The best social science books to explain how people shape, and are shaped by, their communities

Between 1954 and 1981, when this book was written, the number of cities in L.A. County nearly doubled from 45 to 81. Many of these new cities contracted with the county for their basic public services, and were consequently able to maintain low property tax rates. Homeowners "voted with their feet" by moving to these new cities, and previously middle-class places like Compton saw their tax bases plummet while their need for public services skyrocketed. As a native Angeleno, I found Miller's account of the fragmentation of Los Angeles fascinating and devastating.  A gem of a chapter entitled "Is the Invisible Hand Biased?" presents a withering critique of the argument—standard in economic theory—that more choices make people better off.

Math modeling in the social sciences starts with assumptions—what people want, what they can do— and deduces the consequences of those assumptions. In this classic, Schelling develops simple models showing that people making the best choices for themselves on a small scale can lead to large-scale, unintended social outcomes bearing no relationship to what people wanted. A provocative chapter entitled "Sorting and Mixing: Race and Sex" shows that a small desire to live near others of one's race leads to near-total racial segregation. Schelling won the Nobel Prize in 2005, and I was lucky to have attended one of his lectures shortly afterward. One of my favorite lines from this book: "If your problem is that there is too much traffic, you are part of the problem."

In 2004, sociologists Elizabeth Armstrong and Laura Hamilton set up camp in a dorm at Indiana University with the aim of writing an ethnography of the girls on the floor. They tracked the girls for five years, documenting their education, social lives, and post-college outcomes. As the product of a flagship state university myself, this book floored me. Armstrong and Hamilton document a process whereby administrators attract wealthy full-tuition students by subsidizing Greek life and creating legitimate-sounding but low-value majors. Far from being an equalizer, the rich leave university employed and debt-free, while the poor leave with staggering debt and few job prospects. For those of us in higher ed, this book articulates the discomfort many of us have felt in recent decades as universities have become increasingly consumer-oriented.

Much of what we do in the social sciences requires articulating what it is that people want. What do people find beautiful, valuable, and correct? A cultural anthropologist, Shweder details the remarkable differences in how humans make meaning of their lives, and the different conceptions of morality, modesty, and normality found in different cultures. The book's most provocative chapter, "What About Female Genital Mutilation?," can be read as a qualified defense of the practice, arguing that using state coercion to enforce our own Western conceptions of correctness can constitute a form of liberal imperialism. Regardless of whether you find Shweder's case for FGM persuasive, the argument that tolerance requires seriously engaging with beliefs that may be alien and distressing is particularly welcome in these divided times.

Given the above books, one might ask: Can free markets and unchecked self-interest ever work for the social good? Leeson offers an answer in the affirmative: Yes! For pirates! This delightful and readable book applies Adam Smith's metaphor of the invisible hand to pirate life at the turn of the 18th century, arguing that purely profit-seeking motives led pirates to adopt norms of cooperation, democratic governance, and (sometimes) racial equality. Recent events like the subprime mortgage crisis led many to argue that our government's failure to check risky profit-seeking behavior led to market collapse. This book provides an interesting complement to that claim, arguing that it was precisely the criminality of the pirate enterprise that drove democracy on the high seas.