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The Economy of Esteem

Geoffrey Brennan & Philip Pettit

Recommended by 1 person on the record.

The bar next to each date shows how long ago it was said: 6d is days, 4yr is years.

Kwame Anthony Appiah recommends it
This is a book by a philosopher and an economist about a topic that was neglected for a very long time in social analysis. So there's lots about it in the 18th century – Adam Smith and people like that – and it's about how esteem, which is their word for the respect that you give to people who have achieved things against a certain standard, can be used to motivate people to do good things.

on fivebooks.com · 21 Nov 2012

This book on rcmnd →

That little bar

It says how long ago something was said, so you can tell last month from 2014 without doing the arithmetic. Full and green is recent; it drains and cools as the date gets older, and empties completely at about 6 years.

A striped bar means the date itself is an estimate — the source did not carry an exact one. An entry with no date at all gets no bar.