I just got an advance copy of Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive, the newest book by Bruce Schneier, which is due to be released on February 21.
The question the book tries to answer is: how does society function when you can't trust everyone?
Schneier’s magnum opus is Applied Cryptography, which gets into the details of the arcane aspects of encryption and cryptography.
This book takes a radically different approach. Rather than focusing on the minutia of bit-level encryption and cryptographic algorithms; the book focusing on how society thinks about trust.
Scheier notes that trust is an extremely broad topic, and that nothing in society works without trust. It's the foundation of communities, commerce, democracy; and basically everything.
While Applied Cryptography had hundreds of code fragments and equations, Liars and Outliers has none of them. Rather it is heavy on social theory, sociology, economics, public policy, biology and much more.
After reading the first 30 pages, this looks to be an incredibly fascinating and groundbreaking book.
Full review to follow.