The Other Barbarians at the Gates

It’s strange to imagine someone like Greene, who counts Mike Tyson as a close friend, and who has a streak that caused the L.A. party girls to refer to him as “Mean Jeff Greene,” feeling vulnerable. It’s hard to think of any superrich person as vulnerable, just as it’s hard to think that a bear with outstretched claws and giant teeth is more afraid than you are. But over the past few months, it’s become clear that rich people are very, very afraid. Sometimes it feels like this was the main accomplishment of Occupy Wall Street: a whole lot of tightened sphincters. It’s not a stretch to say many residents of Park Avenue harbor vivid fears of a populist revolt like the one seen in The Dark Knight Rises, in which they cower miserably under their sideboards while ragged hordes plunder the silver.

“This is my fear, and it’s a real, legitimate fear,” Greene says, revving up the engine. “You have this huge, huge class of people who are impoverished. If we keep doing what we’re doing, we will build a class of poor people that will take over this country, and the country will not look like what it does today. It will be a different economy, rights, all that stuff will be different.”

What makes countries rich or poor

Somebody figured it out, apparently.

The Dismal Education

Econogrinch

in related ideas: As for Empathy, the Haves Have Not

ARE the upper classes really indifferent to the hopes, fears and miseries of ordinary folk? Or is it that they just don’t understand their less privileged peers?

According to a paper by three psychological researchers — Michael W. Kraus, at the University of California, San Francisco; Stéphane Côté, at the University of Toronto; and Dacher Keltner, the University of California, Berkeley — members of the upper class are less adept at reading emotions.

 Sounds like Mitt to me.

Here’s why: Earlier studies have suggested that those in the lower classes, unable to simply hire others, rely more on neighbors or relatives for things like a ride to work or child care. As a result, the authors propose, they have to develop more effective social skills — ones that will engender good will.

Recipe for Kindness

 Does exposure to nature make us more caring?

Open Happiness Data

The OECD is relaunching its Better Life Index today - and has given us the key data behind it

Better life: relaunching the happiness index

from 0 to 12

Psychology Of Fraud: Why Good People Do Bad Things

How we frame an issue sure is important.

Homophobic? Maybe You’re Gay

Science providing some confirmation for what I have long thought:

Our paper describes six studies conducted in the United States and Germany involving 784 university students. Participants rated their sexual orientation on a 10-point scale, ranging from gay to straight. Then they took a computer-administered test designed to measure their implicit sexual orientation. In the test, the participants were shown images and words indicative of hetero- and homosexuality (pictures of same-sex and straight couples, words like “homosexual” and “gay”) and were asked to sort them into the appropriate category, gay or straight, as quickly as possible. The computer measured their reaction times.

The twist was that before each word and image appeared, the word “me” or “other” was flashed on the screen for 35 milliseconds — long enough for participants to subliminally process the word but short enough that they could not consciously see it. The theory here, known as semantic association, is that when “me” precedes words or images that reflect your sexual orientation (for example, heterosexual images for a straight person), you will sort these images into the correct category faster than when “me” precedes words or images that are incongruent with your sexual orientation (for example, homosexual images for a straight person). This technique, adapted from similar tests used to assess attitudes like subconscious racial bias, reliably distinguishes between self-identified straight individuals and those who self-identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual.

Using this methodology we identified a subgroup of participants who, despite self-identifying as highly straight, indicated some level of same-sex attraction (that is, they associated “me” with gay-related words and pictures faster than they associated “me” with straight-related words and pictures). Over 20 percent of self-described highly straight individuals showed this discrepancy.

Notably, these “discrepant” individuals were also significantly more likely than other participants to favor anti-gay policies; to be willing to assign significantly harsher punishments to perpetrators of petty crimes if they were presumed to be homosexual; and to express greater implicit hostility toward gay subjects (also measured with the help of subliminal priming). Thus our research suggests that some who oppose homosexuality do tacitly harbor same-sex attraction.

So that is not really surprising. But why the internal struggle?

Individuals whose sexual identity was at odds with their implicit sexual attraction were much more frequently raised by parents perceived to be controlling, less accepting and more prejudiced against homosexuals. 

Living in the Homogenocene: The First 500 Years

Bio-blender Earth

Tumultuous effects resulted and continue to result from the massive mixing of the world’s biota when European ships reconnected the American continent to the rest of the world. Mann traced several of the cascading consequences of "the biggest ecological convulsion since the death of the dinosaurs."

The first momentous change came from microbial exchange---20 lethal diseases came from Europe to the Americas while only one (syphilis) went the other way. North America, which had been largely cleared by natives with fire and agriculture, reforested when two-thirds to 95% of the native inhabitants died from European diseases---"the greatest demographic catastrophe in human history." That huge reforesting drew down atmospheric carbon dioxide and Europe’s "Little Ice Age" (1550-1800) apparently resulted.

Meanwhile the mountain of silver at Potosí, Bolivia, vastly enriched Europe, which "went shopping" worldwide. Trading ships coursed the world’s oceans. One artifact picked up from Peru was the potato---a single variety of the 6,000 available. When potatoes in Europe turned out to provide four times the amount of food per acre as wheat, the previously routine famines came to an end, population soared, governments became more stable, and they began building global empires. After 1843 guano shipped by the ton from coastal Peru for fertilizer introduced high-input agriculture. In Ireland 40% of the exploding population ate only potatoes. Around 1844 a potato blight arrived from Mexico, and a million Irish died in the Great Famine and a million more emigrated.

In China, which has no large lakes and only two major rivers, agriculture had been limited to two wet regions where rice could be grown. Two imports from America---maize and sweet potato---could be farmed in dry lands. As in Europe, population went up. Vast areas were terraced as Han farmers pushed westward as far as the Mongolian desert. In heavy rains the terraces melted into the streams, and silt built up in the lowlands, elevating the rivers as much as 40 feet above the surrounding terrain, so when they flooded, millions died. "A Katrina per month for 100 years," as one Chinese meteorologist described it. The constant calamities weakened the government, and China became ripe for foreign colonial takeover.

In America two imported diseases---malaria and yellow fever---were selective in who they killed. Europeans died in huge numbers, but Africans were one-tenth as susceptible, and so slavery replaced traditional indentured servitude in all the warm regions that favored mosquito-borne diseases. As one result, four times as many Africans as Europeans crossed the Atlantic and began mixing with the remaining native Americans, giving rise to an endless variety of racial blends and accompanying vitality throughout the Americas.

During the Q & A, Mann described a potential fresh eco-convulsion-in-waiting. "There is an area in southeast Asia roughly the size of Great Britain that is a single giant rubber plantation." Where rubber trees originally came from in the Amazon there is now a rubber tree leaf-blight that is starting to spread in Asia. "You could lose all the rubber trees in three to six months. It would be the biggest deforestation in a long time." The entire auto industry, he added, depends on just-in-time delivery of rubber.

-- by Stewart Brand

Academic spring: how an angry maths blog sparked a scientific revolution

how a Cambridge mathematician's protest has led to demands for open access to scientific knowledge

Hillary Clinton on open and closed societies

A lesson in defection from Goldman Sachs

Just about in time for Occupy Wall Street’s half-birthday last month, there was what might ostensibly seem to be a fitting reason to celebrate: Goldman Sachs executive Greg Smith quit his job and, to massive fanfare, penned a New York Times op-ed denouncing what his company has become. With those 1,300 words, Goldman’s stock price dropped 3.4 percent, vanishing more than $2 billion from its worth and necessitating a commiserative house call from the mayor of New York. The trouble is, Smith didn’t really echo any of the Occupy movement’s concerns. There was no mention of the company’s habit of self-serving market manipulation, contributing to downturns from the Great Depression to the Great Recession, or its present hijacking of the very political system tasked with regulating it. The word “bailout” does not appear. What really seemed to disturb Smith, rather, was that this institution was putting its own interests before those of its obscenely wealthy clients. (He had personally worked with “two of the largest hedge funds on the planet, five of the largest asset managers in the United States, and three of the most prominent sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East and Asia.”) The company from which he’d once learned that obscenely wealthy clients come first was betraying that solemn trust so as to enrich its obscenely wealthy self. This was unconscionable, in Smith’s view, so he decided to give his longtime employer a big kick in the shins — all, it seems, in the service of a hope that Goldman Sachs might once again defraud the universe in a more gentlemanly fashion.

Why French Parents Are Superior (in One Way)

Food culture

Hacks of Valor

Why Anonymous Is Not a Threat to National Security

not just for kids

The kid should see this.

Eat red meat and you die

sort of

People who ate more red meat were less physically active and more likely to smoke and had a higher body mass index, researchers found. Still, after controlling for those and other variables, they found that each daily increase of three ounces of red meat was associated with a 12 percent greater risk of dying over all, including a 16 percent greater risk of cardiovascular death and a 10 percent greater risk of cancer death. The increased risks linked to processed meat, like bacon, were even greater: 20 percent over all, 21 percent for cardiovascular disease and 16 percent for cancer. If people in the study had eaten half as much meat, the researchers estimated, deaths in the group would have declined 9.3 percent in men and 7.6 percent in women.

looks like I'm going to lower my bacon intake...

future of education?

Khan Academy: the future of education?

How open journalism reimagines the story

Globe and mail story on open journalism

Jonathan Haidt Explains Our Contentious Culture

To Bill Moyers

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt explains how liberals and conservatives see the world differently.



Added bonus: an old TED talk by Haidt:

Cheat, lie, break the law? Chances are, you’re rich

no surprises here.