In Print: Faculty Books

How To Disagree Better

Julia Minson, Professor of Public Policy

The average person has over six “memorable disagreements” each week. Then, they spend nearly four hours in total ruminating on or regretting them. 

In her new book, How to Disagree Better, Professor Julia Minson doesn’t promise to help readers avoid disagreement. Rather, she helps them move from tense and desperate arguments to productive conversations where all parties feel heard. In order to move forward—and truly influence others—we need to show that we’re receptive to their ideas, Minson argues. This receptivity is a skill, and it’s one we can build with practice. 

So how do we do it? Minson pulls together decades of research to guide readers through how they can “disagree better.” She offers concrete steps for healthier disagreement, backed up by data and illustrated by anecdotes from her own life. This book is both a deep dive into fascinating behavioral science and a “how-to” manual for hard conversations: each chapter concludes with key tips and takeaways for managing negotiations.

Minson hopes How to Disagree Better will serve both individual readers and our society at large. 

“I wanted to help people achieve their goals faster and with fewer missteps,” she writes in the book’s conclusion. And individual change can have collective impact. Given the United States’ polarized political climate, she writes, “Our ability to debate issues honestly and receptively is literally a matter of life and death that will determine our ability to survive climate change, the next pandemic, and the next election.”

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The Happiness Files: Insights on Work and Life

Arthur Brooks, Parker Gilbert Montgomery Professor of the Practice of Public Leadership

Arthur Brooks teaches happiness—using lessons from neuroscience, social psychology, and behavioral economics—at Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Business School. 

The Happiness Files: Insights on Work and Life is his latest book on the topic, a compilation of essays he published in a weekly column in The Atlantic, “How to Build a Life.” These essays, in turn, were inspired by a Harvard Business Review volume, On Managing Yourself, which, Brooks says, reflects his “start-up life approach.” In his introduction to the book, he explains that taking an entrepreneurial approach to life, grounded in understanding happiness and fulfillment, can be deeply rewarding. “Your life is the most important task you will ever undertake,” he writes. The Happiness Files is organized around five pillars: managing yourself, building your career, communicating and connecting with others, keeping a work-life balance, and crafting the right professional goals. Each essay includes both the science behind the idea Brooks discusses as well as practical applications for how the reader can use it in real life. Even more, he advises sharing these ideas. “Once you learn the concepts in this book, practice them, and upon deciding which ones you find most beneficial personally, teach them to others,” Brooks writes. “The world will be better with happier leaders and professionals in it, and you can be one of them, and, as a teacher, you can help create that world.”

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Shared Prosperity in a Fractured World: A New Economics for the Middle Class, the Global Poor, and Our Climate

Dani Rodrik, Ford Foundation Professor of International Political Economy

Economist Dani Rodrik was one of the earliest and most prominent economists to question globalization in his 1997 book Has Globalization Gone Too Far? In his latest book, he continues to explore what economic frameworks might best serve the world. Rodrik examines three key issues of our time in Shared Prosperity in a Fractured World. “We want to live in societies that are free, a world without poverty, and a climate that is hospitable. We want, in brief, democracy, prosperity, and sustainability,” he writes. But challenges abound. With geopolitics shaped by U.S.-China rivalry and a rapidly shifting global economy, it is not an easy task to achieve these aims— and pursuing one may come at the expense of others. 

“Democracy, prosperity, and sustainability are vast subjects, each with enormous bodies of literature of their own,” Rodrik writes. “Each requires a critical ingredient, with implications and spillovers for the other two. Healthy democracies require a strong middle class. Poverty eradication requires rapid, inclusive economic growth in low-income countries. And environmental sustainability requires greening our economies to slow down and ultimately stop climate change. We need a policy agenda that spans all three arenas.” 

Rodrik lays out a policy framework that he calls “productivism”—an updated form of industrial policy—to address these three interrelated areas. He argues that thoughtful approaches in one area can reinforce another and help policymakers avoid cruel tradeoffs. For example, the green energy transition tackles climate change but also can be a pathway to a stronger middle class and potentially reduce poverty. 

Ultimately, to meet our current global challenge, Rodrik writes, “we need to depart from established ways of thinking and consider new approaches. We must do things differently, relying often on unconventional remedies.”

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Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship

Bruce Schneier, adjunct lecturer in public policy, and Nathan E. Sanders

Technologist Bruce Schneier and data scientist Nathan Sanders examine how artificial intelligence could affect democracy in Rewiring Democracy. AI, the authors explain, has the potential to affect legislation, advocacy, campaigning, public administration, and other democratic processes. It can sway opinion through sophisticated deepfakes or spread information. “If laws permit it, AI will be capable of lobbying a legislator, filing a lawsuit, or casting a vote,” Schneier and Sanders write. 

“All our experiences of the twenty-first century will be, in no small part, a battle over how to rewire democracy using AI,” they argue. “Entrenched elected officials, political movements with authoritarian tendencies, and the billionaire class all regard AI as a tool to consolidate and centralize power. But the rest of us, the public, can harness it as a tool to distribute power instead.” The authors examine three major risks AI poses to democracy: exacerbating injustice, being untrustworthy, and concentrating power.

To counter these risks, they propose reforming AI. “Democracy can be made better with AI, for all its risks and limitations, if we do four things: implement reforms to distribute control of AI and steer its ecosystem in pro-democratic directions, resist inappropriate and autocratic uses of technology, leverage AI in responsible ways where it’s fit for purpose throughout government, and renovate our democratic systems in ways responsive to the threats and challenges of AI,” Sanders and Schneier write. “Whether AI results in more and better democracy, or less and worse, is up to us.”

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Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality

Danielle Allen, James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University

First published in 2014, Danielle Allen’s Our Declaration has been reissued with a new foreword this year to mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Our Declaration shares Allen’s personal story about teaching this foundational American document along with an account of the colonial world in which it was written and the philosophy that it expresses. “The purpose of this account will not be to retell a well-known tale but rather to discover, through that tale, the birth of the Declaration, the art of democratic writing,” Allen explains. “Democracies are built out of language. To succeed as citizens, we need to understand this fundamental political fact.” 

Allen’s primary argument is that the Declaration of Independence is not simply about the concept of individual liberty but also about political equality, and that these two notions are interrelated. “Ideally, if political equality exists, citizens become co-creators of their shared world,” Allen writes. “Freedom from domination and the opportunity for co-creation maximize the space available for individual and collective flourishing.”