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The Common Core promotes 10 so-called "College and Career Readiness Anchor Standards" for reading that emphasize technical skills like analyzing, integrating, and delineating a text. But these expectations deal very little with ensuring students are actually appreciating the literature at hand—and say nothing about the personal engagement and life lessons to which my principal was referring

Kate Kinsella, an influential author who consults school districts across the country and is considered "a guiding force on the National Advisory Board for the Consortium on Reading Excellence," recently told me to "ditch literature" since "literary fiction is not critical to college success." Kinsella continued, "What’s represented by the standards is the need to analyze texts rather than respond to literature.

As a teacher working within this regimented environment, my classroom objectives have had to shift. I used to feel deeply satisfied facilitating a rich classroom discussion on a Shakespearean play; now, I feel proud when my students explicitly acknowledge the aforementioned "anchor standards" and take the initiative to learn these technical skills.

But as a man who used to be a high school student interested in pursuing wisdom, I’m almost startled to find myself up late at night, literally studying these anchor standards instead of Hamlet itself.

It just feels like a very slow, gradual cultural shift that I don’t even notice except for sudden moments of nostalgia, like remembering a dream out of nowhere

I get it: My job is to teach communication, not values, and maybe that’s reasonable. After all, I’m not sure I would want my daughter gaining her wisdom from a randomly selected high-school teacher just because he passed a few writing and literature courses at a state university (which is what I did). My job description has evolved, and I’m fine with that

This arrangement, in theory, allows students to read the literature on their own, when they get their own time—and I’m fine with that. But then, where are they getting the time and space to appreciate the deeper lessons of classic literature, to evaluate its truth and appropriately apply it to their own lives?

research suggests that a significant majority of teens do not attend church, and youth church attendance has been decreasing over the past few decades. This is fine with me. But then again, where are they getting their wisdom?

I’m not talking about my child, or your child. I’m absolutely positive that my daughter will know the difference between Darcy and Wickham before she’s in eighth grade; and it's likely that people who would gravitate toward this story would appreciate this kind of thinking

I’m talking about American children in general—kids whose parents work all day, whose fathers left them or whose mothers died

even for the parents who do prioritize the humanities in their households, I’m not sure that one generation is actually sharing culturally relevant wisdom with the next one—not if the general community doesn’t even talk about what that wisdom specifically means. Each family can be responsible for teaching wisdom in their own way, and I’m fine with that. But then, does the idea of cultural wisdom get surrendered in the process?

Secular wisdom in the public schools seems like it should inherently spring from the literature that’s shaped American culture. And while the students focus on how Whitman’s "purpose shapes the content and style of his text," they’re obviously exposed to the words that describe his leaves of grass.

But there is a noticeable deprioritization of literature, and a crumbling consensus regarding the nation’s idea of classic literature. The Common Core requires only Shakespeare, which is puzzling if only for its singularity

The country’s disregard for the institutional transfer of cultural wisdom is evident with this single observation: None of the state assessments has a single question about the content of any classic literature. They only test on reading skills

But where are the students getting their wisdom?

Admittedly, nothing about the Common Core or any modern shifts in teaching philosophies is forbidding me from sharing deeper lessons found in Plato’s cave or Orwell’s Airstrip One. The fine print of the Common-Core guidelines even mentions a few possible titles. But this comes with constant and pervasive language that favors objective analysis over personal engagement.

Later, a kid who reminds me of the teenager I was in high school—a boy who is at different times depressed, excited, naive, and curious—asked me why I became an English teacher. I smiled in self-defense, but I was silent again, not knowing what to say anymore.

At the same time, the rise in protective committees and procedures (like trigger warnings) ensure that students will not be confronted with course materials that might upset them (even classics like Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”).

universities like Yale have given in to the implicit notion that they should provide the equivalent of the home environment.

But college is a different kind of community than a family, and its primary job is education of the student and adaptation to independent community living.

To prepare for increased autonomy and responsibility, college needs to be a time of exploration and experimentation. This process entails “trying on” new ways of thinking about oneself both intellectually and personally, which is possible only if a certain degree of freedom is allowed.

While we should provide “safe spaces” within colleges for marginalized groups, we must also make it safe for all community members to express opinions and challenge majority views. Intellectual growth and flexibility are fostered by rigorous debate and questioning.

It is not surprising that young people are prone to lash out, particularly when there are sociologic reasons to do so. Our generation rallied around clear issues: the war in Vietnam and governmentally sanctioned discrimination based on race and gender. ISIS, Newtown, a changing economy with fewer good jobs and stable career paths create anxiety without generating a unifying moral vision

The encroachment of behavioral guidelines into the social and even intellectual spheres comes at a cost. Every college discussion about community values, social climate and behavior should also include recognition of the developmental importance of student autonomy and self-regulation, of the necessary tension between safety and self-discovery.

David Marr, a neuroscientist colleague of Chomsky's at MIT, defined a general framework for studying complex biological systems (like the brain) in his influential book Vision,

a complex biological system can be understood at three distinct levels. The first level ("computational level") describes the input and output to the system, which define the task the system is performing. In the case of the visual system, the input might be the image projected on our retina and the output might our brain's identification of the objects present in the image we had observed. The second level ("algorithmic level") describes the procedure by which an input is converted to an output, i.e. how the image on our retina can be processed to achieve the task described by the computational level. Finally, the third level ("implementation level") describes how our own biological hardware of cells implements the procedure described by the algorithmic level.

The emphasis here is on the internal structure of the system that enables it to perform a task, rather than on external association between past behavior of the system and the environment. The goal is to dig into the "black box" that drives the system and describe its inner workings, much like how a computer scientist would explain how a cleverly designed piece of software works and how it can be executed on a desktop computer.

As written today, the history of cognitive science is a story of the unequivocal triumph of an essentially Chomskyian approach over Skinner's behaviorist paradigm -- an achievement commonly referred to as the "cognitive revolution,"

While this may be a relatively accurate depiction in cognitive science and psychology, behaviorist thinking is far from dead in related disciplines. Behaviorist experimental paradigms and associationist explanations for animal behavior are used routinely by neuroscientists

Chomsky critiqued the field of AI for adopting an approach reminiscent of behaviorism, except in more modern, computationally sophisticated form. Chomsky argued that the field's heavy use of statistical techniques to pick regularities in masses of data is unlikely to yield the explanatory insight that science ought to offer. For Chomsky, the "new AI" -- focused on using statistical learning techniques to better mine and predict data -- is unlikely to yield general principles about the nature of intelligent beings or about cognition.

Behaviorist principles of associations could not explain the richness of linguistic knowledge, our endlessly creative use of it, or how quickly children acquire it with only minimal and imperfect exposure to language presented by their environment.

it has been argued in my view rather plausibly, though neuroscientists don't like it -- that neuroscience for the last couple hundred years has been on the wrong track.

Implicit in this endeavor is the assumption that with enough sophisticated statistical tools and a large enough collection of data, signals of interest can be weeded it out from the noise in large and poorly understood biological systems.

Brenner, a contemporary of Chomsky who also participated in the same symposium on AI, was equally skeptical about new systems approaches to understanding the brain. When describing an up-and-coming systems approach to mapping brain circuits called Connectomics, which seeks to map the wiring of all neurons in the brain (i.e. diagramming which nerve cells are connected to others), Brenner called it a "form of insanity."

These debates raise an old and general question in the philosophy of science: What makes a satisfying scientific theory or explanation, and how ought success be defined for science?

Ever since Isaiah Berlin's famous essay, it has become a favorite pastime of academics to place various thinkers and scientists on the "Hedgehog-Fox" continuum: the Hedgehog, a meticulous and specialized worker, driven by incremental progress in a clearly defined field versus the Fox, a flashier, ideas-driven thinker who jumps from question to question, ignoring field boundaries and applying his or her skills where they seem applicable.

Chomsky's work has had tremendous influence on a variety of fields outside his own, including computer science and philosophy, and he has not shied away from discussing and critiquing the influence of these ideas, making him a particularly interesting person to interview.

If you take a look at the progress of science, the sciences are kind of a continuum, but they're broken up into fields. The greatest progress is in the sciences that study the simplest systems. So take, say physics -- greatest progress there. But one of the reasons is that the physicists have an advantage that no other branch of sciences has. If something gets too complicated, they hand it to someone else.

If a molecule is too big, you give it to the chemists. The chemists, for them, if the molecule is too big or the system gets too big, you give it to the biologists. And if it gets too big for them, they give it to the psychologists, and finally it ends up in the hands of the literary critic, and so on.

An unlikely pair, systems biology and artificial intelligence both face the same fundamental task of reverse-engineering a highly complex system whose inner workings are largely a mystery

neuroscience developed kind of enthralled to associationism and related views of the way humans and animals work. And as a result they've been looking for things that have the properties of associationist psychology.

The trendlines are obvious: Asked the same questions at about the same points in their lives, Americans are, over time, experiencing worse and worse symptoms associated with anxiety and depression.

there’s an interesting recent wrinkle to this trajectory. In a paper published in 2014 in Social Indicators Research, Twenge tracked the results of the Monitoring the Future (MtF) survey, “a nationally representative sample of U.S. 12th graders [administered] every year since 1976,” between 1982 and 2013. Like the MMPI, the MtF asks students about symptoms in a manner that should be generally resistant to cultural change: The somatic items Twenge examined asked about trouble sleeping, remembering things, thinking/concentrating, and learning, as well as shortness of breath. An interesting recent pattern emerged on these measures:

All the items end up significantly higher than where they started, but for many of them most of the increase happens over the first half of the time period in question. From the late 1990s or so until 2013, many of the items bounce around a bit but ultimately remain flat, or flat-ish.

drugs — Prozac and Lexapro, among others — have been prescribed to millions of people who experience these symptoms, many of whom presumably saw some improvement once the drugs kicked in, so this explanation at least makes intuitive sens

there are likely other factors leading to the plateau as well, said Twenge. For one thing, the “crime rate is lower [today] than it was when it peaked in the early 1990s,” and dealing with crime can lead to anxiety and depression symptoms. Other indicators of youth well-being, like teen pregnancy, were also significantly higher back then, and could have accounted for the trajectory visible on the graphs.“For whatever reason,” said Twenge, “if you look at what was going on back then, the early 1990s were not a good time, particularly for young people.”

“Obviously there’s a lot of good things about societal and technological progress,” she said, “and in a lot of ways our lives are much easier than, say, our grandparents’ or great-grandparents’ lives. But there’s a paradox here that we seem to have so much ease and relative economic prosperity compared to previous centuries, yet there’s this dissatisfaction, there’s this unhappiness, there are these mental health issues in terms of depression and anxiety.

She thinks the primary problem is that “modern life doesn’t give us as many opportunities to spend time with people and connect with them, at least in person, compared to, say, 80 years ago or 100 years ago. Families are smaller, the divorce rate is higher, people get married much later in life.”

it may simply be the case that many people who lived in less equal, more “traditional” times were forced into close companionship with a lot of other people, and that this shielded them from certain psychological problems, whatever else was going on in their lives.

She was virtually never alone — and that can be a bad thing, clearly, but from a mental health perspective being surrounded by people is a good thing.”

the shift away from this sort of life has also brought with it a shift in values, and Twenge thinks that this, too, can account for the increase in anxiety and depression. “There’s clear evidence that the focus on money, fame, and image has gone up,

“and there’s also clear evidence that people who focus on money, fame, and image are more likely to be depressed and anxious.”

“It’s so tempting to say the world is going to hell in a handbasket and everything’s bad, but there are so many good things about modern life,” she said. So maybe the key message here is that while there’s no way to go back to family farms and young marriage and parenthood — and, from an equality standpoint,we wouldn’t want to anyway — modern life needs to do a better job of connecting people to one another, and encouraging them to adopt the sorts of goals and outlooks that will make them happy.

And while empirical evidence is important and we need more of it, the data almost never speak for themselves – a point amply illustrated by recent monetary events.

chwinger, as I remember the story, was never seen to use a Feynman diagram. But he had a locked room in his house, and the rumor was that that room was where he kept the Feynman diagrams he used in secret.

What’s the equivalent of Feynman diagrams? Something like IS-LM, which is the simplest model you can write down of how interest rates and output are jointly determined, and is how most practicing macroeconomists actually think about short-run economic fluctuations. It’s also how they talk about macroeconomics to each other. But it’s not what they put in their papers, because the journals demand that your model have “microfoundations.”

The Bernanke Fed massively expanded the monetary base, by a factor of almost five. There were dire warnings that this would cause inflation and “debase the dollar.” But prices went nowhere, and not much happened to broader monetary aggregates (a result that, weirdly, some economists seemed to find deeply puzzling even though it was exactly what should have been expected.)

What about fiscal policy? Traditional macro said that at the zero lower bound there would be no crowding out – that deficits wouldn’t drive up interest rates, and that fiscal multipliers would be larger than under normal conditions. The first of these predictions was obviously borne out, as rates stayed low even when deficits were very large. The second prediction is a bit harder to test, for reasons I’ll get into when I talk about the limits of empiricism. But the evidence does indeed suggest large positive multipliers.

The overall story, then, is one of overwhelming predictive success. Basic, old-fashioned macroeconomics didn’t fail in the crisis – it worked extremely well

In fact, it’s hard to think of any other example of economic models working this well – making predictions that most non-economists (and some economists) refused to believe, indeed found implausible, but which came true. Where, for example, can you find any comparable successes in microeconomics?

Meanwhile, the demand that macro become ever more rigorous in the narrow, misguided sense that it look like micro led to useful approaches being locked up in Schwinger’s back room, and in all too many cases forgotten. When the crisis struck, it was amazing how many successful academics turned out not to know things every economist would have known in 1970, and indeed resurrected 1930-vintage fallacies in the belief that they were profound insights.

mainly I think it reflected the general unwillingness of human beings (a category that includes many though not necessarily all economists) to believe that so many people can be so wrong about something so big.

. To normal human beings the study of international trade and that of international macroeconomics might sound like pretty much the same thing. In reality, however, the two fields used very different models, had very different intellectual cultures, and tended to look down on each other. Trade people tended to consider international macro people semi-charlatans, doing ad hoc stuff devoid of rigor. International macro people considered trade people boring, obsessed with proving theorems and offering little of real-world use.

does microeconomics really deserve its reputation of moral and intellectual superiority? No

Even before the rise of behavioral economics, any halfway self-aware economist realized that utility maximization – indeed, the very concept of utility — wasn’t a fact about the world; it was more of a thought experiment, whose conclusions should always have been stated in the subjunctive.

But, you say, we didn’t see the Great Recession coming. Well, what do you mean “we,” white man? OK, what’s true is that few economists realized that there was a huge housing bubble

True, a model doesn’t have to be perfect to provide hugely important insights. But here’s my question: where are the examples of microeconomic theory providing strong, counterintuitive, successful predictions on the same order as the success of IS-LM macroeconomics after 2008? Maybe there are some, but I can’t come up with any.

The point is not that micro theory is useless and we should stop doing it. But it doesn’t deserve to be seen as superior to macro modeling.

And the effort to make macro more and more like micro – to ground everything in rational behavior – has to be seen now as destructive. True, that effort did lead to some strong predictions: e.g., only unanticipated money should affect real output, transitory income changes shouldn’t affect consumer spending, government spending should crowd out private demand, etc. But all of those predictions have turned out to be wrong.

Kahneman and Tversky and Thaler and so on deserved all the honors they received for helping to document the specific ways in which utility maximization falls short, but even before their work we should never have expected perfect maximization to be a good description of reality.

But data never speak for themselves, for a couple of reasons. One, which is familiar, is that economists don’t get to do many experiments, and natural experiments are rare

The other problem is that even when we do get something like natural experiments, they often took place under economic regimes that aren’t relevant to current problems.

Both of these problems were extremely relevant in the years following the 2008 crisis.

you might be tempted to conclude that the empirical evidence is that monetary expansion is inflationary, indeed roughly one-for-one.

But the question, as the Fed embarked on quantitative easing, was what effect this would have on an economy at the zero lower bound. And while there were many historical examples of big monetary expansion, examples at the ZLB were much rarer – in fact, basically two: the U.S. in the 1930s and Japan in the early 2000

These examples told a very different story: that expansion would not, in fact, be inflationary, that it would work out the way it did.

The point is that empirical evidence can only do certain things. It can certainly prove that your theory is wrong! And it can also make a theory much more persuasive in those cases where the theory makes surprising predictions, which the data bear out. But the data can never absolve you from the necessity of having theories.

Over this past decade, I’ve watched a number of economists try to argue from authority: I am a famous professor, therefore you should believe what I say. This never ends well. I’ve also seen a lot of nihilism: economists don’t know anything, and we should tear the field down and start over.

Obviously I differ with both views. Economists haven’t earned the right to be snooty and superior, especially if their reputation comes from the ability to do hard math: hard math has been remarkably little help lately, if ever.

On the other hand, economists do turn out to know quite a lot: they do have some extremely useful models, usually pretty simple ones, that have stood up well in the face of evidence and events. And they definitely shouldn’t defer to important and/or rich people on polic

: compare Janet Yellen’s macroeconomic track record with that of the multiple billionaires who warned that Bernanke would debase the dollar. Or take my favorite Business Week headline from 2010: “Krugman or [John] Paulson: Who You Gonna Bet On?” Um.The important thing is to be aware of what we do know, and why.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.

Originally

These days, ethical wills are nonbinding documents that are increasingly seen as important legacy-building ingredients, say experts, because they can convey a person’s deep inner values and beliefs, even helping soothe ruffled feathers when dispensing family assets.

They may explain how the family money was made, she said, so that future generations can understand how the monetary legacy is to be used. “Without the glue of the family patriarch or matriarch, conflict is more likely to happen,” she added.

an oral tradition, ethical wills have been used by Jewish people for centuries to pass on life lessons and ethics, such as the importance of charity. In the 11th century, ethical wills began to be written down, and some still exist in archives.

Mr. Friedman said that video wills were especially effective because messages were best heard when conveyed through tone of voice or posture. “Being appropriately emotional in a video adds more dimensions than just words on paper,” he said.

“People can even do video selfies.”

To coax storytelling, Ms. Bell uses a 20-question questionnaire that touches on a person’s values and philosophies. “But the point is keeping it simple and fun,” she said.

Though high-tech ethical wills can be inviting, they aren’t for everyone, Ms. Turnbull said. “Writing is enduring and timeless,” she said. “It’s an archive that can be printed.” Conversely, high-tech wills can become outmoded. “What happens if video is outdated in a generation?”

ethical wills can also deepen our own lives, said Mr. Baines. “Today, we don’t take time to self-reflect,” he said. “But putting together an ethical will early on helps you live life with more intention.” That way, life can be richer, he said, adding: "We’re built for story and narrative.”

he and Dr. Fredrickson and their colleagues have demonstrated that the brain is “plastic,” or capable of generating new cells and pathways, and it is possible to train the circuitry in the brain to promote more positive responses. That is, a person can learn to be more positive by practicing certain skills that foster positivity.

Negative feelings activate a region of the brain called the amygdala, which is involved in processing fear and anxiety and other emotions. Dr. Richard J. Davidson, a neuroscientist and founder of the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin — Madison, has shown that people in whom the amygdala recovers slowly from a threat are at greater risk for a variety of health problems than those in whom it recovers quickly.

Worry, sadness, anger and other such “downers” have their place in any normal life. But chronically viewing the glass as half-empty is detrimental both mentally and physically and inhibits one’s ability to bounce back from life’s inevitable stresses.

In other words, Dr. Davidson said, “well-being can be considered a life skill. If you practice, you can actually get better at it.”

Activities Dr. Fredrickson and others endorse to foster positive emotions include:

Do good things for other people

Appreciate the world around you

Develop and bolster relationships.

Establish goals that can be accomplished.

Learn something new.

Choose to accept yourself, flaws and all.

Practice resilience.

Practice mindfulness

There is growing concern that as well as addicting users, technology is contributing toward so-called “continuous partial attention”, severely limiting people’s ability to focus, and possibly lowering IQ. One recent study showed that the mere presence of smartphones damages cognitive capacity – even when the device is turned off. “Everyone is distracted,” Rosenstein says. “All of the time.”

Drawing a straight line between addiction to social media and political earthquakes like Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump, they contend that digital forces have completely upended the political system and, left unchecked, could even render democracy as we know it obsolete.

Without irony, Eyal finished his talk with some personal tips for resisting the lure of technology. He told his audience he uses a Chrome extension, called DF YouTube, “which scrubs out a lot of those external triggers” he writes about in his book, and recommended an app called Pocket Points that “rewards you for staying off your phone when you need to focus”.

“One reason I think it is particularly important for us to talk about this now is that we may be the last generation that can remember life before,” Rosenstein says. It may or may not be relevant that Rosenstein, Pearlman and most of the tech insiders questioning today’s attention economy are in their 30s, members of the last generation that can remember a world in which telephones were plugged into walls.

One morning in April this year, designers, programmers and tech entrepreneurs from across the world gathered at a conference centre on the shore of the San Francisco Bay. They had each paid up to $1,700 to learn how to manipulate people into habitual use of their products, on a course curated by conference organiser Nir Eyal.

Eyal, 39, the author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, has spent several years consulting for the tech industry, teaching techniques he developed by closely studying how the Silicon Valley giants operate.

“The technologies we use have turned into compulsions, if not full-fledged addictions,” Eyal writes. “It’s the impulse to check a message notification. It’s the pull to visit YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter for just a few minutes, only to find yourself still tapping and scrolling an hour later.” None of this is an accident, he writes. It is all “just as their designers intended”

He explains the subtle psychological tricks that can be used to make people develop habits, such as varying the rewards people receive to create “a craving”, or exploiting negative emotions that can act as “triggers”. “Feelings of boredom, loneliness, frustration, confusion and indecisiveness often instigate a slight pain or irritation and prompt an almost instantaneous and often mindless action to quell the negative sensation,” Eyal writes.

The most seductive design, Harris explains, exploits the same psychological susceptibility that makes gambling so compulsive: variable rewards. When we tap those apps with red icons, we don’t know whether we’ll discover an interesting email, an avalanche of “likes”, or nothing at all. It is the possibility of disappointment that makes it so compulsive.

Finally, Eyal confided the lengths he goes to protect his own family. He has installed in his house an outlet timer connected to a router that cuts off access to the internet at a set time every day. “The idea is to remember that we are not powerless,” he said. “We are in control.

But are we? If the people who built these technologies are taking such radical steps to wean themselves free, can the rest of us reasonably be expected to exercise our free will?

Not according to Tristan Harris, a 33-year-old former Google employee turned vocal critic of the tech industry. “All of us are jacked into this system,” he says. “All of our minds can be hijacked. Our choices are not as free as we think they are.”

Harris, who has been branded “the closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience”, insists that billions of people have little choice over whether they use these now ubiquitous technologies, and are largely unaware of the invisible ways in which a small number of people in Silicon Valley are shaping their lives.

“I don’t know a more urgent problem than this,” Harris says. “It’s changing our democracy, and it’s changing our ability to have the conversations and relationships that we want with each other.” Harris went public – giving talks, writing papers, meeting lawmakers and campaigning for reform after three years struggling to effect change inside Google’s Mountain View headquarters.

He explored how LinkedIn exploits a need for social reciprocity to widen its network; how YouTube and Netflix autoplay videos and next episodes, depriving users of a choice about whether or not they want to keep watching; how Snapchat created its addictive Snapstreaks feature, encouraging near-constant communication between its mostly teenage users.

The techniques these companies use are not always generic: they can be algorithmically tailored to each person. An internal Facebook report leaked this year, for example, revealed that the company can identify when teens feel “insecure”, “worthless” and “need a confidence boost”. Such granular information, Harris adds, is “a perfect model of what buttons you can push in a particular person”.

Tech companies can exploit such vulnerabilities to keep people hooked; manipulating, for example, when people receive “likes” for their posts, ensuring they arrive when an individual is likely to feel vulnerable, or in need of approval, or maybe just bored. And the very same techniques can be sold to the highest bidder. “There’s no ethics,” he says. A company paying Facebook to use its levers of persuasion could be a car business targeting tailored advertisements to different types of users who want a new vehicle. Or it could be a Moscow-based troll farm seeking to turn voters in a swing county in Wisconsin.

It was Rosenstein’s colleague, Leah Pearlman, then a product manager at Facebook and on the team that created the Facebook “like”, who announced the feature in a 2009 blogpost. Now 35 and an illustrator, Pearlman confirmed via email that she, too, has grown disaffected with Facebook “likes” and other addictive feedback loops. She has installed a web browser plug-in to eradicate her Facebook news feed, and hired a social media manager to monitor her Facebook page so that she doesn’t have to.

Harris believes that tech companies never deliberately set out to make their products addictive. They were responding to the incentives of an advertising economy, experimenting with techniques that might capture people’s attention, even stumbling across highly effective design by accident.

It’s this that explains how the pull-to-refresh mechanism, whereby users swipe down, pause and wait to see what content appears, rapidly became one of the most addictive and ubiquitous design features in modern technology. “Each time you’re swiping down, it’s like a slot machine,” Harris says. “You don’t know what’s coming next. Sometimes it’s a beautiful photo. Sometimes it’s just an ad.”

The reality TV star’s campaign, he said, had heralded a watershed in which “the new, digitally supercharged dynamics of the attention economy have finally crossed a threshold and become manifest in the political realm”.

“Smartphones are useful tools,” he says. “But they’re addictive. Pull-to-refresh is addictive. Twitter is addictive. These are not good things. When I was working on them, it was not something I was mature enough to think about. I’m not saying I’m mature now, but I’m a little bit more mature, and I regret the downsides.”

All of it, he says, is reward-based behaviour that activates the brain’s dopamine pathways. He sometimes finds himself clicking on the red icons beside his apps “to make them go away”, but is conflicted about the ethics of exploiting people’s psychological vulnerabilities. “It is not inherently evil to bring people back to your product,” he says. “It’s capitalism.”

He identifies the advent of the smartphone as a turning point, raising the stakes in an arms race for people’s attention. “Facebook and Google assert with merit that they are giving users what they want,” McNamee says. “The same can be said about tobacco companies and drug dealers.”

McNamee chooses his words carefully. “The people who run Facebook and Google are good people, whose well-intentioned strategies have led to horrific unintended consequences,” he says. “The problem is that there is nothing the companies can do to address the harm unless they abandon their current advertising models.”

But how can Google and Facebook be forced to abandon the business models that have transformed them into two of the most profitable companies on the planet?

McNamee believes the companies he invested in should be subjected to greater regulation, including new anti-monopoly rules. In Washington, there is growing appetite, on both sides of the political divide, to rein in Silicon Valley. But McNamee worries the behemoths he helped build may already be too big to curtail.

Rosenstein, the Facebook “like” co-creator, believes there may be a case for state regulation of “psychologically manipulative advertising”, saying the moral impetus is comparable to taking action against fossil fuel or tobacco companies. “If we only care about profit maximisation,” he says, “we will go rapidly into dystopia.”

James Williams does not believe talk of dystopia is far-fetched. The ex-Google strategist who built the metrics system for the company’s global search advertising business, he has had a front-row view of an industry he describes as the “largest, most standardised and most centralised form of attentional control in human history”.

It is a journey that has led him to question whether democracy can survive the new technological age.

He says his epiphany came a few years ago, when he noticed he was surrounded by technology that was inhibiting him from concentrating on the things he wanted to focus on. “It was that kind of individual, existential realisation: what’s going on?” he says. “Isn’t technology supposed to be doing the complete opposite of this?

That discomfort was compounded during a moment at work, when he glanced at one of Google’s dashboards, a multicoloured display showing how much of people’s attention the company had commandeered for advertisers. “I realised: this is literally a million people that we’ve sort of nudged or persuaded to do this thing that they weren’t going to otherwise do,” he recalls.

Williams and Harris left Google around the same time, and co-founded an advocacy group, Time Well Spent, that seeks to build public momentum for a change in the way big tech companies think about design. Williams finds it hard to comprehend why this issue is not “on the front page of every newspaper every day.

“Eighty-seven percent of people wake up and go to sleep with their smartphones,” he says. The entire world now has a new prism through which to understand politics, and Williams worries the consequences are profound.

g. “The attention economy incentivises the design of technologies that grab our attention,” he says. “In so doing, it privileges our impulses over our intentions.”

That means privileging what is sensational over what is nuanced, appealing to emotion, anger and outrage. The news media is increasingly working in service to tech companies, Williams adds, and must play by the rules of the attention economy to “sensationalise, bait and entertain in order to survive”.

It is not just shady or bad actors who were exploiting the internet to change public opinion. The attention economy itself is set up to promote a phenomenon like Trump, who is masterly at grabbing and retaining the attention of supporters and critics alike, often by exploiting or creating outrage.

All of which has left Brichter, who has put his design work on the backburner while he focuses on building a house in New Jersey, questioning his legacy. “I’ve spent many hours and weeks and months and years thinking about whether anything I’ve done has made a net positive impact on society or humanity at all,” he says. He has blocked certain websites, turned off push notifications, restricted his use of the Telegram app to message only with his wife and two close friends, and tried to wean himself off Twitter. “I still waste time on it,” he confesses, “just reading stupid news I already know about.” He charges his phone in the kitchen, plugging it in at 7pm and not touching it until the next morning.

He stresses these dynamics are by no means isolated to the political right: they also play a role, he believes, in the unexpected popularity of leftwing politicians such as Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, and the frequent outbreaks of internet outrage over issues that ignite fury among progressives.

All of which, Williams says, is not only distorting the way we view politics but, over time, may be changing the way we think, making us less rational and more impulsive. “We’ve habituated ourselves into a perpetual cognitive style of outrage, by internalising the dynamics of the medium,” he says.

It was another English science fiction writer, Aldous Huxley, who provided the more prescient observation when he warned that Orwellian-style coercion was less of a threat to democracy than the more subtle power of psychological manipulation, and “man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions”.

If the attention economy erodes our ability to remember, to reason, to make decisions for ourselves – faculties that are essential to self-governance – what hope is there for democracy itself?

“The dynamics of the attention economy are structurally set up to undermine the human will,” he says. “If politics is an expression of our human will, on individual and collective levels, then the attention economy is directly undermining the assumptions that democracy rests on.”

Leaders of the effort said that teachers may well wind up covering fewer subjects, but digging more deeply into the ones they do cover. In some cases, traditional classes like biology and chemistry may disappear entirely from high schools, replaced by courses that use a case-study method to teach science in a more holistic way.

the standards are meant to do for science what a separate set of guidelines known as the Common Core is supposed to do for English and mathematics: impose and raise standards, with a focus on critical thinking and primary investigation.

“This is a huge deal,” said David L. Evans, the executive director of the National Science Teachers Association. “We depend on science in so many aspects of our lives. There’s a strong feeling that we need to help people understand the nature of science itself, as an intellectual pursuit.”

a group called Citizens for Objective Public Education, which lists officers in Florida and Kansas, distributed a nine-page letter attacking them. It warned that the standards ignored evidence against evolution, promoted “secular humanism,” and threatened to “take away the right of parents to direct the religious education of their children.”

In many states, extensive scientific instruction does not begin until high school. The guidelines call for injecting far more science into the middle grades, with climate change being one among many topics. In high school, students would learn in more detail about the human role in generating emissions that are altering the planetary climate.

While thousands of schools in the United States already teach climate change to some degree, they are usually doing it voluntarily, and often in environmental studies classes. In many more schools, the subject does not come up because students are not offered those specialized courses, and state guidelines typically do not require that the issue be raised in traditional biology or chemistry classes.

Outlining how the standards might change science classrooms, educators said they foresaw more use of real-world examples, like taking students to a farm or fish hatchery — perhaps repeatedly, over the course of years — to help them learn principles from biology, chemistry and physics.

For instance, we might choose a different metaphor—like, say, the traffic system. Sounds ridiculous? No more so than the market metaphor. After all, we already talk about one important aspect of economic life in terms of traffic: online activity. We could describe it in market terms (the market demands Trump memes!), but we use a different metaphor, because it’s just intuitively more suitable. That last Trump meme is generating a lot of traffic. Redirect your attention as required.

We don’t know much about markets, because we don’t deal with them very often. But most of us know plenty about traffic systems: drivers will know the frustration of trying to turn left onto a major road, of ceaseless, pointless lane-switching on a stalled rush-hour freeway, but also the joys of clear highways.

We know the traffic system because, whether we like it or not, we are always involved in it, from birth

As of birth, Jean is in the economy—even if s/he rarely goes to a market. You can’t not be an economic actor; you can’t not be part of the transport system.

Consider also the composition of the traffic system and the economy. A market, whatever else it is, is always essentially the same thing: a place where people can come together to buy and sell things. We could set up a market right now, with a few fences and a sign announcing that people could buy and sell. We don’t even really need the fences. A traffic system, however, is far more complex. To begin with, the system includes publicly and privately run elements: most cars are privately owned, as are most airlines

If we don’t evaluate traffic systems based on their size, or their growth, how do we evaluate them? Mostly, by how well they help people get where they want to go. The market metaphor encourages us to think that all economic activity is motivated by the search for profit, and pursued in the same fashion everywhere. In a market, everyone’s desires are perfectly interchangeable. But, while everybody engages in the transport system, we have no difficulty remembering that we all want to go to different places, in different ways, at different times, at different speeds, for different reasons

Deciding how to improve the traffic system, how to expand people’s opportunities, is obviously a question of resource allocation and prioritization on a scale that private individuals—even traders—cannot influence on their own. That’s why government have not historically trusted the “magic of the markets” to produce better opportunities for transport. We intuitively understand that these decisions are made at the level of mass society and public policy. And, whether you like it or not, this is true for decisions about the economy as well.

Thinking of the economy in terms of the market—a featureless plane, with no entry or exit costs, little need for regulation, and equal opportunity for all—obscures this basic insight. And this underlying misconception creates a lot of problems: we’ve fetishized economic growth, we’ve come to distrust government regulation, and we imagine that the inequalities in our country, and our world, are natural or justified. If we imagine the economy otherwise—as a traffic system, for example—we see more clearly how the economy actually works.

We see that our economic life looks a lot less like going to “market” for fun and profit than it does sitting in traffic on our morning commute, hoping against hope that we’ll get where we want to go, and on time.

I want to advance a technology-driven hypothesis: This mix of youthful safety and adult immaturity may be a feature of life in a society increasingly shaped by the internet’s virtual realities.

It is easy to see how online culture would make adolescent life less dangerous. Pornography to take the edge off teenage sexual appetite. Video games instead of fisticuffs or contact sports as an outlet for hormonal aggression. (Once it was feared that porn and violent media would encourage real-world aggression; instead they seem to be replacing it.) Sexting and selfie-enabled masturbation as a safer alternative to hooking up. Online hangouts instead of keggers in the field. More texting and driving, but less driving — one of the most dangerous teen activities — overall.

The question is whether this substitution is habit-forming and soul-shaping, and whether it extends beyond dangerous teen behavior to include things essential to long-term human flourishing — marriage, work, family, all that old-fashioned “meatspace” stuff.

It wasn’t so long ago that people worried about a digital divide, in which online access would be a luxury good that left the bottom half behind. But if anything, the virtual world looks more like an opiate for the masses

trends in the marketplace — ever-more-customized pornography, virtual realities that feel more and more immersive, devices and apps customized for addictive behavior — seem likely to overwhelm most attempts to enjoy the virtual only within limits.

Patricia Snow (yes, even columnists have mothers), in an essay for First Things earlier this year, suggested that any effective resistance to virtual reality’s encroachments would need to be moral and religious, not just pragmatic and managerial

But the narrative is insufficient. The real problem with the modern meritocracy can be found in the ideology of meritocracy itself. Meritocracy is a system built on the maximization of individual talent, and that system unwittingly encourages several ruinous beliefs:

Exaggerated faith in intelligence.

Many of the great failures of the last 50 years, from Vietnam to Watergate to the financial crisis, were caused by extremely intelligent people who didn’t care about the civic consequences of their actions.

Misplaced faith in autonomy

The meritocracy is based on the metaphor that life is a journey. On graduation days, members for the educated class give their young Dr. Seuss’ “Oh, the Places You’ll Go!” which shows a main character, “you,” who goes on a solitary, unencumbered journey through life toward success. If you build a society upon this metaphor you will wind up with a society high in narcissism and low in social connection

Life is not really an individual journey. Life is more like settling a sequence of villages. You help build a community at home, at work, in your town and then you go off and settle more villages.

Instead of seeing the self as the seat of the soul, the meritocracy sees the self as a vessel of human capital, a series of talents to be cultivated and accomplishments to be celebrated.

Misplaced notion of the self

If you base a society on a conception of self that is about achievement, not character, you will wind up with a society that is demoralized; that puts little emphasis on the sorts of moral systems that create harmony within people, harmony between people and harmony between people and their ultimate purpose.

Inability to think institutionally.

Previous elites poured themselves into institutions and were pretty good at maintaining existing institutions, like the U.S. Congress, and building new ones, like the postwar global order.

The current generation sees institutions as things they pass through on the way to individual success. Some institutions, like Congress and the political parties, have decayed to the point of uselessness, while others, like corporations, lose their generational consciousness

Misplaced idolization of diversity

But diversity is a midpoint, not an endpoint. Just as a mind has to be opened so that it can close on something, an organization has to be diverse so that different perspectives can serve some end.

Diversity for its own sake, without a common telos, is infinitely centrifugal, and leads to social fragmentation.

The essential point is this: Those dimwitted, stuck up blue bloods in the old establishment had something we meritocrats lack — a civic consciousness, a sense that we live life embedded in community and nation, that we owe a debt to community and nation and that the essence of the admirable life is community before self.

The meritocracy is here to stay, thank goodness, but we probably need a new ethos to reconfigure it — to redefine how people are seen, how applicants are selected, how social roles are understood and how we narrate a common national purpose

A statement from the White House press secretary said the president “reassured the leaders that America remains committed to the trans-Atlantic alliance and to robust efforts to protect the environment.”

The president’s speech was his boldest and most sweeping assertion of an “America first” foreign policy doctrine since he assumed office four months ago.

“At what point does America get demeaned? At what point do they start laughing at us as a country?” Mr. Trump said. “We don’t want other leaders and other countries laughing at us anymore. And they won’t be.”

said the decision would ultimately harm the economy by ceding the jobs of the future in clean energy and technology to overseas competitors.

In his remarks, Mr. Trump listed sectors of the United States economy that would lose revenue and jobs if the country remained part of the accord, citing a study — vigorously disputed by environmental groups — asserting that the agreement would cost 2.7 million jobs by 2025.

“Even in the absence of American leadership; even as this administration joins a small handful of nations that reject the future; I’m confident that our states, cities, and businesses will step up and do even more to lead the way, and help protect for future generations the one planet we’ve got,” Mr. Obama said.

In recent days, Mr. Trump withstood withering criticism from European counterparts who accused him of shirking America’s role as a global leader and America’s responsibility as history’s largest emitter of planet-warming greenhouse gasses.

shortsightedness about the planet and a reckless willingness to shatter longstanding diplomatic relationships.

“It undermines America’s standing in the world and threatens to damage humanity’s ability to solve the climate crisis in time.”

poor readers can sound out words from print, so in that sense, they can read. Yet they are functionally illiterate — they comprehend very little of what they can sound out. So what does comprehension require? Broad vocabulary, obviously. Equally important, but more subtle, is the role played by factual knowledge.

All prose has factual gaps that must be filled by the reader.

Knowledge also provides context.

You might think, then, that authors should include all the information needed to understand what they write.

Current education practices show that reading comprehension is misunderstood. It’s treated like a general skill that can be applied with equal success to all texts. Rather, comprehension is intimately intertwined with knowledge.

students who score well on reading tests are those with broad knowledge; they usually know at least a little about the topics of the passages on the test.

One experiment tested 11th graders’ general knowledge with questions from science (“pneumonia affects which part of the body?”), history (“which American president resigned because of the Watergate scandal?”), as well as the arts, civics, geography, athletics and literature. Scores on this general knowledge test were highly associated with reading test scores.

But those details would make prose long and tedious for readers who already know the information. “Write for your audience” means, in part, gambling on what they know.

That suggests three significant changes in schooling.

First, it points to decreasing the time spent on literacy instruction in early grades.

Third-graders spend 56 percent of their time on literacy activities but 6 percent each on science and social studies. This disproportionate emphasis on literacy backfires in later grades, when children’s lack of subject matter knowledge impedes comprehension.

Another positive step would be to use high-information texts in early elementary grades. Historically, they have been light in content.

Second, understanding the importance of knowledge to reading ought to make us think differently about year-end standardized tests. If a child has studied New Zealand, she ought to be good at reading and thinking about passages on New Zealand. Why test her reading with a passage about spiders, or the Titanic?

Third, the systematic building of knowledge must be a priority in curriculum design.

The Common Core Standards for reading specify nearly nothing by way of content that children are supposed to know — the document valorizes reading skills. State officials should go beyond the Common Core Standards by writing content-rich grade-level standards

Don’t blame the internet, or smartphones, or fake news for Americans’ poor reading. Blame ignorance. Turning the tide will require profound changes in how reading is taught, in standardized testing and in school curriculums. Underlying all these changes must be a better understanding of how the mind comprehends what it reads.

Daniel T. Willingham (@DTWillingham) is a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and the author, most recently, of “The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads.”

More than two decades ago, a study of 295 skulls in museums found “enormous differences” between the two types of elephants, he said. In life, forest elephants have smaller bodies, rounder ears and straighter tusks than savanna elephants.

Elephants being killed for their ivory tusks isn’t a new problem, and neither is the habitat loss they face.

Savanna elephants are “thriving,”

“At the moment we are getting to the minds of the people,” Dr. Okita said. “But we need to get to the hearts.”

The average savanna elephant mother gives birth at 25 years; forest elephant moms are 31 on average. Because the earliest surveys researchers could find were from the 1960s and 1970s, they could peer back only two generations for savanna elephants, and a single generation for forest elephants.

“The forest elephants, in most cases, have been largely ignored,” he said. Grouping the two elephants together probably masked just how bad things were for the forest elephant, he said.

The country will also need to open more vaccination sites, some of which should be open 24/7 to ensure people who get off work at odd hours have easy access to the vaccine.“This is a wartime sort of response,” Fagbuyi said. “You’re going to pull all the stops and not leave any stone unturned.”

“Enjoy the opportunity, but also be cautious and look at what’s going on around you,” Fagbuyi said.

“We’re going to be trying to convince people to come get vaccinated,” Adalja said.

Adalja predicts that by the Fourth of July, vulnerable people will be vaccinated in all states and there will no longer be concerns about reaching hospital capacity.

So, when will we get to a point where it won’t be so complicated for the general public to score a vaccine appointment? Fagbuyi predicts sometime in June.

We often hear doctors say we want 70% of the population to be immune to COVID-19, whether through vaccination, natural infection or preexisting immunity, to achieve herd immunity. Each dose pricked in someone’s arm makes it harder for the virus to spread.

“What I think is more important than herd immunity is making sure vulnerable populations are vaccinated so that COVID loses the ability to cause severe illness, hospitalization and death,” Adalja said.

Our previous work has shown that ACTN3 variants play an important role in our muscle’s ability to generate strength. We showed that the loss of alpha-actinin-3 is detrimental to sprint performance in athletes and the general population, but may benefit muscle endurance.

This is because the loss of alpha-actinin-3 causes the muscle to behave more like a slower muscle fibre.

Our study shows that ACTN3 is more than just the “gene for speed”, but that its loss improves our muscle’s ability to generate heat and reduces the need to shiver when exposed to cold.

The goal of our research is to improve our understanding of how our genetics influence how our muscle works. This will allow us to develop better treatments for those who suffer from muscle diseases, like Duchenne muscular dystrophy, as well as more common conditions, such as obesity and type 2 diabetes.

Such trading on information originating outside the company is generally not covered by insider trading regulation.

Insider trading is quite different from market manipulation, disclosure of false or misleading information to the market, or direct expropriation of the corporation’s wealth by insiders.

Regulation of insider trading began in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, when judges in several states became willing to rescind corporate insiders’ transactions with uninformed shareholders.

One of the earliest (and unsuccessful) federal attempts to regulate insider trading occurred after the 1912–1913 congressional hearings before the Pujo Committee, which concluded that “the scandalous practices of officers and directors in speculating upon inside and advance information as to the action of their corporations may be curtailed if not stopped.”

The Securities Acts of 1933–1934, passed by the U.S. Congress in the aftermath of the stock market crash, though aimed primarily at prohibiting fraud and market manipulation, also targeted insider trading.

As of 2004, at least ninety-three countries, the vast majority of nations that possess organized securities markets, had laws regulating insider trading

Several factors explain the rapid emergence of such regulation, particularly during the last twenty years: namely, the growth of the securities industry worldwide, pressures to make national securities markets look more attractive in the eyes of outside investors, and the pressure the SEC exerted on foreign lawmakers and regulators to increase the effectiveness of domestic enforcement by identifying and punishing offenders and their associates operating outside the United States.

Many researchers argue that trading on inside information is a zero-sum game, benefiting insiders at the expense of outsiders. But most outsiders who bought from or sold to insiders would have traded anyway, and possibly at a worse price (Manne 1970). So, for example, if the insider sells stock because he expects the price to fall, the very act of selling may bring the price down to the buyer.

A controversial case is that of abstaining from trading on the basis of inside information (Fried 2003).

There is little disagreement that insider trading makes securities markets more efficient by moving the current market price closer to the future postdisclosure price. In other words, insiders’ transactions, even if they are anonymous, signal future price trends to others and make the current stock price reflect relevant information sooner.

Accurately priced stocks give valuable signals to investors and ensure more efficient allocation of capital.

The controversial question is whether insider trading is more or less effective than public disclosure.

Insider trading’s advantage is that it introduces individual profit motives, does not directly reveal sensitive intercorporate information, and mitigates the management’s aversion to disclosing negative information (

Probably the most controversial issue in the economic analysis of insider trading is whether it is an efficient way to pay managers for their entrepreneurial services to the corporation. Some researchers believe that insider trading gives managers a monetary incentive to innovate, search for, and produce valuable information, as well as to take risks that increase the firm’s value (Carlton and Fischel 1983; Manne 1966).

Another economic argument for insider trading is that it provides efficient compensation to holders of large blocks of stock

A common contention is that the presence of insider trading decreases public confidence in, and deters many potential investors from, equity markets, making them less liquid (Loss 1970).

Empirical research generally supports skepticism that regulation of insider trading has been effective in either the United States or internationally, as evidenced by the persistent trading profits of insiders, behavior of stock prices around corporate announcements, and relatively infrequent prosecution rates (Bhattacharya and Daouk 2002; Bris 2005).

Despite numerous and extensive debates, economists and legal scholars do not agree on a desirable government policy toward insider trading. On the one hand, absolute information parity is clearly infeasible, and information-based trading generally increases the pricing efficiency of financial markets. Information, after all, is a scarce economic good that is costly to produce or acquire, and its subsequent use and dissemination are difficult to control. On the other hand, insider trading, as opposed to other forms of informed trading, may produce unintended adverse consequences for the functioning of the corporate enterprise, the market-wide system of publicly mandated disclosure, or the market for information.

Investment is usually the result of forgoing consumption. In a purely agrarian society, early humans had to choose how much grain to eat after the harvest and how much to save for future planting. The latter was investment.

In a more modern society, we allocate our productive capacity to producing pure consumer goods such as hamburgers and hot dogs, and investment goods such as semiconductor foundries. If we create one dollar worth of hamburgers today, then our gross national product is higher by one dollar.

Investment need not always take the form of a privately owned physical product. The most common example of nonphysical investment is investment in human capital.

In an economy that is closed to the outside world, investment can come only from the forgone consumption—the saving—of private individuals, private firms, or government.

In an open economy, however, investment can surge at the same time that a nation’s saving is low because a country can borrow the resources necessary to invest from neighboring countries.

That economists have a fairly strong understanding of firms’ investment behavior makes sense. A firm that maximizes its profits must address investment using the framework discussed in this article.

This method of financing investment has been very important in the United States. The industrial base of the United States in the nineteenth century—railroads, factories, and so on—was built on foreign finance, especially from Britain. More recently, the United States has repeatedly posted significant investment growth and very low savings.

Investment fluctuates a lot because the fundamentals that drive investment—output prices, interest rates, and taxes—also fluctuate. But economists do not fully understand fluctuations in investment. Indeed, the sharp swings in investment that occur might require an extension to the Jorgenson theory.

In Jorgenson’s user cost model, firms will purchase a machine if the extra revenue the machine generates is a smidgen more than its cost.

The general conclusion is that there is a gain to waiting if there is uncertainty and if the installation of the machine entails sunk costs, that is, costs that cannot be recovered once spent.

Although quantifying this gain exactly is a highly mathematical exercise, the reasoning is straightforward. That would explain why firms typically want to invest only in projects that have a high expected profit.

The fact of irreversibility might explain the large fluctuations in investment that we observe.

The theory of investment dates back to the giants of economics. irving fisher, arthur cecil pigou, and alfred marshall all made contributions; as did john maynard keynes, whose Marshallian user cost theory is a central feature in his General Theory.

Consumer behavior is harder to study than firms’ behavior. Market forces that drive irrational people out of the marketplace are much weaker than market forces that drive bad companies from the market.

Because the saving response of consumers must be known if one is to fully understand the impact of any investment policy, and because saving behavior is so poorly understood, much work remains to be done.

By removing the tangible product from the center of commerce, surveillance capitalism upsets the equilibrium. Whenever we use free apps and online services, it’s often said, we become the products, our attention harvested and sold to advertisers

this truism gets it wrong. Surveillance capitalism’s real products, vaporous but immensely valuable, are predictions about our future behavior — what we’ll look at, where we’ll go, what we’ll buy, what opinions we’ll hold — that internet companies derive from our personal data and sell to businesses, political operatives, and other bidders.

Unlike financial derivatives, which they in some ways resemble, these new data derivatives draw their value, parasite-like, from human experience.To the Googles and Facebooks of the world, we are neither the customer nor the product. We are the source of what Silicon Valley technologists call “data exhaust” — the informational byproducts of online activity that become the inputs to prediction algorithms

Another 2015 study, appearing in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, showed that when people hear their phone ring but are unable to answer it, their blood pressure spikes, their pulse quickens, and their problem-solving skills decline.

The smartphone has become a repository of the self, recording and dispensing the words, sounds and images that define what we think, what we experience and who we are. In a 2015 Gallup survey, more than half of iPhone owners said that they couldn’t imagine life without the device.

So what happens to our minds when we allow a single tool such dominion over our perception and cognition?

Not only do our phones shape our thoughts in deep and complicated ways, but the effects persist even when we aren’t using the devices. As the brain grows dependent on the technology, the research suggests, the intellect weakens.

he has seen mounting evidence that using a smartphone, or even hearing one ring or vibrate, produces a welter of distractions that makes it harder to concentrate on a difficult problem or job. The division of attention impedes reasoning and performance.

internet companies operate in what Zuboff terms “extreme structural independence from people.” When databases displace goods as the engine of the economy, our own interests, as consumers but also as citizens, cease to be part of the negotiation. We are no longer one of the forces guiding the market’s invisible hand. We are the objects of surveillance and control.

Social skills and relationships seem to suffer as well.

In both tests, the subjects whose phones were in view posted the worst scores, while those who left their phones in a different room did the best. The students who kept their phones in their pockets or bags came out in the middle. As the phone’s proximity increased, brainpower decreased.

In subsequent interviews, nearly all the participants said that their phones hadn’t been a distraction—that they hadn’t even thought about the devices during the experiment. They remained oblivious even as the phones disrupted their focus and thinking.

The researchers recruited 520 undergraduates at UCSD and gave them two standard tests of intellectual acuity. One test gauged “available working-memory capacity,” a measure of how fully a person’s mind can focus on a particular task. The second assessed “fluid intelligence,” a person’s ability to interpret and solve an unfamiliar problem. The only variable in the experiment was the location of the subjects’ smartphones. Some of the students were asked to place their phones in front of them on their desks; others were told to stow their phones in their pockets or handbags; still others were required to leave their phones in a different room.

the “integration of smartphones into daily life” appears to cause a “brain drain” that can diminish such vital mental skills as “learning, logical reasoning, abstract thought, problem solving, and creativity.”

 Smartphones have become so entangled with our existence that, even when we’re not peering or pawing at them, they tug at our attention, diverting precious cognitive resources. Just suppressing the desire to check our phone, which we do routinely and subconsciously throughout the day, can debilitate our thinking.

They found that students who didn’t bring their phones to the classroom scored a full letter-grade higher on a test of the material presented than those who brought their phones. It didn’t matter whether the students who had their phones used them or not: All of them scored equally poorly.

A study of nearly a hundred secondary schools in the U.K., published last year in the journal Labour Economics, found that when schools ban smartphones, students’ examination scores go up substantially, with the weakest students benefiting the most.

Data, the novelist and critic Cynthia Ozick once wrote, is “memory without history.” Her observation points to the problem with allowing smartphones to commandeer our brains

Because smartphones serve as constant reminders of all the friends we could be chatting with electronically, they pull at our minds when we’re talking with people in person, leaving our conversations shallower and less satisfying.

In a 2013 study conducted at the University of Essex in England, 142 participants were divided into pairs and asked to converse in private for ten minutes. Half talked with a phone in the room, half without a phone present. The subjects were then given tests of affinity, trust and empathy. “The mere presence of mobile phones,” the researchers reported in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, “inhibited the development of interpersonal closeness and trust” and diminished “the extent to which individuals felt empathy and understanding from their partners.”

The evidence that our phones can get inside our heads so forcefully is unsettling. It suggests that our thoughts and feelings, far from being sequestered in our skulls, can be skewed by external forces we’re not even aware o

 Scientists have long known that the brain is a monitoring system as well as a thinking system. Its attention is drawn toward any object that is new, intriguing or otherwise striking — that has, in the psychological jargon, “salience.”

even in the history of captivating media, the smartphone stands out. It is an attention magnet unlike any our minds have had to grapple with before. Because the phone is packed with so many forms of information and so many useful and entertaining functions, it acts as what Dr. Ward calls a “supernormal stimulus,” one that can “hijack” attention whenever it is part of our surroundings — and it is always part of our surroundings.

Imagine combining a mailbox, a newspaper, a TV, a radio, a photo album, a public library and a boisterous party attended by everyone you know, and then compressing them all into a single, small, radiant object. That is what a smartphone represents to us. No wonder we can’t take our minds off it.

The irony of the smartphone is that the qualities that make it so appealing to us — its constant connection to the net, its multiplicity of apps, its responsiveness, its portability — are the very ones that give it such sway over our minds.

Phone makers like Apple and Samsung and app writers like Facebook, Google and Snap design their products to consume as much of our attention as possible during every one of our waking hours

Social media apps were designed to exploit “a vulnerability in human psychology,” former Facebook president Sean Parker said in a recent interview. “[We] understood this consciously. And we did it anyway.”

A quarter-century ago, when we first started going online, we took it on faith that the web would make us smarter: More information would breed sharper thinking. We now know it’s not that simple.

As strange as it might seem, people’s knowledge and understanding may actually dwindle as gadgets grant them easier access to online data stores

In a seminal 2011 study published in Science, a team of researchers — led by the Columbia University psychologist Betsy Sparrow and including the late Harvard memory expert Daniel Wegner — had a group of volunteers read forty brief, factual statements (such as “The space shuttle Columbia disintegrated during re-entry over Texas in Feb. 2003”) and then type the statements into a computer. Half the people were told that the machine would save what they typed; half were told that the statements would be erased.

Afterward, the researchers asked the subjects to write down as many of the statements as they could remember. Those who believed that the facts had been recorded in the computer demonstrated much weaker recall than those who assumed the facts wouldn’t be stored. Anticipating that information would be readily available in digital form seemed to reduce the mental effort that people made to remember it

The researchers dubbed this phenomenon the “Google effect” and noted its broad implications: “Because search engines are continually available to us, we may often be in a state of not feeling we need to encode the information internally. When we need it, we will look it up.”

as the pioneering psychologist and philosopher William James said in an 1892 lecture, “the art of remembering is the art of thinking.”

Only by encoding information in our biological memory can we weave the rich intellectual associations that form the essence of personal knowledge and give rise to critical and conceptual thinking. No matter how much information swirls around us, the less well-stocked our memory, the less we have to think with.

As Dr. Wegner and Dr. Ward explained in a 2013 Scientific American article, when people call up information through their devices, they often end up suffering from delusions of intelligence. They feel as though “their own mental capacities” had generated the information, not their devices. “The advent of the ‘information age’ seems to have created a generation of people who feel they know more than ever before,” the scholars concluded, even though “they may know ever less about the world around them.”

That insight sheds light on society’s current gullibility crisis, in which people are all too quick to credit lies and half-truths spread through social media. If your phone has sapped your powers of discernment, you’ll believe anything it tells you.

A second experiment conducted by the researchers produced similar results, while also revealing that the more heavily students relied on their phones in their everyday lives, the greater the cognitive penalty they suffered.

When we constrict our capacity for reasoning and recall or transfer those skills to a gadget, we sacrifice our ability to turn information into knowledge. We get the data but lose the meaning

We need to give our minds more room to think. And that means putting some distance between ourselves and our phones.

Google’s once-patient investors grew restive, demanding that the founders figure out a way to make money, preferably lots of it.

nder pressure, Page and Brin authorized the launch of an auction system for selling advertisements tied to search queries. The system was designed so that the company would get paid by an advertiser only when a user clicked on an ad. This feature gave Google a huge financial incentive to make accurate predictions about how users would respond to ads and other online content. Even tiny increases in click rates would bring big gains in income. And so the company began deploying its stores of behavioral data not for the benefit of users but to aid advertisers — and to juice its own profits. Surveillance capitalism had arrived.

Google’s business now hinged on what Zuboff calls “the extraction imperative.” To improve its predictions, it had to mine as much information as possible from web users. It aggressively expanded its online services to widen the scope of its surveillance.

Through Gmail, it secured access to the contents of people’s emails and address books. Through Google Maps, it gained a bead on people’s whereabouts and movements. Through Google Calendar, it learned what people were doing at different moments during the day and whom they were doing it with. Through Google News, it got a readout of people’s interests and political leanings. Through Google Shopping, it opened a window onto people’s wish lists,

The company gave all these services away for free to ensure they’d be used by as many people as possible. It knew the money lay in the data.

the organization grew insular and secretive. Seeking to keep the true nature of its work from the public, it adopted what its CEO at the time, Eric Schmidt, called a “hiding strategy” — a kind of corporate omerta backed up by stringent nondisclosure agreements.

Page and Brin further shielded themselves from outside oversight by establishing a stock structure that guaranteed their power could never be challenged, neither by investors nor by directors.

What’s most remarkable about the birth of surveillance capitalism is the speed and audacity with which Google overturned social conventions and norms about data and privacy. Without permission, without compensation, and with little in the way of resistance, the company seized and declared ownership over everyone’s information

The companies that followed Google presumed that they too had an unfettered right to collect, parse, and sell personal data in pretty much any way they pleased. In the smart homes being built today, it’s understood that any and all data will be beamed up to corporate clouds.

Google conducted its great data heist under the cover of novelty. The web was an exciting frontier — something new in the world — and few people understood or cared about what they were revealing as they searched and surfed. In those innocent days, data was there for the taking, and Google took it

Google also benefited from decisions made by lawmakers, regulators, and judges — decisions that granted internet companies free use of a vast taxpayer-funded communication infrastructure, relieved them of legal and ethical responsibility for the information and messages they distributed, and gave them carte blanche to collect and exploit user data.

Consider the terms-of-service agreements that govern the division of rights and the delegation of ownership online. Non-negotiable, subject to emendation and extension at the company’s whim, and requiring only a casual click to bind the user, TOS agreements are parodies of contracts, yet they have been granted legal legitimacy by the court

Law professors, writes Zuboff, “call these ‘contracts of adhesion’ because they impose take-it-or-leave-it conditions on users that stick to them whether they like it or not.” Fundamentally undemocratic, the ubiquitous agreements helped Google and other firms commandeer personal data as if by fiat.

n the choices we make as consumers and private citizens, we have always traded some of our autonomy to gain other rewards. Many people, it seems clear, experience surveillance capitalism less as a prison, where their agency is restricted in a noxious way, than as an all-inclusive resort, where their agency is restricted in a pleasing way

Zuboff makes a convincing case that this is a short-sighted and dangerous view — that the bargain we’ve struck with the internet giants is a Faustian one

but her case would have been stronger still had she more fully addressed the benefits side of the ledger.

there’s a piece missing. While Zuboff’s assessment of the costs that people incur under surveillance capitalism is exhaustive, she largely ignores the benefits people receive in return — convenience, customization, savings, entertainment, social connection, and so on

hat the industries of the future will seek to manufacture is the self.

Behavior modification is the thread that ties today’s search engines, social networks, and smartphone trackers to tomorrow’s facial-recognition systems, emotion-detection sensors, and artificial-intelligence bots.

All of Facebook’s information wrangling and algorithmic fine-tuning, she writes, “is aimed at solving one problem: how and when to intervene in the state of play that is your daily life in order to modify your behavior and thus sharply increase the predictability of your actions now, soon, and later.”

“The goal of everything we do is to change people’s actual behavior at scale,” a top Silicon Valley data scientist told her in an interview. “We can test how actionable our cues are for them and how profitable certain behaviors are for us.”

This goal, she suggests, is not limited to Facebook. It is coming to guide much of the economy, as financial and social power shifts to the surveillance capitalists

Combining rich information on individuals’ behavioral triggers with the ability to deliver precisely tailored and timed messages turns out to be a recipe for behavior modification on an unprecedented scale.

it was Facebook, with its incredibly detailed data on people’s social lives, that grasped digital media’s full potential for behavior modification. By using what it called its “social graph” to map the intentions, desires, and interactions of literally billions of individuals, it saw that it could turn its network into a worldwide Skinner box, employing psychological triggers and rewards to program not only what people see but how they react.

spying on the populace is not the end game. The real prize lies in figuring out ways to use the data to shape how people think and act. “The best way to predict the future is to invent it,” the computer scientist Alan Kay once observed. And the best way to predict behavior is to script it.

competition for personal data intensified. It was no longer enough to monitor people online; making better predictions required that surveillance be extended into homes, stores, schools, workplaces, and the public squares of cities and towns. Much of the recent innovation in the tech industry has entailed the creation of products and services designed to vacuum up data from every corner of our lives

“The typical complaint is that privacy is eroded, but that is misleading,” Zuboff writes. “In the larger societal pattern, privacy is not eroded but redistributed . . . . Instead of people having the rights to decide how and what they will disclose, these rights are concentrated within the domain of surveillance capitalism.” The transfer of decision rights is also a transfer of autonomy and agency, from the citizen to the corporation.

What we lose under this regime is something more fundamental than privacy. It’s the right to make our own decisions about privacy — to draw our own lines between those aspects of our lives we are comfortable sharing and those we are not

Other possible ways of organizing online markets, such as through paid subscriptions for apps and services, never even got a chance to be tested.

Online surveillance came to be viewed as normal and even necessary by politicians, government bureaucrats, and the general public

Google and other Silicon Valley companies benefited directly from the government’s new stress on digital surveillance. They earned millions through contracts to share their data collection and analysis techniques with the National Security Agenc

As much as the dot-com crash, the horrors of 9/11 set the stage for the rise of surveillance capitalism. Zuboff notes that, in 2000, members of the Federal Trade Commission, frustrated by internet companies’ lack of progress in adopting privacy protections, began formulating legislation to secure people’s control over their online information and severely restrict the companies’ ability to collect and store it. It seemed obvious to the regulators that ownership of personal data should by default lie in the hands of private citizens, not corporations.