Books by Herbert A. Simon
“If you look at economics textbooks, they typically assume that we have complete information, understand everything about the environment that we are in, that we can map out ad infinitum what strategies other actors are going to play against us, and that we do not have any bandwidth limits on our ability to process information. Simon says this is nonsense. We know human beings simply can’t do that. We are flawed. Our individual capacity to understand the world is limited and so what we tend to do in ordinary life, he says, is go for good seeming solutions that are obvious to us rather than for optimal ones. This means that a lot of the actual processes of cognition, or computation that we do, have to be offloaded onto other social systems rather than our individual brains.” Read more...
The Best Books on the Politics of Information
Henry Farrell, Political Scientist
Interviews where books by Herbert A. Simon were recommended
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1
Red Plenty
by Francis Spufford -
2
The Market System: What It Is, How It Works, and What To Make of It
by Charles Lindblom -
3
The Sciences of the Artificial
by Herbert A. Simon -
4
Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society
by E. Glen Weyl & Eric A. Posner -
5
Uncanny Valley: A Memoir
by Anna Wiener
The Best Books on the Politics of Information, recommended by Henry Farrell
The Best Books on the Politics of Information, recommended by Henry Farrell
Our political systems evolved in an era when information was much harder to come by. What challenges does our current reality of information overload pose for democracy? How do we even start thinking about these questions? Political scientist Henry Farrell proposes key books for building a curriculum on ‘the politics of information,’ starting with a beautifully written novel.
