Ian Bradley (3)

A good book on how social scientists can benefit from mathematics, in particular, matrix algebra. Discusses the basics of matrices and how to use them, then covers particular topics of interest to social scientists: input-output analysis, kinship systems and marriageability, Markov chains, and game theory, each with numerous applications. Markov chains and game theory in particular get a lot of attention. The book also offers a good treatment, again with examples, of how people in many show more different fields are wont to misuse models.

The real strength of this book is its examples from the social science literature. The authors include a result from sociology, for instance, that shows that the spread of gossip is entirely dependent on the likelihood that people pass on the original message or a false version of it -- if those probabilities are equal, then eventually half the population will believe each message, regardless of how small the probabilities of passing it on originally were. For me, this goes some way to explaining the 25%+ Americans who doubt Obama's citizenship.

For a social scientist allergic to math or unsure what the benefit of math could be to them, this book would be a perfect fit. I'd highly recommend it to such a person. Unfortunately I'd had much of this material previously in other ways; in that case, there's little new here (but there wasn't supposed to be). show less