Values, World Society and Modelling Yearbook 2014

Reviews / Votes

"Gordon Burt's Values, World Society and Modelling Yearbook 2014 is exactly that - a roller-coaster of a ride, full of surprising and interesting information on a huge range of aspects, collected under its three main sections. The 'values' are extraordinarily diverse, the 'world society' stretches from the individual to the global, and the 'modelling' is mainly mathematical - the equations baffling for non-specialists, but the final vision intriguing - 'look at the universe ... and see mathematics'. The book is fired by energy and erudition."Oliver RamsbothamUniversity of Bradford"Gordon Burt demonstrates how intellectual curiosity about the world around us can be enriched with the mathematician's toolkit and a search for simplifying models. He analyzes a series of topics as diverse as relationships and divorce, the number of states in the world, the conflict in the Ukraine, and UK house prices, first noting key empirical facts and events, and then trying to think of simple models that can give rise to the observed outcomes and their properties. There is much to be learned from this remarkable book."Kristian Skrede GleditschUniversity of Essex'Amid a rich assortment of offerings, the work contains a fascinating chapter in which one of John Burton's American critics - the cultural anthropologist, Kevin Avruch - revisits his early debates with Burton about the tension between general theories of Basic Human Needs and the impact of culture and context. Avruch updates his evaluation of Burton as an intellectual revolutionary of his time and finds some meeting ground in their efforts to deal with the problem of power in finding possible resolutions for intractable, asymmetric conflicts.'Christopher MitchellGeorge Mason University