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Myong-Hun Chang

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Books

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My Bookshelf

Below is the list of books that I recently read and enjoyed enough to recommend to others.  You may read detailed descriptions and the reviews of each individual book at amazon.com by clicking on the title.

2007-2008 : 2006-2007 : 2005-2006 : 2004-2005 : 2003-2004 : 2002-2003 : 2001-2002 : 2000-2001 : 1999-2000 : 1998-1999

2007-2008

• In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind by Eric R. Kandel
• Mathematical Models of Social Evolution: A Guide for the Perplexed by Richard McElreath and Robert Boyd
• The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
• Poincare's Prize by George G. Szpiro
• J. D. Bernal: The Sage of Science by Andrew Brown
• Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation by William H. Sewell, Jr.
• The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought by Thomas S. Kuhn
• Chance and Necessity by Jacques Monod
• Empire of the Bay: The Company of Adventurers that Seized a Continent by Peter C. Newman
• The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Society by Scott E. Page
• Making Globalization Work by Joseph E. Stiglitz
• What If? Eminent Historians Imagine What Might Have Been Edited by Robert Cowley
• The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory by Brian Greene

2006-2007

• Lawlessness and Economics: Alternative Modes of Governance by Avinash K. Dixit
• Generative Social Science: Studies in Agent-Based Computational Modeling (Princeton Studies in Complexity) by Joshua M. Epstein
• The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good by William Easterly
• Complex Adaptive Systems: An Introduction to Computational Models of Social Life (Princeton Studies in Complexity) by John H. Miller and Scott E. Page
• Globalization and Its Discontents by Joseph E. Stiglitz
• A People's History of Science: Miners, Midwives, and "Low Mechanicks" by Clifford D. Conner
• Clocks and Culture: 1300-1700 by Carlo M. Cipolla
• Doctors: The Biography of Medicine by Sherwin B. Nuland
• Second Nature: Brain Science and Human Knowledge by Gerald M. Edelman
• Adam's Fallacy: A Guide to Economic Theology by Duncan K. Foley
• Dissecting the Social: On the Principles of Analytical Sociology by Peter Hedstrom
• Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes on the Cosmos by Seth Lloyd

2005-2006

• Creative Destruction: Why Companies That Are Built to Last Underperform the Market -- And How to Successfully Transform Them by Richard Foster and Sarah Kaplan
• Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics by Eric D. Beinhocker
• Technological Innovation as an Evolutionary Process by John Ziman (Editor)
• Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations: A Story of Economic Discovery by David Warsh
• Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World by Barrington Moore, Jr.
• Knowledge in a Social World by Alvin I. Goldman
• Politics in Time: History, Institutions, and Social Analysis by Paul Pierson
• The Advancement of Science: Science without Legend, Objectivity without Illusions by Philip Kitcher
• The Idea of Progress:  An Inquiry into Its Origin and Growth by J. B. Bury
• The Idea of History by R. G. Collingwood
• The Historian's Craft by Marc Bloch
• On Social Structure and Science by Robert K. Merton
• Warped Passages by Lisa Randall
• Linked by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi
• Deep Simplicity: Bringing Order to Chaos and Complexity by John Gribbin

2004-2005

• Science as a Process: An Evolutionary Account of the Social and Conceptual Development of Science by David L. Hull
• Chaos of Disciplines by Andrew Abbott
• Historical Dynamics: Why States Rise and Fall by Peter Turchin
• The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change by Thomas S. Kuhn
• Isaac Newton by James Gleick
• Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love by Dava Sobel
• Genes, Peoples, and Languages by Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza
• Not by Genes Alone:  How Culture Transformed Human Evolution by Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd
• Understanding the Process of Economic Change by Douglas North
• Methods of Discovery: Heuristics for the Social Sciences by Andrew Abbott
• The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society by Norbert Wiener
• Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener The Father of Cybernetics by Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman
• The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution by Richard Dawkins
• The Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond
• The Riemann Hypothesis by Karl Sabbagh
• The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life by Paul Seabright
• Analytic Narratives by Robert H. Bates, Avner Greif, Margaret Levi, Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, and Barry R. Weingast
• The Modern Firm: Organizational Design for Performance and Growth by John Roberts
• On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace by Donald Kagan
• The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments by Gertrude Himmelfarb
• The Landscape of History by John Lewis Gaddis
• Miles Gone By by William F. Buckley, Jr.

2003-2004

• The New Humanists: Science at the Edge by John Brockman
• A History of American Law by Lawrence M. Friedman
• Knowledge and Competitive Advantage: The Co-evolution of Firms, Technology, and National Institutions by Johann Peter Murmann
• The Economic Structure of Intellectual Property Law by William M. Landes and Richard A. Posner
• Diffusion of Innovations by Everett M. Rogers
• The Limits of Convergence: Globalization and Organizational Change in Argentina, South Korea, and Spain by Mauro F. Guillen
• Principles of Economic Sociology  by Richard Swedberg
• Life's Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe  by Simon Conway Morris
• Social Economics: Market Behavior in a Social Environment  by Gary Becker and Kevin Murphy
• The Spirit of Capitalism: Nationalism and Economic Growth  by Liah Greenfeld
• The Value of Science: Essential Writings of Henri Poincare  by Henri Poincare, edited by Stephen Jay Gould
  • This volume is a collection of three books by Poincare:  Science and Hypothesis (1903);  The Value of Science (1905);  and Science and Method (1908).
• Six Degrees:  The Science of a Connected Age  by Duncan J. Watts
• Sync:  The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order by Steven Strogatz

2002-2003

• Ants at Work:  How an Insect Society Is Organized  by Deborah Gordon
• Being There:  Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again  by Andy Clark
• The Blank Slate:  The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker  [Read H. Allen Orr's review and an exchange between Pinker and Orr in The New York Review of Books]
• Choices, Values, and Frames edited by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky  [Kahneman's Nobel Prize Lecture]
• Unto Others:  The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior by Elliott Sober and David Sloan Wilson
• Of Paradise and Power:  America vs. Europe in the New World Order by Robert Kagan
• Charles Darwin:  The Power of Place by Janet Browne
• The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Modern European Thought by Jerry Z. Muller
• The Biographer's Tale by A. S. Byatt
• The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy by Joel Mokyr
• The Rise of the Network Society by Manuel Castells
• The Hilbert Challenge by David Rowe and Jeremy J. Gray
• The Big Problem of Small Change by Thomas J. Sargent and Francois R. Velde
• Inventing the Electronic Century: The Epic Story of the Consumer Electronics and Computer Industries by Alfred D. Chandler, Jr.
• The Clash of Civilization and the Remaking of World Order by Samuel P. Huntington
• Foundations of Organizational Strategy by Michael C. Jensen
• A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram
• Strange Beauty by George Johnson
• The Structure of Evolutionary Theory by Stephen Jay Gould
• A Primer on Decision Making:  How Decisions Happen by James G. March

2001-2002

• The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy by Kenneth Pomeranz
• The Essential Wallerstein by Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein
• Adaptive Individuals in Evolving Populations: Models and Algorithms (Santa Fe Institute Studies in the Sciences of Complexity) edited by Richard K. Belew and Melanie Mitchell
• Blondie24: Playing at the Edge of AI by David B. Fogel
• Reinforcement Learning by Richard S. Sutton and Andrew G. Barto
• Wittengenstein's Poker  by David Edmonds and John Eidinow  [Read a review by Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker.]
• Churchill: A Biography  by Roy Jenkins
• The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal  by M. Mitchell Waldrop [Another book by the same author: Complexity- the Emerging Science At the Edge of Order and Chaos ]
• Half a Life  by V. S. Naipaul  [Featured Author from the archives of the New York Times - reviews of his earlier books, articles about and by V. S. Naipaul]
• A Stitch in Time by Frederick H. Abernathy, John T. Dunlop, Janice H. Hammond, and David Weil
• Hilbert by Constance Reid
• Signs of Life:  How Complexity Pervades Biology by Ricard V. Sole and Brian Goodwin
• Euclid's Window:  The Story of Geometry from Parallel Lines to Hyperspace by Leonard Mlodinow
• Game Theory and Animal Behavior  edited by Lee Alan Dugatkin and Hudson Kern Reeve
• Levels of Selection in Evolution edited by Laurent Keller 
• Bounded Rationality:  The Adaptive Toolbox  edited by Gerd Gigerenzer and Reinhard Selten
• Social Dynamics edited by Steven N. Durlauf and H. Peyton Young
  

2000-2001

• The Demography of Corporations and Industries by Glenn R. Carroll and Michael T. Hannan
• Small Worlds by Duncan J. Watts
• The Self-Made Tapestry:  Pattern Formation in Nature by Philip Ball
• Paradigms Lost:  Tackling the Unanswered Mysteries of Modern Science by John L. Casti
• Rare Earth:  Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe Peter Douglas Ward and Donald Brownlee
• The Moral Animal:  Why We Are the Way We Are:  The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology by Robert Wright
• The Universal Computer: The Road from Leibniz to Turing by Martin Davis
• Catastrophe: An Investigation into the Origins of the Modern World by David Keys
• A Life in the Twentieth Century:  Innocent Beginnings, 1917 - 1950 by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
• Irrational Exuberance by Robert J. Shiller
• Open Source:  The Unauthorized White Papers by Donald K. Rosenberg
• Evolution of the Social Contracts by Brian Skyrms
• Self-Organized Criticality:  Emergent Complex Behavior in Physical and Biological Systems by Henrik Jeldtoft Jensen
• Winners, Losers & Microsoft:  Competition and Antitrust in High Technology by Stan J. Liebowitz and Stephen E. Margolis
• How to Solve It: Modern Heuristics by Z. Michalewicz and D. B. Fogel
• Investigations by Stuart Kauffman
• Growth Recurring: Economic Change in World History by E. L. Jones
• The Quark and the Jaguar by Murray Gell-Mann
• The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History by David Hackett Fischer
  

1999-2000

• Design Rules:  The Power of Modularity by Carliss Y. Baldwin and Kim B. Clark
• Culture Matters:  How Values Shape Human Progress  edited by Lawrence E. Harrison and Samuel P. Huntington
• The Innovator's Dilemma  by Clayton M. Christensen
• Blown to Bits:  How the New Economics of Information Transforms Strategy  by Philip Evans and Thomas S. Wurster
• Harnessing Complexity:  Organizational Implications of a Scientific Frontier  by Robert Axelrod and Michael D. Cohen
• The Tipping Point:  How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell
• ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age by Andre Gunder Frank
• CODE:  The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold
• The Ice Finders:  How a Poet, a Professor, and a Politician Discovered the Ice Age by Edmund Blair Bolles
• Symbiotic Planet: A New Look At Evolution by Lynn Margulis
• Fermat's Enigma by Simon Singh
• Cambrian Intelligence: The Early History of the New AI by Rodney A. Brooks
• Beyond Calculation: The Next Fifty Years of Computing edited by Peter J. Denning and Robert M. Metcalfe
• Learning By Doing In Markets, Firms, and Countries edited by Naomi R. Lamoreaux, Daniel M. G. Raff, and Peter Temin
• System Effects:  Complexity in Political and Social Life by Robert Jervis
• How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker
• Guns, Germs, and Steel:  The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond
• The End of Certainty:  Time, Chaos, and the New Laws of Nature by Ilya Prigogine
• What Is Random?:  Chance and Order in Mathematics and Life by Edward Beltrami
  

1998-1999

• Titan:  The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. by Ron Chernow
• The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor  by David S. Landes
• New Rules for the New Economy: 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World by Kevin Kelly
• Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy by Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian
• Strategy and the Business Landscape by Pankaj Ghemawat
• Competing on Internet Time: Lessons from Netscape and Its Battle with Microsoft by Michael A. Cusumano and David B. Yoffie
• Competing on the Edge: Strategy As Structured Chaos by Shona L. Brown and Kathleen M. Eisenhardt
• Technology and Market Structure: Theory and History by John Sutton
• Creating Modern Capitalism:  How Entrepreneurs, Companies, and Countries Triumphed in Three Industrial Revolutions, edited by Thomas K. McCraw
• The Complexity of Cooperation: Agent-Based Models of Competition and Collaboration by Robert Axelrod
• The Pattern on the Stone:  The Simple Ideas That Make Computers Work by W. Daniel Hillis
• A Beautiful Mind: A Biography of John Forbes Nash, Jr.  by Sylvia Nasar
• Time, Love, Memory: A Great Biologist and His Quest for the Origins of Behavior by Jonathan Weiner [Also see The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time (Pulitzer Prize Winner) by the same author.]
•  The Sources of Economic Growth by Richard R. Nelson
•  The Eighth Day of Creation by Horace Freeland Judson