Broken: How Our Social Systems are Failing Us and How We Can Fix Them

Summary

Many of the systems built to serve people instead do more harm than good.

In Broken, Dr. Paul LeBlanc, president of Southern New Hampshire University, draws on his experience working in one such system—education—to reconnect us to the human facets of serving people. In doing so, he charts a course for rebuilding and reinhabiting better systems across education, healthcare, criminal justice, government, and more.

The United States spends enormous sums on helping people—$3.8 trillion on healthcare, $182 billion on prisons, and $604 billion on higher education—and yet these systems routinely fail us.

When we seek to improve how they function, our efforts focus on policy debates, technical solutions, funding, and data. But if these systems are to truly improve, we have to start with the human values that fuel decision making.

Broken explores the deeply human dimensions we must consider—aspiring, discovering, mattering—if we want to rebuild the policies, technologies, processes, and, most importantly, the heart we use to serve people.