25 Posts found for source_month: February

Consider the following propositions: First, because human behavior is ultimately determined by outside factors, human beings cannot be held responsible for their actions. Second, punishment doesn’t work anyway. These propositions are legacies of modern psychology. And, the author argues, they are nonsense

Author: John Staddon | Source: The Atlantic (February1995) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy, Psychology | Behavior

One way to look at the rise of Donald Trump is as part of a decades-long backlash among the American leadership class to the idea of accountability. Since Richard Nixon was forced to resign, powerful people in both political parties have worked assiduously to ensure that their leaders would escape the consequences of their actions… This is not just about Trump; his impunity is the … [ Read more ]

Author: Adam Serwer | Source: The Atlantic (February 26, 2026) | Subjects: America, International, Politics & Public Policy

An excerpt from the book, The Age of Austerity: How Scarcity Will Remake American Politics.

A wide range of academic scholarship exploring political belief-formation reveals that those who identify themselves as politically conservative, for example, exhibit distinctive values underpinning their world view and their orientation towards political competition.

Conservatives, argues researcher Philip Tetlock of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, are less tolerant of compromise; … [ Read more ]

Author: Thomas B. Edsall | Source: The Atlantic (February 6, 2012) | Subjects: Excerpts, Politics & Public Policy

Max Weber wondered how the leaders of states derive legitimacy, the claim to rule rightfully. He thought it boiled down to two choices. One is rational legal bureaucracy (or “bureaucratic proceduralism”), a system in which legitimacy is bestowed by institutions following certain rules and norms…

The other source of legitimacy is more ancient, more common, and more intuitive—“the default form of rule in the premodern world,” … [ Read more ]

Author: Jonathan Rauch | Source: The Atlantic (February 24, 2025) | Subjects: America, Excerpts, International, Politics & Public Policy, Trump

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

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.

[…]

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

Five key fallacies and pitfalls have affected public-health messaging, as well as media coverage, and have played an outsize role in derailing an effective pandemic response. These problems were deepened by the ways that we—the public—developed to cope with a dreadful situation under great uncertainty.

Risk Compensation

One of the most important problems undermining the pandemic response has been the mistrust and paternalism that some public-health agencies … [ Read more ]

Author: Zeynep Tufekci | Source: The Atlantic (February 26, 2021) | Subjects: Excerpts, Health & Medicine, Politics & Public Policy

Alec Nevala-Lee, author of Astounding, a forthcoming book on the history of science fiction, digs into the writing career of L. Ron Hubbard, gaining new insights into the life of the controversial founder of dianetics and the origins and nature of Scientology itself.

Source: Longreads (February 1, 2017) | Subjects: Excerpts, Literature | Arts, Religion

After World War II, so many Americans believed in the new, activist New Deal state, the “liberal consensus,” that politicians could not motivate voters with sweeping stories of what it meant to be an American: almost all Americans agreed on those basic principles. So political scientists concluded that there was no longer any real defining ideological difference between Republicans and Democrats. In a famous book … [ Read more ]

Author: Heather Cox Richardson | Source: Facebook (February 9, 2020) | Subjects: Excerpts, Politics & Public Policy

New research published in Current Biology confirms this feeling: people with radical beliefs actually think differently than those without. Specifically, radicals have less metacognitive sensitivity than moderates.

Metacognition refers to the ability to be aware of and analyze one’s own thinking. Metacognitive sensitivity is similar, but more specific: it refers to the ability to distinguish between one’s correct and incorrect judgements.

[…]‌

First, the researchers developed … [ Read more ]

Author: Matt Davis | Source: Big Think (February 15, 2019) | Subjects: Excerpts, Politics & Public Policy, Psychology | Behavior

This article presents an overview of the Schwartz theory of basic human values. It discusses the nature of values and spells out the features that are common to all values and what distinguishes one value from another. The theory identifies ten basic personal values that are recognized across cultures and explains where they come from. At the heart of the theory is the idea that … [ Read more ]

Author: Shalom H. Schwartz | Source: Readings in Psychology and Culture (February2017) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Psychology | Behavior, Values

“Many people say” is what’s known as an argumentum ad populum. If we were a nation of logicians, we would dismiss the argument as dumb.

I think it’s important not to dismiss the president’s reply simply as dumb. We ought to assume that it’s darkly brilliant — if not in intention then certainly in effect. The president is responding to a claim of fact not by … [ Read more ]

Author: Bret Stephens | Source: Time (February 21, 2017) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Journalism, News | Media | Publishing, Politics & Public Policy, Trump

In 2009, I helped sketch out a marketing campaign for an internet personality and blogger named Tucker Max. With a very limited advertising budget available for the independent movie he had written and produced, we had few options for getting the word out.

Maybe it was crazy but my thinking was that one of the best ways to get young men to go see a movie … [ Read more ]

Author: Ryan Holiday | Source: Observer (February 17, 2017) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Politics & Public Policy, Psychology | Behavior

To live with sincerity in our culture of cynicism is a difficult dance — one that comes easily only to the very young and the very old. The rest of us are left to tussle with two polarizing forces ripping the psyche asunder by beckoning to it from opposite directions — critical thinking and hope. Critical thinking without hope is cynicism. Hope without critical thinking … [ Read more ]

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (February 9, 2015) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

“What happens when anyone can make it appear as if anything has happened, regardless of whether or not it did?” technologist Aviv Ovadya warns.

Authors: Aviv Ovadya, Charlie Warzel | Source: BuzzFeed (February 12, 2018) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, IT | Technology, Journalism, Life & Society, News | Media | Publishing, Psychology | Behavior

We can identify four “turnings” that each last about 20 years — the length of a generation. Think of these as recurring seasons, starting with spring and ending with winter. In every turning, a new generation is born and each older generation ages into its next phase of life.

Author: Neil Howe | Source: The Washington Post (February 24, 2017) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Foreign Policy, History, Politics & Public Policy, Sociology | Anthropology

Perspective from the right on Trump’s political challenge for the left

Author: David Frum | Source: The Atlantic (February 6, 2017) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Politics & Public Policy, Trump

The arguments being pushed by the Trump administration regarding tariffs and related restrictive trade policies are off the mark because they overlook two crucial issues, according to Wharton dean Geoffrey Garrett: “Rapid technological change coupled with economic stagnation have caused more of the pain felt in Middle America than free trade.” In this opinion piece, Garrett also notes that while free trade lowers the cost … [ Read more ]

Author: Geoffrey Garrett | Source: Knolwedge@Wharton (February 1, 2017) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Economics | Economy, Excerpts, International, Politics & Public Policy

What is a trade deficit?
A trade deficit happens when a country’s imports of goods and services exceed its exports of goods and services. In other words, when a country buys more from the rest of the world than it sells, the country incurs a trade deficit. […] The size of the trade deficit is primarily determined by four macroeconomic forces:

1. The difference between U.S. household

… [ Read more ]

Authors: Euijin Jung, Gary Clyde Hufbauer | Source: PBS NewsHour (February 2, 2017) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Economics | Economy, Excerpts

Last week, six top State Department officials were suddenly discharged by the White House—an Undersecretary, an acting Undersecretary, and four Assistant Secretaries—without notice and without even a nominee selected to replace them. Tom Countryman, who served the nation for 35 years and at the time as Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Nonproliferation, was in Amman booked to fly to an international meeting … [ Read more ]

Authors: Ryan Goodman, Tom Countryman | Source: Just Security (February 3, 2017) | Subjects: America, Articles & Links, Excerpts, Foreign Policy, International, Politics & Public Policy