“What’s so remarkable about the Nordic countries is that they manage to pull off their systems despite the considerable handicap of small populations and small market sizes. Despite all the pressures being small puts on having lower wages and lower taxes in order to remain competitive, the Nordics consistently post the highest unit labor costs in Europe and highest taxes in the developed world. Yet they flourish.”

(This is a weird argument…X has drawbacks, but X works great, therefore the benefits must come from Y not X, so Z should try Y?)

“Darker color variations are made by lowering brightness and increasing saturation. Brighter color variations are made by increasing brightness and lowering saturation.

[…]

The important bit is this: if you don’t count saturation and brightness, shifting hue towards red (0°), green (120°), or blue (240°) will decrease the luminosity, or perceived lightness of the color. And shifting the hue towards yellow (60°), cyan (180°), or magenta (300°) will increase the perceived lightness of the color.

The trick is to just make the movement of the hue match up with the movement of the saturation and brightness. If you want a darker variation, move the hue towards red (0°), green (120°), or blue (240°), whichever is closest — and vice versa (with cyan, magenta, and yellow) for lighter variations.”

“Whether you look at fish or humans, research keeps finding the same thing. When you win, you win more. When you lose, you lose more.

Losers don’t just lose more, they don’t even bother to come back to compete again.

Winners on the other hand, even if their win was faked (their opponent lost on purpose), gain the confidence to keep competing. For example a mouse who wins a fixed fight where the other mouse was sedated (i.e. forced to lose), has greater odds now of winning his next fight.

Robert brings up the unfortunate side effect this has. Acts of aggression against the weak become a coping mechanism.”

“The Gormans, too, argue that ways of thinking that now seem self-destructive must at some point have been adaptive. And they, too, dedicate many pages to confirmation bias, which, they claim, has a physiological component. They cite research suggesting that people experience genuine pleasure—a rush of dopamine—when processing information that supports their beliefs. “It feels good to ‘stick to our guns’ even if we are wrong,” they observe.

The Gormans don’t just want to catalogue the ways we go wrong; they want to correct for them.”

NY Times: “Moreover, cash might force aid workers and nongovernmental organizations to confront the fact that they could be doing better by doing things differently — often by doing less. “It’s easy to muster evidence that you should be giving cash instead of fertilizer,” said Justin Sandefur of the Center for Global Development. “The harder argument is: You should shut down your U.S.A.I.D. program, which is bigger than the education budget of Liberia, and give the money to Liberians. That’s the radical critique.” Faye put it more bluntly, if half-jokingly: If cash transfers flourished, “the whole aid industry would have to fire itself.””

“What is required now is broad recognition that centrists cannot resolve our deepening crisis. Structurally, they are too dependent on the Washington party system and its false equivalency. Intellectually, they suffer from a poverty of imagination. Philosophically, they have few core commitments. And temperamentally, they are too milquetoast, lacking one of the most essential traits for such a moment: political courage.”