Economic-dependence Books

One of the best reference books I've come across, for System Dynamics. The topics are covered with minimum of mathematical formalism (complemented by very intuitive explanation). Being foreign to this discipline, Parts 2 & 3 of this book help you get the gist of what this discipline is all about (causal loop diagrams, stocks & flows, positive and negative feedback loops). Part 3 is the most interesting/engaging part of the book for beginners to this subject area: dynamics of growth. You can jump to topics of interest without discontinuity: For those with technology management responsibility, Chapter 10.4 (Positive feedback and how it impacts corporate growth) is a must read.

I wish our high schools cover this discipline. I definitely go back to this book from time to time whenever I'm spending time thinking about process improvements, internal policy or strategy design. Glad I came across this book!

Este libro contiene información de vanguardia y vital en el desarrollo de las prácticas avanzadas de dirección por procesos. Cualquier ejecutivo que se considere experto en operaciones, deberá incluir este documento como base para sus trabajos.

This book is really impressive. Is an eye opener. Must read for Industrial Engineering Students, must have for professors and great addition for a professional looking for new ideas.

"Business Dynamics" is a great book leading the knowledge seeking "fresh" system dynamicist into the field of SD and the experienced system dynamicist can use it as a knowledge pool.

John Sterman removes the theoretical barriers and brings SD to real life as he goes along known complex questions in order to understand them through the use of System Dynamics and Systems Thinking.

Learning and getting more experienced in System Dynamics and the use for daily problem solving is a dynamic and evolving process of wisdom with lots of feedback and "Business Dynamics" is the right companion in getting deeper insights in order to achieve the goals.

Best regards

Ralf

Excellent guide to systems thinking, clear examples, clear thinking and very interesting conclusions reached. highly recommended

I think it is probably the best book on decision-making psychology I read. This book is full of great insights and tips into the decision making. It gives a very well rounded overview of the many aspects of decision making: selective perception, memory, biases and heuristic, behavioral traps, etc. It is also one of the more easily read books on the very complex subject. It has a large number of relevant and easy to digest examples.

Lev Virine, author of Project Decisions: The Art and Science

This work by Scott Plous should not be taken lightly. Dr. Plous, indeed, reviews the literature, but he also puts the missing pieces to the puzzle together as you try to understand how we got to the point we are today in the Psychology of judgment and decision making. Without this comprehensive review, it is hard to put other books in context. Many books explore specific persuasion principles and the psychological aspects of decision making. The problem is, how to you put all of the pieces together to make sense of it all. Plous gives the big picture so you will have a place from which to view all the other articles and books you read. I read this book four times and tried to pick apart each paragraph to see how it could apply to influencing others. I promise you the pearls are there if read each page with the goal of understanding how it can be applied in the real world. This book was my top 2 of all time!

One of my favorite recommendations to non-cognitive psychologist friends in addition to required reading in several of my courses.

If you are interested in getting a glimpse into the way people make decisions under ambiguous, complex, or non-linear conditions, this book is a good place to start. I only gave it four stars, however, because it failed to leave me with a strong impression. Many experiments are covered, but there's little in the way of practical application or insight.

The book starts out with a 12 page reader survey, which I encourage you to skip. It took me an hour to complete, but didn't add anything to my grasp of the material. The author uses it to prevent hindsight bias, which I experienced vividly when telling my sister about one of the experiments covered in the book. "Of course," she said, like the whole concept was so obvious that the average idiot has already figured it out. That's hindsight bias.

Another interesting concept is attitude-behavior inconsistency. One example is the road trip a psychologist took with a Chinese couple in the 1930's when anti-Chinese sentiment was prevalent in the U.S. In the vast majority of cases the couple was treated quite well. After the trip, the psychologist anonymously contacted the places they had stayed at, and asked if Chinese people were accommodated. The vast majority of responses were, "No." Another example of attitude-behavior inconsistency given is when Seminary students on their way to give a speech on being a Good Samaritan ignored a person in an alley dressed as a bum who was coughing and moaning.

Another interesting concept was social loafing, which demonstrated that a person working in a threesome will expend 85% of the effort they would expend if working alone.

There were a few examples in the book, however, that seem to demonstrate a lack of understanding on the author's part. One was the experiment that demonstrated that doctors could be easily misled into diagnosing the odds of a tumor being malignant at 75% rather than the true probability of 7%. This is a fascinating result with practical implications, but this topic was not explored in detail, leaving me feeling quite unsatisfied. This is the second book that has handled this experiment superficially, unfortunately.

Another example was the chart showing weather forecasters versus doctors. The author commented that weather forecasters were more accurate than doctors in their predictions, contrary to popular opinion. In reality, the chart demonstrated that weather forecasters are much more aware of their limitations than are doctors, because they get immediate feedback regarding their predictive failures, and are therefore much less confident regarding their predictive abilities than are doctors who often do not receive such feedback.

The main takeaway I got from this book was that it is possible to make better decisions, if one listens to contrary opinions, and by empathizing with those who hold them. This exercise may not change your decision, but it will help minimize common biases and decision-making errors.

The author does a nice job at the end of letting readers know that even psychological researchers are prone to making many of the judgment errors discussed in the book. He also provides a list of books for further reading, including one of my favorites, How We Know What Ain't So by Gilovich. The Gilovich book is definitely my first recommendation for anyone just starting to explore this fascinating field.

A decade ago Scott Plous produced a very readable summary of research in social psychology and (what is now known as) behavioral economics.
Our understanding of how people actually behave (as opposed to our theories as to how they should behave) has been immeasurably enriched by work dating (variously) from Herbert Simon, Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, Stanley Milgram and many others.
Management education has yet to fully take into account the many insights coming from psychologists, experimental economists and others so nicely summarized in this book.

This excellent book will give you the insight to understand how transportation and cities interact.

This book presents a right track of understanding and solving the problems of today cities.

This book has provided a clear insight on sustainable transport strategies and policies which have been adopted in different countries. It is very well explained and I must say that it is the best piece the authors have actually written. It amalgamates the previous work carried out by the authors and therefore is an excellent reference book, which should be present in every transport planner's shelf and in every university.

A must-read for city planners, environmentalists, urban policymakers, and all those generally concerned with "smart growth," sustainability and a vision for the 21st century. Newman and Kenworthy make a clear case for the rethinking of our current pattern of development and why it just doesn't make sense. They offer an alternative pattern that is not only achievable, but attractive. Their study of global cities throughout the US, Canada, Europe, Asia, and Australia is clear and conclusive. And their vision is inspiring. American cities are making their comeback based on many of the principles expressed here. Read this book and share it with all those you know!

In "The Life and Death of Great American Cities" written in the 1960s Jane Jacobs embraced complexity as a goal in itself. "How" she asked "can cities generate enough mixture among uses, enough diversity throughout enough of their territories, to sustain their own civilisation?" For Newman and Kenworthy the key idea is sustainability - "one of the most diversely applied concepts among academics and professionals discussing the future..." that "...has cut across all disciplines and professions and has developed many complexities." The car enters Newman and Kenworthy's consideration as a technology of widening individual choice. Why then is the car not the transport technology, par excellence? What unintended consequence has meant its proliferation has blighted the very thing it might have been expected to nurture?

Newman and Kenworthy argue that the car, unlike public transport, offered people who could afford it freedom to live anywhere in a city and get quickly to any other part of it. It appeared to remove the need to plan land-use. Anything could be built anywhere with drivers determining their own routes to and from home to work, shops, schools and entertainment. In the "car-city" - which Newman and Kenworthy distinguish from the "pedestrian city" and the "transit city" - it is possible to develop in any direction and not just along rivers, tramlines or railways. Dispersed low density housing becomes accessible and popular. Town planners can separate residential from industrial zones accelerating decentralisation. Public and commercial buildings no longer need to cluster as a product of the convergence of private and public investment in a particular place. Public transport constricted by timetables and fixed routes becomes second class travel.

Where the car city has been taken to extremes as in Newman and Kenworthy's intellectual territory - America and Australia - the penny dropped soonest. The social consequences that attended driving people off streets and creating boundaries round parks, squares, promenades, pavements - which had served as milieu for human interaction - only began to be widely accepted quite recently. Only now is a wedge of new economic logic being driven between the car and its enduring connection with the good life.

The car, once it ceased to be an indulgence of the rich, always represented a balance between liberation and dependency. Today, the choices promised by cars are linked transparently to those they take away. Everyone knows about exhaust emissions and most drivers, outside of advertisements, experience worsening road conditions. There is growing despondency among those who would like to use their cars less. They realise alternatives won't work unless people switch in large numbers to other ways of getting around. But the public space needed to take to the streets to walk or cycle and take trains and buses is unavailable. Many see public space as hazardous for themselves, and perilous for their children. Deprivations long imposed on people without cars apply, with increasing force, to people with them. New technology may reduce vehicle emissions. It cannot recover the enormous interaction space taken out of circulation by road traffic. Before that lost social space can become available for people outside cars, a legal and moral space has to be reclaimed.

This is why the idea of sustainability is slowly and surely turning into a value. It is the big idea which legitimates unpopular regulation. It offers space for the entrepreneurs of the future, exciting third world policy makers who want to leap a stage in the industrial revolutions of the richer nations. It is the idea around which people are ready to form alliances that go beyond their interests; a concept which "did not come so much from academic discussion as from a global political process." Newman and Kenworthy speak of their book being "many years in preparation", a book that is a "combination of text book and life story" deriving from work with city governments and voluntary groups attempting to address a major global and local issue of how people "can simultaneously reduce their impact on earth while improving their quality of life".

This books aims to show how a city's use of land determines and is determined by its dominant forms of transport. It describes how policies aimed at creating sustainable relationships between humans and their environment necessarily revolve around a city's land-use-transport formula. Getting this right is a prerequisite for urban renaissance.

What makes this book of especial value and its focus provocative is that so many cities and towns are now "auto-dependent". Because cars are sold on the basis of the freedoms they offer, policies to regulate so dominant a form of transport, even when those freedoms are nurtured in the imagination rather than available in the material world, arouse strong protest. Attempts to diversify people's transport choices are regularly characterised as restrictive and even oppressive. Instead of being seen as a catalyst for wealth production, governments addressing challenges to the reputation and wealth of cities caused by "auto-dependence" are seen as depriving large numbers of citizens of fundamental freedoms. The "motorist" has become a late 20th century everyman, affected from all angles by policies to restore a balance in cities between space allocated to rapid movement and space where citizens can engage in civil exchange.

This book is a mine of arguments, backed by statistics, illustrations and graphs. Readers concerned about global warming may be disappointed to find no thinking about the impact of air transport on the sustainability of cities. Officials and politicians thinking of purchasing this text may ask whether it arrays anti-car prejudices against a "normal paradigm" of improving cars and roads and a friendlier planning regime for building of homes and businesses on green field sites. For Newman and Kenworthy that argument is over. Their book is primarily for those who seek to understand the implications of a paradigm which doesn't treat gridlocks or bypasses as the only options.

This is the second edition of THE book on copulas; there are others, eg Joe, and Drouet and Kotz, but this is the best reference work I know of on this topic. The second edition does not frankly have a huge amount of new content; the most obvious is the very useful set of scatterplots used to illustrate the appearance of copulas. This I think shows up some properties like symmetry better than equations could do. If I had purchased the first edition, I probably wouldn't feel it had been worth upgrading---it depends on how deeply you are `into' this topic. On the other hand it's reassuring that there hasn't been a lot of recent work we didn't know about!

I thoroughly recommend this book, and, if I meet the author, I shall reckon that he owes me a drink.

This is a great introduction to the area for those already possessing good mathematical ability and knowledge of distribution theory. All the seminal theorems and references are in here and the reader would be wise to check them out. Well written and communicated, didn't find any typo's. Enjoyed it. This area is fast growing in the area of mathematical finance.

I just got this book, so I can't comment on the contents yet. However, I feel quite ripped off, because this is the previous edition. The hardcover, which is only $20 more is a new second edition, while the paperback is from 1999.

the title of this book makes me think of the idea: newspapers throughout the developing world have an item printed with Iodized ink; just eat the article to cure a disease that affected 2 billion during the 20th century

wikipedia says Iodine deficiency disease has affected two billion people simultaneously; a third of earths 20th century population
Newspapers are ubiquitous trash available as new used or trash to almost all humans

printing a nutrition Item brings Iodine sufficiency to giant numbers of people

Iodine sufficiency can be achieved with near 70 micrograms of Iodine

There is also an opportunity here to put microgram micronutrients like V Sn B12 as well as birth defect reducing folate with the material


www.halfbakery.com /idea/Iodized_20newspaper_20ink_20cures_20Iodine_20deficiency_20disease

In this book, Theodore MacDonald demonstrates the incompatibility of global health promotion and global capitalism through a case studies approach. He focuses especially on the impact of Structural Adjustment Programs.

Very roughly, health promotion is involved with the social milieu in which health outcomes are determined, not merely the doctor's office or the specific application of treatment, etc...It also doesn't merely involve itself with those aspects of the social milieu which determine how the doctor's office will be or how much access to treatment people will have. It also deals with how social factors impact health without necessarily being mediated through what is traditionally considered the healthcare system. A good example is that well known negative impact that economic inequality, in and of itself, has on health.

To give examples of some of MacDonald's case studies - he shows how manipulative marketting campaigns have sold breast milk substitutes throughout the third world. This is inferior to breast milk, but there is of course no money in the latter! He details how pharmaceutical companies pay third world doctors according to how much they prescribe, so of course drugs are overprescribed. He shows how AIDS is spread because of female subordination, which is a result of absolute levels of poverty.

Most importantly, he shows that health is a collective process involving personal empowerment and community advocacy, and he details case studies of such progressive strategies. The most extensive one is a study of Cuba which has an excellent portion showing the effects on health of the U.S. embargo. To avoid being sanctioned by the U.S. foreign companies must go through unrealistic amounts of red tape to sell pharmaceuticals to Cuba. They must fill out a 38 page application for each individual patient! The process taking months, of course. Cuba's infrastructure is built to U.S. non-metric specifications and relies on international suppliers for parts. Thus, the embargo prevents effective maintenance of infrastructure.

Theo has worked in Korea, Vietnam, the South Pacific, Nicaragua, South America and the Caribbean. He begins by setting the scene in which health workers struggle to do their jobs. He shows how the global debt crisis, expressing US domination of the international financial institutions, damages health across the world. US-imposed Structural Adjustment Programs force dis-investment in health and education. He notes how first world banks have made at least three times the amount they originally lent, and how no country has ever paid off its IMF debts.

The heart of the book is a superb chapter on the Cuban model of development. 40% of Cuba's GNP, the world's highest proportion, is spent on health and education. By 1974, its doctor-patient ration was better than the USA's or Britain's, and in 1996 it could generously send 600 doctors to South Africa. Cuba has adopted the basics of health promotion - personal autonomy and high self-esteem, leading to neighbourhood advocacy and female emancipation, and to collaboration between health and education workers. Cuba is indeed a `worldwide model of how to organise and administer global health promotion'. Its precondition is a social revolution, based on democratic participation; the old systems of representative democracy simply won't do the job.

Theo presents a series of brilliant case studies of primary health care in Nepal, the World Bank-imposed user health fees in Uganda, the effect of HIV/AIDS in Zimbabwe, the privatisation of pharmaceutical provision in India, and the IMF's `shock treatment' of Peru. He details British American Tobacco's assault on China, China's development of its successful health and education systems after the USA ended all its aid programmes to China in 1949, the USA's use of GATT to stop Thailand banning tobacco imports, and the baby milk manufacturing companies' attack on breast-feeding. He also refutes Amartya Sen's pro-capitalist dogmas about the causes of famine.

Paul Walker, Vice President of the Socialist Health Association, sums up the book's vital message in his Foreword, "capitalism is bad for health; effective health promotion requires a socialist economic and political milieu."

UCSF Law student Michael Murtagh brings insightful analysis of European drug policy, using regulation in Poland as his main paradigm. The book focuses on criminal and societal changes--as shown in various studies--that have resulted since the inception of Poland's newer drug policy. Murtagh goes further to imply how the adoption of less prohibitive measures and more regulatory decrees could effect changes in drug use and the destructive activities associated with drug trafficking. Controversial, revealing, and informative. Murtagh's use of statistics, and analysis of actual legislature makes this a book with concrete details rather than hypothetical ramblings. Rock and Roll Mike Murtagh. . . Rock and Roll!

The term 'resource war' is new (early 1980's) but the concept isn't the British wanted access to 'Naval Stores' from America's forests. The Romans had a few wars where metal ores were the goal. And probably the earliest days of warfare involved who got the best cave or something like that. Nor is the concept likely to be ended soon, especially with the reducing availability of oil.

This book is a collected set of essays, apparently from the journal 'Geopolitics.' While there are two or three articles on a resource other than oil, oil is the resource discussed in most.

It would have seemed that resource rich countries would favor a country's economic and social development. Yet, the people in resource rich areas seem to have been harmed more than helped by the predatory corrupt governmental regimes, insurgent groups and terrorists.

Biodiesel America the book that's written for the people who wonder about what's going to happen to everyone when the earth runs out of crude oil. Better yet just for the people who are tired of spending sixty dollars a week just on gas.My name is Ashley Joseph I'm a sophmore at Kelvyn Park high school and even I realize that there's a problem with us being so dependent on other countries for oil. And even I realize that biodiesel can be a great solution for this growing problem.
Josh Tickell the author of this book has not only givin us a book that could potentially change our entire economy but he's also done it in a way that makes you want to learn more about it and the problems that come from us being so dependent on other nations for crude oil.He's written his book in such a way that anyone who reads it will realize that we've found a solution to our problem now we just have to put that solution in to action.Biodiesal America gives us all the information you need and answers all of your questions all you need to do is read it. I know it's going to be on my recomended book the list because in truth I think everyone should know about this.The question I'm asking you America is whether you'll be one of the ones to know.

Although the book is over a year in its release and was written much longer ago, the predictions of Tickell are coming true today ( 6/07) much faster than even he predicted.

First,the use of algae as a feedstock is just now being commercially used for biodiesel and will only improve in cost and production. In addition, Jatropa is now being commercially used as feedstock and produces a very high rate of oil per acre. The rising cost of diesel and the price of oil itself is making biodiesel economically viable in today's market such that there is much more demand for biodiesel than can possibly satisfy the market.
The attention to greener fuels is just another add - on which further enchances the use of biodiesel in reducing the polluting effects of fossel diesel fuel.
To the nay sayers that think we cannot produce enough vegetable oil to effectively produce biodiesel as a viable alternative to fossel diesel, the use of algae and jatropa shows that necessity is indeed the mother of all inventions and that we can and will find a way to produce a cost effective alternative to fossel fuels.

States like Minnesota, Illinois, Michigan, and Oregon have made Biodiesel feasible through political incentives and mandates. The desired affect of the political mandates has been to artificially raise the prices of soybeans and corn. Minnesota fuel law msandates 2% of the diesel fuel include biodiesel and an additional law favoring corn support requires gasoline too include 10% ethanol. Locally owned and operated, Ethanol production plants produce 400 million gallons of ethanol a year: Fontieer Energy, World Energy, and Pacific Biodiesel. The production of Ethanol boosts the price of corn removing excess inventories and driving up demand for the commodity. Likewise, Illinois, Michigan, and Oregon have similar fuel laws mandating 2% biodiesel portion to the fuel mix. Biodiesel in some parts of the country has become an alternative heat fuel to natural gas.

Cost is the biodiesel barrier. Biodiesel costs 20 cents more than conventional diesel. Tax incentives attempt to temporarily narrow the cost gap. Tax support is linked to environmental advantages. Biodiesel environmental advantages include: Biodiesel emits no sulfur, discharges 78% less CO2, has 50% fewer smog producing components, leads to 48% reduction in carbon monoxide, and has 67% less hydrocarbons.

Biodiesel production volumes are insignificant, 30 million gals/day, in comparison to the 85 million barrels/day of oil. The Energy Information Administration predicts that worldwide oil consumption would increase from 28.4 billion barrels a year in 2002 to 43 billion barrels per year by 2025. Each year the US consumes 125 billion gallons of gasoline and 60 billion gallons of diesel and distillate fuel. Biodiesel would need to reach at least 60 billion gallons a year to replace diesel and endure five to ten years worth of tax burden to compensate for cost differences between the two products. Currently, Biodiesel volumes are too small to be significant. Secondly, there is a water shortage, "Ultimate Resource II" which Tickell ignores in his three scenario plan to reach, 60 billion gallons of biodiesel. Tickell's problem is water and arable land not incentives to grow more soybeans. Tickell becomes desparate and proposes a $308 billion algae oil infrastructure to achieve his 60 billion gallons. This plan would alienate both the farmer and the tax payer and incourage them to seek methods for extracting shale and tar oil.

Biodiesel contains 10% less energy per gallon than diesel fuel but has 7% more combustion efficiency yielding 2-3% decrease in torque, power, and fuel efficiency. Three components are need to produce biodiesel: vegetable oil or animal fat, an alcohol (methanol or ethanol), and a catalyst (sodium hydroxide - NaOH). Vegetable oil + Methyl Alochol->Glycerol + Methyl Ester.

Diesel engines cost more than gas engines, but perform more efficiently. Diesel cars and performance stats: ninety-eight 27 miles/gal, Volkswagon Rabbit 45 miles/gal, Delta 88 and Oldsmobile Tornonado, Ford - prodigy diesel-electric hybrid 70 miles/gal, Dodge Esx4 diesel-electric 72 miles/gal, GM Precept 79.6 miles/gal, Toyota Prius 50 miles/gal, Jeep CRD: tow capacity of 5,000 lbs and 27 miles/gal, Volkswagon Turbo Direct Injection (TDI) for new beetle, golf, Jetta, Passat 50 miles/gal, and A2 80 miles gal.

Tickel is wrong and Peter Huber is right. Future energy will come from Shale and Tar oil as Middle East oil depletes. The US and Canada will become the new "empty quarter". The future of energy will not be biodiesel or hydrogen, but oil and electricity. Biodiesel is a short-term political maneuver to appease special interest groups. Cheap petroleum fuel will force the inevitable conclusion to abandon these alternative fuels as too expensive. Tickel calls the House of Saud a House of cards: 1. The House of Saud with its 30,000 members owns 25% of the worlds oil. 2. The House of Saud is a top-heavy ruling class and putting downward economic pressure on an increasingly large Saudi society. 3. Economic cannibalization of the middle class by the ruling elite has reduced stipends for the average Saudi citizen demonstrated by the plummet in per capita income of $28,600 in 1981 to $6,800 in 2001. 4. The country owes $164 billion equal to the GNP. 5. Country assets drain has become a crisis. Financial follies has drained the country of $120 billion cash assets in 1980 leaving the Saudi treasury holding only about $20 billion. 6. Rapid disintegration of the middle class has driven the popularity of the Islamic fundamentalist. 7. Unemployment rate stands near 25%.

Tickel is a doomdayer and from the doomsday ashes he preaches his vision of a biodiesel powered economy. Peter Huber, "The Bottomless well" is a more accurate vision of abundant and infinite energy. Wealth is the country that produces and consumes the most energy. Bottom line, the country with the maximum consumption of energy will become the wealthiest country. India and China are rapidly consumption energy and their wealth is increasing. India enjoys a 8% growth rate and experience rapid wealth creation buying BMW, Mercedes, Rolls-Royce, expensive watches, and large real-estate abodes. Private banks and hedge funds surge into India seeking to stabilize and profit from the surge in wealth creation in the country. Wealthy investors vote with their dollars encouraging rapid growth to be sustained. Everything looks better during a boom. The expression of this new found wealth is a result of cheap energy.

What happens when energy consumption increases another 4 fold? Computers, robots, electronics, and logic created devices will proliferate as diverse means of service and production as companies seek to market and sell this expert logic. Energy takes on a higher quality form and produces higher quality results. Machine and computer moves closer to the consumer and provide value chains of service. Exclusive and expensive devices will become more accessible: health devices, music devices, media devices, and transportation devices; more manual labor becomes mechanical labor; more intellectual processes become digital; and more energy transform from combustible energy to electrical energy.

Huber believes in the potential of fusion energy telling readers that 10 trillion quads of energy exist in our oceans. The problem with fusion energy is cost. Therefore, oil and nuclear energy will remain the most feasible source of energy in the near future. However, as cars become more computerized and robotic the need for combustible engine locomotion will diminish.

Tickel at best should be arguing for short-term relief of energy supplies. During the 1970s, oil production increased locally to 50 percent as oil in Texas, Alaska, and Mexico warded off production shortages in the Middle East. Huber predicts that Shale and Tar oil will ward off any shortages in the near future to peak oil, a false and misleading concept. The world is not running out of energy. We are just beginning to tap the endless boundary of infinite energy.

An excellent overview of this country's energy history and energy options and a good starting point from which to learn more. Not a left wing political rant nor an argument for biodiesel as an energy panacea. Tickell emphasizes the economic costs of our energy dependence and the benefits of energy self-sufficiency from a practical perspective - certainly a highly relevant subject in light of the turmoil in the Middle East.

I strongly recomend this book for anyone who wants a very readable overview of the biodiesel world. This book is just as engaging to someone seasoned in the renewable fuels industry as those that are just being introduced to this important subject. Josh Tickell explains things to just the right depth, tackling complicated concepts with straighforward language that helps you understand its relavance.
Buy this book. Give it to your friends. Donate one to the local library!

Takeo Doi's "The Anatomy of Dependence" is in truth a psychological analysis of Japanese society through his linguistic interpretation of the Japanese concept of amae. Though the title of the book translates amae as "dependence", the semantic meaning of the word has a much deeper importance in Japanese culture and has a more positive connotation. The originality of Doi's hypothesis of Japanese psychology stems from his refusal to accept that the peoples of Japan and the rest of Asia cannot be understood through psychological analysis. Here, Doi explains his basic argument against using Western terminology to describe Japanese emotions, "...the forms of a person's thoughts are controlled by an inexorable laws of patterns of which he is unconscious. These patterns are the unperceived intricate systematizations of his own language-shown readily enough by a candid comparison and contrast with other languages, especially those of a different linguistic family, " (67). What Doi proposes is that Western psychology has yet to understand Japanese culture because it lacks a Japanese vocabulary.
Doi's text ventures to create a Japanese psychological vocabulary branching off from his concept of amae and built on the structure of Western principles of psychoanalysis. Amae, as Doi interprets it, is the interdependence of indulgences afforded between Japanese people of close relations. In Japanese society, Amae is expected to be given by parents to their children throughout their lives. Amae is also afforded to the elderly, leading some outsiders to wrongly assume that the elderly in Japan are in some way slighted, being treated like babies or small children. Within romantic or marital relationships, amae is expected to be exchanged freely as a way of expressing love and affection. The idea of dependence in Western psychology has connotations of weakness or inability to cope with reality. This is mostly due to the individualistic structure of modern Western culture, in particular, America.
Some of the most satisfying and convincing analysis in Doi's text are the parts of his argument where he openly attacks the Western interpretation of Japanese society. Doi daringly takes apart almost 20 years of Western analysis when he confronts Benedict's conclusion on Japan's total lack of guilt in her pivotal book, The Chrysanthemum and The Sword, "...[Benedict] seems to postulate guilt and shame as entirely unrelated to each other, which is obviously contrary to the facts, " (48). Benedict tried to say that Japanese people feel shame towards the group to which they belong but have no sense of guilt on an individual level. What Benedict is really talking about is the concept of betrayal.
Guilt in Western thought, as Benedict uses it in her text, is defined as a betrayal to oneself. This inner conflict is an individual experienced when there is a conflict between the id, ego and super-ego as Freud used them. Though Japanese people may not feel guilt towards themselves in the Western way, they do feel guilt towards the group. This is what Benedict defines as shame. Doi uses this idea to conclude that, "Even with the Western sense of guilt one might, in fact, postulate a deep-lying psychology of betrayal, but the Westerner is not normally conscious of it, " (49). Doi continues to hypothesize that at one point in history Western civilization did feel guilt towards the group as they do in Japan. With the advent and spread of Christianity, guilt was shifted from the community to one's individual relationship with god. With the industrial age, god was essentially dead. This left the only source of guilt to be found within oneself.
Doi is able to, within a page of text, turn the West's perspective on Japanese culture right back around at itself to create a very convincing and audacious psychological analysis of both the West and Japan. This book is one of the few satisfying texts written about Japanese society and the Japanese self. For the first time I feel that Japan can be described as something more concrete than merely inscrutable.

This is a great look at the Japanese mind that is actually turns out to have universal applicablility. After reading it I saw the western world in quite a different way, there are so many things that we can not see because we live in one culture. I did have a problem with the book though , which might be the author's or translator's fault, the constantly sexist language. The word man is used over and over again for both sexes which makes the book confusing at times. The author is also a died hard fruedian and so the book carries with it all the applicable baggage.

In The Anatomy of Dependence, Takeo Doi presents a psychological study of Japanese society through the concept of amae. Amae is a Japanese word that means to act in a self-indulgent, or childish, manner toward people with whom one is very close. It is this idea that Doi believes is "the essence of the Japanese psychology" (65). However, he makes it clear that amae is universal to everyone and that even animals show signs of it. What makes the Japanese unique is that they have the only language with a word for amae. This difference in vocabulary, Doi believes, is one of the reasons why the Japanese and the West have developed such different psychologies.
Doi does a really great job explaining how having a word for amae can shape the way Japanese people think. Doi argues that "it should be possible to discuss the psychological characteristics of a people in terms of the language it speaks" (66). This is because one must use language to express oneself. If there is no word for a certain emotion in a language, it is difficult for the native speaker to logically think about or express that emotion. In this way, the Japanese are able to speak of and deal with amae; whereas Westerners have trouble with it. Since Western languages do not have any words equal to amae, the concept of amae has not taken hold. This is part of the reason why, Doi asserts, the West considers feelings of dependence on or "passive love" (21) from a group to be inferior to individualism - we do not fully understand it.
Doi shows us that this concept of "amae lurking in the heart of each individual Japanese" (61) is the underlying cause of many social norms. For example, the honorific language system in Japan is an attempt to amaeru (the verb form of amae). By using language that exalts the listener, the speaker is allowing the listener to indulge in their own selfish desires. In other words, it is used to baby one's superiors. Another example comes from the fact that Japanese tend to prefer doing things with a group. Doi shows that amae's origin is the need to cope with separation from the mother during early childhood. Due to this fact, the group is most important because it takes the place of the mother by allowing individual members to amaeru without fear of rejection.
Compared with Benedict's The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, Doi's work is much more credible. Whereas Benedict was not able to do any field work in Japan, Doi is able to give us specific examples of where he gets his ideas. For instance, Doi tells us of his experience of traveling to America for the first time and how the phrase "help yourself" struck him as terribly rude. He took it to mean "nobody else will help you" (13), when it simply means to "do as you please." He also refers to an English patient of his who switched into speaking Japanese solely to be able to use the word amae during a session. Examples like these really help give this book credibility. They help show us that the author is not making rash generalizations in an attempt to prove a theory.
With The Anatomy of Independence, Doi is able to present us with a convincing argument for one of the reasons why Japan has developed in such a different fashion than the West. Although I enjoyed reading this book, I believe that Doi spends more time explaining Freud's theories, especially in the chapter 5, than is hardly necessary. I also believe that parts of the book rely too heavily on the assumption that the reader has read many other psychological studies, leaving the reader unsure of how an idea makes sense. Despite these two flaws, Doi's psychological analysis of Japan is worth reading for its insights into the Japanese mind, especially if one has not read any other books on Japanese psychology.

The Anatomy of Dependence was first published in 1971 under the title 'Amae no Kozo' and almost immediately gained national and international recognition. The author, Dr. Takeo Doi, is one of Japan's leading psychiatrists. His experience in the US, where he made several extended research stays, allowed him to reflect on the nature of the Japanese mindset. He begins his book by recording common experiences of minor alienation that every Japanese living abroad has undergone, such as being given the choice between several options of food or drink that Americans propose "as if to reassure themselves of their own freedom."

A peculiar trait of Japanese medical studies is its heavy use of terms borrowed from the German, which entered the Japanese language at the turn of the twentieth century and which are pronounced in a way that makes them understandable only by Japanese trained in the medical sciences. Doi's main breakthrough is to record the feelings and emotions held by his patients in Japanese terms, and to show that these terms form a constellation of meaning structured around the notion of `amae'.

Part of the interest of this book comes from the fact that amae is very difficult to translate but very easy to grasp--it is the emotion felt by the baby at the breast towards his mother, the need for a passive, unconditional love, the unwillingness to be separated from the warm mother-child circle and cast into a world of objective `reality'. Such a relationship implies a considerable blurring of the distinction between subject and object; it is not necessarily governed by what might be considered strict rational or moral standards, and may often seem selfish to the outsider. Doi contends that it provides an invaluable key to Japanese behavior.

In a way, the Anatomy of Dependence belongs to the field of Nihonjin-ron, or commentary about Japanese-ness, a genre much reviled by social scientists but that still enjoys a high degree of popularity among the Japanese public. Its quest for `the soul of a nation' or `the structure of the Japanese personality' will appear as naive and uncouth to sophisticated readers, who might nonetheless remember that Freud also made sweeping generalizations about the future of Western civilization. To those who might object that Dr. Doi's analysis lacks intellectual rigor and smacks of culturalism, one may object that, first, the description of Japanese behavioral traits is grounded in language structures and that, second, these structures are enacted through speech acts and clinical situations.

Takeo Doi spends some time discussing the New Left and the students movement of the 1970s, which he interestingly compares with Momotaro, the monster-slaying character born out of a giant peach. Interestingly, he doesn't apply his frame of analysis to the most evident of all dependency relationships: that of Japan towards the US, all at once the indulgent motherly figure and the domineering hegemon that blocks Japan from becoming a power in its own right. The anatomy of this political and societal dependence has yet to be written.

The Anatomy of Dependence by Takeo Doi is a look at one facet of Japanese society. Unlike other authors who study Japan as an entire society, Doi focuses on the aspect of unconditional love between parent and child and how it relates to the overarching characteristics of Japanese social structure. Doi relates many theories from many fields of study, notably psychology, anthropology, and sociology. Doi relates his theory of amae with Western schools of thought and how these schools relate to Japan. He is remarkably capable of writing without expressing culture bias, and much credit needs to be given to John Bester for translating the book so well. With Anatomy of Dependence, Doi is able to explain many traditional Japanese behaviors to a Western audience by relating them all to the concept of amaeru, a verb expressing a concept that has no equivalent word in English. Amaeru is `to act in a self-indulgent, or childish, manner toward people with whom one is very close' and Doi's main argument is that amae is the crux of Japanese psychology. It is the attempt to explain the full nature of amae that allows Doi to explain the connections as a psychologist.
The concept of amae is a characteristic of humanity and many other mammalians such as dogs and apes. The term itself and its implications are mostly ignored or misunderstood by people in Western cultures. A basic definition of amae is `to depend and presume upon another's benevolence.' This definition may be applied to common everyday relationships such as mother-child, master-apprentice, sempai-kohai, and between friends. Amaeru, described above, is best stated as the need to be loved, to depend and to be dependent on others. The way that every native Japanese citizen handles amae is the core of the mental psyche. He is able to write confidently about Japanese social nuances and psychology after being a psychologist himself for over twenty years. Amae is the root of the Japanese psyche because everything relates back to it, from apologies to the development of the self-awareness. The instinctual awareness of amae is in every human being, but Japanese society is more in touch with it. This is the crux of Doi's thesis and argument, an argument that has valid arguments and falters only every so often.
Doi does a very good job of explaining things in this account. Anatomy of Dependence is not a book for someone who does not understand psychology. Psychology and its many ways of analysis are the bases of Doi's perspectives. Oftentimes in the book he will recall a patient of his whom suffers from a lack of amae or one who fails to amae properly. He does this with care and ease to the subject, explaining social concepts like enryo, tanin, giri, and sumanai. These four words relate to the Japanese sense of companionship, its inner and outer circles, its duty or loyalty, and its way of apologizing. There are many concepts explored in the book and they are explained with appropriate depth for the time spent on them. Doi is definitely a highbrow writer, assuming that his reading audience is as intelligent as he is. While the more casual reader will be put off by this tactic, it allows for more knowledge and depth to be conveyed. Additional reading can benefit almost every topic that Doi speaks of. There are entire books on the insider-outsider social structure, but Doi can only focus on them for just a few pages. The basis of Anatomy of Dependence then is not to make someone intimately familiar with all the social ambiguities of Japanese society but to make the readership aware that each aspect is influenced by the amae.
Thus Doi is able to explain amae in the Anatomy of Dependence. He does not leave many stones unturned by the end of the account. There are a few places where Doi falters, however. A section on Eastern and Western appreciation for aesthetic beauty falters. Doi is a psychologist, not an artist. He is able to make surprisingly few cultural generalizations, but one that he does make is that the Japanese have a greater appreciation for aesthetic beauty because they are in a culture where amae is recognized and practiced many times daily. While the Japanese society has been hailed for centuries as having many beautiful pieces of artwork, poetry and philosophy on the subject of aesthetic beauty, the explanation Doi gives is a little weak. Apart from this, Doi makes about .1% of the cultural generalizations that Ruth Benedict makes in Chrysanthemum and the Sword. Doi's highbrow writing may also be considered a pitfall of the book, but it was written for people in the psychiatric field and not for the layperson uneducated in Japanese society. This book is not a casual read for a person who is just getting into the study of Japan.
That said, the book fulfills its primary objective. The primary objective is to make people, namely psychologists, aware of the Japanese sense of amae, a cultural sensitivity that is not to be found in Western cultures due to the greater sense of individuality that is placed on them as soon as babies develop self-identity. Doi writes and speaks as a psychologist and that can be perplexing to the reader. However, he is able to explain amae with such remarkably clarity and his experiences as a psychologist make the book highly credible.

Are you interested in environmental issues, natural resource policy, or understanding how ecosystems silently enable our society to function? If so you must read this book.

Almost 10 years has passed since this edited volume was published (edited by Gretchen Daily), and there has been considerable progress on some fronts. Accordingly and expectedly, some of the estimates of the values of services are out-dated, but there are crucial contributions here in the framework for understanding and characterizing such ecosystem services (the flow of benefits from ecosystems to people). This book sparked an immense scholarly and public interest in ecosystem services that has not even begun to peak. In order to enable our society to persist sustainably, we *must* understand our dependence on ecosystem services and incorporate this understanding into societal decision-making.

Top-notch scholars contributed to this excellent volume, which continues to be cited frequently in first-rate academic papers and to cause ripples in broader society.

I haven't read this book. But I think that maybe it would be good if the only review --which is in spanish-- were translated. I'm supposed to be a native speaker, but I'm more like Tarzan...be that as it may, here's Francisco's review:

This edition is important on the themes of environmental economy and the underestimation of the health of ecosystems, for humanity surges to break the little known of the ecosystems, of the synergies, and the diverse benefits they bring, much of which we don't know.
So, this book approaches the important elements, for the process of optimizing the utilization of the ecosystems, from philosophic, environmental, and economic perspectives.

I made it sound like stereo instrucions, sigh.

Es bien importante que se editen textos en estos temas de economía ambiental pues la subestimación del valor de los ecosistemas para la humanidad surge a partir del poco conocimiento de los ecosistemas, de sus sinergias y los diversos beneficios que brindan, muchos de ellos no reconocidos. Así, este libro aporta elementos importantes, para el proceso de optimización de la utilización de los ecosistemas, desde la perpectiva ambiental, filosófica y económica.