Critical Mass. How One Thing Leads to Another

According to Donne, no man is an island, but how exactly are we affected by the behaviour of others? Are there laws of nature that guide human affairs? Have we complete freedom in creating our societies, or are we trapped by human nature? And how, in human affairs, does one thing lead to another? Ranging from Hobbes and Adam Smith to modern work on traffic flow and market trading, and across economics, sociology and psychology, Phillip Bail shows how much we can understand of human behaviour when we cease to try to predict and analyse the actions of individuals and look to the impact of hundreds, thousands or millions of individual human decisions