The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion

  • Jonathan Haidt
Allen Lane 448 pp. £20 (2012)

Morality, above all else, is behind human success, says psychologist Jonathan Haidt. But why do individuals and societies disagree so violently about what morality is? The answer, he says, is that humans are tribal creatures, with minds designed for “groupish righteousness”. Haidt discusses how morals arise from intuitions, not reason, and how this leads to both nobility and hypocrisy. He argues that right-wing politicians have a built-in advantage when they appeal to those intuitions by invoking liberty, loyalty and sanctity.

In the Wake of the Crisis: Leading Economists Reassess Economic Policy

Edited by:
  • Olivier J. Blanchard,
  • David Romer,
  • A. Michael Spence &
  • Joseph E. Stiglitz
MIT Press 174 pp. £13.95 (2012)

Why did the global economy melt down in 2008? And how can it be fixed? Here, 23 economists, including three Nobel prizewinners, seek the causes of the crash and the feeble recovery, and suggest policy responses. They focus on macroeconomic issues such as the control of inflation and financial-sector regulation. The hunt for an answer will take years, says Olivier Blanchard, chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, but it is clear that we are in a “brave new world”.

To Forgive Design: Understanding Failure

  • Henry Petroski
Belknap Press 408 pp. $27.95 (2012)

When a plane crashes or a bridge collapses, faulty engineering is the usual suspect. But in seeking the roots of failure, we should look beyond design, says engineer Henry Petroski. We must probe the political and economic imperatives that shape purposes and use. In this follow-up to his influential To Engineer is Human (Vintage, 1985), Petroski argues that accidents such as the Deepwater Horizon oil spill are the result of faults as much in “human machinery” as in mechanical devices. He praises software developers for learning from structural engineering about how to report and analyse mishaps.

The Sensorium of God: A Novel

  • Stuart Clark
Polygon 272 pp. £12.99 (2012)

In 1679, astronomer Edmond Halley seeks out Isaac Newton to help him decipher planetary motion. But the great physicist has less lofty preoccupations: natural philosopher Robert Hooke is demanding recognition for ideas that Newton has passed off as his own. Stuart Clark's novel, the second in a projected trilogy about the giants of physics and astronomy — the first, The Sky's Dark Labyrinth (Polygon, 2011), starred Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler — sets collaborations and disputes in Britain's Glorious Revolution of 1688. The supporting cast includes John Locke and Robert Boyle.

American Genesis: The Evolution Controversies from Scopes to Creation Science

  • Jeffrey P. Moran
Oxford University Press 216 pp. $29.95 (2012)

When historian Jeffrey Moran began teaching in Kansas in 1998, he thought the 1925 Scopes 'monkey trial', in which a Tennessee teacher was prosecuted for teaching evolution, was a curiosity. Yet in 1999, his state's education board removed evolution from its curriculum. Moran discusses how US anti-evolutionism has persisted. Attitudes towards evolution touch on every point of social friction, he says, including gender, race and the North–South divide.