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What is wrong with the economies of the West—and with economics?

With little or no effective policy initiative giving a lift to the less advantaged, the jarring market forces of the past four decades—mainly the slowdowns in productivity that have spread over the West and, of course, globalization, which has moved much low-wage manufacturing to Asia—have proceeded, unopposed, to drag down both employment and wage rates at the low end. The setback has cost the less advantaged not only a loss of income but also a loss of what economists call inclusion—access to jobs offering work and pay that provide self-respect.

The classical idea of political economy has been to let wage rates sink to whatever level the market takes them, and then provide everyone with the “safety net” of a “negative income tax,” unemployment insurance, and free food, shelter, clothing, and medical care

Expert judges and amateurs alike claim to judge classical musicians based on sound. But Tsay’s research suggests that the original judges, despite their experience and expertise, judged the competition (which they heard and watched live) based on visual information, just as amateurs do.

just like with classical music, we do not appraise wine in the way that we expect. 

Priceonomics revisited this seemingly damning research: the lack of correlation between wine enjoyment and price in blind tastings, the oenology students tricked by red food dye into describing a white wine like a red, a distribution of medals at tastings equivalent to what one would expect from pure chance, the grand crus described like cheap wines and vice-versa when the bottles are switched.

cience is being turned against itself. For decades, its twin ideals of transparency and rigor have been weaponized by those who disagree with results produced by the scientific method. Under the Trump administration, that fight has ramped up again.

The same entreaties crop up again and again: We need to root out conflicts. We need more precise evidence. What makes these arguments so powerful is that they sound quite similar to the points raised by proponents of a very different call for change that’s coming from within science.

Despite having dissimilar goals, the two forces espouse principles that look surprisingly alike: Science needs to be transparent. Results and methods should be openly shared so that outside researchers can independently reproduce and validate them. The methods used to collect and analyze data should be rigorous and clear, and conclusions must be supported by evidence.

Humans tend to discount information that undermines past choices and judgments. This

confirmation bias has significant impact on domains ranging from politics to science and education. Little is known about the mechanisms underlying this fundamental characteristic of belief formation. Here we report a mechanism underlying the confirmation bias. Specifically, we provide evidence for a failure to use the strength of others’ disconfirming opinions to alter confidence in judgments, but adequate use when opinions are confirmatory. This bias is related to reduced neural sensitivity to the strength of others’ opinions in the posterior medial prefrontal cortex when opinions are disconfirming. Our results demonstrate that existing judgments alter the neural representation of information strength, leaving the individual less likely to alter opinions in the face of disagreement.

But those scientists might have been looking at only half the picture. To understand how we remember, we must also understand how, and why, we forget.

Until about ten years ago, most researchers thought that forgetting was a passive process in which memories, unused, decay over time like a photograph left in the sunlight

But then a handful of researchers who were investigating memory began to bump up against findings that seemed to contradict that decades-old assumption. They began to put forward the radical idea that the brain is built to forget.

The idea that dietary restriction can be used as a tool to increase lifespan has been a centrepiece of ageing research for decades. But the mechanisms by which dietary restriction might act, and the specific nutritional components involved, remain unclear.

Both dietary protein restriction (which results in low levels of leucine and other BCAAs) and inhibition of mTOR can extend lifespan in animals

Flies that carry a mutation in this residue have lower mTOR activity than do controls. They are also longer-lived, and are protected against the negative lifespan-shortening effects of a high-protein diet.

Aristotelian thought had dominated mathematics and astronomy for centuries, until revolutionaries like Nicolaus Copernicus and Galileo Galilei challenged those views.

The mathematization of physics was a crucial step in the advancement of science. It was realized that the mathematical tools we had at the time weren’t strong enough.

By trial and error, Kepler worked and worked until finally, he hit upon the shape that worked—elliptical orbits with the Sun at one focus. It turned out to perfectly fit the known observations.

Some people welcome face coverings for reasons ranging from the convenient and expedient to the more complex and psychological. But is this a helpful coping mechanism?

Since I've been wearing the mask, my awkward interactions with friends and family have significantly reduced,” he says. Now, he goes to the shops whenever he wants, without worrying about whom he might see. He hopes that, even after the pandemic ends, it will still be socially acceptable to wear a mask.

Some welcome the way face coverings reduce or change interactions that might otherwise spark social anxiety. But is this a helpful coping mechanism – and what happens when the pandemic comes to an end?

The term "synesthesia" comes from the Greek words syn, which means "together", and aisthesis, which means "sensation." Synesthesia is a perception in which stimulating one sensory or cognitive pathway  causes experiences in another sense or cognitive pathway. In other words, a sense or concept is connected to a different sense or concept, such as hearing a color or tasting a word. The connection between pathways is involuntary and consistent over time, rather than conscious or arbitrary.

Types of SynesthesiaThere are many different types of synesthesia, but they may be categorized as falling into one of two groups: associative synesthesia and projective synesthesia. An associate feels a connection between a stimulus and a sense, w

There are at least 80 known types of synesthesia, but some are more common than others: Chromesthesia: In this common form of synesthesia, sounds and colors are associated with each other. For example, the musical note "D" may correspond to seeing the color green.Grapheme-color synesthesia: This is a common form of synesthesia characterized by seeing graphemes (letter or numerals) shaded with a color. Synesthetes don't associate the same colors for a grapheme as each other, although the letter "A" does appear to be red to many individuals. Persons who experience grapheme-color synesthesia sometimes report seeing impossible colors when red and green or blue and yellow graphemes appear next to each other in a word or number. Number form: A number form is a mental shape or map of numbers resulting from seeing or thinking about numbers.Lexical-gustatory synesthesia: This a rare type of synesthesia in which hearing a word results in tasting a flavor. For example, a person's name might taste like chocolate.Mirror-touch synesthesia: While rare, mirror-touch synesthesia is noteworthy because it can be disruptive to a synesthete's life. In this form of synesthesia, an individual feels the same sensation in response to a stimulus as another person. For example, seeing a person being tapped on the shoulder would cause the synesthete to feel a tap on

A paper posted online last month has reignited a debate about one of the oldest, most startling claims in the modern era of network science: the proposition that most complex networks in the real world—from the World Wide Web to interacting proteins in a cell—are “scale-free.” Roughly speaking, that means that a few of their nodes should have many more connections than others, following a mathematical formula called a power law, so that there’s no one scale that characterizes the network.

Purely random networks do not obey power laws, so when the early proponents of the scale-free paradigm started seeing power laws in real-world networks in the late 1990s, they viewed them as evidence of a universal organizing principle underlying the formation of these diverse networks. The architecture of scale-freeness, researchers argued, could provide insight into fundamental questions such as how likely a virus is to cause an epidemic, or how easily hackers can disable a network.

Amazingly simple and far-reaching natural laws govern the structure and evolution of all the complex networks that surround us,” wrote Barabási (who is now at Northeastern University in Boston) in Linked. He later added: “Uncovering and explaining these laws has been a fascinating roller-coaster ride during which we have learned more about our complex, interconnected world than was known in the last hundred years.”

After more than 60 years of research into child language development, the mechanism that enables children to segment syllables and words out of the strings of sounds they hear, and to acquire grammar to understand and produce language is still quite an enigma.

Skinner argued that children learn language based on behaviorist reinforcement principles by associating words with meanings.

children will never acquire the tools needed for processing an infinite number of sentences if the language acquisition mechanism was dependent on language input alone.

From Santa Barbara, Calif., to Hefei, China, scientists are developing a new kind of computer that will make today’s machines look like toys.

the technology will perform tasks in minutes that even supercomputers could not complete in thousands of years.

The new experiment indicates that scientists can stretch a quantum network across an increasingly large number of sites. “We are now building small quantum networks in the lab,” said Ronald Hanson

By Jaron LanierMr. Lanier is a computer scientist and an author of several books on technology’s impact on people.

I have observed a change, or really a narrowing, in the public behavior of people who use Twitter or other social media a lot.

When I compare Mr. Musk, Mr. Trump and Ye, I see a convergence of personalities that were once distinct. The garish celebrity playboy, the obsessive engineer and the young artist, as different from one another as they could be, have all veered not in the direction of becoming grumpy old men, but into being bratty little boys in a schoolyard. Maybe we should look at what social media has done to these men.

It is well known that social media amplifies misinformation and other harmful content. The Integrity Institute, an advocacy group, is now trying to measure exactly how much

The institute’s initial report, posted online, found that a “well-crafted lie” will get more engagements than typical, truthful content and that some features of social media sites and their algorithms contribute to the spread of misinformation.

Twitter, the analysis showed, has what the institute called the great misinformation amplification factor, in large part because of its feature allowing people to share, or “retweet,” posts easily.

Christopher Lasch, the historian and social critic, posed a banger of a question in his 1991 book, “The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics.”

“How does it happen,” Lasch asked, “that serious people continue to believe in progress, in the face of massive evidence that might have been expected to refute the idea of progress once and for all?”

A review in The New York Times Book Review by William Julius Wilson, a professor at Harvard, was titled: “Where Has Progress Got Us?”

Osama bin Laden had forced us to admit that, while the U.S. may legally separate church and state, it cannot do so intellectually. Beneath even the most ostensibly faithless of our institutions and our polemicists lie crouching religious lions, ready to devour the infidels who set themselves in opposition to the theology of the free market and the messianic march of democracy

As our political system depends on a shaky separation between religion and politics that has become increasingly unstable, scholars are sensing the deep disillusionment afoot and trying to chart a way out.

At its best, Religion for Atheists is a chronicle of the smoldering heap that liberal capitalism has made of the social rhythms that used to serve as a buffer between humans and the random cruelty of the universe. Christian and Jewish traditions, Botton argues, reinforced the ideas that people are morally deficient, that disappointment and suffering are normative, and that death is inevitable. The abandonment of those realities for the delusions of the self-made individual, the fantasy superman who can bend reality to his will if he works hard enough and is positive enough, leaves little mystery to why we are perpetually stressed out, overworked, and unsatisfied.

One-fifth of Americans are religiously unaffiliated — higher than at any time in recent U.S. history — and those younger than 30 especially seem to be drifting from organized religion. A third of young Americans say they don't belong to any religion.

raised Jewish and considers herself Jewish with an "agnostic bent." She loves going to synagogue.

I realize maybe there's a disconnect there — why are you doing it if you don't necessarily have a belief in God? But I think there's a cultural aspect, there's a spiritual aspect, I suppose. I find the practice of sitting and being quiet and being alone with your thoughts to be helpful, but I don't think I need to answer that question [about God] in order to participate in the traditions I was brought up with."

“Civilization,” wrote the philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead in 1911, “advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.”

On this account, technology can save us a lot of cognitive effort, for “thinking” needs to happen only once, at the design stage.

The hidden truth about many attempts to “bury” technology is that they embody an amoral and unsustainable vision. Pick any electrical appliance in your kitchen. The odds are that you have no idea how much electricity it consumes, let alone how it compares to other appliances and households. This ignorance is neither natural nor inevitable; it stems from a conscious decision by the designer of that kitchen appliance to free up your “cognitive resources” so that you can unleash your inner Oscar Wilde on “contemplating” other things. Multiply such ignorance by a few billion, and global warming no longer looks like a mystery.

As soon as you hit Google’s territorial waters, you came under our jurisdiction, our terms of service. Our laws–or lack thereof–apply here. By boarding our self-driving boat you granted us the right to all feedback you provide during your journey. This includes the chemical composition of your sweat.

Unified logins let us get to know our audience in ways we never could before. They gave us their locations so that we might better tell them if it was raining outside. They told us where they lived and where they wanted to go so that we could deliver a more immersive map that better anticipated what they wanted to do–it let us very literally tell people what they should do today. As people began to see how very useful Google Now was, they began to give us even more information. They told us to dig through their e-mail for their boarding passes–Imagine if you had to find it on your own!–they finally gave us permission to track and store their search and web history so that we could give them better and better Cards. And then there is the imaging. They gave us tens of thousands of pictures of themselves so that we could pick the best ones–yes we appealed to their vanity to do this: We’ll make you look better and assure you present a smiling, wrinkle-free face to the world–but it allowed us to also stitch together three-dimensional representations. Hangout chats let us know who everybody’s friends were, and what they had to say to them. Verbal searches gave us our users’ voices. These were intermediary steps. But it let us know where people were at all times, what they thought, what they said, and of course how they looked. Sure, Google Now could tell you what to do.

“We learned so much about regulation with Google Health. It turns out, the government has rules about health records, and that people care about these rules for some reason. So we began looking around for ways to avoid regulation. For example, government regulation meant it was much easier to experiment with white space in Kenya than in the United States. So we started thinking: What if the entire world looked more like Kenya? Or, even better, Somalia? Places where there are no laws. We haven’t adapted mechanisms to deal with some of our old institutions like the law. We aren’t keeping up with the rate of change we caused through technology. If you look at the laws we have, they’re very old. A law can’t be right if it’s 50 years old. Like, it’s before the Internet

during the last decade, the pendulum of scientific thought has begun its inevitable swing in the other direction. These days, general cognitive mechanisms, not language-specific ones, are all the rage. We humans are really smart. We’re fantastic at recognizing patterns in our environments—patterns that may have nothing to do with language. Who says that the same abilities that allow us to play the violin aren’t also sufficient for learning subject-verb agreement? Perhaps speech isn’t genetically privileged so much as babies are just really motivated to learn to communicate.

If the brain did evolve for language, how did it do so? An idea favored by some scholars is that better communicators may also have been more reproductively successful. Gradually, as the prevalence of these smooth talkers’ offspring increased in the population, the concentration of genes favorable to linguistic communication may have increased as well.

two recent articles, one published in 2009 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences and a 2012 follow-up in PLOS ONE (freely available), rebut this approach