The presence of security guards in a place is arguably a good indicator of this “negative social capital.” Guards are needed because a place otherwise lacks the norms of reciprocity that are needed to assure good order and behavior. The steady increase in the number of security guards and the number of places (apartments, dormitories, public buildings) to which access is secured by guards indicates the absence of trust.

The U.S. has the dubious distinction of employing a larger share of its workers as guards than other industrialized nations and there seems to be a correlation between national income inequality and guard labor.

A cursory look at history reveals that propaganda and disinformation are nothing new. In fact, humans have always lived in the age of post-truth. Homo sapiens is a post-truth species, who conquered this planet thanks above all to the unique human ability to create and spread fictions. We are the only mammals that can cooperate with numerous strangers because only we can invent fictional stories, spread them around, and convince millions of others to believe in them. As long as everybody believes in the same fictions, we all obey the same laws and can thereby cooperate effectively.

The truth is, truth has never been high on the agenda of Homo sapiens. If you stick to unalloyed reality, few people will follow you. False stories have an intrinsic advantage over the truth when it comes to uniting people. If you want to gauge group loyalty, requiring people to believe an absurdity is a far better test than asking them to believe the truth. If the chief says the sun rises in the west and sets in the east, only true loyalists will clap their hands. Similarly, if all your neighbors believe the same outrageous tale, you can count on them to stand together in times of crisis. If they are willing to believe only accredited facts, what does that prove?

Yet the difference between holy books and money is far smaller than it might seem. When most people see a dollar bill, they forget that it is just a human convention. As they see the green piece of paper with the picture of the dead white man, they see it as something valuable in and of itself. They hardly ever remind themselves, “Actually, this is a worthless piece of paper, but because other people view it as valuable, I can make use of it.” If you observed a human brain in an fMRI scanner, you would see that as someone is presented with a suitcase full of hundred-dollar bills, the parts of the brain that start buzzing with excitement are not the skeptical parts but the greedy parts. Conversely, in the vast majority of cases people begin to sanctify the Bible or the Vedas only after long and repeated exposure to others who view it as sacred. We learn to respect holy books in exactly the same way we learn to respect paper currency.

humans have a special capacity for perceiving and even anticipating natural phenomena and its patterns.

This innate sense has been largely forgotten, according to Gooley, because modern lifestyles demand we engage in mostly logical, deductive thinking, rather than using our intuition. Our ability to extract meaning from interrelated phenomena such as bird behavior, wind direction, plant growth, and sunlight has atrophied. By searching out these relationships and patterns in nature, Gooley writes, he has rediscovered a manner of experiencing the outdoors through intuition. With some practice, he assures us that we can, too.

Gooley describes the nature instinct as an awareness of the outdoors that allows him to observe and understand before conscious thought. He can sense direction from a tree or predict the behavior of animals, and only afterwards analyzes how he knew these things to be true. While he uses gut feeling or the sixth sense (a common but debunked theory of navigational aptitude in the 19th century and early 20th century), he settles instead on the term “fast thinking.”

Why do groups of humans sometimes exhibit collective wisdom and at other times madness? Can we reduce the risk of maladaptive herding and at the same time increase the possibility of collective wisdom?

Understanding this apparent conflict has been a longstanding problem in social science. The key to this puzzle could be the way that individuals use information from others versus information gained from their own trial-and-error problem solving. If people simply copy others without reference to their own experience, any idea – even a bad one – can spread. So how can social learning improve our decision making? Striking the right balance between copying others and relying on personal experience is key. Yet we still need to know exactly what the right balance is.

Our results suggest that we should be more aware of the risk of maladaptive herding when these conditions – large group size and a difficult problem – prevail. We should take account of not just the most popular opinion, but also other minority opinions. In thinking this way, the crowd can avoid maladaptive herding behaviour. This research could inform how collective intelligence is applied to real-world situations, including online shopping and prediction markets.

“I sometimes feel like a flying fish who has had the opportunity to take a ‘bird’s eye view’ of the water in which we swim, and is now trying to report back to its fellow fish and explain what it has learned about what we usually cannot see.”

“The real issue is not whether widespread changes will happen or not, but how much awareness there will be about where these changes are leading us. The real question is whether we are even conscious that we have a choice in the matter.”

“The urgent message for economics from nature is that the monoculture of national currencies, justified on the basis of market efficiency, generates structural instability in our global financial system. Complementary currencies of diverse types of money enable the economy to flow back towards greater sustainability. While this process clearly reduces efficiency, that is the price to pay for increased resilience of the whole.”

Tanzania alone sits on an estimated 2,222 metric tons of gold and boasts the third-highest reserves of the metal in Africa. But while the failure of these reserves to translate into wealth for ordinary people has led to populist moves – Tanzania’s President John Magufuli has demanded foreign mining firms pay higher taxes if they want to continue exporting — the problem may lie, in part, elsewhere. While women account for about 40 to 50 percent of Africa’s 8 million artisanal miners, their average income is significantly lower than that of their male counterparts, according to the African Center for Economic Transformation.

That has a spillover effect on communities. An established body of economic research, including by organizations like the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), has shown that economic empowerment of women translates into greater benefits for their families and communities than similar levels of earnings for men. That’s a phenomenon that groups working with gold miners in East Africa are witnessing also.

One problem is the price of the produce. Many of us have had the experience of turning up at our local farmers' market, armed with tote bags, only to slink back to the supermarket after seeing the prices of the vegetables on offer. This is hardly the fault of the individual farmers. Still, as Pilgeram points out in a paper that she published in 2011, the costs involved with running such an operation mean that the benefits are inevitably affordable only to a small (generally white and middle-class) portion of society.

But it's a limited victory, Pilgeram writes in her most recent paper, published in November of 2018, and empowers only a certain class of women "while leaving [the capitalist] system basically entirely unaffected"—and which also risks gentrifying the towns to which these farmers move, further entrenching the country's class divide.

"The economic system that we have in place makes it impossible, really, to create a socially just food system. It's not possible under capitalism," Pilgeram says. Without a drastic change to this system, sustainable agriculture risks becoming an "esoteric side note" to conventional agriculture, she adds—or simply another way for those with money to live healthier lives than those without.