Political Systems

In the years following her role as the lead author of the international best seller, Limits to Growth - the first book to show the consequences of unchecked growth on a finite planet - Donella Meadows remained a pioneer of environmental and social analysis until her untimely death in 2001. Thinking in Systems is a concise and crucial book offering insight for problem-solving on scales ranging from the personal to the global. Edited by the Sustainability Institute's Diana Wright, this essential primer brings systems thinking out of the realm of computers and equations and into the tangible world....

All Systems Red is the tense first science fiction adventure novella in Martha Wells' series The Murderbot Diaries. For fans of Westworld, Ex Machina, Ann Leckie's Imperial Raadch series, or Iain M. Banks' Culture novels. The main character is a deadly security droid that has bucked its restrictive programming and is balanced between contemplative self-discovery and an idle instinct to kill all humans.

"The National System of Political Economy" by Friedrich List, first published in 1841, is a seminal work that advocates for economic nationalism and the strategic use of protectionist policies to foster a country's economic development. List argues against the prevailing doctrine of free trade and presents a comprehensive framework for promoting domestic industry and infrastructure. His ideas have had a lasting impact on the development of industrial policy and international trade theory. The book remains a significant contribution to the understanding of economic development.

Valeria Velez has just pulled off a stunning upset in California's 27th District, ousting ten-term corporatist incumbent Fillian Dunne from his seat in Congress. Young, beautiful, and idealistic, Valeria and her boyfriend/campaign manager Preston Jante are determined to use Valeria's new position to "stop stuffing the maw of the military machine" and return power to the people. But when fugitive hacker Lance Thaddeus uncovers a top-secret Pentagon program combining artificial intelligence with nuclear command-and-control, Valeria might have to choose between her ideals...and her life.

You might not care about politics… but politics sure as hell cares about you.
Your bills, your job, your rent, your rights – all shaped by decisions made in rooms you’re never invited into. This isn’t some boring textbook full of waffle. It’s a straight-talking guide to how the system really works – and why it doesn’t work for people like us.

Donors, leaders of nonprofits, and public policy makers usually have the best of intentions to serve society and improve social conditions. But often their solutions fall far short of what they want to accomplish and what is truly needed. Moreover, the answers they propose and fund often produce the opposite of what they want over time. We end up with temporary shelters that increase homelessness, drug busts that increase drug-related crime, or food aid that increases starvation.

A decade ago, developers built information-sharing software by writing a lot of custom code in a single code base, then adding layers of caching. Now we build information systems: interdependent software and services, data platforms, and event streams. Many of our software-to-systems initiatives fail, though, and when they do, we double down on traditional linear approaches. But linear thinking cannot resolve systems challenges. We need to shift to systems thinking.

Machine learning systems are both complex and unique. Complex because they consist of many different components and involve many different stakeholders. Unique because they're data dependent, with data varying wildly from one use case to the next. In this book, you'll learn a holistic approach to designing ML systems that are reliable, scalable, maintainable, and adaptive to changing environments and business requirements. Author Chip Huyen, cofounder of Claypot AI, considers each design decision in the context of how it can help your system as a whole achieve its objectives.

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.

How did the world’s greatest systems thinkers handled crises, invented revolutionary ideas, and solved complex problems? How did the field of systems thinking develop? Who were the pioneers in the field? Learn about the answers in Lessons from Systems Thinkers, from Norbert Wiener’s pioneering contribution on positive and negative feedback to Warren McCulloch’s research on feedback mechanisms in neurology, from Gregory Bateson’s double bind and how it affects family relationships to Margaret Mead’s systems approach to cultural anthropology.

In a context, lobbying can be said to be the art and heart of both democracy and capitalism. At its core, democracy involves lobbying which is persuading and swaying people with promises and or previous performance as proof for prospects. It is the same for capitalism. Among a people where democracy and consequently capitalism prevails, one is meant to lobby for a people or project or policy and or position primarily to advance one’s interest that relatively advances the interests of majority at least or all at most.

The issues of poverty, inequality, racial injustice, and climate change have never been more pressing or paralyzing. Current approaches to social change, which rely on linear thinking and traditional power dynamics to "solve" social problems, are not helping. In fact, they may only be entrenching the status quo. This book draws on stories of committed social changemakers to uncover a set of principles and practices for social change that dramatically depart from the industrial approach. Simple yet profound, these stories distill timely lessons for leaders, scholars, and policymakers.

A compelling new set of interviews on our changing and turbulent times with Noam Chomsky, one of the world's foremost thinkers In this collection of conversations, conducted from 2010 to 2012, Noam Chomsky explores the most immediate and urgent concerns: the future of democracy in the Arab world...

Following his book Captured on corporate capture of regulatory and government agencies, and his years of experience as a prosecutor, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse here turns his attention to the right-wing scheme to capture the courts, and how it influenced the Trump administration's appointment of over 230 "business-friendly" judges, including the last three justices of the United States Supreme Court.

Islam and Political Economic Systems examines how Islamic societies have fared under and dealt with the major political-economic systems that have operated throughout history. Each chapter explores one of several political-economic systems by defining major concepts and their synthesis, providing a thematic review of available literature, and reviewing three Islamic societies that operated under the system. In the end, Islam and Political Economic Systems draws a conclusion based on the findings from the case studies. Islam and Political Economic Systems examines Islamic societies in the following major political-economic systems: - Mercantilism- Capitalism- Socialism- Social Democracy- Self Reliance- Contemporary Globalism.

Mindset is your path to quickly breaking free: to making a small tweak in how you see your world and then using that more accurate vision to get what you’ve always wanted from work, relationships, and health.

We are told that, when we vote and elect representatives, we gain a voice in government and its policies. Yet, it hasn't translated our preferences into higher living standards for the majority of us. In America, the wealthy few have built a system that works in their favor, while maintaining the illusion of democracy. American voters have little influence on policies engineered by lawmakers. Political scientists call it the "income bias", causing lawmakers to compete to satisfy preferences of donors from the top one percent instead of the middle class.

From the fearless defense attorney and civil rights lawyer who rose to fame with Netflix’s The Staircase comes a “bracing account of abuses of power and corruption in the criminal justice system.” (The Guardian) “A fine companion to Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy and Emily Bazelon’s...

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia under Yeltsin and Putin implemented a political system of "imitation democracy," marked by "a huge disparity between formal constitutional principles and the reality of authoritarian rule." How did this system take shape, how else might it have developed, and what are the prospects for re-envisioning it more democratically in the future? These questions animate Dmitrii Furman's Imitation Democracy, a welcome antidote to books that blandly decry Putin as an omnipotent dictator without considering his platforms, constituencies, and sources of power.

Has American democracy's long, ambitious run come to an end? Possibly yes. As William G. Howell and Terry M. Moe argue in this trenchant new analysis of modern politics, the United States faces a historic crisis that threatens our system of self-government - and if democracy is to be saved, the causes of the crisis must be understood and defused.