Betting on Ideas: Wars, Invention, Inflation

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Betting On Ideas employs the same explanatory hypothesis advance in Brenner's 1983 book, History, The Human Gamble, but back it up with the evidence of war, inventions, inheritance laws, inflation, and indexation and urges some pragmatic applications.

FROM THE CRITICS

Booknews

Reprint of the well-received sequel to Brenner's History: the human gamble, (Chicago, 1983). The author continues the line of argument presented in his earlier book: people bet on new ideas and are more willing to take risks when they have been outdone by their fellows on local, national, or international scales. Expanding upon this provocative theory, indeed even looking for evidence to contradict it, Brenner applies his impressive abilities, using both expressive, ordinary language and mathematics, to a great diversity of social phenomena. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Michael R. Smith

This is a very clever book which can be read with pleasure and profit by many sociologists. The book is a pleasure to read because it displays such dazzling erudition. In out teaching and research most of us labour in fairly delimited areas. Brenner, in contrast, ranges across institutional areas, and centuries, and continents, with remarkable aplomb: from lottery ticket purchases in today's Quebec to the evolution of inheritance laws in Europe, to eighteenth-century painting, to theories of inflation, and so on. And in so doing he ornaments his work with impressive array of illustrations drawn from literature and culture more generally; from Troilus and Cressida early on, to the musical taste of Glenn Gould at the end. It is worth reading this book because it is fun. Sociologists can read this book with profit as an example of what an intellectually defensible model in the social sciences should look like...Brenner does build a choice theoretic model. That he has not said the last word on the subjects to which he applies his model is beside the point. At least he starts from the right place. -- (Michael R. Smith, McGill University, The Canadian Journal of Sociology, Vol. 12, 1987)

John Nye

In Betting on Ideas, Reuven Brenner extends the insights into human behavior under uncertainty he first put forth in History - the Human Gamble (1983) by applying his theory to war, inflation, creativity and the history of French inheritance laws ... Having found the first book ingennious and facsinating, yet terribly frustrating, I can now report that the second work is equally ingenious and fascinating. -- (John Nye, Washington University, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, November 1987)

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

Betting on Ideas is an ingenious and erudite creation, easily as much so as History - the Human Gamble. Its appeal like its predecessor's, is to a wide audience: historians, economists. sociologists, and anthropologists, among others. And like its predecessor, the book's greatest value is as a general, truly novel paradigm of large scale human behavior. -- (Jonathan Hughes, Northwestern University)  — Jonathan Hughes

Certainly one of the most unusual and mind-challenging books I have read in a long time. -- (G.O.W. Mueller, Professor of Criminal Justice, Rutgers University)  — G.O.W. Mueller