A work by the Economist Thomas Sowell, originally published in 1980 by Basic Books, Inc. of New York and re-released by the same publisher in 1996 with a new preface by the author.
The major thrust of this work is to examine and explain how humans make decisions. It covers how people decide based upon inputs from Social Instutions such as the economy, politics, and society. The second section of the book is devoted to trends in society such as law, economics, and politics.
As a side note, this is a dry and difficult work at times, and it took me several weeks to really get into the meat of the text.