Typically academic books and papers are the only places that really try to identify cause and effect at a level of abstraction that makes you think you understand. Be aware, of course, that neither they nor you can actually understand it—human behavior is complex enough that we can’t model individual choices very well, let alone the sum of billions of individual choices that add up to societal “phenomena” like wars and demographic shifts and stock market blips.
Typically academic books and papers are the only places that really try to identify cause and effect at a level of abstraction that makes you think you understand. Be aware, of course, that neither they nor you can actually understand it—human behavior is complex enough that we can’t model individual choices very well, let alone the sum of billions of individual choices that add up to societal “phenomena” like wars and demographic shifts and stock market blips.