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There are killers, and there are losers.

Throughout his life, the President has seemingly operated with that conviction

the President has seemingly operated with that conviction

The New York Times analyzed every public utterance by Mr. Trump over the past week from rallies, speeches, interviews and news conferences to explore the leading candidate’s hold on the Republican electorate for the past five months.

The transcriptions yielded 95,000 words and several powerful patterns

The most striking hallmark was Mr. Trump’s constant repetition of divisive phrases, harsh words and violent imagery that American presidents rarely use

Here’s Furman:There’s what economists think people should think about inflation—and what people actually think about inflation are different. . . .Inflation has big winners and losers. So surprise inflation helps debtors and hurts creditors. And there are probably tens of millions of people in our economy who have benefited from inflation. Maybe it’s a business that was able to raise prices more. Maybe a worker who was able to get a bigger raise. Maybe it’s someone whose mortgage is now worth 10 percent less.But there are not tens of millions of people who think they’ve benefited from inflation. In fact, I’m not sure there are tens of people who think they’ve benefited from inflation.And so it has these winners and losers. The losers are very aware of their losses. The winners are completely oblivious to their gains.So then as a policymaker, do you want to sort of make people happy? Or do you want to sort of do what you think is in their economic and financial interests? And that to me is not obvious.

Oh it’s obvious to me. The People are the problem.But they’re a persistent problem and until the AIs replace us, The People aren’t going away. So given this constraint, I’m not sure that an optimal solution is ever going to be politically possible in American democracy. The country is too fractured. Our political institutions too compromised.

so if you work from the assumption that we’re going to shoot wide of the mark in one direction or the other, I’d still rather be on the Trump-Biden side of having done too much, and dealing with our attendant problems than the Bush-Obama side of having done too little.

Candidates accordingly believed that being caught in an outright lie could damage their careers. (As Daniel Patrick Moynihan reportedly said, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”) They tended only to bend the truth, not break it.

At least four factors since the 1970s have lowered the cost for politicians who lie and, more important, repeat their fabrications through their attack ads. First is the overall decline in respect for institutions and professionals of all kinds, from scientists and lawyers to journalists and civil servants.

Second are changes in media regulation and ownership

The attraction of Nietzsche to socially maladjusted young men is obvious, but it isn't exactly simple. It is built from several interlocking pieces.

If your social world fails to appreciate your singularity and tells you that you're a loser, reading Nietzsche can steel you in your secret conviction that, no, I'm a genius, or at least very special, and everyone else is the loser. Like you, Nietzsche was misunderstood in his day, ignored or derided by other scholars. Like you, Nietzsche seems to find everything around him lame, either stodgy and moralistic or sick with democratic vulgarity. Nietzsche seems to believe in aristocracy, which is taboo these days, which might be why no one recognizes you as the higher sort of guy you suspect yourself to be. And crucially, if you're a horny and poetic young man whose dream girl is ever present before your eyes but just out of reach, Nietzsche frames his project of resistance and overcoming as not just romantic but erotic.

While railing about how difficult it’s become for the man on the street to separate facts from beliefs, he brought up his favorite global impasse again: climate change. Despite scientific evidence that stacks higher than the Egyptian pyramids, Maher lamented that there are still Americans walking around who “don’t think the sun is hot.”

Maher asks why facts are becoming marginalized. The answer is right under his nose. When Darwin discovered the slow pace of evolutionary change (millions of years), he also explained what happens to us when the complexity of our problems exceeds the capabilities our brains have evolved to this point. It’s simple: when facts become incomprehensible, we switch to beliefs. In other words, all societies eventually become irrational when confronted with problems that are too complex, too large, too messy to solve.

Thankfully, we have two weapons earlier civilizations didn’t have: models for high failure rates and neuroscience. Take the venture capital model for example. No matter how much due diligence venture capitalists perform, they can’t pick a winner from a loser more than 20 percent of the time. But the enormous success of those winners overshadows the failures, so venture capitalists are successful in spite of themselves.

Norway, like many European states, has public offerings many Americans would consider political fantasy. There is lengthy paid maternity leave, free university education, and long-term unemployment benefits

What is it about the Norwegian state—or about Scandinavian countries in general—that leads their populations to support redistribution policies in a way that Americans don’t?

A group of Scandinavian researchers recently did an experiment trying to tease that out. Their goal: to find out how social attitudes towards inequality in the U.S. and Norway differ, in an effort to explain why the two countries have such different redistribution policies. The difference, they discovered, hinges on how people think about luck and fairness.

From unsympathetic journalists to political rivals, Trump calls his opponents “disgusting” and writes them off as “losers.” By the standards of reality TV, Trump’s disagreeableness may not be so shocking. But political candidates who want people to vote for them rarely behave like this.

Trump seems capable of a similar toughness and strategic pragmatism, although the cool rationality does not always seem to fit, probably because Trump’s disagreeableness appears so strongly motivated by anger.

Research shows that people low in agreeableness are typically viewed as untrustworthy. Dishonesty and deceit brought down Nixon and damaged the institution of the presidency. It is generally believed today that all politicians lie, or at least dissemble, but Trump appears extreme in this regard. Assessing the truthfulness of the 2016 candidates’ campaign statements, PolitiFact recently calculated that only 2 percent of the claims made by Trump are true, 7 percent are mostly true, 15 percent are half true, 15 percent are mostly false, 42 percent are false, and 18 percent are “pants on fire.” Adding up the last three numbers (from mostly false to flagrantly so), Trump scores 75 percent. The corresponding figures for Ted Cruz, John Kasich, Bernie Sanders, and Hillary Clinton, respectively, are 66, 32, 31, and 29 percent.

Turner and other elite students are living the American Dream. Parents raise them in a world of winners and losers, victory and defeat, and expect them to be victors

They mythologize this behavior as natural order. From “boys will be boys” to “he was a born champion,” young men like Brock Turner are taught that they should aspire to be talented, successful winners.

for every conqueror, there must be conquered. We don’t say that someone simply won a game, they demolished their competition. A young man doesn’t just “have sex” with a woman, he “scores” or “smashes.” There are no ties, and there is no second place.

At the same time, a second, more momentous, intellectual revolution will be needed regarding government intervention in social outcomes and economic structures. Market fundamentalism conceals a profound contradiction. Free trade, technological progress, and other forces that promote economic “efficiency” are presented as beneficial to society, even if they harm individual workers or businesses, because growing national incomes allow winners to compensate losers, ensuring that nobody is left worse off.

During the Nineties, and again in the wake of September 11, 2001, I was struck more than once by a perverse contemporary insistence on not understanding the context of our present dilemmas, at home and abroad; on not listening with greater care to some of the wiser heads of earlier decades; on seeking actively to forget rather than remember, to deny continuity and proclaim novelty on every possible occasion. We have become stridently insistent that the past has little of interest to teach us. Ours, we assert, is a new world; its risks and opportunities are without precedent.

the twentieth century that we have chosen to commemorate is curiously out of focus. The overwhelming majority of places of official twentieth-century memory are either avowedly nostalgo-triumphalist—praising famous men and celebrating famous victories—or else, and increasingly, they are opportunities for the recollection of selective suffering.

The problem with this lapidary representation of the last century as a uniquely horrible time from which we have now, thankfully, emerged is not the description—it was in many ways a truly awful era, an age of brutality and mass suffering perhaps unequaled in the historical record. The problem is the message: that all of that is now behind us, that its meaning is clear, and that we may now advance—unencumbered by past errors—into a different and better era.

Amazon is a global superstore, like Walmart. It’s also a hardware manufacturer, like Apple, and a utility, like Con Edison, and a video distributor, like Netflix, and a book publisher, like Random House, and a production studio, like Paramount, and a literary magazine, like The Paris Review, and a grocery deliverer, like FreshDirect, and someday it might be a package service, like U.P.S. Its founder and chief executive, Jeff Bezos, also owns a major newspaper, the Washington Post. All these streams and tributaries make Amazon something radically new in the history of American business

Amazon is not just the “Everything Store,” to quote the title of Brad Stone’s rich chronicle of Bezos and his company; it’s more like the Everything. What remains constant is ambition, and the search for new things to be ambitious about.

It wasn’t a love of books that led him to start an online bookstore. “It was totally based on the property of books as a product,” Shel Kaphan, Bezos’s former deputy, says. Books are easy to ship and hard to break, and there was a major distribution warehouse in Oregon. Crucially, there are far too many books, in and out of print, to sell even a fraction of them at a physical store. The vast selection made possible by the Internet gave Amazon its initial advantage, and a wedge into selling everything else.

Let me get this straight. If I want the admiration and blessings of the most flamboyant, judgmental Christians in America, I should marry three times, do a queasy-making amount of sexual boasting, verbally degrade women, talk trash about pretty much everyone else while I’m at it, encourage gamblers to hemorrhage their savings in casinos bearing my name and crow incessantly about how much money I’ve amassed?

No matter. The holy rollers are smiling upon the high roller. And they’re proving, yet again, how selective and incoherent the religiosity of many in the party’s God squad is.

What’s different and fascinating about the Trump worship is that he doesn’t even try that hard for a righteous facade — for Potemkin piety. Sure, he speaks of enthusiastic churchgoing, and he’s careful to curse Planned Parenthood and to insist that matrimony be reserved for heterosexuals as demonstrably inept at it as he is

All of these public policies have one thing in common: They create winners and losers among members of society. Therefore, an overarching question (on which economists themselves seem unable to agree) is whether economists in their role as social scientists should make recommendations on such issues at all — even if these recommendations are driven by the quest for greater efficiency. In fact, what does efficiency actually mean in economic analysis?

Astute readers will have figured out by now that literally every point falling on the entire solid curve in the graph must be “Pareto optimal” by the economist’s definition of that term, not only those falling on line segment Y-Z. That circumstance makes the economist’s use of the word optimal even more dubious.

Indeed, can it be said that a more efficient resource allocation is better than a less efficient one, given the changes in the distribution of welfare among members of society that these allocations imply?

the hypothesis that teaching economics is debasing people's morality

They designed a game where participants were given an allotment of tokens to divide between a private account and a public fund

the game was designed to promote free-riding: the socially optimal behavior would be to contribute to the public fund, but the personal advantage was in investing everything in the private fund (as long as the others did not catch on or make the same move).

before the financial crisis, many economists — even, to some extent, yours truly — believed that there was a fairly broad professional consensus on some important issues.

class interests also operate through a cruder, more direct channel. Quite simply, easy-money policies, while they may help the economy as a whole, are directly detrimental to people who get a lot of their income from bonds and other interest-paying assets — and this mainly means the very wealthy, in particular the top 0.01 percent.

there’s also a much more direct reason for those defending the interests of the wealthy to complain about easy money: The wealthy derive an important part of their income from interest on bonds, and low-rate policies have greatly reduced this income.

there is a really simple way of thinking of the debate over net neutrality: Is access to the Internet more like access to electricity, or more like cable television service?

For all the technical complexity of generating electricity and distributing it to millions of people, the economic arrangement is very simple: I give them money. They give me electricity. I do with it what I will.

Comcast, my cable provider, offers me a menu of packages from which I might choose, each with a different mix of channels. It goes through long and sometimes arduous negotiations with the owners of those cable channels and has a different business arrangement with each of them. The details of those arrangements are opaque to me as the consumer; all I know is that I can get the movie package for X dollars a month or the sports package for Y dollars and so on.

“Anyone who studies the issue seriously understands that material poverty has continued to fall in the U.S. in recent decades, primarily due to the success of anti-poverty programs” and the declining cost of “food, air-conditioning, communications, transportation, and entertainment,”

Despite the rising optimism, there are disagreements over how many poor people there are and the conditions they live under. There are also questions about the problem of relative poverty, what we are now calling inequality

There are strong theoretical justifications for the use of a relative poverty measure. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development puts it this way:In order to participate fully in the social life of a community, individuals may need a level of resources that is not too inferior to the norms of a community. For example, the clothing budget that allows a child not to feel ashamed of his school attire is much more related to national living standards than to strict requirements for physical survival

By the early ’90s, so long as one had the good sense to major in the humanities — all bets were off in the STEM fields — it was nearly impossible to get a final grade below a B-minus at an elite college. According to a 2012 study, the average college GPA, which in the 1930s was a C-plus, had risen to a B at public universities and a B-plus at private schools. At Duke, Pomona and Harvard, D’s and F’s combine for just 2 percent of all grades. A Yale report found that 62 percent of all Yale grades are A or A-minus. According to a 2013 article in the Harvard Crimson, the median grade at Harvard was an A-minus , while the most common grade was an A.

The result is widespread panic about grade inflation at elite schools. (The phenomenon is not as prevalent at community colleges and less-selective universities.) Some blame students’ consumer mentality, a few see a correlation with small class sizes (departments with falling enrollments want to keep students happy), and many cite a general loss of rigor in a touchy-feely age.

Yet whenever elite schools have tried to fight grade inflation, it’s been a mess. Princeton instituted strict caps on the number of high grades awarded, then abandoned the plan, saying the caps dissuaded applicants and made students miserable. At Wellesley, grade-inflated humanities departments mandated that the average result in their introductory and intermediate classes not exceed a B-plus. According to one study, enrollment fell by one-fifth, and students were 30 percent less likely to major in one of these subjects.