Link: Amazon, Goodreads. Price: £10.99

The blurb purports that the book will help us understand a science of society that enables us to predict and analyse human behaviour by looking at the impact of decisions taken in large groups. Or something like that – it isn’t terribly clear. The interior is concerned with the discipline of econophysics – applying statistical physics to economics to understand how individual behaviours emerge in group outcomes, from traffic and the stock exchange to the ways in which people try to escape a burning building. Economics has striven to become more scientific for decades: in this book Ball demonstrates how that can be achieved.

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