Cooperation and Coercion

How Busybodies Became Busybullies and What That Means for Economics and Politics

By: Antony Davies, James R. Harrigan

Narrated by: Pat Grimes

There are only two ways that humans work together: They cooperate with one another or they coerce one another. And once you realize this fundamental fact, it will change how you see the world.

In this myth-busting book, Antony Davies and James R. Harrigan display their wisdom and talent for explaining complex topics; these skills have attracted a devoted audience to their weekly podcast, Words & Numbers, and made them popular speakers around the country.

By looking for cooperation and coercion in everyday life, they help make sense of a wide range of issues that dominate the public debate. You'll come away from this book with a clear understanding of everything from the minimum wage to taxes, from gun control to government regulations, from the War on Terror to the War on Drugs to the War on Poverty.

It turns out that coercion is necessary...sometimes. Even in a democracy, we all abide by rules, including plenty that we don’t agree with, in the name of getting along.

But in the end, Davies and Harrigan show that cooperation, without question, is the key to human happiness and progress. The more we encourage it, the better off we all are.

©2020 Antony Davies and James R. Harrigan (P)2020 Dreamscape Media, LLC

Great book!

Nice dive into the perils of asking government to do everything for us, versus figuring out how to do things together.

A comprehensive and excellent explanation of the current climate

Davies and Harrigan provide reasoned and easily understandable explanations of today’s political and social climate.

Economics is about Human incentives.

This is a book explains that economics is about human behavior. Human behavior is directed by incentives either artificially created by the government or naturally created by cooperating with each other in the marketplace. It explains that an artificially created incentive often results in unintended consequences. The reason is that incentives that are created by the government come from people who have limited and/or flawed knowledge. Ultimately these incentives or disincentives come at the point of a gun from the government. Government action is always coercive.

Everyone needs to read this book

I highly recommend this book it needs to be read, listened, and understood. Share with everyone.

Sober and Thought Provoking Binary Classification

As a regular Words & Numbers listener, I was not disappointed in the least! While both Antony and James are excellent at appealing to the facts and figures to make their arguments, it would have been nice for there to have been a bit more of the indignation that James can pull off so well. It's no surprise then that chapter 9 on "Busybullies" was my favorite. Not only could you pick up on a certain level of disdain when reading that chapter, but was the one place where there was a discussion of the the kinds of people drawn to government whereas the rest of the book focused on how people adapted to various forms of coercion.

This appeals to those who are more libertarian in temperament while also not being completely satisfying to those who are anarchists, but I won't dock the book for not going into something that it wasn't meant to address. One topic that I really would've appreciated hearing their perspective on is schooling since the requirement to have a K-12 education is a form of coercion — especially since both authors are heavily involved with education broadly speaking.

Don't get me wrong, I still found this to be a very compelling read, and it's clearly a good recommendation for the uninitiated to get them thinking and perhaps more motivated to continue reading further going forwards. And honestly, this somewhat reminded me of Thomas Sowell's "A Conflict of Visions" since they both introduce a binary classification, explain it with some basic principles, and then illustrate how it manifests in a variety of facets of real life. Not only is the approach reminiscent of Sowell's work, but also the quality. Those familiar with Sowell's work will understand how strong an endorsement that is.

I really hope that we can see more publications out of this duo in the future!

Should be Required Reading

If everyone in the USA understood the concepts in this book, we could spend a LOT less time arguing.

The most underrated economic and political science book of our time.

Davies and Harrigan have created a book that should be required reading for highschoolers or college. Simply a great book.

Clear, Concise, and Informative

In addition to being virtually free of political bias, this book offers a tremendous amount of verifiable statistics and easy-to-understand examples of the benefits and downfalls of different balances of cooperative and coercive societies.

Rounds out the podcast

The arguments and topics will largely be familiar to the podcast listeners. I enjoyed this book; there were a few topics and statistics in here that were not in the podcast.

So good, I read it twice

I have been a listener of Words and Numbers for several years and this is just the next step for me. Highly recommended.