Blog Post

AEIdeas

Beyond anger: Philosophy can help us out of this dark vortex – Martha Nussbaum

A wronged person who is really angry, seeking to strike back, soon arrives, I claim, at a fork in the road. Three paths lie before her. Path one: she goes down the path of status-focus, seeing the event as all about her and her rank. In this case her payback project makes sense, but her normative focus is self-centred and objectionably narrow. Path two: she focuses on the original offence (rape, murder, etc), and seeks payback, imagining that the offender’s suffering would actually make things better. In this case, her normative focus is on the right things, but her thinking doesn’t make sense. Path three: if she is rational, after exploring and rejecting these two roads, she will notice that a third path is open to her, which is the best of all: she can turn to the future and focus on doing whatever would make sense, in the situation, and be really helpful. This may well include the punishment of the wrongdoer, but in a spirit that is deterrent rather than retaliatory. … Let’s call this change of focus the Transition. We need the Transition badly in our personal and our political lives, dominated as they all too frequently are by payback and status-focus.

New Evidence on Trust and Well-being – NBER ” We found significant additional well-being links from several different measures of trust. Social trust and trust in police are estimated to be the most important, but we found also significant additional benefits from trust in three key aspects of the institutional environment: the legal system, parliament and politicians. ”

The Paradox of Productivity – RCF

There is a much more important reason, however, why people think manufacturing is in decline. Manufacturing employment is in decline. The actual output of goods is increasing, but fewer workers are required to make them. … If you want a better-paying job, you have to let a machine take it away from you. The paradox is that it seems as if you will then be out of a job and won’t enjoy any of the benefits. The solution to the paradox is that you will have the opportunity to do a new job managing the work of the machines.

Deciding on the Consecrated Life, With the Help of Speed Dating – NY Times

Do Racy Billboards Create Better Drivers? – Pacific Standard

Why are doctors plagued by depression and suicide? A crisis comes into focus – STAT

The starkest sign of the crisis gripping medicine is the number of physicians who commit suicide every year — 300 to 400, about the size of three average medical school classes. Male doctors are 1.4 times more likely to kill themselves than men in the general population; female physicians, 2.3 times more likely. The grim tally is probably an under-count, since many suicides aren’t listed as such on death certificates. And it doesn’t include suicides among medical students, which aren’t tracked systematically in the United States.

Teacher cognitive ability around the world – Brookings