The Spirit Level — Richard Wilkinson & Kate Pickett
Why more equal societies almost always do better. The data that changed the governance conversation.
Exit, Voice, and Loyalty — Albert Hirschman
Hirschman's classic on the three things you can do when an organisation, a firm, or a state is declining — leave, complain, or stay loyal — and how each strategy interacts with the others. The intellectual scaffolding underneath the entire network-state thesis.
Governing the Commons — Elinor Ostrom
Ostrom won the Nobel for showing — empirically, across decades of fieldwork — that communities can manage shared resources without either privatisation or central control. The basis for every serious modern conversation about coordination at scale.
Kate Pickett
Epidemiologist at the University of York who, with Richard Wilkinson, published The Spirit Level in 2009 — a sweeping analysis showing that more-equal societies do better on nearly every health and social outcome, regardless of average wealth.
Richard Wilkinson
Emeritus professor of social epidemiology at Nottingham who, with Kate Pickett, co-founded The Equality Trust in 2009. The Spirit Level made the most rigorous case to date that inequality itself — not poverty — drives the bulk of social dysfunction.
Democracy Earth
Open-source liquid democracy for DAOs and communities. Governance as a public good.
Participatory Budgeting Project
Giving communities real power over public money. The most direct form of democratic participation.
