This book presents an exciting - and unexpected - way of looking at the patterns that occur in social life - from residential segregation to phantom traffic jams, ethnic conflict, and the streams people make moving in crowds. Buchanan takes up an idea that has been widely tried in the past - to find the "laws" that undergird social behavior. Unlike previous efforts, though, his models do not try to scale up a set of assumptions about human nature or individual action. Instead, treating people like "atoms" in a scientific equation, he looks to see what patterns they construct - (using the notion of self-organizing patterns now found in surprising ways in nature) - without intending or even being aware of it.

The notion of self-organizing patterns is contrary to the way we usually think about our social life. Instead, we think patterns are the results of norms, social structures, laws, etc. Buchanan, instead, presents and dissects situations in which change occurred - without plan - and seeks to show how it happened.

Along the way, he takes many pot-shots at existing social science, some of them more deserved than others. (Post-modernists will not enjoy this book!) His work does uncover aspects of methodology or theory that are weakly supported by fact if at all. His critiques, though, do not demolish social science to the extent he presumes - but they nonetheless raise solid and intriguing questions.

This is certainly one of those books that you don't want to miss - it's like adding an entirely new kind of tool to your toolbox for understanding how come things are the way they are in the world.

Now available in paperback too. ( )

An interesting read. Not my field of experteise but I can see how some of it would ring true. Like some other reviewers he lost me at the end when he started attacking religion. Surely it, like all other human traits should be worked with rather than against.

It's an interesting look at the fact that humanity tends to work in groups and that a lot of people find it very hard to go against the group. He's a physicist and has some pet theories about social sciences that he feels need airing.

It's one to read, think about and use some salt with. Peppered with interesting ideas and encouages thinking. ( )

Gift for Dad???

I went to a seminar by the author recently, which is why I picked this one up. Unfortunately it's a little more pop-science than I was hoping for, and complexity science writers really need to come up with some new anecdotes, because there wasn't a whole lot to this book that I hadn't come across elsewhere.

This book is basically about how the social sciences should use a more physics-like, experimental approach to their research, instead of coming up with theorems which are logical but don't produce results that resemble reality. (I quite like the quote from Mike Davis on the back cover: "This is a first-class attack on the smugness of the Humanities".) The sections on economics and altruism were particularly lacking in things I hadn't heard before, but the stuff about ethnocentrism was pretty interesting.

Over all, I thought this was pretty good but could have done with more maths. ( )

The author says, "Get a rough picture of the social atom, and of how people interact, then use anything you have, mathematics, the computer, whatever, to learn the kinds pattern likely to emerge and what their consequences might be. Outside of the social world, this is how all science works. And it is ironic that this is still not the way most social science works." It's easier said than done. The problem is that pattern itself may not last forever. So just by discovering a pattern might not prove anything. It just takes one abnormal pattern to disprove the discovery. Also, the author portrays religion as a dangerous threat to human society. It's just as a narrow view point in my mind. What about pointing out how religion also contributed positively to our society in "some" ways"? ( )