From the oceans to continental heartlands, human activities have altered the physical characteristics of Earth's surface. With Earth's population projected to peak at 8 to 12 billion people by 2050 and the additional stress of climate change, it is more important than ever to understand how and where these changes are happening. Innovation in the geographical sciences has the potential to advance knowledge of place-based environmental change, sustainability, and the impacts of a rapidly changing economy and society. Understanding the Changing Planet outlines eleven strategic directions to focus research and leverage new technologies to harness the potential that the geographical sciences offer.

The current waves of migration sweeping the Chinese world may seem like new phenomena, the outcome of modernization and industrialization. However, this concise and readable book convincingly shows that contemporary movements are just the most recent stage in a long history of migration, both within China and beyond its borders. Distinguished historian Diana Lary traces the continuous expansion and contraction of the Chinese state over more than four millennia. Periods of expansion, which involved huge movements of people, have been interspersed with periods of inward-turning stasis. Following a chronological framework, the author discusses the migrations themselves and the recurrent themes within them. We see migration as a broad spectrum of movement, from short-term and short-range to permanent and long-range, and as a powerful vehicle for the transfer of commodities, culture, religion, and political influence. The Confucian tradition treated migration as undesirable. It praised the delights of staying at home: “A thousand days at home are good, half a day away is hard.” Lary argues that, despite this view, migration has been a key element in the evolution of Chinese society, one that the state disparages and encourages at the same time. Her book will be compelling for all readers who want to understand the context for the present internal and international migrations that have changed the face of China itself and its international relations.

In this book, one of our most innovative, popular thinkers, Steven Johnson, takes on one of life's key questions: where do good ideas come from?

With its wry portrayal of a shallow, materialistic 'leisure class' obsessed by clothes, cars, consumer goods and climbing the social ladder, this withering satire on modern capitalism is as pertinent today as when it was written over a century ago.

In Let Their People Come, Lant Pritchett discusses five "irresistible forces" of global labor migration, and the "immovable ideas" that form a political backlash against it. Increasing wage gaps, different demographic futures, "everything but labor" globalization, and the continued employment growth in low skilled, labor intensive industries all contribute to the forces compelling labor to migrate across national borders. Pritchett analyzes the fifth irresistible force of "ghosts and zombies," or the rapid and massive shifts in desired populations of countries, and says that this aspect has been neglected in the discussion of global labor mobility. Let Their People Come provides six policy recommendations for unskilled immigration policy that seek to reconcile the irresistible force of migration with the immovable ideas in rich countries that keep this force in check. In clear, accessible prose, this volume explores ways to regulate migration flows so that they are a benefit to both the global North and global South.

A landmark tour of the new science of "idea flow" outlines revolutionary insights into the mysteries of collective intelligence and social influence, explaining the virtually unlimited data sets of today's digital technologies and the considerable accuracy of information from social networks.

In What Money Can't Buy, renowned political philosopher Michael J. Sandel rethinks the role that markets and money should play in our society. Should we pay children to read books or to get good grades? Should we put a price on human life to decide how much pollution to allow? Is it ethical to pay people to test risky new drugs or to donate their organs? What about hiring mercenaries to fight our wars, outsourcing inmates to for-profit prisons, auctioning admission to elite universities, or selling citizenship to immigrants willing to pay? In his New York Times bestseller What Money Can't Buy, Michael J. Sandel takes up one of the biggest ethical questions of our time: Isn't there something wrong with a world in which everything is for sale? If so, how can we prevent market values from reaching into spheres of life where they don't belong? What are the moral limits of markets? Over recent decades, market values have crowded out nonmarket norms in almost every aspect of life. Without quite realizing it, Sandel argues, we have drifted from having a market economy to being a market society. In Justice, an international bestseller, Sandel showed himself to be a master at illuminating, with clarity and verve, the hard moral questions we confront in our everyday lives. Now, in What Money Can't Buy, he provokes a debate that's been missing in our market-driven age: What is the proper role of markets in a democratic society, and how can we protect the moral and civic goods that markets do not honor and money cannot buy?