Download or read book The Democracy Trap written by Graham E. Fuller and published by Dutton Adult. This book was released on 1991 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Soon after the toppling of the Berlin Wall, a scholar named Francis Fukuyama wrote a piece in The New York Times stating that the momentous events occurring in Eastern Europe signalled "the end of history", as a result of the final failure of the communist experiment. Here is a powerful rebuttal that warns global democracy will cause not less but more conflict.
Download or read book The Confidence Trap written by David Runciman and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-31 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why democracies believe they can survive any crisis—and why that belief is so dangerous Why do democracies keep lurching from success to failure? The current financial crisis is just the latest example of how things continue to go wrong, just when it looked like they were going right. In this wide-ranging, original, and compelling book, David Runciman tells the story of modern democracy through the history of moments of crisis, from the First World War to the economic crash of 2008. A global history with a special focus on the United States, The Confidence Trap examines how democracy survived threats ranging from the Great Depression to the Cuban missile crisis, and from Watergate to the collapse of Lehman Brothers. It also looks at the confusion and uncertainty created by unexpected victories, from the defeat of German autocracy in 1918 to the defeat of communism in 1989. Throughout, the book pays close attention to the politicians and thinkers who grappled with these crises: from Woodrow Wilson, Nehru, and Adenauer to Fukuyama and Obama. In The Confidence Trap, David Runciman shows that democracies are good at recovering from emergencies but bad at avoiding them. The lesson democracies tend to learn from their mistakes is that they can survive them—and that no crisis is as bad as it seems. Breeding complacency rather than wisdom, crises lead to the dangerous belief that democracies can muddle through anything—a confidence trap that may lead to a crisis that is just too big to escape, if it hasn't already. The most serious challenges confronting democracy today are debt, the war on terror, the rise of China, and climate change. If democracy is to survive them, it must figure out a way to break the confidence trap.
Download or read book In Defense of Politicians written by Stephen K. Medvic and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-03-05 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Politicians are reviled. From jokes on late-night TV talk shows to radio show rants and from public opinion polls to ubiquitous conventional wisdom—politicians are among the most despised professional class in modern society. Drawing on seminal work in political science, Stephen K. Medvic convincingly argues to the masses that this blanket condemnation of politicians is both unfair and unwarranted. While some individual politicians certainly deserve scorn for misjudgments, moral failings, or even criminal acts, the assumption that all of them should be cast in a similar light is unjustified. More importantly, that deeply cynical assumption is dangerous to the legitimacy of a democratic system of government. Politicians, as a class, deserve respect, not out of blind obedience to authority but because democratic deliberation requires it. Medvic explains how cognitive biases in the way people reason often lead us to draw unjustified conclusions of politicians in general based on the malfeasance of some. Scandals involving politicians are likely to be remembered and to serve as "evidence" of the belief that "they all do it." Most politicians, in fact, care deeply about their cities, states, and nation. But they face a trap of unrealistic and contradictory expectations from the public about how politicians should behave. Medvic, in turn, demonstrates the necessity of ambition, the utility of politics for resolving conflicts peacefully, and the value of ideology in framing political choices. In the end, citizens must learn to tolerate the inherent messiness of politics as the only viable alternative to violent conflict. In the process, we must embrace our role in the political system as well.
Download or read book The Internet Trap written by Matthew Hindman and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-10 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why there is no such thing as a free audience in today's attention economy The internet was supposed to fragment audiences and make media monopolies impossible. Instead, behemoths like Google and Facebook now dominate the time we spend online—and grab all the profits. This provocative and timely book sheds light on the stunning rise of the digital giants and the online struggles of nearly everyone else, and reveals what small players can do to survive in a game that is rigged against them. Challenging some of the most enduring myths of digital life, Matthew Hindman explains why net neutrality alone is no guarantee of an open internet, and demonstrates what it really takes to grow a digital audience in today's competitive online economy.
Download or read book Policy Accumulation and the Democratic Responsiveness Trap written by Christian Adam and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-04-11 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Responsiveness to societal demands entails policy accumulation, which undermines the ability of democracies to communicate, implement and evaluate public policy.
Download or read book The People Vs Democracy written by Yascha Mounk and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-05 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Uiteenzetting over de opkomst van het populisme en het gevaar daarvan voor de democratie.
Download or read book The Meritocracy Trap written by Daniel Markovits and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-09-08 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A revolutionary new argument from eminent Yale Law professor Daniel Markovits attacking the false promise of meritocracy It is an axiom of American life that advantage should be earned through ability and effort. Even as the country divides itself at every turn, the meritocratic ideal – that social and economic rewards should follow achievement rather than breeding – reigns supreme. Both Democrats and Republicans insistently repeat meritocratic notions. Meritocracy cuts to the heart of who we are. It sustains the American dream. But what if, both up and down the social ladder, meritocracy is a sham? Today, meritocracy has become exactly what it was conceived to resist: a mechanism for the concentration and dynastic transmission of wealth and privilege across generations. Upward mobility has become a fantasy, and the embattled middle classes are now more likely to sink into the working poor than to rise into the professional elite. At the same time, meritocracy now ensnares even those who manage to claw their way to the top, requiring rich adults to work with crushing intensity, exploiting their expensive educations in order to extract a return. All this is not the result of deviations or retreats from meritocracy but rather stems directly from meritocracy’s successes. This is the radical argument that Daniel Markovits prosecutes with rare force. Markovits is well placed to expose the sham of meritocracy. Having spent his life at elite universities, he knows from the inside the corrosive system we are trapped within. Markovits also knows that, if we understand that meritocratic inequality produces near-universal harm, we can cure it. When The Meritocracy Trap reveals the inner workings of the meritocratic machine, it also illuminates the first steps outward, towards a new world that might once again afford dignity and prosperity to the American people.
Download or read book The Confidence Trap written by David Runciman and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-31 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why democracies believe they can survive any crisis—and why that belief is so dangerous Why do democracies keep lurching from success to failure? The current financial crisis is just the latest example of how things continue to go wrong, just when it looked like they were going right. In this wide-ranging, original, and compelling book, David Runciman tells the story of modern democracy through the history of moments of crisis, from the First World War to the economic crash of 2008. A global history with a special focus on the United States, The Confidence Trap examines how democracy survived threats ranging from the Great Depression to the Cuban missile crisis, and from Watergate to the collapse of Lehman Brothers. It also looks at the confusion and uncertainty created by unexpected victories, from the defeat of German autocracy in 1918 to the defeat of communism in 1989. Throughout, the book pays close attention to the politicians and thinkers who grappled with these crises: from Woodrow Wilson, Nehru, and Adenauer to Fukuyama and Obama. In The Confidence Trap, David Runciman shows that democracies are good at recovering from emergencies but bad at avoiding them. The lesson democracies tend to learn from their mistakes is that they can survive them—and that no crisis is as bad as it seems. Breeding complacency rather than wisdom, crises lead to the dangerous belief that democracies can muddle through anything—a confidence trap that may lead to a crisis that is just too big to escape, if it hasn't already. The most serious challenges confronting democracy today are debt, the war on terror, the rise of China, and climate change. If democracy is to survive them, it must figure out a way to break the confidence trap.
Download or read book A Middle Quality Institutional Trap Democracy and State Capacity in Latin America written by Sebastián L. Mazzuca and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-11 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Latin America is currently caught in a middle-quality institutional trap, combining flawed democracies and low-to-medium capacity States. Yet, contrary to conventional wisdom, the sequence of development - Latin America has democratized before building capable States - does not explain the region's quandary. States can make democracy, but so too can democracy make States. Thus, the starting point of political developments is less important than whether the State-democracy relationship is a virtuous cycle, triggering causal mechanisms that reinforce each other. However, the State-democracy interaction generates a virtuous cycle only under certain macroconditions. In Latin America, the State-democracy interaction has not generated a virtuous cycle: problems regarding the State prevent full democratization and problems of democracy prevent the development of state capacity. Moreover, multiple macroconditions provide a foundation for this distinctive pattern of State-democracy interaction. The suboptimal political equilibrium in contemporary Latin America is a robust one.
Download or read book The Great Experiment written by Yascha Mounk and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2023-02-07 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of Barack Obama's Recommended Reads for Summer “[A] brave and necessary book . . . Anyone interested in the future of liberal democracy, in the US or anywhere else, should read this book.” —Anne Applebaum “A convincing, humane, and hopeful guide to the present and future by one of our foremost democratic thinkers.” —George Packer “A rare thing: [an] academic treatise . . . that may actually have influence in the arena of practical politics. . . . Passionate and personal.” —Joe Klein, New York Times Book Review From one of our sharpest and most important political thinkers, a brilliant big-picture vision of the greatest challenge of our time—how to bridge the bitter divides within diverse democracies enough for them to remain stable and functional Some democracies are highly homogeneous. Others have long maintained a brutal racial or religious hierarchy, with some groups dominating and exploiting others. Never in history has a democracy succeeded in being both diverse and equal, treating members of many different ethnic or religious groups fairly. And yet achieving that goal is now central to the democratic project in countries around the world. It is, Yascha Mounk argues, the greatest experiment of our time. Drawing on history, social psychology, and comparative politics, Mounk examines how diverse societies have long suffered from the ills of domination, fragmentation, or structured anarchy. So it is hardly surprising that most people are now deeply pessimistic that different groups might be able to integrate in harmony, celebrating their differences without essentializing them. But Mounk shows us that the past can offer crucial insights for how to do better in the future. There is real reason for hope. It is up to us and the institutions we build whether different groups will come to see each other as enemies or friends, as strangers or compatriots. To make diverse democracies endure, and even thrive, we need to create a world in which our ascriptive identities come to matter less—not because we ignore the injustices that still characterize the United States and so many other countries around the world, but because we have succeeded in addressing them. The Great Experiment is that rare book that offers both a profound understanding of an urgent problem and genuine hope for our human capacity to solve it. As Mounk contends, giving up on the prospects of building fair and thriving diverse democracies is simply not an option—and that is why we must strive to realize a more ambitious vision for the future of our societies.
Download or read book The Technology Trap written by Carl Benedikt Frey and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-22 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Industrial Revolution to the age of artificial intelligence, Carl Benedikt Frey offers a sweeping account of the history of technological progress and how it has radically shifted the distribution of economic and political power among society's members. As the author shows, the Industrial Revolution created unprecedented wealth and prosperity over the long run, but the immediate consequences of mechanization were devastating for large swaths of the population.These trends broadly mirror those in our current age of automation. But, just as the Industrial Revolution eventually brought about extraordinary benefits for society, artificial intelligence systems have the potential to do the same. Benedikt Frey demonstrates that in the midst of another technological revolution, the lessons of the past can help us to more effectively face the present. --From publisher description.
Download or read book The American Trap written by Frédéric Pierucci and published by Hodder & Stoughton. This book was released on 2019-11-14 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2014, France lost part of the control of its nuclear power plants to the United States. Frédéric Pierucci, former senior executive of one of Alstom's power company subsidiaries, found himself at the heart of this state scandal. His story goes to the very core of how he plotted the key features of the secret economic war that the United States is waging in Europe. And after being silenced for a long time, he has decided, with the help of journalist Matthieu Aron, to reveal all. In April 2013, Frédéric Pierucci was arrested in New York by the FBI and accused of bribery. The US authorities imprisoned him for more than two years - including fourteen months in a notorious maximum-security prison. In doing so, they forced Alstom to pay the biggest financial penalty ever imposed by the United States. In the end, Alstom also gave up areas of control to General Electric, its biggest American competitor. Frédéric's story unpacks how the United States is using corporate law as an economic weapon against its own allies. One after the other, some of the world's largest companies are being actively destabilised to the benefit of the US, in acts of economic sabotage that seem to be the beginning of what's to come...
Download or read book Destined For War written by Graham Allison and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2017-05-30 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER | NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR. From an eminent international security scholar, an urgent examination of the conditions that could produce a catastrophic conflict between the United States and China—and how it might be prevented. China and the United States are heading toward a war neither wants. The reason is Thucydides’s Trap: when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling one, violence is the likeliest result. Over the past five hundred years, these conditions have occurred sixteen times; war broke out in twelve. At the time of publication, an unstoppable China approached an immovable America, and both Xi Jinping and Donald Trump promised to make their countries “great again,” the seventeenth case was looking grim—it still is. A trade conflict, cyberattack, Korean crisis, or accident at sea could easily spark a major war. In Destined for War, eminent Harvard scholar Graham Allison masterfully blends history and current events to explain the timeless machinery of Thucydides’s Trap—and to explore the painful steps that might prevent disaster today. SHORT-LISTED FOR THE 2018 LIONEL GELBER PRIZE NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY: FINANCIAL TIMES * THE TIMES (LONDON)* AMAZON “Allison is one of the keenest observers of international affairs around.” — President Joe Biden “[A] must-read book in both Washington and Beijing.” — Boston Globe “[Full of] wide-ranging, erudite case studies that span human history . . . [A] fine book.”— New York Times Book Review
Download or read book The Democracy Project written by David Graeber and published by Doubleday UK. This book was released on 2013 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the idea of democracy, its current state of crisis, and its potential as a tool for change, sharing historical perspectives on the effectiveness of democratic uprisings in various times and cultures.
Download or read book The War Trap written by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1983-07-01 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers a general theory of war and international conflict, looks at specific modern military confrontations, and dispels some common misconceptions about war
Download or read book Man in the Trap written by Elsworth F. Baker and published by American College of Orgonomy. This book was released on 2000 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book How China Escaped the Poverty Trap written by Yuen Yuen Ang and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-06 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE 2017 PETER KATZENSTEIN BOOK PRIZE "BEST OF BOOKS IN 2017" BY FOREIGN AFFAIRS WINNER OF THE 2018 VIVIAN ZELIZER PRIZE BEST BOOK AWARD IN ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGY "How China Escaped the Poverty Trap truly offers game-changing ideas for the analysis and implementation of socio-economic development and should have a major impact across many social sciences." ― Zelizer Best Book in Economic Sociology Prize Committee Acclaimed as "game changing" and "field shifting," How China Escaped the Poverty Trap advances a new paradigm in the political economy of development and sheds new light on China's rise. How can poor and weak societies escape poverty traps? Political economists have traditionally offered three answers: "stimulate growth first," "build good institutions first," or "some fortunate nations inherited good institutions that led to growth." Yuen Yuen Ang rejects all three schools of thought and their underlying assumptions: linear causation, a mechanistic worldview, and historical determinism. Instead, she launches a new paradigm grounded in complex adaptive systems, which embraces the reality of interdependence and humanity's capacity to innovate. Combining this original lens with more than 400 interviews with Chinese bureaucrats and entrepreneurs, Ang systematically reenacts the complex process that turned China from a communist backwater into a global juggernaut in just 35 years. Contrary to popular misconceptions, she shows that what drove China's great transformation was not centralized authoritarian control, but "directed improvisation"—top-down directions from Beijing paired with bottom-up improvisation among local officials. Her analysis reveals two broad lessons on development. First, transformative change requires an adaptive governing system that empowers ground-level actors to create new solutions for evolving problems. Second, the first step out of the poverty trap is to "use what you have"—harnessing existing resources to kick-start new markets, even if that means defying first-world norms. Bold and meticulously researched, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap opens up a whole new avenue of thinking for scholars, practitioners, and anyone seeking to build adaptive systems.
