“Sapolsky cites evidence that in humans, dopamine levels rise dramatically when we anticipate rewards that are uncertain and far in the future, like retirement or even the afterlife. That could explain what motivates people to work for things that have no obvious short-term benefit, he says.”

“We could see fierce old dictatorships losing control over their own stories. A surprising number of them collapsed. Democratic governments became terrified of the public, and with good reason. The wave of information resembled an acid bath of negation.

Information, it turned out, has authority in proportion to its scarcity – the more there is, the less people believe.”

[…]

“These groups are born in negation – friction with the status quo brings them into being, and they exist to attack, condemn, repudiate. Negation binds a network and transforms it into a political force. You stand against Mubarak, for example, or Obama, or capitalism. Once the oppositional impulse is spent, there’s very little left. If you asked an indignado or an Occupier or a Tea Partier what they stood against, you would get long, long lists of grievances. If you asked what they stood for, you’d get throat-clearing noises and generalities like “social justice” or “the Constitution.””

“By the 1970s, Itō’s work had blossomed into a whole new area of mathematics, called stochastic calculus (mathematicians like calling things that are random “stochastic”). It came with a whole new set of tools and theorems, just as calculus had. Today, stochastic calculus is used to study all sorts of phenomena, from neurons firing in a brain to diseases spreading through a population. It is also at the heart of financial mathematics, where it helps banks estimate option prices. It can account for the bumpy behavior of a stock price, and hence reveal how the value of an option changes over time. The resulting equation, which is known as the Black-Scholes formula, is now used on trading floors around the world.”

“Loss aversion, the principle that losses loom larger than gains, is among the most widely accepted ideas in the social sciences. The first part of this article introduces and discusses the construct of loss aversion. The second part of this article reviews evidence in support of loss aversion. The upshot of this review is that current evidence does not support that losses, on balance, tend to be any more impactful than gains. The third part of this article aims to address the question of why acceptance of loss aversion as a general principle remains pervasive and persistent among social scientists, including consumer psychologists, despite evidence to the contrary.”

“Conventional thinking can work for straightforward problems such as healing a wound, but it is not suitable for social problems with all their interlocking features. For example, ending homelessness cannot be accomplished just by providing shelter. It requires a set of long-term initiatives encompassing changes to housing policy, expansion of support services, strengthening family structures and community cohesion, enhancing work opportunities, and so on.”