You might have to start with repetition, rote learning, and a lot of falling down flat, but then something clicks, and you're on the road to mastery. You know what to do and if you don't, you know what to do.
The possibility of failure beckons and is transformed into something exhilarating.
... a lot of people want to grow their wealth, especially for retirement. That's where risky assets come in. Risky assets are where the big bucks are made and lost. Risky assets include volatile investments, real estate other than one's own home, or a business. Households heavily invested in risky assets tend to experience big swings in wealth.
...the rich often own businesses or are self-employed professionals, and many grow their money in the stock market - either directly invested or through mutual funds, annuities, trusts, and pension funds...
...something to the effect, “wealth matters much more than income anyway”. And then they point out the super-rich own the lion’s share of wealth in the US and the world...The implication being if we just redistributed a bunch of that wealth, the war on poverty would be over! Is that so?
Tell subjects they scored in the bottom 20% on some performance measure and they'll feel rotten. Expose women to a 15-minute video of gorgeous models and their self-esteem will take a beating. So, sure, you can make experimental subjects feel bad by exposing them to certain conditions in a lab, but do those conditions prevail in everyday life?
Beliefs serve decision-making under conditions of uncertainty. Without uncertainty, we just act. I don't "believe" the ground will stop my foot when I walk....That's just the neural prediction and reward-seeking machinery running smoothly. It's when the machinery gets stuck that the brain shifts into belief mode to help break the logjam.
Jumping the groove from dopamine to self-efficacy: here we go!
What stands out in this map is that Red States are less densely populated than Blue States. They're more rural with plenty of room for people to spread out. Since rural homes are bigger and traveling distances farther, it should come as no surprise that Red States consume more energy per capita than Blue States. This is a function of landscape and livelihood, not politics. If you're a farmer, you don't tootle around in a Prius - you've got a pick-up.
According to the Conference of State Legislatures, net metering policies "have facilitated the expansion of renewable energy through on-site, also known as distributed, generation." Common distributed generation sources include solar panels, natural gas, micro-turbines, methane digesters, and small wind power generators.
The hypothesis: many Republicans would like to see a reduction in Green House Gas (GHG) emissions, whether or not they believe in anthropogenic climate change. Please see Part I of this series for how I arrived at this hypothesis. ... Now, let's test the hypothesis.
According to a recent Pew Research Center report, most Republicans and Republican-leaning Americans (heretofore "Republicans") do not believe in anthropogenic climate change. Does that mean they won't support policies or regulations that reduce green house gas (GHG) emissions?
Here in a glance are the politics of each state, the most popular governors and the best performing states in terms of fiscal health, level of inequality, affordability, poverty rate, and labor market participation.
...in 1901 the average US family’s income was $750 - worth about $2300 a century later. Before 1940, households spent more than a third of their income on food alone.
Meanwhile, the National Conference of State Legislatures released a report on the partisan composition of state legislatures as of November 8, 2017. I figured that state legislatures are largely responsible for the fiscal health of their states and was curious how the state fiscal rankings matched up with the political composition of their legislatures. This is what I found...
If these additional heuristics were put into words, they may sound like "when in doubt, go with tough love" or "when in doubt, provide relief". Note how uncertainty ("when in doubt") calls for heuristic assistance. Help! I need a heuristic! Thinking hard is aversive!
Unfortunately, the AWS authors mix well-documented facts (say, the spreading of ocean dead zones) with less widely supported claims (say, the unmitigated threat of "alien species"), blurring the line between the known and the hypothetical.
"Since the payoffs of free riders depend on the total contribution to the public good, the only way to punish free riders in this experiment was to stop contributing. This is the tragedy of the commons.” - Section 4.7 Public good contributions and peer punishment - The Economy
Ask a climate change skeptic why they don't trust climate change claims and you may get a history of false alarms in the environmental movement - false alarms endorsed by prominent scientists. Remember the population explosion, peak oil? So when scientists confidently predict global disaster in the very near future, a skeptic would likely file that one away as another case of alarmist rhetoric coming from the usual suspects.
These "Concerned Scientists" posts address a recent viewpoint article in the journal BioScience, World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice (2017), in terms of how effectively it conveys its message to climate change skeptics. No, that’s not me. It’s those members of the public the authors are trying to reach. They’re trying to change minds, convince people that climate change is not only real but that it's potentially catastrophic and serious action is urgent.