The World's Best Book Summaries
How does the social environment affect human behavior? Do you behave differently around the higher-ups? Social environment has a tremendous influence on human behavior. People tend to act differently than their normal self around higher-ups and people from out-groups. Also, men tend to take greater risks in the company of women. Keep reading to learn about the psychology of social interaction.
What is the relationship between poverty and education? Why do the poor choose not to send their children to school? Poverty is a major obstacle to obtaining an education. But even when education is available, poor parents may choose not to send their children to school. This is because there’s often a lack of well-paying jobs in poor areas, so parents don’t bother educating their children because they see little point in doing so. Here’s why the poor often choose not to make use of the educational opportunities that are available to them.
Are women conditioned to suppress their true identities? How does society feed into this problem? How can we make a change? Glennon Doyle’s Untamed shows how the author freed herself from the captivity of society’s expectations. The Untamed book offers insight on the issues of parenting, spirituality, empowering women, rejecting patriarchy and oppression, feminism, and sexuality. Read our overview of Glennon Doyle’s Untamed to find out Doyle’s advice for changing your life and living according to your own rules.
Does your company culture need improvement? If so, where should you start? What practical steps can you take to make lasting change? In the book What You Do Is Who You Are, Ben Horowitz shares three cultural leadership lessons taken from the story of Shaka Senghor. Senghor demonstrated transformational leadership when he served in prison. Horowitz discusses three lessons from Senghor’s story: take advantage of teachable moments, start necessary changes from the top, and meet daily to model changes. Keep reading to learn how to improve company culture.
What are the core economic assumptions? Do the current economic assumptions align with the ultimate goal of economics? According to Kate Raworth, economics has developed some core assumptions about human nature, what an economy exists to do, and what the social science of economics is meant to achieve. According to her, if the economy is to better serve humanity’s needs, these core assumptions need to change. Here’s why the traditional economic assumptions are flawed, according to Raworth.
Why is it so hard to get out of poverty? What is the key factor that keeps people stuck in the poverty trap? Poverty is an insidious trap that is extremely difficult to escape. Poor people are so focused on stretching their limited resources that they simply don’t have the time or energy to think about anything else. According to Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee, the authors of Poor Economics, one way to break the vicious cycle of poverty is to give the poor easier choices. Here’s how lack of choices keeps people in the poverty trap.
Do you ever feel held captive by society’s rules? Does being a woman in today’s society require conformity to stereotypes? How can you set yourself free? Author Glennon Doyle discovered four pathways to help women reconnect with themselves: embracing emotion, intuition, imagination, and reconstruction. Additionally, embracing your wildness allows you to live free from society’s expectations of women. Read on to learn why society’s expectations of women are unrealistic and how one woman broke free from this captivity.
What’s a distributive economy? What are the dangers in entrusting the distribution of the money supply to private commercial banks? A distributive economy promotes an equitable distribution of the money supply. In a capitalist economy, the money supply is distributed by private banks, which gives banks too much power. In a distributive economy, government-backed financial institutions take the role of private banks. Here’s why we should democratize money, according to Kate Raworth.
Why do poor people have so many children? How do poor parents plan their family size? Poor mothers often suffer disadvantages if they have children too early in life or if they have more children than they can afford. If they have children before they finish school, mothers tend to get less education during their lifetimes, and if they have more children than they can afford, mothers sacrifice their own health needs to ensure those children are cared for. Given these facts, Duflo and Banerjee point out two factors that affect the poor’s reproductive decisions. Here’s why the poor have
Are you constantly distracted? Do you need a place to air out your creativity? In Keep Going, artist Austin Kleon advises disconnecting from the world to be your most creative self. To disconnect, he says to make a creative space and slow down your life. Here’s how to disconnect from the world and connect with your inner artist.