Our co-workers shouldn’t have to worry that each time they open their mouths to speak in a meeting, they have to prove that they are not like the memo states, being “agreeable” rather than “assertive,” showing a “lower stress tolerance,” or being “neurotic.” - Google CEO Sundar Pichai
The other side of income is spending. Income by itself is a meaningless concept. What matters is what that income can buy. If income goes up 100% but prices for necessary stuff goes up 200%, well you're a whole lot poorer than you used to be.
Of course details matter. A super modest UBI might take the edge off of poverty without disincentivizing work and have little effect on tax rates or revenues. But what constitutes "super modest"?
It doesn't take much to trigger the SC blues: basically you reach a threshold of unfavorable self-comparison and bam! Perhaps the SC blues is subject to a dose effect: the misery of social comparison doesn't keep ramping up with exposure to ever more dazzling people.
To keep the Republican party in check, Trump has to keep his troops motivated. He has to tweet. He has to balance presidential displays with divisive rabble-rousing. A reasonable and humble Trump would lose his base and therefore the power to punish those who cross him.
"Technical manuals for 47 interest inventories were used, yielding 503,188 respondents. Results showed that men prefer working with things and women prefer working with people, producing a large effect size (d _ 0.93) on the Things–People dimension."
- Su, Rounds and Armstrong (2009) Men and things, women and people: A meta-analysis of sex differences in interests.
Are male engineers simply more sexist and less welcoming of female students and coworkers than, say, male doctors and lawyers? Why would that be? If we were only talking about the perniciousness of men, we would expect similar gender patterns in a broad range of traditionally male-dominated occupations. But we don't. There's something special about engineering.
That biology influences personality isn't saying personality is fixed or that biology has a bigger effect than other types of influence. Predispositions can be minimized, neutralized or reversed. Personal experience, socialization, and workplace culture are incredibly important. No one is denying that.
...the Diversity Memo's author says that, on average, women are more open, people-oriented, gregarious, anxious, and agreeable than men and men are more thing-oriented, systemizing, assertive, and status-driven. He further notes that biology accounts only partly for these gender differences, many of which are small, and there is considerable overlap between men and women.
Recently a Google engineer was fired for writing a very long memo about gender differences and its implications for company diversity policy. There was an uproar and he got fired. This post addresses a single word in that memo: neuroticism.
As part of their 2014 survey on religion and politics, Pew did collect data on the political affiliation of meditation practitioners. They found that most were conservative. Well, there goes my thesis I thought. Delving further, though, it turns out that many religious groups practice meditation, including evangelical Protestants, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Mormons.
...mindfulness teachers and advocates, whom I assume don't want to drive away potential converts by creating a political litmus test for membership in the mindful community. Even groups that have promoted mindful political engagement shy away from explicit party affiliation
Another sense of happiness is about experiencing positive emotions. Gallup has a survey for that too – and it seems that experiencing positive emotions and being satisfied with life don't necessarily go together: country rankings are completely different.
Arguments against the Deserving Rich:
Assuming some degree of inequality is compatible with the principle of fairness, on what basis would some people deserve more than others? In surveys and lab studies, participants have generally considered it fair to reward ability, effort, and moral behavior with more stuff. But when people are presented with hypothetical scenarios of economic good fortune, they're fine with "brute luck" as a source of riches. No begrudging the lottery winner.
Let's unpack what's so bad about inequality in and of itself. Say we eliminate poverty and create conditions that facilitate individual social mobility; healthcare is universal; housing is generally affordable...
The Japanese healthcare system does illustrate how regulation can sometimes be the friend of innovation. The government overseers set low reimbursement rates for MRIs. So what did the Japanese do? Develop cheap MRI machines. Create the right incentives and inventions will follow.
Here's a possible variation on the Fat Man version: A trolley is hurtling down a track towards five people. You are on a bridge under which it will pass, and you might be able to stop it by putting something very heavy in front of it. As it happens, there is a very fat man next to you – your only chance to stop the trolley is to push him over the bridge, hopefully onto the track, killing him for sure to possibly save five. Should you proceed?
I’m tempted to say “Estimating economic damage from climate change in the United States” is a noble failure, a well-meaning endeavor of questionable value due to a few missteps. But I don’t believe it. What I believe is that the authors deliberately chose implausible worst-case assumptions because the resulting projections of economic damage would be more likely to spur policy action than more plausible middle-of-the-road assumptions.
...we may have already reached "peak farm" as “the ratio of arable land per unit of crop production shows improved efficiency of land use, the number of hectares of cropland [having] scarcely changed since 1990” (Ausubel, Wernick, & Waggoner, 2013). This despite an additional two billion mouths to feed in the last 25 years.