These are hard times for economists. Their reputations are tarnished; their favorite doctrines are damaged. Among their most prominent thinkers, there is no consensus as to how — or whether — governments in advanced countries can improve lackluster recoveries.

economists at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) published a retrospective study of its economic forecasts. This qualifies as an act of bureaucratic courage, because the record was predictably dismal

Interestingly, one item not on the list is “too much austerity.” The OECD economists found that they generally hadn’t underestimated the effects of spending cuts and tax increases intended to shrink budget deficits in Spain, Italy, Ireland, Portugal and elsewhere

the company states on its website. “We have scientifically validated research showing that Cogmed training provides substantial and lasting improvements in attention for people with poor working memory—in all age groups. That makes Cogmed’s products the best-validated products on the market.”

“What we see, over and over again,” he said, “is improvement of working memory and also of attention, including attention in everyday life. This is not everything, but it’s good enough for me if we can have that. Working-memory problems and attention problems are huge for many children and adults

at a total cost to families of about $2,000 for the 25 sessions, she said, it compares favorably with many other kinds of ADHD treatments.

"the most comprehensive global index of love ever constructed." In 2006 and 2007, Gallup asked people in 136 countries whether they had experienced love the previous day

on a typical day, roughly 70 percent of the world's population reports feeling love

The world leader in love turned out to be the Philippines, where more than 90 percent said they had experienced love, and the world's laggard Armenia, where only 29 percent of respondents did

Mathematical knowledge is unlike any other knowledge. Its truths are objective, necessary and timeless.

What kinds of things are mathematical entities and theorems, that they are knowable in this way? Do they exist somewhere, a set of immaterial objects in the enchanted gardens of the Platonic world, waiting to be discovered? Or are they mere creations of the human mind?

Many mathematicians, when pressed, admit to being Platonists. The great logician Kurt Gödel argued that mathematical concepts and ideas “form an objective reality of their own, which we cannot create or change, but only perceive and describe.” But if this is true, how do humans manage to access this hidden reality?

to be a scholar is, often, to be irrelevant.

One reason is the anti-intellectualism in American life

over all, there are, I think, fewer public intellectuals on American university campuses today than a generation ago.

he report shows us that for at least some of the questions, Americans may be answering not based on knowledge, but on belief.

only 48 percent of Americans responded "true" to the statement "Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals." But if the question was reframed slightly, far more people responded with "true." Given the statement "according to the theory of evolution, human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals," 72 percent answered "true."

A similar pattern happens with the Big Bang question. When the statement is simply "The universe began with a huge explosion," 39 percent responded "true." When it is "according to astronomers, the universe began with a huge explosion," 60 percent said "true.

In 2005, Michael Ignatieff left a teaching job at Harvard to enter politics in his native Canada

In Parliament, he became a total partisan, putting, as one must, loyalty to the group above loyalty to truth. He had no friends who were not in his own party. He loathed the other side. “We never wasted a single breath trying to convince each other of anything,” he recalls.

He quickly came to understand how politics is different from academia. In academia, you use words to persuade or discover; in politics, you use words to establish a connection. Academia is a cerebral enterprise, but politics is a physical enterprise, a charismatic form of athletics in which you touch people to show you care.In academia, the goal is to come up with a timeless truth. In politics, timing is everything, knowing when the time is ripe for a certain proposal. In academia, the idea is to take a stand based on what you believe; in politics, the idea is to position yourself along a left-right axis in a way that will differentiate you from your opponents and help you win a majority.In academia, a certain false modesty is encouraged; in politics, you have to self-dramatize a fable about yourself — concoct a story to show how your life connects to certain policies. In academia, you are rewarded for candor, intellectual rigor and a willingness to follow an idea to its logical conclusion. In politics, all of these traits are ruinous.

Once considered the product of genius or divine inspiration, creativity — the ability to spot problems and devise smart solutions — is being recast as a prized and teachable skill.

“The reality is that to survive in a fast-changing world you need to be creative,”

“That is why you are seeing more attention to creativity at universities,” he says. “The marketplace is demanding it.”

A FUNNY thing has happened in the United States over the last few decades. Men’s average testosterone levels have been dropping by at least 1 percent a year

Testosterone appears to decline naturally with aging, but internal belly fat depresses the hormone further, especially in obese men. Drugs like steroids and opiates also lower testosterone, and it’s suspected that chemicals like bisphenol A (or BPA, commonly found in plastic food containers) and diseases like Type 2 diabetes play a role as well.

Clinical testosterone deficiency, which is variously defined as lower than 220 to 350 nanograms of testosterone per deciliter of blood serum, can cause men to lose sex drive and fertility. Their bone density often declines, and they may feel tired and experience hot flashes and sweats.

You might think that if you simply started adding the natural numbers, 1 plus 2 plus 3 and so on all the way to infinity, you would get a pretty big number. At least I always did.So it came as a shock to a lot of people when, in a recent video, a pair of physicists purported to prove that this infinite series actually adds up to ...minus 1/12.

certain mental skills will become less valuable because computers will take over. Having a great memory will probably be less valuable. Being able to be a straight-A student will be less valuable — gathering masses of information and regurgitating it back on tests. So will being able to do any mental activity that involves following a set of rules.

what human skills will be more valuable?

In the news business, some of those skills are already evident.

Johnson & Johnson announced that it was making all of its clinical trial data available to scientists around the world. It has hired my group, Yale University Open Data Access Project, or YODA, to fully oversee the release of the data. Everything in the company’s clinical research vaults, including unpublished raw data, will be available for independent review.

Today, more than half of the clinical trials in the United States, including many sponsored by academic and governmental institutions, are not published within two years of their completion. Often they are never published at all.

As a result, evidence-based medicine is, at best, based on only some of the evidence.

we need a new way of thinking about our informational milieu. What we need is a concept of infopolitics that would help us understand the increasingly dense ties between politics and information

Infopolitics encompasses not only traditional state surveillance and data surveillance, but also “data analytics” (the techniques that enable marketers at companies like Target to detect, for instance, if you are pregnant), digital rights movements (promoted by organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation), online-only crypto-currencies (like Bitcoin or Litecoin), algorithmic finance (like automated micro-trading) and digital property disputes (from peer-to-peer file sharing to property claims in the virtual world of Second Life)

Surveying this iceberg is crucial because atop it sits a new kind of person: the informational person. Politically and culturally, we are increasingly defined through an array of information architectures: highly designed environments of data, like our social media profiles, into which we often have to squeeze ourselves

Now that we can compare robust data for different countries, we can see not only what we knew intuitively — that inequality is divisive and socially corrosive — but that it also damages the individual psyche.

Our tendency to equate outward wealth with inner worth invokes deep psychological responses, feelings of dominance and subordination, superiority and inferiority. This affects the way we see and treat one another.

To compare mental illness rates internationally, the World Health Organization asked people in each country about their mood, tiredness, agitation, concentration, sleeping patterns and self-confidence. These have been found to be good indicators of mental illness.

in 1973, the BBC aired an extraordinary documentary series called “The Ascent of Man,” hosted by one Dr. Jacob Bronowski

It was not an account of human biological evolution, but cultural evolution — from the origins of human life in the Rift Valley to the shifts from hunter/gatherer societies,  to nomadism and then settlement and civilization, from agriculture and metallurgy to the rise and fall of empires: Assyria, Egypt, Rome.

The tone of the programs was rigorous yet permissive, playful yet precise, and always urgent, open and exploratory. I remember in particular the programs on the trial of Galileo, Darwin’s hesitancy about publishing his theory of evolution and the dizzying consequences of Einstein’s theory of relativity.

“Life is tragic simply because the earth turns, and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.

It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death – ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life.

The poll above (source here), conducted last December, is arguably the critical one. It’s of Americans living in the states that ban marriage rights for gay couples. Commissioned by Freedom To Marry, it reveals the seismic shift of the last few years.

Something has fundamentally changed since the late 1980s when I first made this argument. Gay people have become human in the eyes of most straights. Not perfect and not identical – but human in our capacity for love and commitment.

that is not, in the end, a political gain. It is a moral one. And it reveals, once again, that those who despair of persuading resistant majorities of core moral arguments in America are wrong. Americans, in the end, are open to persuasion.

I think I’m pretty good at keeping my moral compass while recognizing that I am a product of original sin. And every morning and every night I’m taking measure of my actions against the options and possibilities available to me, understanding that there are going to be mistakes that I make

and that there’s going to be tragedy out there and, by occupying this office, I am part of that tragedy

I think we are born into this world and inherit all the grudges and rivalries and hatreds and sins of the past. But we also inherit the beauty and the joy and goodness of our forebears. And we’re on this planet a pretty short time, so that we cannot remake the world entirely during this little stretch that we have,” – president Barack Obama,