Networks, Crowds, and Markets textbook
I thought some people might like to see a free textbook on networks. This is not a graph theory course; it covers an enormous breadth of topics including game theory, and it’s written in plain English with almost no mathematical technicality. There are a lot of examples related to the social sciences, frequently citing and summarizing specific studies, and this is the real value of the book, I think—it’s almost an overview of the field of “math applied to the social sciences.” Some of the examples are fascinating—for example, I now have the first convincing explanation I’ve yet seen for why WWI began.
Should be a fairly quick read; I’m up to Ch. 7 in a few hours this evening.
When people ask why WWI began, they’re usually asking why equally balanced alliances started fighting, not why such alliances came into being. If the triple alliance was happy to fight the triple entente in 1914, why didn’t it (or the three emperors’ league) attack an isolated France decades earlier? Maybe the fear of this possibility lead to the triple entente (that’s the common story, a bit less detailed than what the book says), but what after that?
In what chapter is the outbreak of world-war 1 treated?
I read some time ago The Origins of Major War by D. C. Copeland. He argues that WW1 broke out because Germany feared that due to Russia’s large size, and their at the time rapid industrialisation and economic growth, would become a strategic threat in the future. Therefore Germany better had to try a war to weaken them when Germany’s relative military strength was at its peak, which the German gouvernment estimated was at 1914. So, according to Copeland, the German attack on France (which they hoped to be a quick blietzkrieg as in 1871, although that failed) was primarily to clear their back for their main objective of attacking Russia.
Cool.
Ah, Jon Kleinberg, who could have been Google (he invented Hubs and Authorities ranking algorithm which compared well with PageRank at the time)