Best Books About Society

Modern autocracies are no longer run by a single dictator, but by sophisticated networks relying on kleptocratic financial structures, security services, and technological experts providing surveillance, propaganda and disinformation.

These networks are connected across autocratic countries and sometimes in democracies too. Autocratic regimes share a determination to repress their citizens, push back against transparency and accountability, and undermine anyone who challenges them.

Section: 1, Chapter: 1

Chapter 3 tackles the widespread fear of overpopulation. While the world population is still increasing rapidly by about 1 billion every 13 years, UN projections show it will level off around 10-12 billion by 2100.

• This is because the number of children in the world has stopped increasing. We have reached "peak child."
• The current population growth comes from the last large generation of children, born just before families started shrinking, growing up and having their own children.
• But those children are having just 2 kids on average. After 3 generations of this, the population growth will flatten out.

Section: 1, Chapter: 3

While cult leaders' linguistic techniques are undeniably powerful, it's crucial to understand that language alone cannot brainwash or coerce people into believing or doing things they truly don't want to. Phrases like "mind control" and "drinking the Kool-Aid" oversimplify the complex reasons why someone might join and stay in a cult, such as a search for meaning, a desire for belonging, or gradually escalating commitment over time.

These loaded terms can also stigmatize cult involvement as something that only happens to the foolish or mentally ill, when in reality, a wide range of psychologically normal people can be vulnerable under the right circumstances. To have productive conversations about this topic, avoid sensationalistic language and instead strive to understand the underlying human needs and social forces at play.

Section: 2, Chapter: 4

The rising generation, despite receiving unprecedented mental health accommodations and resources, has become the loneliest, most anxious, depressed, pessimistic, and helpless cohort on record. 42% have a diagnosed mental illness. Therapists insist this is because young people face more stressors than ever, like smartphones, the pandemic, and climate change. But the author argues youth mental health has been declining for decades before these factors. She believes the real problem may be the mental health system itself - convincing kids they are disordered, inculcating feelings of helplessness, and inhibiting normal development.

Section: 1, Chapter: 0

Despite a 75-year surge in mental health treatment availability and sophistication, rates of anxiety and depression in young people have swelled. A "treatment-prevalence paradox" has emerged, where expanded access to therapy and medication has not reduced mental illness prevalence as expected.

Therapists argue this is because today's youth face unprecedented stressors compared to previous generations, such as smartphones, social media, the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns, and climate change fears. But the author contends that adolescent mental health has been slipping since the 1950s, long before these modern issues existed. She suggests that perhaps the mental health complex itself, in pathologizing normal stress, inhibiting coping skills, and creating dependence, is part of the problem rather than the solution.

Section: 1, Chapter: 12

The lack of adequate public toilet facilities for women is a global issue. Women often have to wait in long lines because there are insufficient female toilets, while men rarely queue. This is due to several flawed assumptions in restroom design:

1. Providing equal floor space for male and female restrooms, even though urinals allow more men to use the facility at once
2. Not accounting for women's need to use the toilet more frequently and for longer durations, due to biological factors like menstruation, pregnancy, and higher risk of UTIs
3. Ignoring that women are more likely to be accompanied by children or elderly/disabled people they are caring for

Section: 1, Chapter: 2

Meritocracy is a myth. Despite companies increasingly using supposedly objective measures like performance reviews and scores to evaluate merit, gender bias still creeps in:

• Women face gendered double standards, with qualities like assertiveness being penalized in women but rewarded in men
• Women receive more subjective negative feedback about their personalities, while men receive more constructive feedback about their work
• Women's performance ratings are more likely to be attributed to luck rather than skill
• White men are judged as more competent than equally performing women and people of color

The reliance on merit metrics and "objective" algorithms can actually deepen inequality, by laundering human biases through a veneer of neutrality. True meritocracy requires an honest reckoning with bias.

Section: 2, Chapter: 4

Globally, women do significantly more unpaid work than men, and this disparity persists even as more women enter the paid workforce. On average, women do 4.5 hours of unpaid work per day compared to men's 1.5 hours.

• In India, women spend 6 hours a day on housework compared to men's 13 minutes
• American women do 4 hours of unpaid work per day vs 2.5 hours for men
• Even in Norway, with a relatively gender-equal culture, women do more unpaid work

Time use data shows that when women reduce their unpaid work, it is usually because they are doing more paid work - not because men are contributing more. Men consistently fail to match women's unpaid contributions, regardless of employment status or income.

Section: 2, Chapter: 3

Once agriculture developed, it spread to neighboring regions as farmers spread and outbred hunter-gatherers due to their higher population densities, and hunter-gatherers adopted crops and livestock from their neighbors, once exposed to them.

Several factors tipped the competitive balance in favor of food production over hunting-gathering:

• Decline in availability of wild foods, due to overhunting or climate change
• Increased availability of domesticable wild plants, due to climate change
• Development of technologies for collecting, processing and storing wild foods
• Rise in human population densities, putting pressure on food supplies

Section: 2, Chapter: 6

Writing was a key factor in enabling European societies to build the knowledge and organizational complexity needed to dominate the Americas:

• Writing allowed communication over long distances and time periods
• Literate societies can accumulate and transmit knowledge over generations
• Writing facilitated political administration and economic exchanges
• European literacy and record-keeping was vital for navigation and colonial rule The lesson is that preserving and transmitting information via writing provides a huge competitive advantage for societies.

Section: 4, Chapter: 18

China was more geographically interconnected than Europe, allowing the spread of a single culture:

• Few internal geographic barriers like high mountains or deserts in China
• Major navigable rivers flow east-west, facilitating north-south diffusion
• Result was the spread of technologies and political systems over a wide area
• The lesson is that geographic features that facilitate the mixing of ideas and people promote cultural homogenization, while barriers promote diversification.

Section: 4, Chapter: 16

African languages belong to five major families. The distribution of these families reflects the spread of food-producing peoples over the last several thousand years:

• Afroasiatic languages spread with animal herders and farmers from the Sahara and Ethiopia
• Nilo-Saharan languages spread with herding and farming over the eastern Sahel
• Niger-Congo languages spread with farmers out from Nigeria and Cameroon
• The Bantu branch of Niger-Congo spread agriculture over most of subequatorial Africa
• The Khoisan languages of hunter-gatherers were displaced by these expansions

Section: 4, Chapter: 19

The major axes of the continents vary:

• The Americas are longest from north to south (9,000 miles vs only 3,000 miles east to west)
• Africa is also longer from north to south than from east to west
• Eurasia's major axis is east-west

These differences proved highly consequential. In general, it's easier for crops, livestock, knowledge and technologies to spread along the same latitude (east-west) than between different latitudes (north-south). That's because locations at the same latitude tend to have similar day lengths, seasons, and climates, suiting them for the same agricultural package.

Section: 2, Chapter: 10

Polynesian societies were shaped by factors like:

• Island climate, geological type, marine resources, and area
• Terrain fragmentation and isolation
• Available indigenous flora and fauna

The most productive agricultural systems developed on large, high islands with rich volcanic soils and ample rainfall, such as Hawaii and Tonga. At the other extreme, small, dry islands with poor soil produced only hunter-gatherer societies.

In between these extremes, island environments produced a range of societies differing in population density, political complexity, social stratification, and material culture. In general, the larger and more productive the environment, the more complex and stratified the resulting societies.

Section: 1, Chapter: 2

Food production arose independently in only a few regions of the world:

• The Fertile Crescent in Southwest Asia
• China
• Mesoamerica
• The Andes and possibly Amazonia
• The Eastern United States

A few other areas - New Guinea, the Sahel, West Africa, and Ethiopia - may have also developed food production independently, but the evidence is less clear. All other regions acquired food production by the spread of crops and livestock from the independent regions.

Section: 2, Chapter: 5

By 1492, Eurasian societies enjoyed many advantages over Native American ones that enabled them to conquer the Americas:

• Far more domesticated plants and animals, enabling denser populations
• Technological advantages like ships, metal weapons, armor and horses
• Epidemic diseases to which Europeans were resistant but Native Americans weren't
• Writing allowed accumulation of knowledge and political organization These advantages stemmed ultimately from geographic differences between the continents that gave Eurasia a head start.

Section: 4, Chapter: 18

China was once very diverse in language and culture. The current homogeneity is a result of the gradual spread of agricultural people speaking Sino-Tibetan languages and their absorption of other populations.

• This process, called "Sinification," began in the Yellow River valley of north China
• It took thousands of years for agricultural Sino-Tibetan speakers to absorb or displace hunter-gatherer populations
• Mandarin and related languages spread at the expense of other language families China's cultural homogeneity is thus the result of a long, complex process of agricultural expansion and linguistic replacement.

Section: , Chapter: 16

The Polynesian expansion across the Pacific islands provides a "natural experiment" for how environments shape societies. Starting from a common ancestral culture in the Bismarck Archipelago off New Guinea around 1200 BC, Polynesians spread over centuries to islands with vastly different environments - from large high islands to small, resource-poor atolls.

The divergent societies that emerged on different islands, from hunter-gatherers to proto-empires, show how environmental differences can lead to the development of very different cultures, even from a common starting point.

Section: 1, Chapter: 2

Lesson 6: Be wary of paramilitaries: Be vigilant when armed forces separate from the military become involved in politics.

In a healthy democracy, the state should have a monopoly on the use of force, constrained by the rule of law. The rise of paramilitaries - armed forces operating outside the official military structure - is a key warning sign of tyranny. From Hitler's Brownshirts to Mussolini's Blackshirts, paramilitaries can be used to intimidate opponents, subvert legal authority, and consolidate power for a dictatorial regime. They often blur the lines between civilian politics and military force. If you see paramilitary activity or the celebration of paramilitary groups from the past, it's a red flag that democracy is in danger.

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Lesson 15: Contribute to good causes: Support organizations and initiatives that advance the values you believe in.

Supporting good causes, from charities to advocacy groups, is a powerful way to affirm your values and build a bulwark against tyranny. A vibrant civil society - a web of voluntary associations and NGOs that exist independent of the state - provides vital civic space for developing ideas, social trust, and grassroots power. Pick some key organizations that reflect your views and set up regular donations, however small. Volunteer your time and talents.

This keeps precious civic space alive. As Snyder notes, "When Americans think of freedom, we usually imagine a contest between a lone individual and a powerful government...But one element of freedom is the choice of associates, and one defense of freedom is the activity of groups to sustain their members."

Section: 1, Chapter: 15

A large and growing percentage of college-educated millennials are choosing to live in urban, walkable neighborhoods instead of auto-centric suburbs. Companies are following their lead, relocating offices from suburban campuses to downtown areas in order to attract this coveted talent pool. 64% of college-educated millennials first decide where they want to live, and only then look for a job there.

A whopping 77% plan to live in America's urban cores. Walkability has become a key factor in the competition between cities over the millennials and creatives who will power economic growth.

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Over the past 40 years, the US has undergone an unprecedented obesity epidemic fueled largely by our development patterns:

• In the mid-1970s, only 1 in 10 Americans was obese. By 2007, that number had risen to a shocking 1 in 3 adults, with another third clinically overweight.
• The childhood obesity rate has more than tripled since 1980. 25% of young men and 40% of young women are now too overweight to enlist in the military.
• As recently as 1991, no state had an obesity rate above 20%. By 2007, only one state (Colorado) was still under 20%. Several states now exceed 30% of adults.
• Numerous studies have directly linked time spent driving with increased risk of obesity. One study found a 6% rise in likelihood of obesity for each additional hour spent in a car per day.

Section: 1, Chapter: 2