This classic text provides a revised and updated survey of the social sciences, written in an unbiased manner with a multidisciplinary, common sense approach. The thirteenth edition highlights the dramatic political and economic changes that have swept the world in recent years, providing students and instructors with a starting point for lively classroom discussions and debate.
As with every edition, this text has been thoroughly updated. Some highlights of the new edition include:
- Chapter 1 has a new discussion of qualitative analysis and introduces the distinction between causation and correlation.
- Chapter 2 has an expanded discussion of scientific and religious views of evolution.
- Chapter 4 includes a new section on multiculturalism and the political debates over monoculturalism versus multiculturalism.
- Chapter 5 discusses the conservation movement, the price of gasoline, and the global economics of oil production.
- Chapter 6 has a section on technologies used to fight crime and technology-based crime such as identity theft.
- Chapter 7 distinguishes the psychoanalytic and cognitive approaches to understanding behavior.
- Chapter 8 includes both secular and religious histories of marriage.
- Chapter 10 discusses the GED and high school dropouts.
- Chapter 11’s section on social mobility has been rewritten and expanded.
- Chapter 13 has a new discussion of Republicans, Democrats, and political ideology.
- Chapter 14, Governments of the World, includes the Nigerian government to achieve better geographic distribution.
- Chapters 16 and 19 have new material on globalization and the world economy.
- Chapter 17 covers patents, copyrights, and intellectual property rights.
- Chapters 18, 19, and 20, the political science and economics chapters, contain updated examples, discussions of fast-changing foreign policy issues, and the evolving war on terror.
David Colander is the Christian A Johnson Distinguished Professor of Economics at Middlebury College. He has also been the Kelly Professor of Distinguished Teaching at Princeton University. He has authored, co-authored, or edited over 40 books and 150 articles on a wide range of topics, including a popular principles of economics text and a history of economic thought text. Elgin Hunt is deceased. He was one of the early authors of this book when it began in the 1930s, and took over as sole author in the 1950s. He continued revising the book until the late 1960s when David Colander took over.