Social Systems

More than any other institution in the country, Georgia State has overturned the assumption that poorer students are doomed to fail. Won't Lose This Dream describes how the architects of Georgia State's success harnessed the power of evolving data technologies, a "moneyball" strategy that helped them recognize and remove the obstacles that have held poor students back. Veteran journalist Andrew Gumbel uncovers the human stories behind these innovations, tracing real students as they realize lifelong dreams of graduating from college.

In Capitalism, Alone, leading economist Branko Milanovic explains the reasons for this decisive historical shift since the days of feudalism and, later, communism. Surveying the varieties of capitalism, he asks: What are the prospects for a fairer world now that capitalism is the only game in town? His conclusions are sobering, but not fatalistic. Capitalism gets much wrong, but also much right - and it is not going anywhere. Our task is to improve it.

The food system is broken, but there is a revolution underway to fix it. Bite Back presents an urgent call to action and a vision for disrupting corporate power in the food system, a vision shared with countless organizers and advocates worldwide.

Powell and Silverglate shine a light on the defects of the federal criminal-justice system: overzealous prosecutors, perjury traps, negligent judges, perverse limits on self-defense, vague and overabundant criminal statutes, insufficient requirements for criminal intent, and no accountability for prosecutors. Most important, they provide a much-needed blueprint for reforming the Department of Justice and the criminal-justice system, including actions an average citizen can take to help restore justice.

Every year, millions of Americans are overcharged and underserved while the health-care industry makes record profits. We know something is wrong, but the layers of bureaucracy designed to discourage complaints make pushing back seem impossible. Never Pay the First Bill is the guerilla guide to health care the American people and employers need. Drawing on 15 years of investigating the health-care industry, reporter Marshall Allen shows how companies and individuals have managed to force medical providers to play fair and shows how you can, too.

The Supreme Court's decisions on constitutional rights are well known and much talked about. But individuals who want to defend those rights need something else as well: access to courts that can rule on their complaints. And on matters of access, the Court's record over the past generation has been almost uniformly hostile to the enforcement of individual citizens' constitutional rights.

Can we change social systems? How can we understand and apply complexity principles to social order? We come from experience, we have worked in trying to radically change social systems in the past 25 years. Our lab have been communities and governments. Our most significant success has been our crime-prvention model which has helped many communities radically reduce crime in a very short period of time. We were intrigued by the success. Our theoretical background was Systems Theory and Total Quality Management, but we knew we were way out on uncharted territory. So we stepped into Chaos ...

The United States spends enormous sums on helping people—$3.8 trillion on healthcare, $182 billion on prisons, and $604 billion on higher education—and yet these systems routinely fail us. When we seek to improve how they function, our efforts focus on policy debates, technical solutions, funding, and data. But if these systems are to truly improve, we have to start with the human values behind them. Broken explores the deeply human dimensions we must consider if we want to rebuild the policies, technologies, processes, and most importantly, the heart we use to serve people.

In World-Systems Analysis, Immanuel Wallerstein provides a concise and accessible introduction to the comprehensive approach that he pioneered 30 years ago to understanding the history and development of the modern world. Since Wallerstein first developed world-systems analysis, it has become a widely utilized methodology within the historical social sciences and a common point of reference in discussions of globalization.

In this disquieting cyber thriller, Joseph Menn takes readers into the murky hacker underground, traveling the globe from San Francisco to Costa Rica and London to Russia. His guides are California surfer and computer whiz Barrett Lyon and a fearless British high-tech agent. Through these heroes, Menn shows the evolution of cyber-crime from small-time thieving to sophisticated, organized gangs, who began by attacking corporate websites but increasingly steal financial data from consumers.

A soaring bridge is an obvious infrastructural feat, but so are the mostly hidden reservoirs, transformers, sewers, cables, and pipes that deliver water, energy, and information to wherever we need it. When these systems work well, they hide in plain sight. Engineer and materials scientist Deb Chachra takes listeners on a fascinating tour of these essential utilities, revealing how they work, what it takes to keep them running, just how much we rely on them—but also whom they work well for, and who pays the costs.

From best-selling author Jon Krakauer, a stark, powerful, meticulously reported narrative about a series of sexual assaults at the University of Montana - stories that illuminate the human drama behind the national plague of campus rape.

"Copaganda" is a special kind of propaganda employed by police, prosecutors, and news media. It stokes fear of police-recorded crime and distorts society’s responses to it. As the United States incarcerates five times more people per capita than it did in 1970—despite record low crime rates—a sprawling and profitable punishment bureaucracy spends a lot of time and money to manipulate what we think that bureaucracy does and why.

Uncover the historical and social roots of caste discrimination in Who Were the Shudras? by Dr. B. R. Ambedkar. This groundbreaking work challenges the traditional narratives of Hindu society, offering a meticulous examination of the origins and status of the Shudra caste. Ambedkar's critical analysis and visionary insights call for a re-evaluation of social hierarchies and advocate for equality and justice.

Almost every society has professional judges, but from ancient Athens to modern Asia, cultures have wanted ordinary people involved in legal decisions. The use of juries comes with challenges; societies must determine how to select jurors, what cases jurors should decide and by what rules, and how to inform jurors about the law and evidence. This Very Short Introduction shows how and why societies around the world have used juries, charting the spread of the twelve-person jury from England to the British colonies in America, Canada, India, Australia, New Zealand, and the Caribbean.

Recent elections in the advanced Western democracies have undermined the basic foundations of political systems that had previously beaten back all challenges - from both the left and the right. The election of Donald Trump to the US presidency, only months after the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union, signaled a dramatic shift in the politics of the rich democracies. In Anti-System Politics, Jonathan Hopkin traces the evolution of this shift and argues that it is a long-term result of abandoning the post-war model of egalitarian capitalism in the 1970s.

Using the Progressive Outcomes Scale Logic Model to Calculate Social Return on Investment offers a transformative approach for governments, funders, and organizations seeking to maximize the impact of social mission programs. At its core, the Progressive Outcomes Scale Logic Model (POSLM) provides a practical framework to help governments connect federal funding directly to measurable outcomes, enabling them to calculate the social return on investment with precision. This book demonstrates how the POSLM can empower decision-makers to identify programs that fail to deliver meaningful ...

Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy: Exploring the Evolution of Economic Systems and the Future of Democracy by Joseph A. Schumpeter is a seminal work that examines the dynamics of economic systems and their societal impact. Published in 1942, this influential book introduces the concept of "creative destruction," illustrating how innovation disrupts established industries to drive progress. Schumpeter explores the strengths and vulnerabilities of capitalism, arguing that its success ironically paves the way for its decline through institutional shifts and bureaucratic expansion.

When We Walk By takes an urgent look at homelessness in America, showing us what we lose—in ourselves and as a society—when we choose to walk past and ignore our neighbors in shelters, insecure housing, or on the streets. And it brilliantly shows what we stand to gain when we embrace our humanity and move toward evidence-based people-first, community-driven solutions, offering social analysis, economic and political histories, and the real stories of unhoused people.

Each day, our world becomes a little smaller. Technology probes deeper, looking within our bodies, tracking our every move, and becoming mandatory for people to conduct regular business. We learn each day the new questions we are not allowed to ask, the new rules we are required to follow, and with each crisis the facade of freedom is removed. While our past saw us controlled through indirect measures like propaganda and finance, the new world system seeks to integrate biology and technology, and to use the latter to remake the nature of man into something new, something that can be ...