Categorie: Essay

Meaningful, Sustainable, Humanity Centered

Don Norman | 2023

How human behaviour brought our world to the brink, and how human behaviour can save us. The world is a mess. From collapsing social structures to the climate crisis, our dire predicament has been millennia in the making and can be traced back to the erroneous belief that the earth’s resources are infinite.

The key to change, says Don Norman, is human behaviour, covered in the book’s three major themes: meaning, sustainability, and humanity-centeredness. Emphasize quality of life, not monetary rewards; restructure how we live to protect the environment better; and focus on all of humanity.

Design for a Better World presents an eye-opening diagnosis of where we’ve gone wrong and a clear prescription for improving things. It is published by The MIT Press.

Norman proposes a new way of thinking that recognizes our place in a complex global system where even simple behaviours affect the entire world. He identifies the economic metrics contributing to the harmful effects of commerce and manufacturing and proposes a recalibration of what we consider essential in life. His experience as both a scientist and business executive gives him the perspective to show how to make these changes while maintaining a thriving economy. Let the change begin with this book before it’s too late.

Bibliography

Norman, D. (2023) Design for a Better World: Meaningful, Sustainable, Humanity Centered. Cambridge, Massachusetts, US: The MIT Press

Leaders, Citizens, and the Challenge of Populism in Europe

Larry M. Bartels | 2023

A seeming explosion of support for right-wing populist parties has triggered widespread fears that liberal democracy is facing its worst crisis since the 1930s. Democracy Erodes from the Top reveals that the real crisis stems not from an increasingly populist public but from political leaders who exploit or mismanage the chronic vulnerabilities of democracy.

In this provocative book, Larry Bartels dismantles the pervasive myth of a populist wave in contemporary European public opinion. While there has always been a substantial reservoir of populist sentiment, Europeans are no less trusting of their politicians and parliaments than they were two decades ago, no less enthusiastic about European integration, and no less satisfied with the workings of democracy. Anti-immigrant sentiment has waned.

The notion that democracy is in crisis provides a compelling hook for much recent political writing. In the opening pages of his book Fractured Continent: Europe’s Crises and the Fate of the West, a former chief European correspondent of the Washington Post warned, “Just a quarter century after the liberal international order of open markets, free speech, and democratic elections had triumphed over the forces of communism, the Western democracies now seem in danger of collapsing, as a backlash against globalization arouses angry opponents of immigration, free trade, and cultural tolerance.”?

Electoral support for right-wing populist parties has increased only modestly, reflecting the idiosyncratic successes of populist entrepreneurs, the failures of mainstream parties, and media hype. Europe’s most sobering examples of democratic backsliding—in Hungary and Poland—occurred not because voters wanted authoritarianism but because conventional conservative parties, once elected, seized opportunities to entrench themselves in power.

In this book, I summarize broad trends in European public opinion from 2002 through 2019, focusing particularly on attitudes commonly taken as symptomatic of a “crisis of democracy,” including economic disaffection, antipathy to immigration and European integration, ideological polarization, distrust of political elites, and dissatisfaction with the workings of democracy itself. I examine the impact of these attitudes on support for right-wing populist parties, which is substantial. I also explore their role in precipitating significant erosions of democracy in Hungary and Poland, which turned out to be remarkably modest.

By demonstrating the inadequacy of conventional bottom-up interpretations of Europe’s political crisis, Democracy Erodes from the Top turns our understanding of democratic politics upside down.

Bibliography

Bartels, L. (2023) Democracy Erodes from the Top: Leaders, Citizens, and the Challenge of Populism in Europe. Princeton, USA: Princeton University Press.