Group items tagged

We constantly use economic metaphors to describe romantic and sexual relations. Few people today refer to women as “damaged goods” or wonder why a man would “buy the cow when he can get the milk for free,” but we have “friends with benefits” and “invest in relationships.” An ex may be “on” or “off the market.” Online dating makes “shopping around” explicit. Blog after blog strategizes about how to maximize your “return on investment” on OkCupid.

he ways that people date — who contacts whom, where they meet and what happens next — have always been tied to the economy. Dating applies the logic of capitalism to courtship. On the dating market, everyone competes for him or herself.

If you want to understand why “Netflix and chill” has replaced dinner and a movie, you need to look at how people work.

That’s because absolute performance on IQ tests—the actual number of questions people get right—has greatly improved over the last 100 years. It’s called the Flynn effect, after James Flynn, a social scientist at New Zealand’s University of Otago who first noticed it in the 1980s.

They found that the Flynn effect is real—and large. The absolute scores consistently improved for children and adults, for developed and developing countries. People scored about three points more every decade, so the average score is 30 points higher than it was 100 years ago.

The pace jumped in the 1920s and slowed down during World War II. The scores shot up again in the postwar boom and then slowed down again in the ’70s. They’re still rising, but even more slowly. Adult scores climbed more than children’s.

Some questions you ask because you want the right answer. Others are valuable because no answer is right; the payoff comes from the range of attempts.

That is the diversity of views about the types of historical breakthroughs that matter, with a striking consensus on whether the long trail of innovation recorded here is now nearing its end.

The clearest example of consensus was the first item on the final compilation, the printing press

using business profits to increase productivity and output — doesn’t actually drive economic growth. Consumer debt and government spending do. Private investment isn’t even necessary to promote growth.

Economists will tell you that private business investment causes growth because it pays for the new plant or equipment that creates jobs, improves labor productivity and increases workers’ incomes. As a result, you’ll hear politicians insisting that more incentives for private investors — lower taxes on corporate profits — will lead to faster and better-balanced growth.

But history shows that this is wrong.

No well-tested scientific concept is more astonishing than the one that gives its name to a new book by the Scientific American contributing editor George Musser, “Spooky Action at a Distance

The ostensible subject is the mechanics of quantum entanglement; the actual subject is the entanglement of its observers.

his question isn’t so much how this weird thing can be true as why, given that this weird thing had been known about for so long, so many scientists were so reluctant to confront it. What keeps a scientific truth from spreading?

Although there are plenty of grounds for rage against the big banks, the challenge is to sort out which are the activities that grow the real economy of goods and services, and which are the activities that are essentially a zero-sum game of socially useless gambling?

The situation today is that the zero-sum games of the financial sector aren’t just a tiny sideshow. They have grown exponentially and have become almost the main game of the financial sector.

When finance becomes the end, not the means, then the result is what analyst Gautam Mukunda calls “excessive financialization” of the economy, as his excellent article by “The Price of Wall Street Power” in the June 2014 issue of Harvard Business Review makes clear.

The distribution of income lies at the heart of an enduring issue in political economy—the extent to which government should redistribute income from those with more income to those with less.

The term “income distribution” is a statistical concept. No one person is distributing income. Rather, the income distribution arises from people’s decisions about work, saving, and investment as they interact through markets and are affected by the tax system.

In the longer view, the path of income inequality over the twentieth century is marked by two main events: a sharp fall in inequality around the outbreak of World War II and an extended rise in inequality that began in the mid-1970s and accelerated in the 1980s. Income inequality today is about as large as it was in the 1920s.

Of the answers that have been proposed, Popper’s own criterion—falsifiability—remains the most commonly invoked, despite serious criticism from both philosophers and scientists. These attacks fatally weakened Popper’s proposal, yet its persistence over a century of debates helps to illustrate the challenge of demarcation—a problem no less central today than it was when Popper broached it

pper’s answer emerged. Popper was born just after the turn of the twentieth century in Vienna—the birthplace of psychoanalysis—and received his doctorate in psychology in 1928. In the early 1920s Popper volunteered in the clinics of Alfred Adler, who had split with his former mentor, the creator of psychoanalysis: Sigmund Freud. Precocious interest in psychoanalysis, and his subsequent rejection of it, were crucial in Popper’s later formulation of his philosophical views on science.

At first, Popper was quite taken with logical empiricism, but he would diverge from the mainstream of the movement and develop his own framework for understanding scientific thought in his two influential books The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934, revised and translated to English in 1959) and Conjectures and Refutations (1962). Popper claimed to have formulated his initial ideas about demarcation in 1919, when he was seventeen years old. He had, he writes, “wished to distinguish between science and pseudo-science; knowing very well that science often errs, and that pseudoscience may happen to stumble on the truth.”

Nicole Berg's stunted wheat field is so short and sparse she doesn't think the combine can even reach the wheat without, as she puts it, eating rocks.

Northwest farmers like Berg, and ranchers who depend on rain, are expecting what one farmer called a "somber harvest" this year.

Little moisture since February in wide swaths of the region is to blame. And drought is deepening across the West, with federal drought maps showing massive and growing areas of red.

What’s startling is how many mystery infections still exist today.

More than a third of acute respiratory illnesses are idiopathic; the same is true for up to 40 percent of gastrointestinal disorders and more than half the cases of encephalitis (swelling of the brain).

Up to 20 percent of cancers and a substantial portion of autoimmune diseases, including multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis, are thought to have viral triggers, but a vast majority of those have yet to be identified.

History has a tendency to repeat itself. As memory fades, events from the past can become events of the present.

this is due to the cyclical nature of history — history repeats itself and flows based on the generations

According to them, four generations are needed to cycle through before similar events begin to occur, which would put the coming of age of the millennial generation in parallel to the events of the early 20th century.

My first 18 months of military service were uninspiring. Donning the uniform did not fill me with pride, nor did the experience alter my perspective on life. What basic training had taught me was that the best way to get by was to stay out of sight.

Accordingly, my detachment expanded its mission: all males—soldiers and others of military serviceable age, no matter where encountered or whether in uniform—were to be taken prisoner unless they had persuasive evidence of either having been exempted or discharged from military service. Anyone without such proof was considered a potential guerilla. A sweep of the countryside would yield scores of German “civilians,” among them soldiers who had simply shed their uniform or party activists suspected of organizing a resistance usually with cover stories that I had to break. Not only did I become very adept at this task, but it also gave me some great insights into postwar German mentalities—insights that would later inspire me to revisit my views on higher education.

Wilke and his family had emigrated from Germany in the early 1920s, and he still spoke German with a genuine Saxon dialect.

How do scammers use language to trick their victims?

Researchers often have pondered the psychology of how and why certain people fall for scams, especially ones that appear to be so obvious to others. Scammers target certain human traits, including vulnerabilities that can be easily exploited, such as naiveté, overconfidence in one’s intelligence or abilities, an overly optimistic expectation of immediate success in life, or a desire to feel good about helping others. As communication on the internet has gotten more sophisticated, so have the scams. Many still fall for it, as con artists continue to target businesses as well as individuals.

Nigerian 419 cons (the number refers to the fraud section of the Nigerian Criminal Code) are practically the oldest scams on the internet. They can actually be traced back to the 1920s, in the form of a confidence trick most gothically known as the Spanish Prisoner. The victims are asked to pay out more and more money to release the wealthy relative of your respectable foreign correspondents (who naturally doesn’t exist), cruelly imprisoned in Spain, in return for a large reward (that never comes).

Cassirer was responding to the same crisis that animated the other three of Eilenberger’s magicians — a sense that the old ways of philosophizing had failed to keep up with the reality of lived experience.

Eilenberger quotes Max Scheler, another German philosopher, who put it this way: “Ours is the first period when man has become completely and totally problematical to himself, when he no longer knows what he is, but at the same time knows that he knows nothing.”

Language was implicated in this plight, and the responses among the figures in this book were varied and often strange