RigWatch

A Nobel laureate's essential guide to courage in the age of disinformation. Maria Ressa's firsthand account of fighting authoritarianism in the Philippines offers practical wisdom on resisting manipulation and standing up for truth when it's dangerous to do so.

Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman's comprehensive guide to how our minds make decisions. Essential for understanding cognitive biases, why perverse incentives work, and how politicians manipulate voters. If you read one book on human psychology and decision-making, make it this one.

A deep dive into how complex systems emerge from simple rules. Hofstadter's exploration of strange loops and self-reference helps explain how political systems become self-perpetuating even when they're rigged. Dense but rewarding—this book changes how you see systems.

Hans Rosling teaches pattern recognition through data. Our intuitions about global trends are often completely wrong. This book provides frameworks for seeing the world as it actually is—not as our biases tell us it is. Essential companion to the Gapminder tools.

Charlie Munger's collection of mental models for better thinking. Incentive-caused bias, reciprocation tendency, social proof—the cognitive biases that explain why the rigging works. Munger's frameworks apply to investing, but they're even more powerful for understanding politics and power.

Barbara Ehrenreich goes undercover working minimum-wage jobs—waitress, house cleaner, Walmart employee. Her firsthand account reveals how the system is rigged at ground level. When working full-time doesn't cover rent and food, that's not personal failure—it's structural design.

Bateson's classic collection of essays on cybernetics, learning theory, and systems thinking. Dense but foundational. How do patterns connect across different levels of a system? How do we learn to learn? Essential for understanding how complex systems—including political ones—actually work.

Bateson's more accessible synthesis of his life's work. "The pattern which connects"—what do all living systems have in common? How do we recognize patterns across contexts? Perfect companion to Steps to an Ecology of Mind, and easier entry point for those new to systems thinking.

Medical anthropologist Paul Farmer reveals how structural violence—economic arrangements, political institutions, social policies—produces suffering. From Haiti to Russia, from tuberculosis to AIDS, Farmer shows how power determines who gets sick and who gets care. Essential for understanding how systemic inequality becomes biological reality.