Emotions Over Facts
You may have noticed that the United Nations’ international climate panel has quietly set aside its most catastrophic global warming scenario. We are not moving toward it, despite the fact…
When protests matter
When, over the course of three hours, you hear some forty repetitions of “we will stop this,” “we will never allow it,” “we will not tolerate it,” you eventually begin…
The Comfort of Certainty
In the 1970s and 1980s, a group of American social psychologists — Kuhn, Amsel, Brock, Lepper, Lord, and Ross — conducted a series of experiments designed to test how capable…
Property and Power
An interesting observation—or perhaps intuition—from Tomáš Baťa, the most important Czech industrialist in history, from the early 1930s. In his view, one of the central economic problems of the time…
Misreading the Sexes
Men and women differ from one another both physically and psychologically. Those differences are entirely demonstrable, undeniable, and measurable. Research shows, however, that they are somewhat smaller than is commonly…
Freedom and Fertility
“Across countries, higher gender equality is associated with lower birth rates. The theory goes like this: as women gain greater freedom and material prosperity, they become less dependent on men,…