Michael Brownstein et al., "Somebody Should Do Something: How Anyone Can Help Create Social Change" (MIT Press, 2025)
About this episode
The episode discusses how individual choices can lead to structural social change, highlighting the importance of collective action.
A novel and scientific approach to creating transformative social change—and the surprising ways that each of us can help make a real difference. Changing the world is difficult. One reason is that the most important problems, like climate change, racism, and poverty, are structural. They emerge from our collective practices: laws, economies, history, culture, norms, and built environments. The dilemma is that there is no way to make structural change without individual people making different—more structure-facing—decisions. In Somebody Should Do Something: How Anyone Can Help Create Social Change (MIT Press, 2025) Michael Brownstein, Alex Madva, and Daniel Kelly show us how we can connect our personal choices to structural change and why individual choices matter, though not in the way people usually think. The authors paint a new picture of how social change happens, arguing that our most powerful personal choices are those that springboard us into working together with others—warehouse worker Chris Smalls’s unionization at Amazon is one powerful example. Taking inspiration from the writer Bill McKibben, they stress how one “important thing an individual can do is be somewhat…
People in this episode
Host: Marshall Poe
Guest: Michael Brownstein
Topics covered
- social change
- individual choices
- structural problems
- collective action
- climate change
- racism
- poverty
Keywords
- social change
- individual choices
- structural change
- climate change
- racism
- poverty
- collective action
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: MIT Press
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