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haaris's review against another edition
4.0
At the core of Schelling's book is the thesis - now well accepted - that individual actions driven by individual incentives have a habit of aggregating into all kinds of interesting macro phenomena. And therefore achieving a big picture policy target is intimately connected by the natural constraints of the problem, or by the actual incentives for people on the ground, or by the way heterogeneity in responses interact as we scale up.
Schelling was a pioneer in the use of game theory to pressing real life problems (he shared a Nobel for it) and you see the method being used extensively without any recourse to technical jargon. One of the most compelling arguments of the book is that being a social planner (in more practical contexts a leader) does not require outright dictatorial control to achieve the solution; rather ensuring coordination between the actors of the system is often more sustainable and efficient (think traffic lights). How do you design a system that makes people naturally coordinate in choosing their "correct" individual actions? As such, the book is highly relevant not only for social scientists or policy makers but leaders/managers as well.
The book is also, at a more superficial level, a precursor - or the precursor - to best selling Malcolm Gladwell-esque books such as Tipping Point, Freakonomics and the like. Of course, none of these books have had even half the impact that Schelling's life's work has had on the world. His brilliance displays itself in the way he painstakingly creates rudimentary models that explain the mechanics of his thesis.
The book's principal shortcoming is that, forty years after being first published, it hasn't aged well. It is often a very tedious read. There are chapters that are infuriatingly slow and pedantic - I would freely advice all who read to skip the second chapter. The chapter on gene selection in children (chapter 6) is also unsatisfactory. It talks about a future where parents can choose foetus for birth based on its traits (to clarify this is not talking about rare diseases or about abortion but selection on traits like height, physical features or sex) that is somewhat cavalier. Or maybe it's just that I come from a country which has a terrible (historical and ongoing) record in the incidence of female foeticide.
To attempt to get past the Goodreads rating system (my 5's only mean I recommend the book to be read; 4's mean I liked reading it), my normalized rating is 5/10.
(For comparison, Dante's Inferno is 10/10)
P.S.: For economists: The gene selection chapter does seem to talk about the Angrist-Evans instrument well before the famous paper was published (this refers to a famous paper by the Angrist and Evans who wanted to study the effect of family size on parents' labor supply). Not that Schelling wanted to use it as an instrument as far as I can see.
Schelling was a pioneer in the use of game theory to pressing real life problems (he shared a Nobel for it) and you see the method being used extensively without any recourse to technical jargon. One of the most compelling arguments of the book is that being a social planner (in more practical contexts a leader) does not require outright dictatorial control to achieve the solution; rather ensuring coordination between the actors of the system is often more sustainable and efficient (think traffic lights). How do you design a system that makes people naturally coordinate in choosing their "correct" individual actions? As such, the book is highly relevant not only for social scientists or policy makers but leaders/managers as well.
The book is also, at a more superficial level, a precursor - or the precursor - to best selling Malcolm Gladwell-esque books such as Tipping Point, Freakonomics and the like. Of course, none of these books have had even half the impact that Schelling's life's work has had on the world. His brilliance displays itself in the way he painstakingly creates rudimentary models that explain the mechanics of his thesis.
The book's principal shortcoming is that, forty years after being first published, it hasn't aged well. It is often a very tedious read. There are chapters that are infuriatingly slow and pedantic - I would freely advice all who read to skip the second chapter. The chapter on gene selection in children (chapter 6) is also unsatisfactory. It talks about a future where parents can choose foetus for birth based on its traits (to clarify this is not talking about rare diseases or about abortion but selection on traits like height, physical features or sex) that is somewhat cavalier. Or maybe it's just that I come from a country which has a terrible (historical and ongoing) record in the incidence of female foeticide.
To attempt to get past the Goodreads rating system (my 5's only mean I recommend the book to be read; 4's mean I liked reading it), my normalized rating is 5/10.
(For comparison, Dante's Inferno is 10/10)
P.S.: For economists: The gene selection chapter does seem to talk about the Angrist-Evans instrument well before the famous paper was published (this refers to a famous paper by the Angrist and Evans who wanted to study the effect of family size on parents' labor supply). Not that Schelling wanted to use it as an instrument as far as I can see.
rjnn's review against another edition
2.0
I was disappointed by this book. I stopped reading closely about 32% of the way, and started skimming the chapters. This book is very well written, and assumes almost nothing. That was part of the problem: it was tedious to work through. While I appreciated revisiting some very basic assumptions, revisiting tautologies such as the basic invariants in double-entry bookkeeping quickly got tedious. So I gave up. Even the Nobel lecture reproduced as the final chapter was not particularly insightful. I'm disappointed. I expected more. On the other hand, Schelling has had such a massive impact on the economic and sociological discourse, I cannot help but wonder whether I've just osmosed it all, and so it's now repetitive. I can certainly see how reading this book would be immensely valuable to someone getting started in that line of work, and would highly recommend it to anybody in that position.
sam1972's review against another edition
3.0
Maybe a little heavy on visualizations towards the end, but that's probably necessary for understanding the subject, though it does make it harder to listen to. I may need to reread later and go back very the graphs.
adamjcalhoun's review against another edition
I'm sure this is a great book, it seems like a Malcolm Gladwell-esque (except actually factual and rigorous) exploration of social behavior, it just wasn't what I was looking for: I wanted a book that was more about agent-based modeling. So I just skimmed it. But I'm sure if I wanted to take the time I would have enjoyed it.
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