The Human Network: How Your Social Position Determines Your Power, Beliefs, and Behaviors

I took the author's course and learned a lot there. The books introduces several real-life applications of graph analysis. Quite interesting.

The Human Network gives an overview of how networks pervade our lives when we consider relationships as edges. These ideas can be used in a vast range of applications and the author focuses on several topics for which the network dynamics have real measurable effects on outcomes. The author is an academic economist focusing on networks and has a coursera course on game theory which has some overlaps and a textbook which fills out many of the details for a particularly interested reader. But as a non-fiction for the general audience this book is both readable and highly informative.The author starts out by giving an overview of the use of networks in framing relationships as well as using networks to understand how certain phenomenon come about due to the structure of the networks people construct. For example the author starts by describing how power relationships can be modeled with a network and bring up the Medici and Florentine family ties, the author of course discusses social networks and how with different structures different information flows occur and he discusses various measures of how central people are in networks and how there are different ways to frame centrality which have different consequences for different phenomenon. After giving a flavor of the consequences of network architecture on relationship dynamics the author goes on to real world applications. He discusses bank runs and the financial connections of financial institutions during the euro sovereign crisis. The author discusses how neighborhoods can decay and thrive based on different community associations and that even if everyone wants diversity if each individual doesn't want to be a minority than communities become polarized by the dynamics leading to worse outcomes for everyone. The author argues that poverty traps can occur naturally through isolation in network dynamics. One very interesting application of network ideas is for the job market where the author gives the direct statistics on how job formation is due to both merit as well as through association and so the network connections have more influence on job prospects than credentials, thus leading to different feedback effects for different people. All of this solidifies what everyone already knows, who you know matters. But the benefit of making it concrete as to why is useful for framing how to create a more egalitarian system depends on understanding these dynamics. The author ends with globalization and how it is changing a variety of global networks; certainly these changes are at the heart of many of societies biggest concerns at the moment but the fact that the relationships can be abstracted to get insight is highly useful and likely very valuable when applied properly.The Human Network is a really readable overview of networks in society and the consequences of a given network architecture for the outputs of a network. The book is informative and illuminating and will give any reader a lot to think about. I have some familiarity with the authors textbook, but this is a great non-technical overview of the authors ideas that are made to be understandable to all.

This is a fascinating book. Professor Jackson skillfully distills key insights from a large collection of research into an entertaining and easy-to-read book that is accessible also to many people even outside academia. It helps to grasp an idea on the fundamental role that human networks play in a variety of social and economic phenomena, and to build an intuition concerning the mechanism through which the network structure can yield specific outcomes. Various detailed examples are presented in a broad range of contexts, from social influence to contagion, to social learning, and many more.I particularly enjoyed i) the discussion on homophily, ii) contrasting social learning and diffusions, iii) and implications of various types of centrality measures when examining different types of phenomena (e.g. forming norms versus influencing perceptions). The discussion on biases as a result of double-counting and echos is beneficial to any reader, especially given our increasingly connected (and polarized) world.The discussions lose focus sometimes, going into details of the topics which are only weakly linked to the main topic of the book (i.e. to human networks); nevertheless, those discussions have other interesting points that might be appealing to some readers.A fabulous book, highly recommended!

brought for my friend. He likes it very much

Ótimo livro!