Life & Society Archives

Yuval Noah Harari: How to safeguard your mind in the age of junk information

The Limits of What the State Can—and Should—Do for the Economy

An argument for reducing government controls. This essay is an edited excerpt; the original was presented in 1963 at Swarthmore College, as part of a dialogue with Paul A. Samuelson of MIT.

Author: George J. Stigler | Source: Chicago Booth | Subjects: Economics | Economy, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy

Inconspicuous Consumption

University of Chicago economists Kerwin Kofi Charles and Erik Hurst… along with Nikolai Roussanov of the University of Pennsylvania… found… insight into the economic differences between racial groups… [that] challenges common assumptions about luxury. Conspicuous consumption, this research suggests, is not an unambiguous signal of personal affluence. It’s a sign of belonging to a relatively poor group. Visible luxury thus serves less to establish … [ Read more ]

Author: Virginia Postrel | Source: The Atlantic (July2008) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Culture, Demographics, Economics | Economy, Excerpts

A Boy’s Life

What would you do if your son wanted to be a girl? Some doctors have a new and troubling answer.

Pop Psychology

Why asset bubbles are a part of the human condition that regulation can’t cure.

The Irrational Electorate

Many of our worst fears about America’s voters are true.

Author: Larry M. Bartels | Source: The Wilson Quarterly (Autumn2008) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Culture, Excerpts, Politics & Public Policy

The Short-Circuiting of the American Mind

Fact-checking was a theme of Donald Trump’s first presidency. Journalists kept count of those first-term fictions—30,573 in all, per one count—guided by the optimism that checking the president’s words might also serve as a check on his power. In late 2020, when Trump claimed victory in the presidential election he had lost, scholars saw in his declaration the kind of propaganda … [ Read more ]

The Populist Cure Is Worse Than the Elite Disease

Populism is never separate from this “voice of passion.” That is its defining characteristic. It begins in deep grievance. Some of those grievances can be quite real and consequential — such as when modern populist anger is rooted in fury over the Great Recession, long wars in the Middle East or shuttered factories in the Midwest.

Some of the problems, however, that motivate populists aren’t problems … [ Read more ]

Author: David French | Source: The New York Times (February 9, 2025) | Subjects: Excerpts, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy, Trump

How McKinsey Destroyed the Middle Class

Because complex goods and services require much planning and coordination, management (even though it is only indirectly productive) adds a great deal of value. And managers as a class capture much of this value as pay. This makes the question of who gets to be a manager extremely consequential.

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Middle managers, able to plan and coordinate production independently of elite-executive control, shared not just the … [ Read more ]

Author: Daniel Markovits | Source: The Atlantic (February2020) | Subjects: Economics | Economy, Excerpts, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy

The Six Forces That Fuel Friendship

Accumulation. The simplest and most obvious force that forms and sustains friendships is time spent together. One study estimates that it takes spending 40 to 60 hours together within the first six weeks of meeting to turn an acquaintance into a casual friend, and about 80 to 100 hours to become more than that. So friendships unsurprisingly tend to form in places where people

… [ Read more ]

Author: Julie Beck | Source: The Atlantic (June 10, 2022) | Subjects: Excerpts, Family & Friends, Life & Society

Why can’t Americans agree on, well, nearly anything? Philosophy has some answers

Psychologist and law professor Dan Kahan and his collaborators have described two phenomena that affect the ways in which people form different beliefs from the same information.

The first is called “identity-protective cognition.” This describes how individuals are motivated to adopt the empirical beliefs of groups they identify with in order to signal that they belong.

The second is “cultural cognition”: people tend to say that a … [ Read more ]

Study: Dunbar’s number is wrong. You can have more than 150 friends

Since 1992, people have been talking about “Dunbar’s number,” the supposed upper limit of the number of people with whom a person can maintain stable social relationships. Named for British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, its value, rounded from 148 to 150, has permeated both professional and popular culture. […] It’s also probably wrong. Despite its fame, Dunbar’s number has always been controversial. A new study … [ Read more ]

Authors: Robin Dunbar, Scotty Hendricks | Source: Big Think (May2021) | Subjects: Excerpts, Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior

Secrets about People: A Short and Dangerous Introduction to René Girard

Human beings are creatures of mimicry. We are evolutionarily supercharged to do one thing better than anyone else: learn by watching and copying others. And the most important thing we learn is how to want.

As we grow up and live our lives, we watch others and learn what it is we ought to want. Aside from the basics, like food, water, shelter and sex, our … [ Read more ]

Author: Alex Danco | Subjects: Excerpts, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior, Sociology | Anthropology

The Resentment That Never Sleeps

Just over a decade ago, in their paper “Hypotheses on Status Competition,” William C. Wohlforth and David C. Kang, professors of government at Dartmouth and the University of Southern California, wrote that “social status is one of the most important motivators of human behavior” and yet “over the past 35 years, no more … [ Read more ]

Author: Thomas B. Edsall | Source: The New York Times (December 9, 2020) | Subjects: Excerpts, Life & Society, Motivation, Politics & Public Policy, Psychology | Behavior

The Biggest Bluff: Control, Chance, and How the Psychology of Poker Illuminates the Art of Thriving Through Uncertainty

Over and over, people would overestimate the degree of control they had over events — smart people, people who excelled at many things, people who should have known better… The more they overestimated their own skill relative to luck, the less they learned from what the environment was trying to tell them, and the worse their decisions became… The illusion of control is what prevented … [ Read more ]

Authors: Maria Konnikova, Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (December 8, 2020) | Subjects: Excerpts, Life & Society, Math & Science, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

Evolution Made Really Smart People Long to Be Loners

The savanna theory of happiness is the idea that life satisfaction is not only determined by what’s happening in the present but also influenced by the ways our ancestors may have reacted to the event. Evolutionary psychology argues that, just like any other organ, the human brain has been designed for and adapted to the conditions of an ancestral environment. Therefore, the researchers argue, our … [ Read more ]

Author: Sarah Sloat | Source: Inverse (December 6, 2016) | Subjects: Excerpts, Happiness, Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior, Sociology | Anthropology

The Unheeded Message of ‘1984’

Orwell never intended his novel to be a prediction, only a warning. And it’s as a warning that 1984 keeps finding new relevance.

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Unfreedom today is voluntary. It comes from the bottom up.

[…]

We are living with a new kind of regime that didn’t exist in Orwell’s time. It combines hard nationalism—the diversion of frustration and cynicism into xenophobia and hatred—with soft distraction and confusion: … [ Read more ]

Author: George Packer | Source: The Atlantic (June 8, 2019) | Subjects: Excerpts, Life & Society, Literature | Arts, Politics & Public Policy

The Four Quadrants of Conformism

One of the most revealing ways to classify people is by the degree and aggressiveness of their conformism. Imagine a Cartesian coordinate system whose horizontal axis runs from conventional-minded on the left to independent-minded on the right, and whose vertical axis runs from passive at the bottom to aggressive at the top. The resulting four quadrants define four types of people. Starting in the upper … [ Read more ]

Author: Paul Graham | Subjects: Excerpts, Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior

Why Your Christian Friends and Family Members Are So Easily Fooled by Conspiracy Theories

Three primary reasons people are attracted to conspiracy theories:

Conspiracy theories make us feel special. According to Tom Nichols, “[Conspiracy] theories also appeal to a strong streak of narcissism: there are people who would choose to believe in complicated nonsense rather than accept that their own circumstances are incomprehensible, the result of issues beyond their intellectual capacity to understand, or even their own fault.” In other

… [ Read more ]

Restoring faith in humanity?

In his new book, historian Rutger Bregman argues that people are actually fundamentally good.

Author: Mike Jakeman | Source: strategy+business (June 12, 2020) | Subjects: Excerpts, Life & Society, Sociology | Anthropology