ANGER is a primal and destructive emotion, disrupting rational discourse and inflaming illogical passions — or so it often seems. Then again, anger also has its upsides. Expressing anger, for example, is known to be a useful tool in negotiations. Indeed, in the past few years, researchers have been learning more about when and how to deploy anger productively.
.. What does that signal communicate? According to a 2009 paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, anger evolved to help us express that we feel undervalued. Showing anger signals to others that if we don’t get our due, we’ll exert harm or withhold benefits. As they anticipated, the researchers found that strong men and attractive women — those who have historically had the most leverage in threatening harm and conferring benefits, respectively — were most prone to anger.
Japan’s Economy, Crippled by Caution
After all, printing money to pay for stuff sounds irresponsible, because in normal times it is. And no matter how many times some of us try to explain that these are not normal times, that in a depressed, deflationary economy conventional fiscal prudence is dangerous folly, very few policy makers are willing to stick their necks out and break with convention.
The result is that seven years after the financial crisis, policy is still crippled by caution. Respectability is killing the world economy.
How Stanford Took On the Giants of Economics
Stanford’s economics department, he said, “has an excitement about it which Boston and Cambridge can’t touch.”
.. That said, Stanford’s reputation in the future may depend less on a few big-name recruits than on its ability to train the Ph.Ds whose scholarship is widely cited and reshapes important economic debates, or who become influential policy makers who advise presidents and lead central banks. The last 10 people to serve as chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers have all had a Ph.D from either Harvard or M.I.T.
.. The specialties of the new recruits vary, but they are all examples of how the momentum in economics has shifted away from theoretical modeling and toward “empirical microeconomics,” the analysis of how things work in the real world, often arranging complex experiments or exploiting large sets of data. That kind of work requires lots of research assistants, work across disciplines including fields like sociology and computer science, and the use of advanced computational techniques unavailable a generation ago.
.. “There isn’t a Stanford school of thought,” said B. Douglas Bernheim, chairman of the university’s economics department. “This isn’t a doctrinaire place.
America’s Poorest Are Getting Virtually No Assistance
They further note that the EITC expansion partially exacerbate the problem, by further increasing the supply of labor, thus putting downward pressure on wages.
.. the strong increase in labor demand, as the late 1990s ultimately became a unique period of truly full employment. For the first time in decades, real low-wages grew at the rate of productivity. In the early 1990s, poverty among black mother-only families with kids was around 60 percent. By the end of the 1990s it was around 40 percent, a massive decline over such a short time period.
.. if the Federal Reserve is the “lender of last resort,” then the government must be “the employer of last resort.”