Catalog Search Results
Author
Pub. Date
[2015]
Physical Desc
viii, 263 pages ; 23 cm
Description
Progress is not just a goal in the West--it's a religion. Most people believe in its inherent value as enthusiastically and uncritically as medieval peasants believed in heaven and hell. Our faith in progress drives the popular insistence that peak oil and climate change don't actually matter--after all, our lab-coated high priests will surely bring forth yet another miracle to save us all. Unfortunately, progress as we've known it has been entirely...
Author
Pub. Date
2008
Formats
Description
When President Roosevelt took the oath of office in 1933, he was facing a devastated nation. Four years into the Great Depression, 13 million American workers were jobless. What people wanted were jobs, not handouts, and in 1935, after a variety of temporary relief measures, a permanent nationwide jobs program was created--the Works Progress Administration, which would forever change the physical landscape and the social policies of the United States....
Author
Description
Is the world really falling apart? Is the ideal of progress obsolete? In the follow-up to cognitive scientist Steven Pinker's groundbreaking The Better Angels of Our Nature, he urges us to step back from the gory headlines and prophecies of doom, which play to our psychological biases. Instead, follow the data. In seventy-five graphs, Pinker shows that life, health, prosperity, safety, peace, knowledge, and happiness are on the rise, not just in the...
Author
Formats
Description
Is civilization teetering on the edge of a cliff? Or are we just climbing higher than ever? Most people who read the news would tell you that 2017 is one of the worst years in recent memory. We're facing a series of deeply troubling, even existential problems: fascism, terrorism, environmental collapse, racial and economic inequality, and more. Yet this narrative misses something important: by almost every meaningful measure, the modern world is better...
Author
Pub. Date
[2014]
Physical Desc
306 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm
Description
A pair of technology experts describe how humans will have to keep pace with machines in order to become prosperous in the future and identify strategies and policies for business and individuals to use to combine digital processing power with human ingenuity.
Author
Pub. Date
2016.
Physical Desc
xiv, 304 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.
Description
The present is a contest between the bright and dark sides of discovery. To avoid being torn apart by its stresses, we need to recognize the fact - and gain courage and wisdom from the past. Age of Discovery shows how. Now is the best moment in history to be alive, but we have never felt more anxious or divided. Human health, aggregate wealth and education are flourishing. Scientific discovery is racing forward. But the same global flows of trade,...
Author
Formats
Description
In 2393, a historian of the Second People's Republic of China reviews the "Penumbral Age" (1988-2093), when politicians, corporations, and scientists ignored the statistical significance of climate disaster. Carbon dioxide warming the planet, deadly summer heat and fires, and the collapse of the West Antarctica Ice Sheet lead to a second Black Death and "the Great Collapse" of the Western world.
Pub. Date
[2020]
Physical Desc
239 pages : illustrations (some color) ; 31 cm
Description
"From December 1933 to February 1943, as part of a sprawling economic stimulus package, four federal programs hired artists to create public artworks and provide art-making opportunities to millions of Americans. When this initiative abruptly ended shortly after the US entry into World War II, information and artworks were lost or scattered, long obscuring the story of what had happened in the Northwest. This groundbreaking volume (which accompanies...
Author
Pub. Date
[2017]
Physical Desc
ix, 229 pages ; 23 cm.
Description
"To most people paying attention to the collision between industrial society and the hard limits of a finite planet, it's clear that things are going very, very wrong. We no longer have unlimited time and resources to deal with the crises that define our future, and the options are limited to the tools we have on hand right now. This book is about one very powerful option: deliberate technological regression. Technological regression isn't about 'going...
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