Repair
Description
This book propagates a new way of thinking about managing our resources by integrating the perspectives of complex systems theory and social psychology. By resources, the authors mean objects, such as cell phones and cars, and human resources, such as family members, friends, and the small and large communities they belong to. As we all face the "replace or repair" dichotomy, readers will understand how to repair themselves, their relationships, and communities, accept the "new normal," and contribute to repairing the world. The book is offered to Zoomers, growing up in a world where it seems everything is falling apart; people in their 30s and 40s, who are thinking about how to live a fulfilling life; people from the Boomers generation, who are thinking back on life and how to repair relationships. The Reader will enjoy the intellectual adventure of connecting the natural and social worlds and understanding the transition's pathways from a "throwaway society" to a "repair society.
Reviews / Votes
Péter Érdi studies complex systems and focuses on the big picture in human life. His previous book, RANKING: The Unwritten Rules of the Social Game We All Play, illuminated our powerful interest in pecking orders, which we share with many other animals, shown no more dramatically than Americans' obsession with "Who's Number 1?" in college football every season. In Repair, Erdi's nose for the powerful influences of our hidden animal nature leads him to produce a fascinating analysis of one of the most common and important types of decisions we make: whether to stick with what we have and make it work (somehow), upgrade it, or replace it entirely. Why do we choose one option over the others? With his coauthor Zsuzsa Szvetelszky, Erdi deftly shows how widely this basic dilemma applies and permeates our lives, from deciding whether it is finally time for a new car or refrigerator, to reconnecting with an old friend, or even leaving one's job and start that 'second career' at last. Best of all, by showing us why we tend to make one of these choices instead of the other, the authors give us the ability to make better ones in the future.John A. Bargh
Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science and of Management
Yale University
Patrick Grim
Distinguished Teaching Professor Emeritus, Stony Brook
Philosopher in Residence, Center for the Study of Complex Systems, University of Michigan
The book by Érdi and Szvetelszky proposes an unconventional analysis of one of the most pressing dilemmas of our society; namely: the "replace or repair" one. In times where expressions like "resilience" are becoming buzzwords, this book proposes a principled approach to move beyond the current "throw-away society" towards a more sustainable one. Interestingly, the author's proposal is directly inspired from the repertoire of cybernetics and complex systems. Érdi and Szvetelszky show how by recurring to the notions of homeostasis, feedback, friction, stability we can repair our broken society
Antonio Lieto, University of Turin
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Péter Érdi has served since 2002 as the Henry Luce Professor of Complex Systems Studies at Kalamazoo College in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where he teaches interdisciplinary classes and is cross-appointed in the physics and psychology departments. Péter Érdi grew up in Budapest, a research professor at the Wigner Research Centre for Physics. Érdi served between 2015 and 2019 as the Editor-in-Chief of the Elsevier journal Cognitive Systems Research, served as a vice-president of the International Neural Network Society, and was a board member of several learned societies scientific publishing houses. He has given around 200 invited lectures in the overlapping areas of computational, cognitive, and social sciences in the United States, Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America. He is a founding director of a study abroad program, the Budapest Semester in Cognitive Science, which takes international students to Budapest for a semester. Péter Érdi has written well-accepted bookspublished by Princeton University Press, MIT Press, and Springer (Complexity Explained, 2008; Stochastic Chemical Kinetics Theory and (Mostly) Systems Biological Applications (with Gábor Lente), 2014. His recent book, RANKING: The Unwritten Rules of the Social Game We All Play (Oxford University Press, 2020) has been translated into Chinese, German, Hungarian, Japanese, and Korean.
Zsuzsanna Szvetelszky is a Hungarian social psychologist with a master's degree in Librarianship and Information Management from Eötvös University Budapest and a Ph.D. in Social Psychology from the University of Pécs. She has successfully combined her academic interest with practical applications during her career, as she has been able to transfer her academic research to business practice. She is affiliated to the Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary and the Research Center for Educational and Network Studies, Centre for Social Sciences in Budapest. Dr,Szvetelszky has also served as a corporate consultant focused on communication projects and systems. Her six books written in Hungarian, and her papers published in international journals, reflect her broad interests from gossip psychology to informal networking to corporate communication. She frequently appears in Hungarian newspapers and magazines and is often featured on radio and television programs.
