Group items tagged

beliefs about how memory works

some believed that traumatic memories could be repressed for years only to be recovered later in therapy, others questioned the concept, noting that lack of scientific evidence in support of repressed memory

Roughly 60-80% of clinicians, psychoanalysts, and therapists surveyed agreed to some extent that traumatic memories are often repressed and can be retrieved in therapy, compared to less than 30% of research-oriented psychologists

belief in repressed memory is still prevalent among the general public

researchers on the one hand and clinicians and the public on the other

In the courtroom, beliefs about memory often determine whether repressed-memory testimony is admitted into evidence

The Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith once summarized the moral narrative told by the American left like this: “Once upon a time, the vast majority” of people suffered in societies that were “unjust, unhealthy, repressive and oppressive.” These societies were “reprehensible because of their deep-rooted inequality, exploitation and irrational traditionalism — all of which made life very unfair, unpleasant and short. But the noble human aspiration for autonomy, equality and prosperity struggled mightily against the forces of misery and oppression and eventually succeeded in establishing modern, liberal, democratic, capitalist, welfare societies.” Despite our progress, “there is much work to be done to dismantle the powerful vestiges of inequality, exploitation and repression.” This struggle, as Smith put it, “is the one mission truly worth dedicating one’s life to achieving.”This is a heroic liberation narrative. For the American left, African-Americans, women and other victimized groups are the sacred objects at the center of the story. As liberals circle around these groups, they bond together and gain a sense of righteous common purpose.

the Reagan narrative like this: “Once upon a time, America was a shining beacon. Then liberals came along and erected an enormous federal bureaucracy that handcuffed the invisible hand of the free market. They subverted our traditional American values and opposed God and faith at every step of the way.” For example, “instead of requiring that people work for a living, they siphoned money from hard-working Americans and gave it to Cadillac-driving drug addicts and welfare queens.” Instead of the “traditional American values of family, fidelity and personal responsibility, they preached promiscuity, premarital sex and the gay lifestyle” and instead of “projecting strength to those who would do evil around the world, they cut military budgets, disrespected our soldiers in uniform and burned our flag.” In response, “Americans decided to take their country back from those who sought to undermine it.”This, too, is a heroic narrative, but it’s a heroism of defense. In this narrative it’s God and country that are sacred — hence the importance in conservative iconography of the Bible, the flag, the military and the founding fathers. But the subtext in this narrative is about moral order. For social conservatives, religion and the traditional family are so important in part because they foster self-control, create moral order and fend off chaos.

Part of Reagan’s political genius was that he told a single story about America that rallied libertarians and social conservatives, who are otherwise strange bedfellows. He did this by presenting liberal activist government as the single devil that is eternally bent on destroying two different sets of sacred values — economic liberty and moral order. Only if all nonliberals unite into a coalition of tribes can this devil be defeated.

Saudi Arabia has been showing Black Panther in its theaters, too – the first commercially released film to be screened in almost 35 years in this repressive, autocratic regime. And that’s a political victory too. For the repressive, autocratic regime, of course. Because as revolutionary as Black Panther was hailed as being in America, it is ultimately the story of a monarchy triumphing over the challenge presented by a rebellious force. It turns out that it makes for good propaganda for the Saudi monarchy. Oh, the irony.

The third idea is that faith in science can serve as a comprehensive belief system that gives meaning to life, as well. as a sense of well-being, morality, and even immortality.

the spirit behind this scientific ideal inspired several men to believe that the reliable and predictable knowledge that could be obtained about stars and atoms could also be obtained about human behavior.

They held in common two beliefs to which T echnopoly is deeply indebted: that the natural sciences provide a method to unlock the secrets of both the human heart and the direction of social life; that society can be rationally and humanely reorganized according to principles that social science will uncover. It is with these men that the idea of "social engineering" begins and the seeds of Scientism are planted.

Scientists do strive to be empirical and where possible precise, but it is also basic to their enterprise that they maintain a high degree of objectivity, which means that they study things independently of what people think or do about them.

The status of social-science methods is further reduced by the fact that there are almost no experiments that will reveal a social-science theory to be false.

Freud, could not imagine how the book could be judged exemplary: it was science or it was nothing. Well, of course, Freud was wrong. His work is exemplary-indeed, monumental-but scarcely anyone believes today that Freud was doing science, any more than educated people believe that Marx was doing science, or Max Weber or Lewis Mumford or Bruno Bettelheim or Carl Jung or Margaret Mead or Arnold Toynbee. What these people were doing-and Stanley Milgram was doing-is documenting the behavior and feelings of people as they confront problems posed by their culture.

the stories of social r~searchers are much closer in structure and purpose to what is called imaginative literature; that is to say, both a social researcher and a novelist give unique interpretations to a set of human events and support their interpretations with examples in various forms. Their interpretations cannot be proved or disproved but will draw their appeal from the power of their language, the depth of their explanations, the relevance of their examples, and the credibility of their themes.

Both the novelist and the social researcher construct their stories by the use of archetypes and metaphors.

Why do such social researchers tell their stories? Essentially for didactic and moralistic purposes. These men and women tell their stories for the same reason the Buddha, Confucius, Hillel, and Jesus told their stories (and for the same reason D. H. Lawrence told his).

Moreover, in their quest for objectivity, scientists proceed on the assumption that the objects they study are indifferent to the fact that they are being studied.

Unlike science, social research never discovers anything. It only rediscovers what people once were told and need to be told again.

Only in knowing ~omething of the reasons why they advocated education can we make sense of the means they suggest. But to understand their reas.ons we must also understand the narratives that governed their view of the world. By narrative, I mean a story of human history that gives meaning to the past, explains the present, and provides guidance for the future.

In Technopoly, it is not Scientism 159 enough to say, it is immoral and degrading to allow people to be homeless. You cannot get anywhere by asking a judge, a politician, or a bureaucrat to r~ad Les Miserables or Nana or, indeed, the New Testament. Y 01.i must show that statistics have produced data revealing the homeless to be unhappy and to be a drain on the economy. Neither Dostoevsky nor Freud, Dickens nor Weber, Twain nor Marx, is now a dispenser of legitimate knowledge. They are interesting; they are ''.worth reading"; they are artifacts of our past. But as for "truth," we must tum to "science."

In Technopoly, it is not enough for social research to rediscover ancient truths or to comment on and criticize the moral behavior of people. In T echnopoly, it is an insult to call someone a "moralizer." Nor is it sufficient for social research to put forward metaphors, images, and ideas that can help people live with some measure of understanding and dignity.

That is why the commonplaces that people fear death and that children who come from stable families valuing scholarship will do well in school must be announced as "discoveries" of scientific enterprise. In this way, social resear~hers can see themselves, and can be seen, as scientists, researchers without bias or values, unburdened by mere opinion. In this way, social policies can be claimed to rest on objectively determined facts.

given the psychological, social, and material benefits that attach to the label "scientist," it is not hard to see why social researchers should find it hard to give it up.

Our social "s'cientists" have from the beginning been less tender of conscience, or less rigorous in their views of science, or perhaps just more confused about the questions their procedures can answer and those they cannot. In any case, they have not been squeamish about imputing to their "discoveries" and the rigor of their procedures the power to direct us in how we ought rightly to behave.

When the new technologies and techniques and spirit of men like Galileo, Newton, and Bacon laid the foundations of natural science, they also discredited the authority of earlier accounts of the physical world, as found, for example, in the great tale of Genesis. By calling into question the truth of such accounts in one realm, science undermined the whole edifice of belief in sacred stories and ultimately swept away with it the source to which most humans had looked for moral authority. It is not too much to say, I think, that the desacralized world has been searching for an alternative source of moral authority ever since.

This, then, is what I mean by Scientism.

It is the desperate hope, and wish, and ultimately the illusory belief that some standardized set of procedures called "science" can provide us with an unimpeachable source of moral authority, a suprahuman basis for answers to questions like "What is life, and when, and why?" "Why is death, and suffering?" 'What is right and wrong to do?" "What are good and evil ends?" "How ought we to think and feel and behave?

To ask of science, or expect of science, or accept unchallenged from science the answers to such questions is Scientism. And it is Technopoly's grand illusion.

In the institutional form it has taken in the United States, advertising is a symptom of a world-view 'that sees tradition as an obstacle to its claims. There can, of course, be no functioning sense of tradition without a measure of respect for symbols. Tradition is, in fact, nothing but the acknowledgment of the authority of symbols and the relevance of the narratives that gave birth to them. With the erosion of symbols there follows a loss of narrative, which is one of the most debilitating consequences of Technopoly' s power.

What this means is that somewhere near the core of Technopoly is a vast industry with license to use all available symbols to further the interests of commerce, by devouring the psyches of consumers.

In the twentieth century, such metaphors and images have come largely from the pens of social historians and researchers. ·Think of John Dewey, William James, Erik Erikson, Alfred Kinsey, Thorstein Veblen, Margaret Mead, Lewis Mumford, B. F. Skinner, Carl Rogers, Marshall McLuhan, Barbara Tuchman, Noam Chomsky, Robert Coles, even Stanley Milgram, and you must acknowledge that our ideas of what we are like and what kind of country we live in come from their stories to a far greater extent than from the stories of our most renowned novelists.

social idea that must be advanced through education.

The point is that cultures must have narratives and will find them where they will, even if they lead to catastrophe. The alternative is to live without meaning, the ultimate negation of life itself.

by definition, there can be no education philosophy that does not address what learning is for. Confucius, Plato, Quintilian, Cicero, Comenius, Erasmus, Locke, Rousseau, Jefferson, Russell, Montessori, Whitehead, and Dewey--each believed that there was some transcendent political, spiritual, or

There are those who believe--as did the great historian Arnold Toynbee-that without a comprehensive religious narrative at its center a culture must decline. Perhaps. There are, after all, other sources-mythology, politics, philosophy, and science; for example--but it is certain that no culture can flourish without narratives of transcendent orjgin and power.

What story does American education wish to tell now? In a growing Technopoly, what do we believe education is for?

nto this void comes the Technopoly story, with its emphasis on progress without limits, rights without responsibilities, and technology without cost. The T echnopoly story is without a moral center. It puts in its place efficiency, interest, and economic advance. It promises heaven on earth through the conveniences of technological progress. It casts aside all traditional narratives and symbols that· suggest stability and orderliness, and tells, instead, of a life of skills, technical expertise, and the ecstasy of consumption. Its purpose is to produce functionaries for an ongoing Technopoly.

"The twenties were the highest peak of joy-related words that we see," he says. "They really were roaring." But then there came 1941, which, of course, marked the beginning of America's entry into World War II. It doesn't take a historian to see that peaks and valleys like these roughly mirror the major economic and social events of the century. "In 1941, sadness is at its peak," Bently says.

They weren't just novels or books about current events, Bentley says. Many were books without clear emotional content — technical manuals about plants and animals, for example, or automotive repair guides. "It's not like the change in emotion is because people are writing about the Depression, and people are writing about the war," he says. "There might be a little bit of that, but this is just, kind of, averaged over all books and it's just kind of creeping in."

Generally speaking the usage of these commonly known emotion words has been in decline over the 20th century," Bentley says. We used words that expressed our emotions less in the year 2000 than we did 100 years earlier — words about sadness, and joy, and anger, and disgust and surprise. In fact, there is only one exception that Bentley and his colleagues found: fear. "The fear-related words start to increase just before the 1980s," he says.

For psychologists, he says, there are only a handful of ways to try to understand what is actually going on with somebody emotionally. "One is what a person says," Pennebaker explains, "kind of the 'self report' of emotion. Another might be the physiological links, and the third is what slips out when they're talking to other people, when they're writing a book or something like that."

Egypt signed a deal to buy $1 billion of French weapons, as well as agreeing to commercial agreements.

“All French correspondents in Egypt find unacceptable the growing repression

"messages of shame are organized around gender." For women, she said, there are whole constellations of often contradictory expectations that, if not met, are sources of shame.

But for men, the overarching message is that any weakness is shameful. And since vulnerability is often perceived as weakness, it is especially risky for men to practice vulnerability.

men's shame is not primarily inflicted by other men. Instead, it is the women in their lives who tend to be repelled when men show the chinks in their armor.

Ironically, she explained, men are often pressured to open up and talk about their feelings, and they are criticized for being emotionally walled-off; but if they get too real, they are met with revulsion. She recalled the first time she realized that she had been complicit in the shaming: "Holy Shit!" she said. "I am the patriarchy!"

there are three main practices men, in particular, need to engage in. The first is asking for help. The second is setting boundaries; for example, not taking on work or activities that you don't want to do. And the third is apologizing and "owning it" when you are wrong.

The public started drawing comparisons between the Inner Party's regime and Trump's presidency when his adviser used the phrase "alternative facts" in an interview. Kellyanne Conway was being quizzed after the White House press secretary Sean Spicer apparently lied about the number of people who attended Trump's inauguration. The presenter asked why President Trump has asked Spicer to come out to speak to the press and "utter a falsehood". Conway responded that Spicer didn't utter a falsehood but gave "alternative facts". People drew comparisons with "newspeak" which was aimed at wiping out original thought. Her chose of language was also accused of representing "doublespeak" - which Orwell wrote "means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously." Washington Post reporter Karen Tumulty said: "Alternative facts is a George Orwell phrase".

Sales of 1984 also soared in 2013 when news broke of the National Security Administration's Prism surveillance scandal.

Depending on the study, you might get as many as 50 percent of people falling for the suggestion and developing a complete or partial false memory.

What exactly is going on when we retrieve a memory? EL: When we remember something, we're taking bits and pieces of experience—sometimes from different times and places—and bringing it all together to construct what might feel like a recollection but is actually a construction. The process of calling it into conscious awareness can change it, and now you're storing something that's different

How do you plant these memories? EL: We use a "false feedback" technique. We gather a whole bunch of data from you, about your personality, thoughts about different foods, all kinds of things. Later, we hand you this computerized profile, which reveals certain things that probably happened when you were a child. In the middle of the list is, say, that you got sick eating strawberry ice cream. We give you false feedback about your data, and then encourage you to elaborate and imagine. Later we ascertain whether you have a belief that it happened to you. Then we offer you a choice from all these different foods. In that example we found that participants didn't want strawberry ice cream as much.

bad governments, bad people, they don't have requirements of conduct. When we recently published a study about planting false memories among U.S. soldiers, I was worried we were putting out a recipe for how you can do horrible things to somebody and then wipe their memory away.

Is there any way to distinguish a false memory from a real one? EL: Without independent corroboration, little can be done to tell a false memory from a true one.

And this social role is difficult to play with an angry and anxious public face.

Empowered by their own sources of information and their own interpretations of research, doubters have declared war on the consensus of experts.

Our lives are permeated by science and technology as never before. For many of us this new world is wondrous, comfortable, and rich in rewards—but also more complicated and sometimes unnerving. We now face risks we can’t easily analyze.

The world crackles with real and imaginary hazards, and distinguishing the former from the latter isn’t easy.

In this bewildering world we have to decide what to believe and how to act on that. In principle that’s what science is for.

“Science is not a body of facts,” says geophysicist Marcia McNutt,

“Science is a method for deciding whether what we choose to believe has a basis in the laws of nature or not.”

The scientific method leads us to truths that are less than self-evident, often mind-blowing, and sometimes hard to swallow.

We don’t believe you.

Galileo was put on trial and forced to recant. Two centuries later Charles Darwin escaped that fate. But his idea that all life on Earth evolved from a primordial ancestor and that we humans are distant cousins of apes, whales, and even deep-sea mollusks is still a big ask for a lot of people. So is another 19th-century notion: that carbon dioxide, an invisible gas that we all exhale all the time and that makes up less than a tenth of one percent of the atmosphere, could be affecting Earth’s climate.

we intellectually accept these precepts of science, we subconsciously cling to our intuitions

Shtulman’s research indicates that as we become scientifically literate, we repress our naive beliefs but never eliminate them entirely. They lurk in our brains, chirping at us as we try to make sense of the world.

Most of us do that by relying on personal experience and anecdotes, on stories rather than statistics.

We have trouble digesting randomness; our brains crave pattern and meaning.

we can deceive ourselves.

Even for scientists, the scientific method is a hard discipline. Like the rest of us, they’re vulnerable to what they call confirmation bias—the tendency to look for and see only evidence that confirms what they already believe. But unlike the rest of us, they submit their ideas to formal peer review before publishing them

other scientists will try to reproduce them

Scientific results are always provisional, susceptible to being overturned by some future experiment or observation. Scientists rarely proclaim an absolute truth or absolute certainty. Uncertainty is inevitable at the frontiers of knowledge.

Many people in the United States—a far greater percentage than in other countries—retain doubts about that consensus or believe that climate activists are using the threat of global warming to attack the free market and industrial society generally.

news media give abundant attention to such mavericks, naysayers, professional controversialists, and table thumpers. The media would also have you believe that science is full of shocking discoveries made by lone geniuses

science tells us the truth rather than what we’d like the truth to be. Scientists can be as dogmatic as anyone else—but their dogma is always wilting in the hot glare of new research.

But industry PR, however misleading, isn’t enough to explain why only 40 percent of Americans, according to the most recent poll from the Pew Research Center, accept that human activity is the dominant cause of global warming.

“science communication problem,”

yielded abundant new research into how people decide what to believe—and why they so often don’t accept the scientific consensus.

higher literacy was associated with stronger views—at both ends of the spectrum. Science literacy promoted polarization on climate, not consensus. According to Kahan, that’s because people tend to use scientific knowledge to reinforce beliefs that have already been shaped by their worldview.

“egalitarian” and “communitarian” mind-set are generally suspicious of industry and apt to think it’s up to something dangerous that calls for government regulation; they’re likely to see the risks of climate change.

“hierarchical” and “individualistic” mind-set respect leaders of industry and don’t like government interfering in their affairs; they’re apt to reject warnings about climate change, because they know what accepting them could lead to—some kind of tax or regulation to limit emissions.

For a hierarchical individualist, Kahan says, it’s not irrational to reject established climate science: Accepting it wouldn’t change the world, but it might get him thrown out of his tribe.

Science appeals to our rational brain, but our beliefs are motivated largely by emotion, and the biggest motivation is remaining tight with our peers.

organizations funded in part by the fossil fuel industry have deliberately tried to undermine the public’s understanding of the scientific consensus by promoting a few skeptics.

Internet makes it easier than ever for climate skeptics and doubters of all kinds to find their own information and experts

Internet has democratized information, which is a good thing. But along with cable TV, it has made it possible to live in a “filter bubble” that lets in only the information with which you already agree.

How to convert climate skeptics? Throwing more facts at them doesn’t help.

people need to hear from believers they can trust, who share their fundamental values.

We believe in scientific ideas not because we have truly evaluated all the evidence but because we feel an affinity for the scientific community.

“Believing in evolution is just a description about you. It’s not an account of how you reason.”

evolution actually happened. Biology is incomprehensible without it. There aren’t really two sides to all these issues. Climate change is happening. Vaccines really do save lives. Being right does matter—and the science tribe has a long track record of getting things right in the end. Modern society is built on things it got right.

Doubting science also has consequences.

In the climate debate the consequences of doubt are likely global and enduring. In the U.S., climate change skeptics have achieved their fundamental goal of halting legislative action to combat global warming.

“That line between science communication and advocacy is very hard to step back from,”

It’s their very detachment, what you might call the cold-bloodedness of science, that makes science the killer app.

that need to fit in is so strong that local values and local opinions are always trumping science.

not a sin to change your mind when the evidence demands it.

for the best scientists, the truth is more important than the tribe.

Students come away thinking of science as a collection of facts, not a method.

Shtulman’s research has shown that even many college students don’t really understand what evidence is.

“Everybody should be questioning,” says McNutt. “That’s a hallmark of a scientist. But then they should use the scientific method, or trust people using the scientific method, to decide which way they fall on those questions.”

science has made us the dominant organisms,

incredibly rapid change, and it’s scary sometimes. It’s not all progress.

“People everywhere seem to be morally aroused,” said Seidman. “The philosopher David Hume argued that ‘the moral imagination diminishes with distance.’ It would follow that the opposite is also true: As distance decreases, the moral imagination increases. Now that we have no distance — it’s like we’re all in a crowded theater, making everything personal — we are experiencing the aspirations, hopes, frustrations, plights of others in direct and visceral ways.”

“A dentist from Minnesota shoots a cherished lion in Zimbabwe named Cecil, and days later everyone in the world knows about it, triggering a tsunami of moral outrage on Twitter and Facebook. As a result, some people try to shut down his dental practice by posting negative reviews on Yelp and spray paint ‘Lion Killer’ on his Florida vacation home. Almost 400,000 people then sign a petition in one day on Change.org demanding that Delta Air Lines change their policy of transporting trophy kills. Delta does so and other airlines follow. And then hunters who contribute to Zimbabwe’s tourism industry protest the protest, claiming that they were being discriminated against.”

That we are becoming more morally aroused “is generally a good thing,” argued Seidman. Institutionalized racism in police departments, or in college fraternities, is real and had been tolerated for way too long. That it’s being called out is a sign of a society’s health “and re-engagement.”

But when moral arousal manifests as moral outrage, he added, “it can either inspire or repress a serious conversation or the truth.”

“If moral outrage, as justified as it may be, is followed immediately by demands for firings or resignations,” argued Seidman, “it can result in a vicious cycle of moral outrage being met with equal outrage, as opposed to a virtuous cycle of dialogue and the hard work of forging real understanding and enduring agreements.”

Furthermore, “when moral outrage skips over moral conversation, then the outcome is likely going to be acquiescence, not inspired solutions,” Seidman added. It can also feed the current epidemic of inauthentic apologies, “since apologies extracted under pressure are like telling a child, `Just say you’re sorry,’ to move past the issue without ever making amends.”

it’s as if “we’re living in a never-ending storm,” he said. Alas, though, resolving moral disputes “requires perspective, fuller context and the ability to make meaningful distinctions.”

requires leaders with the courage and empathy “to inspire people to pause to reflect, so that instead of reacting by yelling in 140 characters they can channel all this moral outrage into deep and honest conversations.”

reconciliation, development and social control

thousands in the country’s Hutu ethnic majority unleashed unspeakable violence on the Tutsi minority and moderate Hutu countrymen who refused to take part in the slaughter. In just 100 days, nearly one million people perished.

Many political analysts and human rights groups say Mr. Kagame has created a nation that is orderly but repressive. Laws banning so-called genocidal ideology that were adopted to deter a resurgence of sectarian or hate speech are also used to squelch even legitimate criticism of the government.

Like others in this generation, who have been taught from their earliest school days to suppress any sense of ethnic identity, he considers himself simply Rwandan.

That was the fault of the then government that pushed us to kill Tutsis,” he said, his eyes gazing steadily ahead as he echoed a sentiment heard throughout the community from both perpetrators and survivors. “We massacred them, killed and ate their cows. I offended them gravely.”

Mr. Sendegeya re-entered society through a program that allows perpetrators to be released if they seek forgiveness from their victims.

But the healing process has taken years.

She has taught them about the history of the genocide, and she said that they knew the role that Mr. Sendegeya had played in killing members of their family, but that they had never feared him.

This failing in the West’s economies is also a failing of economics

many people have long felt the desire to do something with their lives besides consuming goods and having leisure. They desire to participate in a community in which they can interact and develop.

Our prevailing political economy is blind to the very concept of inclusion; it does not map out any remedy for the deficiency

injustice of another sort. Workers in decent jobs view the economy as unjust if they or their children have virtually no chance of climbing to a higher rung in the socioeconomic ladder

“Money is like blood. You need it to live but it isn’t the point of life.”4

justice is not everything that people need from their economy. They need an economy that is good as well as just. And for some decades, the Western economies have fallen short of any conception of a “good economy”—an economy offering a “good life,” or a life of “richness,” as some humanists call it

The good life as it is popularly conceived typically involves acquiring mastery in one’s work, thus gaining for oneself better terms—or means to rewards, whether material, like wealth, or nonmaterial—an experience we may call “prospering.”

As humanists and philosophers have conceived it, the good life involves using one’s imagination, exercising one’s creativity, taking fascinating journeys into the unknown, and acting on the world—an experience I call “flourishing.”

prospering and flourishing became prevalent in the nineteenth century when, in Europe and America, economies emerged with the dynamism to generate their own innovation.

What is the mechanism of the slowdown in productivity

prospering

In nineteenth-century Britain and America, and later Germany and France, a culture of exploration, experimentation, and ultimately innovation grew out of the individualism of the Renaissance, the vitalism of the Baroque era, and the expressionism of the Romantic period.

What made innovating so powerful in these economies was that it was not limited to elites. It permeated society from the less advantaged parts of the population on up.

High-enough wages, low-enough unemployment, and wide-enough access to engaging work are necessary for a “good-enough” economy—though far from sufficient. The material possibilities of the economy must be adequate for the nonmaterial possibilities to be widespread—the satisfactions of prospering and of flourishing through adventurous, creative, and even imaginative work.

today’s standard economics. This economics, despite its sophistication in some respects, makes no room for economies in which people are imagining new products and using their creativity to build them. What is most fundamentally “wrong with economics” is that it takes such an economy to be the norm—to be “as good as it gets.”

ince around 1970, or earlier in some cases, most of the continental Western European economies have come to resemble more completely the mechanical model of standard economics. Most companies are highly efficient. Households, apart from the very low-paid or unemployed, have gone on saving

In most of Western Europe, economic dynamism is now at lows not seen, I would judge, since the advent of dynamism in the nineteenth century. Imagining and creating new products has almost disappeared from the continent

The bleak levels of both unemployment and job satisfaction in Europe are testimony to its dreary economies.

a recent survey of household attitudes found that, in “happiness,” the median scores in Spain (54), France (51), Italy (48), and Greece (37) are all below those in the upper half of the nations labeled “emerging”—Mexico (79), Venezuela (74), Brazil (73), Argentina (66), Vietnam (64), Colombia (64), China (59), Indonesia (58), Chile (58), and Malaysia (56)

The US economy is not much better. Two economists, Stanley Fischer and Assar Lindbeck, wrote of a “Great Productivity Slowdown,” which they saw as beginning in the late 1960s.11 The slowdown in the growth of capital and labor combined—what is called “total factor productivity”—is star

though the injustices in the West’s economies are egregious, they ought not to be seen as a major cause of the productivity slowdowns and globalization. (For one thing, a slowdown of productivity started in the US in the mid-1960s and the sharp loss of manufacturing jobs to poorer countries occurred much later—from the late 1970s to the early 1990s.) Deeper causes must be at work.

The plausible explanation of the syndrome in America—the productivity slowdown and the decline of job satisfaction, among other things—is a critical loss of indigenous innovation in the established industries like traditional manufacturing and services that was not nearly offset by the innovation that flowered in a few new industries

hat then caused this narrowing of innovation? No single explanation is persuasive. Yet two classes of explanations have the ring of truth. One points to suppression of innovation by vested interests

some professions, such as those in education and medicine, have instituted regulation and licensing to curb experimentation and change, thus dampening innovation

established corporations—their owners and stakeholders—and entire industries, using their lobbyists, have obtained regulations and patents that make it harder for new firms to gain entry into the market and to compete with incumbents.

The second explanation points to a new repression of potential innovators by families and schools. As the corporatist values of control, solidarity, and protection are invoked to prohibit innovation, traditional values of conservatism and materialism are often invoked to inhibit a young person from undertaking an innovation.

ow might Western nations gain—or regain—widespread prospering and flourishing? Taking concrete actions will not help much without fresh thinking: people must first grasp that standard economics is not a guide to flourishing—it is a tool only for efficiency.

Widespread flourishing in a nation requires an economy energized by its own homegrown innovation from the grassroots on up. For such innovation a nation must possess the dynamism to imagine and create the new—economic freedoms are not sufficient. And dynamism needs to be nourished with strong human values.

a reform of education stands out. The problem here is not a perceived mismatch between skills taught and skills in demand

The problem is that young people are not taught to see the economy as a place where participants may imagine new things, where entrepreneurs may want to build them and investors may venture to back some of them. It is essential to educate young people to this image of the economy.

It will also be essential that high schools and colleges expose students to the human values expressed in the masterpieces of Western literature, so that young people will want to seek economies offering imaginative and creative careers. Education systems must put students in touch with the humanities in order to fuel the human desire to conceive the new and perchance to achieve innovations

This reorientation of general education will have to be supported by a similar reorientation of economic education.

Actually, speech is not just interchangeable with violence; even silence is! One of the more popular signs at the rally in Boston a few weeks back was the following: “White Silence = Violence.” If you are not actively speaking out against white supremacy, in other words, you are actively enforcing it. Once you’ve apologized for being born white, and asked permission to speak, your next and only step is to inveigh against racism/sexism, etc. … or be accused of being a white supremacist yourself. At some point your head begins to explode. What is this: a Maoist boot camp?

We often discuss these things in the media without understanding the core ideas that animate them. But it’s important to understand that for the social-justice left, there is nothing irrational about any of this. If you take their ideas seriously, oppressive speech is violence and self-defense is legitimate. Violence is therefore not some regrettable incident. Violence to achieve liberation is a key part of the ideology they believe in.

Mr. Curveira-Santos says it is clear that the lions, when they are present, are influencing the distributions of these smaller carnivores.

“However, we need to take heed of the findings of this paper and direct research to ensure we have sufficient information to adapt management to a more holistic approach for the benefit of the whole ecosystem” she said.

In what sense did economics go astray?

More damning was the widespread conviction among economists that such a crisis couldn’t happen. Underlying this complacency was the dominance of an idealized vision of capitalism, in which individuals are always rational and markets always function perfectly.

starting in the 1980s it became harder and harder to publish anything questioning these idealized models in major journals. Economists trying to take account of imperfect reality faced what Harvard’s Kenneth Rogoff, hardly a radical figure (and someone I’ve sparred with) once called “new neoclassical repression.”

assuming away irrationality and market failure meant assuming away the very possibility of the kind of catastrophe that overtook the developed world six years ago.

while economic models didn’t perform all that badly after the crisis, all too many influential economists did — refusing to acknowledge error, letting naked partisanship trump analysis, or both.

But would it have mattered if economists had behaved better? Or would people in power have done the same thing regardless?

If you imagine that policy makers have spent the past five or six years in thrall to economic orthodoxy, you’ve been misled. On the contrary, key decision makers have been highly receptive to innovative, unorthodox economic ideas — ideas that also happen to be wrong but which offered excuses to do what these decision makers wanted to do anyway.

The great majority of policy-oriented economists believe that increasing government spending in a depressed economy creates jobs, and that slashing it destroys jobs — but European leaders and U.S. Republicans decided to believe the handful of economists asserting the opposite. Neither theory nor history justifies panic over current levels of government debt, but politicians decided to panic anyway, citing unvetted (and, it turned out, flawed) research as justification.