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Because America never had kings or lords, it sometimes seems less inclined to worry about signs that its elite is calcifying.

Thomas Jefferson drew a distinction between a natural aristocracy of the virtuous and talented, which was a blessing to a nation, and an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, which would slowly strangle it.

When the robber barons accumulated fortunes that made European princes envious, the combination of their own philanthropy, their children’s extravagance and federal trust-busting meant that Americans never discovered what it would be like to live in a country where the elite could reliably reproduce themselves.

An emphasis on love is a new addition to Chinese weddings—and shines a pink-filtered spotlight on social change.

the bride’s family exchanged money or goods.

. An average wedding cost $12,000 in 2011 (the latest year for which such data exist)—the equivalent of more than two years’ income for the average urban household.

Until the 1960s boys spent longer and went further in school than girls, and were more likely to graduate from university. Now, across the rich world and in a growing number of poor countries, the balance has tilted the other way. Policymakers who once fretted about girls’ lack of confidence in science now spend their time dangling copies of “Harry Potter” before surly boys. Sweden has commissioned research into its “boy crisis”. Australia has devised a reading programme called “Boys, Blokes, Books & Bytes”. In just a couple of generations, one gender gap has closed, only for another to open up.

the stark partisan divide over issues that should be simply factual, like whether the planet is warming or evolution happened.

The problem, in other words, isn’t ignorance; it’s wishful thinking. Confronted with a conflict between evidence and what they want to believe for political and/or religious reasons, many people reject the evidence. And knowing more about the issues widens the divide, because the well informed have a clearer view of which evidence they need to reject to sustain their belief system.

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

Stormfront was founded in 1995 by Don Black, a former Ku Klux Klan leader. Its most popular “social groups” are “Union of National Socialists” and “Fans and Supporters of Adolf Hitler.” Over the past year, according to Quantcast, roughly 200,000 to 400,000 Americans visited the site every month. A recent Southern Poverty Law Center report linked nearly 100 murders in the past five years to registered Stormfront members.

In the 1930s, Arthur F. Raper reported a correlation between bad economic conditions and lynchings of blacks. This led many scholars to the intuitive conclusion that people turn to hate because their lives are going poorly.

evidence is increasingly casting doubt on this idea. In 2001, the political scientists Donald P. Green, Laurence H. McFalls and Jennifer K. Smith used more data and found that there was actually no relationship between lynchings and economic hardship. Lynchings actually fell during the Great Depression.The economist Alan B. Krueger has shown that terrorists are not disproportionately poor. And the economists Roland G. Fryer Jr. and Steven D. Levitt found that Ku Klux Klan members were actually better educated than the typical American.

It usually turns out that there is much less professional controversy about an issue than the cacophony in the news media might have led you to expect.

This was certainly true of the most recent poll, which asked whether the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act — the Obama “stimulus” — reduced unemployment. All but one of those who responded said that it did, a vote of 36 to 1. A follow-up question on whether the stimulus was worth it produced a slightly weaker but still overwhelming 25 to 2 consensus.

Let me ask, instead, whether you knew that the pro-stimulus consensus among experts was this strong, or whether you even knew that such a consensus existed.

The emphasis on quantitative techniques, however, ignores three areas where economists sometimes lack the necessary knowledge and skills. First, historical learning is patchy at best largely, I'd argue, because so much of economic history doesn't offer the kind of data which econometric whiz kids feel comfortable with. Yet its value is enormous.

the desire to think of economics purely as a science is fine but hugely limiting. The political economy of the classical greats is incredibly important yet is too often forgotten, in part because in recent years teaching has focused on mathematical elegance rather than a reality tinged with political value judgements.

it wasn’t just that more people pulled up the paper that appeared first. Those papers also received 27 percent more citations in later research, though that result was based on a relatively small time period. Having the luck to appear first in the email meant that a given working paper had greater influence in subsequent economic research.

“I think it does remind us that the way in which we present information and choices is important,” said James Poterba, the president of the N.B.E.R. That has implications for things like choices in a retirement account or a health insurance package offered by a company. People don’t necessarily make decisions based on specific cost-benefit analysis but can be pointed in one direction by something as simple as the sequence of choices in a list.

“The choice architecture is an important and understudied dimension of economic choices,”

For as long as there have been government programs designed to help the poor, there have been critics insisting that helping the poor will keep them from working. But the evidence for this proposition has always been rather weak.

And a recent study from MIT and Harvard economists

found "no systematic evidence that cash transfer programs discourage work.

It is worth carefully studying this story. Encoded in it are new yet deeply retrograde ideas about what constitutes consent — and what constitutes sexual violence.

We are told by the reporter that the woman “says she used verbal and nonverbal cues to indicate how uncomfortable and distressed she was.” She adds that “whether Ansari didn’t notice Grace’s reticence or knowingly ignored it is impossible for her to say.” We are told that “he wouldn’t let her move away from him,” in the encounter.

I am a proud feminist, and this is what I thought while reading the article:If you are hanging out naked with a man, it’s safe to assume he is going to try to have sex with you.

As Facebook’s co-founder and chief executive parried questions from members of Congress about how the social network would protect its users’ privacy, he returned time and again to what probably sounded like an unimpeachable proposition.

By providing its users with greater and more transparent controls over the personal data they share and how it is used for targeted advertising, he insisted, Facebook could empower them to make their own call and decide how much privacy they were willing to put on the block.

providing a greater sense of control over their personal data won’t make Facebook users more cautious. It will instead encourage them to share more.

Each of the 61 volunteers was asked to wear a Google Glass, walk for a block in New York and focus their attention on whatever captured their interest. Their souped-up specs then recorded everything they looked at. Afterwards, they filled out a questionnaire that asked, along with matters of age, sex and ethnicity, about their income, their level of education and the social class they believed they belonged to.

they found that the number of gazes at strangers did not vary with social class, but their duration did. Specifically, upper-middle-class and upper-class people gazed at the faces of others for a fifth of a second less than members of lower social classes.

Once again, lower-class people looked at faces for more time than those from the upper classes did. Specifically, working-class people spent a tenth of a second longer doing so than did upper-middle class people—a difference that did not apply when the same people looked at inanimate objects.

They do not include, for example, the domestic purchasing power of a currency.

This illustrates one of the method’s flaws: in terms of the goods and services that it can actually buy, the Swiss franc is in fact among the world’s most overvalued currencies.

As for China itself, it has been fighting to prop up the yuan in the face of capital outflows, and its score is in fact negative

The year 1995 was heralded as the beginning of the “New Economy.” Digital communication was set to upend markets and change everything. But economists by and large didn’t buy into the hype.

Today we are seeing similar hype about machine intelligence. But once again, as economists, we believe some simple rules apply. Technological revolutions tend to involve some important activity becoming cheap, like the cost of communication or finding information. Machine intelligence is, in its essence, a prediction technology, so the economic shift will center around a drop in the cost of prediction.

The first effect of machine intelligence will be to lower the cost of goods and services that rely on prediction. This matters because prediction is an input to a host of activities including transportation, agriculture, healthcare, energy manufacturing, and retail.