging, scientific-based discussion on economics and altruism.
Begun in 1987, the Mind and Life Institute arose out of a series of conferences held with the Dalai Lama and a range of scientists that sought to form a connection between the empiricism of contemporary scientific inquiry and the contemplative, compassion-based practices of Buddhism. Caring Economics is based on a conference held by the Mind and Life Institute in Zurich in which experts from all over the world gathered to discuss the possibility of having a global economy focused on compassion and altruism. Each chapter consists of a presentation by an expert in the field, followed by a discussion with the Dalai Lama in which he offers his response and his own unique insights on the subject.
In this provocative and inspiring book, learn how wealth doesn’t need to be selfish, how in fact, empathy and compassion may be the path to a healthier world economy.

Interview with Angus Deaton,