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Eventually I realised that actions that are individually non-coercive can add up to stable patterns of behaviour that are systematically or structurally coercive, depriving some individuals of their rightful liberty. In fact, rights-violating structures or patterns of behaviour are excellent examples of Hayekian spontaneous orders—of phenomena that are the product of human action, but not of human design. This shift has led me to see racism and sexism themselves as threats to liberty. Racism and sexism have come to matter more to me in that I have come to see them in terms of the political value that matters most to me: liberty. And so I have become much more sympathetic to policies that would limit individual liberty in order to suppress patterns or norms of behaviour that might pose an even greater threat to freedom. So I've become fairly friendly toward federal anti-discrimination law, affirmative action, Title 9, the works. I have found that this sympathy, together with my belief in the theoretical possibility and historical reality of structural coercion, releases me almost entirely from the liberal suspicion that I'm soft on racism (even if I do wish to voucherise Medicare).

this shift in conviction has almost nothing at all to do with a shift in attitude toward any group of people. I say "almost" because it has required that I come to see victims of structural coercion as real victims, really wronged, and thus to see the demand for reform and redress as both legitimate and urgently necessary. And this makes no small difference in one's relationship to those who see it the same way.

"As culture changes, it affects our brains, and as our brains change, that affects our culture. You can't separate the two," Berns says. "We now have the means to start understanding this relationship, and that's putting the relatively new field of cultural neuroscience onto the global stage." Future conflicts over politics and religion will likely play out biologically, Berns says. Some cultures will choose to change their biology, and in the process, change their culture, he notes. He cites the battles over women's reproductive rights and gay marriage as ongoing examples.

But Obama’s early opposition to the Iraq war gave him a political firewall that protected him throughout that primary campaign, while Romney has no such policy safe harbor to safeguard him from an intramural backlash.

Romney and Obama share a lack of natural affinity for this key group of swing voters, but it is Romney who needs to figure out some way of addressing this shortcoming if he wants to make it to the White House. It’s Romney’s misfortune that the voters’ prioritization of economic issues, his own privileged upbringing and his lack of connection with his party’s base on other core issues put him in a much more precarious position than candidate Obama ever reached.

By the time the 2008 general election rolled around, Obama had bolstered his outreach to these voters by recruiting the blue-collar avatar Joe Biden as his running mate. Should Romney win the Republican nomination this year, his advisers will almost certainly be tempted by the working-class credentials that a proletarian like New Jersey Governor Chris Christie or Florida Senator Marco Rubio would bring to the ticket.

Of more immediate concern to Team Romney should be how their candidate can overcome his habit of economic tone-deafness before Rick Santorum steals away enough working-class and culturally conservative voters to throw the Republican primary into complete and utter turmoil.

The curious thing about Romney’s verbal missteps is how limited they are to this very specific area of public policy. He is usually quite articulate when talking about foreign affairs and national security. Despite his complicated history on social and cultural matters like health care and abortion, his explanations are usually both coherent and comprehensible, even to those who oppose his positions. It’s only when he begins talking about economic issues – his biographical strength – that he seems to get clumsy.

The second possibility would be for him to outline a series of proposals specifically targeted at the needs of working-class and poor Americans, not only to control the damage from his gaffes but also to underscore the conservative premise that a right-leaning agenda will create opportunities for those on the lower rungs of the economic ladder. But while that approach might help Romney in a broader philosophical conversation, it’s unlikely to offer him much protection from the attacks and ridicule that his unforced errors will continue to bring him.

The question is why Romney hasn’t embraced a third alternative – admitting the obvious and then explaining why he gets so tongue-tied when the conversation turns to money. Romney’s upbringing and religious faith suggest a sense of obligation to the less fortunate and an unspoken understanding that it isn’t appropriate to call attention to one’s financial success.It wouldn’t be that hard for him to say something like:I was taught not to brag and boast and think I’m better than other people because of the successes I’ve had, so occasionally I’m going to say things that sound awkward. It’s because I’d rather talk about what it takes to get America back to work.

Romney had sketched out an economic plan that avoided the supply-side gimmicks and outright crankery embraced by many of his rivals. He had backed the smartest conservative thinking on entitlements and was rewarded with bipartisan cover when Oregon Democratic Senator Ron Wyden endorsed a similar model for Medicare reform.

But the frontrunner did lose something in the days leading up to the Michigan vote. He lost his general election narrative.

But then came the South Carolina primary, and Romney’s fumbling, tone-deaf responses to Newt Gingrich’s attacks on his career at Bain Capital. His awkwardness didn’t have direct policy implications, but it revealed a surprising inability to defend his own chosen electoral narrative against fairly obvious attacks. And with the businessman-turnaround artist narrative compromised, it became much easier for Romney’s rivals to turn the focus to his moderate past and long list of flip-flops.

It was to change this dynamic, presumably, that Romney’s campaign decided to have him come out for the first time with a big tax reform plan of his own, which he unveiled last week in a speech at Ford Field. In its broadest strokes, the plan isn’t terrible: It promises lower rates and a broader base, which is the goal of just about every sensible tax reform proposal, and it cuts rates for most taxpayers, not just businesses and the rich. But the Romney campaign has declined to explain exactly how the cuts will be paid for, offering vague promises of loophole closing and spending cuts that suggest a return to supply-side irresponsibility.

If left unrevised and unaddressed, this irresponsibility threatens to demolish the pillars of Romney’s general-election argument. First, it will make it considerably harder for him to attack the White House’s record on deficits, which would otherwise be a central part of the case against the president. Second, it will make Romney’s own vision for entitlement reform easy to demagogue and dismiss, since President Obama will have grounds to argue that his opponent only wants to cut Medicare and Social Security in order to cut taxes on the rich.

Both of these problems, needless to say, will be exacerbated if Romney continues to be unable to talk about his wealth in anything save the most clueless and flatfooted fashion. The White House might prefer to face Rick Santorum in the general election, but an out-of-touch rich guy running on Medicare cuts and an ill-considered tax plan will make for a pretty inviting target in his own right.

I fear we’re facing a crisis in which a chunk of working-class America risks being calcified into an underclass, marked by drugs, despair, family decline, high incarceration rates and a diminishing role of jobs and education as escalators of upward mobility. We need a national conversation about these dimensions of poverty, and maybe Murray can help trigger it. I fear that liberals are too quick to think of inequality as basically about taxes. Yes, our tax system is a disgrace, but poverty is so much deeper and more complex than that.

to blame liberal social policies for the pathologies he examines. Yes, I’ve seen disability programs encourage some people to drop out of the labor force. But there were far greater forces at work, such as the decline in good union jobs.

Eighty percent of the people in my high school cohort dropped out or didn’t pursue college because it used to be possible to earn a solid living at the steel mill, the glove factory or sawmill. That’s what their parents had done. But the glove factory closed, working-class jobs collapsed and unskilled laborers found themselves competing with immigrants. There aren’t ideal solutions, but some evidence suggests that we need more social policy, not less. Early childhood education can support kids being raised by struggling single parents. Treating drug offenders is far cheaper than incarcerating them. A new study finds that a jobs program for newly released prison inmates left them 22 percent less likely to be convicted of another crime. This initiative, by the Center for Employment Opportunities, more than paid for itself: each $1 brought up to $3.85 in benefits.

“In the Internet era,” said Andreas Weigend, a physicist and former chief scientist at Amazon, “research has moved out of the universities to the Googles, Amazons and Facebooks of the world.”

A recent review found that 44 of 50 leading scientific journals instructed their authors on sharing data but that fewer than 30 percent of the papers they published fully adhered to the instructions. A 2008 review of sharing requirements for genetics data found that 40 of 70 journals surveyed had policies, and that 17 of those were “weak.”

here is a truth with which I hope we can all agree. Our subjective system of cognition can be dangerous. It can produce perceptions that conflict with the evidence, what I call The Perception Gap, which can in turn produce profound harm.

The Perception Gap can lead to disagreements that create destructive and violent social conflict, to dangerous personal choices that feel safe but aren’t, and to policies more consistent with how we feel than what is in fact in our best interest. The Perception Gap may in fact be potentially more dangerous than any individual risk we face.

We need to recognize the greater threat that our subjective system of cognition can pose, and in the name of our own safety and the welfare of the society on which we depend, do our very best to rise above it or, when we can’t, account for this very real danger in the policies we adopt.

we have an obligation to confront our own ideological priors. We have an obligation to challenge ourselves, to push ourselves, to be suspicious of conclusions that are too convenient, to be sure that we're getting it right.

subjective cognition is built-in, subconscious, beyond free will, and unavoidably leads to different interpretations of the same facts.

Views that have more to do with competing tribal biases than objective interpretations of the evidence create destructive and violent conflict.

The social welfare system is the modern system for redistributing resources,”

early man regularly experienced hunger, and when times were especially lean, he had to convince other group members to share their bounty.

 foundations of social welfare attitudes in an unusual place: among our hunter-gatherer ancestors

To the authors, this indicated that the hungrier subjects were, essentially, bigger fans of sharing society’s resources, and they wanted to remind others about the importance of redistribution.

That is, the hungrier people liked the idea of encouraging others to share, but they didn’t actually want to be the ones doing the sharing

ast studies from the same authors have also shown that people who are in a physically weaker situation tend to support wealth redistribution. Voters were more likely to be supportive of welfare policies if they were asked before lunchtime, as opposed to after, for example. Among rich men, those with smaller biceps were more likely to be open to wealth redistribution. (The opposite was true for poor men).

Granted, these studies were small, and they were performed in Denmark, which already has a more generous social welfare net that the U.S. does, so they can’t be applied directly.

Early in his career, Professor Thaler created a list of observed behaviors that were obviously inconsistent with the predictions of established orthodoxy.

“Misbehaving” charts Mr. Thaler’s journey to document these anomalies in the face of economists’ increasingly desperate, and sometimes comical, efforts to deny their existence or relevance

As these tools have been applied to practical problems, Professor Thaler has noted that there has been “very little actual economics involved.” Instead, the resulting insights have “come primarily from psychology and the other social sciences.”

To the extent that economists fought the integration of behavioral insights into economic analyses, it seems that their fears were founded. Rather than making the resulting work less rigorous, however, it simply made its economic underpinnings less relevant. Professor Thaler argues that it is actually “a slur on those other social sciences if people insist on calling any policy-related research some kind of economics.”

by trying to set itself as somehow above other social sciences, the “rationalist” school of economics actually ended up contributing far less than it could have. The group’s intellectual denial led to not just sloppy social science, but sloppy philosophy.

Economists would do well to embrace both their philosophical and social science roots. No amount of number-crunching can replace the need to confront the complexity of human existence.

It is not only in academics that the most difficult questions are avoided behind a mathematical smoke screen. When businesses use cost-benefit analysis, for instance, they are applying a moral philosophy known as utilitarianism, popularized by John Stuart Mill in the 19th century.

Mill has relatively few contemporary adherents in professional philosophical circles. But utilitarianism does have the virtue of lending itself to mathematical calculation. By giving the contentious philosophy a benign bureaucratic name like “cost-benefit analysis,” corporations hope to circumvent the need to confront the profound ethical issues implicated.

What nonsense am I talking about? Simon Wren-Lewis of the University of Oxford, who has been a tireless but lonely crusader for economic sense, calls it “mediamacro.” It’s a story about Britain that runs like this: First, the Labour government that ruled Britain until 2010 was wildly irresponsible, spending far beyond its means. Second, this fiscal profligacy caused the economic crisis of 2008-2009. Third, this in turn left the coalition that took power in 2010 with no choice except to impose austerity policies despite the depressed state of the economy. Finally, Britain’s return to economic growth in 2013 vindicated austerity and proved its critics wrong.

every piece of this story is demonstrably, ludicrously wrong

Yet this nonsense narrative completely dominates news reporting, where it is treated as a fact rather than a hypothesis. And Labour hasn’t tried to push back, probably because they considered this a political fight they couldn’t win. But why?

Mr. Wren-Lewis suggests that it has a lot to do with the power of misleading analogies between governments and households, and also with the malign influence of economists working for the financial industry, who in Britain as in America constantly peddle scare stories about deficits and pay no price for being consistently wrong. If U.S. experience is any guide, my guess is that Britain also suffers from the desire of public figures to sound serious, a pose which they associate with stern talk about the need to make hard choices (at other people’s expense, of course.)

The fact is that Britain and America didn’t need to make hard choices in the aftermath of crisis. What they needed, instead, was hard thinking — a willingness to understand that this was a special environment, that the usual rules don’t apply in a persistently depressed economy, one in which government borrowing doesn’t compete with private investment and costs next to nothing.

bias by omission can occur either within a story, or over the long term as a particular news outlet reports one set of events, but not another

Experts in news stories are like expert witnesses in trials.

Journalists often go looking for quotes to fit their favorite argument into a news story

  If charges of impropriety are leveled at two politicians of approximately equal power, one liberal and one conservative, compare the amount of coverage given to each.

Story placement is a measure of how important the editor considers the story. 

Bias by placement is where on a website (or newspaper) or in an article a story or event is printed; a pattern of placing news stories so as to downplay information supportive of either conservative views or liberal views

tagging of conservative politicians and groups with extreme labels while leaving liberal politicians and groups unlabeled or with more mild labels, or vice versa.

bias by labeling occurs when a reporter not only fails to identify a liberal as a liberal or a conservative as a conservative, but describes the person or group with positive labels, such as “an expert” or “independent consumer group.”

the reporter imparts an air of authority that the source does not deserve.

Bias by spin occurs when the story has only one interpretation of an event or policy, to the exclusion of the other; spin involves tone – it’s a reporter’s subjective comments about objective facts; makes one side’s ideological perspective look better than another.

“Part of white fragility is to assume that when we talk about racism, we are calling someone out as being individually a racist,” he said. “So if you say we're going to talk about racism, white people think you're going to call them a name. But for most people of color it's a system. And we're talking about dealing with a structure so the real problem is the system.”

When separate groups of people are using the same word with different implied meanings then problems will persist.

When it comes to racism and increased segregation, both Wise and DiAngelo noted that there seems to be this rigid unwillingness to address any inequality, because it would upset the very people who are both benefiting from the injustice and refusing to acknowledge its existence.

The fear is that if someone seeks to define and fix racism, many white people feel like they’re being directly attacked. So instead of waiting for the attack, white fragility promotes protection by putting punitive restrictions on “the others.”

The Obama era has been an interesting petri dish of white fragility. On the heels of a moderate economic recovery, we’ve seen sweeping new state laws aimed at social issues: voting rights restrictions, defunding of Planned Parenthood, anti-gay legislation, Stand Your Ground bills, and restrictive union laws to weaken their bargaining power. These laws have resulted in a rollback of rights for minorities, women, the LGBT movement, and the working class.

The strangest thing about white fragility politics is that the detrimental policy results are spread out across race and class. Yet, the political results for the conservative movement priming the pump of white fragility and rage is election victories. And why should they change when they can get large sections of an aging white population to consistently vote for policies proven to statistically hurt their economic chances, personal health, their children’s education, and their very safety?

These are not rational decisions. These are fear-based politics that create avoidable disasters in which all suffer. This new wave of segregation fear is surging across the country. In response to the continued white fragility panic of 2008, conservative political movements are set to capitalize on the cycles of manufactured hysteria. “We are watching the repeal of the 20th century,” Wise said.

When I asked Wise and DiAngelo to give me something hopeful for the future, they both gave me a bleak picture. When I suggested that more facts and evidence could sway people, they disagreed. “People who are deeply committed to a world view don’t change their opinions when confronted with new facts,” Wise said. “Oddly enough, new facts cause them to dig in more deeply.”

This method puts the spotlight on the reactions of voting blocs and takes the spotlight off the individual qualities of candidates. It puts the spotlight on messaging and takes the spotlight off product: actual policies.

It puts the spotlight on slight differences across the socio-economic spectrum and takes the spotlight off the power of events to reframe the whole mood and landscape.

Another victim was President Obama. His 2012 campaign was legendary from an analytic point of view, and, of course, it was victorious. But it lacked a policy agenda and produced no mandate. Without a compelling agenda, the administration has projected an image of reactive drift and lost public confidence.

Some politicians, like F.D.R. or Ronald Reagan, can reframe debates and envision coalitions that don’t exist. Their visions emerge out of unique life experiences, which are unusual but have broad appeal. They build trust not through a few targeted messages but by fully embodying a moment and a people. They often don’t pander to existing identities but arouse different identities.

Obviously demography matters a lot. But, at heart, politics is a personal enterprise. Voters are looking for quality of leadership, character, vision and solidarity that defies quantification. Candidates like Daniel Patrick Moynihan or Jerry Brown can arouse great loyalty in ways that are impossible to predict.

In the midst of this scuffling economy, voters are thinking as Americans and not as members of a niche. They’re asking: What can be done to kick-start America? They’re not asking: How can I guarantee affordable contraception?

The more you look at political history, the more you see that political imagination is the rarest and most valuable of qualities. Voters don’t always know what they want, but they look to leaders to jump ahead of the current moment and provide visions they haven’t thought of.

other victims include the Democratic senators in red states. Winning in a state that the other party dominates is a personal enterprise. It requires an ineffable individual connection with voters. It requires an idiosyncratic approach to issues. By eclipsing individual quirks with generic messages, the data-driven style deprives outnumbered candidates of precisely what they need to survive.

Data-driven candidates sacrifice their own souls. Instead of being inner-directed leaders driven by their own beliefs, they become outer-directed pleasers driven by incomplete numbers.

Above all, there were many dire warnings about the evils of “printing money.” For example, in May 2009 an editorial in The Wall Street Journal warned that both interest rates and inflation were set to surge “now that Congress and the Federal Reserve have flooded the world with dollars.” In 2010 a virtual Who’s Who of conservative economists and pundits sent an open letter to Ben Bernanke warning that his policies risked “currency debasement and inflation.”

Although the Fed continued on its expansionary course — its balance sheet has grown to more than $4 trillion, up fivefold since the start of the crisis — inflation stayed low. For the most part, the funds the Fed injected into the economy simply piled up either in bank reserves or in cash holdings by individuals — which was exactly what economists on the other side of the divide had predicted would happen.

the similar state of affairs when it comes to economics, monetary economics in particular.

Mainly, though, the currency-debasement crowd just keeps repeating the same lines, ignoring its utter failure in prognostication.

Isn’t the question of how to manage the money supply a technical issue, not a matter of theological doctrine?

Well, it turns out that money is indeed a kind of theological issue. Many on the right are hostile to any kind of government activism, seeing it as the thin edge of the wedge — if you concede that the Fed can sometimes help the economy by creating “fiat money,” the next thing you know liberals will confiscate your wealth and give it to the 47 percent.

if you look at the internal dynamics of the Republican Party, it’s obvious that the currency-debasement, return-to-gold faction has been gaining strength even as its predictions keep failing.

It’s hard to think of anyone on the American right who even considered the possibility that Obamacare might work, or at any rate who was willing to admit that possibility in public. Instead, even the supposed experts kept peddling improbable tales of looming disaster long after their chance of actually stopping health reform was past, and they peddled these tales not just to the rubes but to each other.

“distracting” and “unacceptable” and the #ClothingHasNoGender campaign that was launched by his friends in response.

The term “Daesh” is strategically a better choice because it is still accurate in that it spells out the acronym of the group’s full Arabic name, al-Dawla al-Islamiya fi al-Iraq wa al-Sham

“Daesh” can also be understood as a play on words — and an insult. Depending on how it is conjugated in Arabic, it can mean anything from “to trample down and crush” to “a bigot who imposes his view on others.

By using the militants’ preferred names, the US government implicitly gives them legitimacy. But referring to the group as Daesh doesn’t just withhold validity. It also might help the United States craft better policy.

A number of studies suggest that the language we use affects the way we think and behave. By using a term that references the Arabic name and not an English translation, American policy makers can potentially inoculate themselves from inherent biases that could affect their decision making

the United States is weakening the potency of its own messaging if it continues to refer to the group as ISIL.