Obesity: Another thing it's too late to prevent | The Economist - 0 views
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It's not that it's impossible for governments to hold down obesity; France, which had rapidly rising childhood obesity early this century, instituted an aggressive set of public-health interventions including school-based food and exercise shifts, nurse assessments of overweight kids, visits to families where overweight kids were identified, and so forth. Their childhood obesity rates stabilised at a fraction of America's.
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The problem isn't that it's not possible; rather, it's that America is incapable of doing it.
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America's national governing ideology is based almost entirely on the assertion of negative rights, with a few exceptions for positive rights and public goods such as universal elementary education, national defence and highways. But it's become increasingly clear over the past decade that the country simply doesn't have the political vocabulary that would allow it to institute effective national programmes to improve eating and exercise habits or culture. A country that can't think of a vision of public life beyond freedom of individual choice, including the individual choice to watch TV and eat a Big Mac, is not going to be able to craft public policies that encourage people to exercise and eat right. We're the fattest country on earth because that's what our political philosophy leads to. We ought to incorporate that into the way we see ourselves; it's certainly the way other countries see us.
The politics and philosophy of racism: Grand Racist Party? | The Economist - 0 views
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At best, Republicans on the whole are slightly more likely to have opinions commonly believed to be racist, and that is far from undeniable.
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In my experience, the real crux of the left-right divide on policies with fraught racial dimensions, such as welfare or affirmative action, is the question of structural coercion.
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I used to think that if negative rights to non-interference were strictly observed, liberty was guaranteed, but I don't now. Here's how I had thought about the matter. One racist acting in a private capacity on his or her racist beliefs can't violate anyone's legitimate, negative rights. (No one is entitled to another's good opinion!) Two racists acting as private citizens on their racist beliefs can't violate anyone's rights. Therefore, I inferred, thousands or millions of racists acting non-coercively on their racist beliefs can't coercively violate anyone's rights. I now think this is quite wrongheaded.
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The American Scholar: The Decline of the English Department - William M. Chace - 1 views
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The number of young men and women majoring in English has dropped dramatically; the same is true of philosophy, foreign languages, art history, and kindred fields, including history. As someone who has taught in four university English departments over the last 40 years, I am dismayed by this shift, as are my colleagues here and there across the land. And because it is probably irreversible, it is important to attempt to sort out the reasons—the many reasons—for what has happened.
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English: from 7.6 percent of the majors to 3.9 percent
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In one generation, then, the numbers of those majoring in the humanities dropped from a total of 30 percent to a total of less than 16 percent; during that same generation, business majors climbed from 14 percent to 22 percent.
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Metaphors: Johnson: The impossibility of being literal | The Economist - 1 views
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IT IS literally impossible to be literal.
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Guy Deutscher, a linguist at the University of Manchester, calls all language “a reef of dead metaphor”. Most of the time we do not realise that nearly every word that comes out of our mouths has made some kind of jump from older, concrete meanings to the ones we use today. This process is simple language change. Yesterday’s metaphors become so common that today we don’t process them as metaphors at all.
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if “tree” and “rock” aren’t metaphors, nearly everything else in our vocabulary seems to be. For example, you cannot use “independent” without metaphor, unless you mean “not hanging from”. You can’t use “transpire” unless you mean “to breathe through”. The first English meaning of a book was “a written document”. If we want to avoid all metaphorised language (If we want to be “literal”), we must constantly rush to a historical dictionary and frantically check
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Research Says: Studying Economics Turns You Into a Liar - Jordan Weissmann - The Atlantic - 1 views
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Written by a pair of researchers from universities in Montreal and Madrid, it examined whether the study of economics made students more apt to lie for financial gain. The answer: a resounding yes.
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By the rules of this game, it was always more profitable to report a green circle. There was no way for the decision to be generous and help the other guy get a better payday, so altruism shouldn't have been a factor. There was no way for the decision maker to get caught lying. And because the rules were transparent, the decision maker didn't even have to worry about whether the other guy might know they were lying.
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economics and business students lied a much more often than everybody else. As shown in the table below, just 22.8 percent of them honestly reported the colors of the flashing circles, even when it cost them that extra euro. More than half of humanities students, on the other hand, were honest. Same went for law students, who appeared to play against type
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Triumph of the Unthinking - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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“Words,” wrote John Maynard Keynes, “ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking.”
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It’s true that in practice Mr. Obama pushed through a stimulus that, while too small and short-lived, helped diminish the depth and duration of the slump. But when Republicans began talking nonsense, declaring that the government should match the belt-tightening of ordinary families — a recipe for full-on depression — Mr. Obama didn’t challenge their position. Instead, within a few months the very same nonsense became a standard line in his speeches, even though his economists knew better, and so did he.
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Like Mr. Obama and company, Labour’s leaders probably know better, but have decided that it’s too hard to overcome the easy appeal of bad economics, especially when most of the British news media report this bad economics as truth.
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Do you see what I see? | The Economist - 0 views
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HUMAN beings are not born with the knowledge that others possess minds with different contents. Children develop such a “theory of mind” gradually, and even adults have it only imperfectly. But a study by Samantha Fan and Zoe Liberman at the University of Chicago, published in Psychological Science, finds that bilingual children, and also those simply exposed to another language on a regular basis, have an edge at the business of getting inside others’ minds.
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This study joins a heap of others suggesting that there are cognitive advantages to being bilingual. Researchers have found that bilinguals have better executive function (control over attention and the planning of complex tasks). Those that suffer dementia begin to do so, on average, almost five years later than monolinguals. Full bilinguals had previously been shown to have better theory-of-mind skills. But this experiment is the first to demonstrate that such benefits also accrue to those merely exposed to other languages.
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It has become fashionable to consider multilingualism as a kind of elite mental training. The question is not settled, though, for many studies have not been successfully replicated. Nor is it yet clear precisely which kinds of language skills and exposure make people better at exactly which tasks.
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Shape-shifting | The Economist - 0 views
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But “Curvology”, a new book by David Bainbridge, focuses on the part played by evolution in men’s—and women’s—understanding and appreciation of the undulations of the female form. Men’s and women’s bodies differ more than is necessary simply to gestate, bear and nourish children
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Humans are uneasy with the idea that they have overcome so few of their baser urges and that appearance matters so much, argues Mr Bainbridge. But these urges have existed for as long as people have desired each other enough to want to have sex.
Religion and climate change: Competing to save the earth | The Economist - 0 views
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Meanwhile, it is hoped that millions of people of "faith and moral belief" from across the world will have signed up to an e-petition, ourvoices.net, which urges the world's political leaders to act boldly on climate change, both in New York and at next year's "make-or-break" session in Paris.
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That is certainly an opinion to which she is entitled as a concerned global citizen, but it is not clear how her job as executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change entitles her to lobby for the virtual destruction of a sector of the world economy which, whatever its misdeeds, will have a part to play in any rational approach to the planet's future.
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Stilll, the good news is that there has apparently been learning on both sides
The Unrealized Horrors of Population Explosion - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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No one was more influential — or more terrifying, some would say — than Paul R. Ehrlich, a Stanford University biologist. His 1968 book, “The Population Bomb,” sold in the millions with a jeremiad that humankind stood on the brink of apocalypse because there were simply too many of us. Dr. Ehrlich’s opening statement was the verbal equivalent of a punch to the gut: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over.” He later went on to forecast that hundreds of millions would starve to death in the 1970s, that 65 million of them would be Americans, that crowded India was essentially doomed, that odds were fair “England will not exist in the year 2000.” Dr. Ehrlich was so sure of himself that he warned in 1970 that “sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come.” By “the end,” he meant “an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity.”
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In fact, birthrates are now below long-term replacement levels, or nearly so, across much of Earth, not just in the industrialized West and Japan but also in India, China, much of Southeast Asia, Latin America — just about everywhere except Africa, although even there the continentwide rates are declining. “Girls that are never born cannot have babies,”
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Stewart Brand, founding editor of the Whole Earth Catalog. On this topic, Mr. Brand may be deemed a Keynesian, in the sense of an observation often attributed to John Maynard Keynes: “When the facts change, I change my mind, sir. What do you do?” Mr. Brand’s formulation for Retro Report was to ask, “How many years do you have to not have the world end” to reach a conclusion that “maybe it didn’t end because that reason was wrong?”
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Why a Harvard Professor Has Mixed Feelings When Students Take Jobs in Finance - NYTimes... - 0 views
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Many of the best students are not going to research cancer, teach and inspire the next generation, or embark on careers in public service. Instead, large numbers are becoming traders, brokers and bankers. At Harvard in 2014, nearly one in five students who took a job went to finance. For economics majors, the number was closer to one in two.
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arbitrage is valuable only to a point. It has a gold rush element with prospectors racing to get to the gold first. While finding gold has value, finding gold before someone else does is mainly rent-seeking.
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I wonder: Is this a good decision for society as a whole?
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Change: Is it literally too late to stop the drift? | The Economist - 0 views
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he proposes a two-part scale for determining which words (and phrases) we should try to stop from changing their meanings fundamentally. The usual suspects are familiar: nonplussed, presently, decimate, beg the question, fulsome and disinterested are now all used to mean something quite different from what they once meant.
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proposes a two-part test for which changes to arrest: 1) how far along is the change?, and 2) how irreplaceable is the word undergoing the shift? If his math is a little unserious (he just multiplies his two factors), and his data a little dodgy (he simply uses the first 20 Google-search results for his usage corpus), the two questions are pretty good ones.
Data-Driven Decisions Can Aid Companies' Productivity - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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the data explosion is also an enormous opportunity. In a modern economy, information should be the prime asset — the raw material of new products and services, smarter decisions, competitive advantage for companies, and greater growth and productivity.
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Is there any real evidence of a “data payoff” across the corporate world? It has taken a while, but new research led by Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, suggests that the beginnings are now visible.
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studied 179 large companies. Those that adopted “data-driven decision making” achieved productivity that was 5 to 6 percent higher than could be explained by other factors, including how much the companies invested in technology, the researchers said.
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How Game Theory Helped Improve New York City's High School Application Process - NYTime... - 0 views
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“It was an allocation problem,” explained Neil Dorosin, the director of high-school admissions at the time of the redesign. The city had a scarce resource — in this case, good schools — and had to work out an equitable way to distribute it. “But unlike a scarce resource like Rolling Stones tickets, where whoever’s willing to pay the most gets the tickets, here we can’t use price,”
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In the early 1960s, the economists David Gale and Lloyd Shapley proved that it was theoretically possible to pair an unlimited number of men and women in stable marriages according to their preferences.In game theory, “stable” means that every player’s preferences are optimized; in this case, no man and no woman matched with another partner would both prefer to be with each other.
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a “deferred acceptance algorithm.”
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Who Wants a Depression? - NYTimes.com - 1 views
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before the financial crisis, many economists — even, to some extent, yours truly — believed that there was a fairly broad professional consensus on some important issues.
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class interests also operate through a cruder, more direct channel. Quite simply, easy-money policies, while they may help the economy as a whole, are directly detrimental to people who get a lot of their income from bonds and other interest-paying assets — and this mainly means the very wealthy, in particular the top 0.01 percent.
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there’s also a much more direct reason for those defending the interests of the wealthy to complain about easy money: The wealthy derive an important part of their income from interest on bonds, and low-rate policies have greatly reduced this income.
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