Author: Yuval Noah Harari | Source: Big Think (August 11, 2025) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Information, Intelligence | Knowledge, IT | Technology, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Politics & Public Policy, Psychology | Behavior
Trickle-down economics suggests that tax cuts for wealthy citizens energize ailing economies, as recipients of the cuts use their windfalls to hire workers. And conventional wisdom among policy makers and economists contends that the main beneficiaries of corporate tax breaks are workers, who see wages increase.
But some research suggests that if you want to create jobs, it’s better to cut taxes for the bottom 90 … [ Read more ]
Authors: Juan Carlos Suárez Serrato, Owen Zidar | Source: Chicago Booth (August 30, 2016) | Subjects: Economics | Economy, Politics & Public Policy
Anthropologist Wade Davis on how COVID-19 signals the end of the American era.
Author: Wade Davis | Source: Rolling Stone (August 6, 2020) | Subjects: America, Excerpts, History
The thing is, the immune system is very complicated. Arguably the most complex part of the human body outside the brain, it’s an absurdly intricate network of cells and molecules that protect us from dangerous viruses and other microbes. These components summon, amplify, rile, calm, and transform one another: Picture a thousand Rube Goldberg machines, some of which are aggressively smashing things to pieces. Now … [ Read more ]
Author: Ed Yong | Source: The Atlantic (August 5, 2020) | Subjects: Excerpts, Health & Medicine
Each thing we preconceive blinds us to what actually is — a tendency that, when it rises to the level of social perception in the form of stereotypes, metastasizes into a status quo that makes the powerful all the more powerful and the power-poor all the poorer.
Drawing on the pioneering psychologist William James […] Lippmann writes:
For the most part we do not first
Authors: Maria Popova, Walter Lippmann | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (August 4, 2019) | Subjects: Excerpts, Intelligence | Knowledge
We need go-go capitalism to afford a generous welfare state, and people won’t support go-go capitalism without a safety net. “Socialists” and Republicans forget different parts of this lesson.
Author: Will Wilkinson | Source: Vox (August 16, 2018) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Economics | Economy, Excerpts, Politics & Public Policy
The Republican Party has changed since 2005. It has become the vehicle for white identity politics. In 2005 only six percent of Republicans felt that whites faced “a great deal” of discrimination, the same number of Democrats who felt this. By 2016, the percentage of Republicans who felt this had tripled.
Recent surveys suggest that roughly 47 percent of Republicans are what you might call conservative … [ Read more ]
Author: David Brooks | Source: The New York Times (August 29, 2017) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Politics & Public Policy, Race Relations, Trump
In 1908, Indian revolutionary Taraknath Das wrote to Leo Tolstoy, by then one of the most famous public figures in the world, asking for the author’s support in India’s independence from British colonial rule. On December 14, Tolstoy, who had spent the last twenty years seeking the answers to life’s greatest moral questions, was moved to reply in a long letter, which Das published in … [ Read more ]
Author: Leo Tolstoy | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (August 21, 2014) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Freedom | Liberty, History, Life & Society, Love, Sociology | Anthropology
When she was 30, Suzy Hansen left the US for Istanbul – and began to realize that Americans will never understand their own country until they see it as the rest of the world does.
Author: Suzy Hansen | Source: The Guardian (August 8, 2017) | Subjects: America, Culture, Demographics, Excerpts, International, Life & Society, Race Relations, Sociology | Anthropology