There are only two ways that humans work together: they cooperate with one another, or they coerce one another. And once you realize this fundamental fact, it will change how you see the world. In this myth-busting book, Antony Davies and James R. Harrigan display the wisdom and talent for explaining complex topics that have attracted a devoted audience to their weekly podcast, Words & Numbers, and made them popular speakers around the country. By looking for cooperation and coercion in everyday life, they help make sense of a wide range of issues that dominate the public debate. You’ll come away from this book with a clear understanding of everything from the minimum wage to taxes, from gun control to government regulations, from the War on Terror to the War on Drugs to the War on Poverty. It turns out that coercion is necessary . . . sometimes. Even in a democracy, we all abide by rules, including plenty that we don’t agree with, in the name of getting along. But in the end, Davies and Harrigan show, cooperation without question is the key to human happiness and progress. The more we encourage it, the better off we all are. Cooperation & Coercion cuts through heated partisan debates to provide a refreshingly clear and comprehensive understanding of the way the world works.

This volume brings together the recent essays of Richard Ned Lebow, one of the leading scholars of international relations and US foreign policy. Lebow's work has centred on the instrumental value of ethics in foreign policy decision making and the disastrous consequences which follow when ethical standards are flouted. Unlike most realists who have considered ethical considerations irrelevant in states' calculations of their national interest, Lebow has argued that self interest, and hence, national interest can only be formulated intelligently within a language of justice and morality. The essays here build on this pervasive theme in Lebow's work by presenting his substantive and compelling critique of strategies of deterrence and compellence, illustrating empirically and normatively how these strategies often produce results counter to those that are intended. The last section of the book, on counterfactuals, brings together another set of related articles which continue to probe the relationship between ethics and policy. They do so by exploring the contingency of events to suggest the subjective, and often self-fulfilling, nature of the frameworks we use to evaluate policy choices.

This innovative study shows that multilateral sanctions are coercive in their pressure on their target and in their origin: the sanctions themselves frequently result from coercive policies, with one state attempting to coerce others through persuasion, threats, and promises. To analyze this process, Lisa Martin uses a novel methodology combining game-theoretic models, statistical analysis, and case studies. She emphasizes that credible commitments gain international cooperation, and concludes that the involvement of international institutions and the willingness of the main "sender" to bear heavy costs are the central factors influencing the sanction's credibility.

"[Cooperation research] is one of the busiest and most exciting areas of transdisciplinary science right now, linking evolution, ecology and social science. . . this is the first major work or collection to address linkages between archaeology and cooperation research."—Michael E. Smith, Arizona State University Past archaeological literature on cooperation theory has emphasized competition's role in cultural evolution. As a result, bottom-up possibilities for group cooperation have been under theorized in favor of models stressing top-down leadership, while evidence from a range of disciplines has demonstrated humans to effectively sustain cooperative undertakings through a number of social norms and institutions. Cooperation and Collective Action is the first volume to focus on the use of archaeological evidence to understand cooperation and collective action. Disentangling the motivations and institutions that foster group cooperation among competitive individuals remains one of the few great conundrums within evolutionary theory. The breadth and material focus of archaeology provide a much needed complement to existing research on cooperation and collective action, which thus far has relied largely on game-theoretic modeling, surveys of college students from affluent countries, brief ethnographic experiments, and limited historic cases. In Cooperation and Collective Action, diverse case studies address the evolution of the emergence of norms, institutions, and symbols of complex societies through the last 10,000 years. This book is an important contribution to the literature on cooperation in human societies that will appeal to archaeologists and other scholars interested in cooperation research.

An eye-opening guide to how society and government function . . . and how they should function There are only two ways that humans work together: they cooperate with one another, or they coerce one another. And once you realize this fundamental fact, it will change how you see the world. In this myth-busting book, Antony Davies and James R. Harrigan display the wisdom and talent for explaining complex topics that have attracted a devoted audience to their weekly podcast, Words & Numbers, and made them popular speakers around the country. By looking for cooperation and coercion in everyday life, they help make sense of a wide range of issues that dominate the public debate. You'll come away from this book with a clear understanding of everything from the minimum wage to taxes, from gun control to government regulations, from the War on Terror to the War on Drugs to the War on Poverty. It turns out that coercion is necessary . . . sometimes. Even in a democracy, we all abide by rules, including plenty that we don't agree with, in the name of getting along. But in the end, Davies and Harrigan show, cooperation without question is the key to human happiness and progress. The more we encourage it, the better off we all are. Cooperation and Coercion cuts through heated partisan debates to provide a refreshingly clear and comprehensive understanding of the way the world works.