bp060801 's Public Library

many self-styled impostors are phony phonies: they adopt self-deprecation as a social strategy, consciously or not, and are secretly more confident than they let on.

They found that psychologically speaking, impostorism looked a lot more like a self-presentation strategy than a personality trait.

What he’s pushing instead are aggressive government policies designed to protect and nurture domestic manufacturers, allowing countries to ascend the technological ladder so that they can eventually compete with wealthier nations. Chang believes that private investors are impatient and unwilling to sacrifice present returns for future gains. As a result, they will not take risks on new industries in poor countries, at least not in the absence of some other advantage (like tariff protection or government subsidy). If governments create protective umbrellas—via tariffs, subsidies, loose intellectual-property rules, restrictions on imports, and the like—for domestic companies, though, those companies will have a chance over time to become globally competitive, raising the level of prosperity of the country as a whole. Chang acknowledges that these umbrellas have costs—they raise prices for consumers in developing countries and often cut off access to better and cheaper foreign goods—but those are outweighed by the future benefits.

He also trenchantly attacks the developed world’s insistence on absurdly strict intellectual-property rules (rules that the United States willfully circumvented when it was a developing nation) and rightly points out that government ownership—in the context of a generally free-market economy—is hardly the automatic disaster that privatization advocates insist it will be.

The controls that China deploys on use of the Internet, the battles it wages with its artists in every field, the focus in its education system on rote learning, the continuing failure to implement its own intellectual property rules, and now the embracing of a new Confucianism—all of these inhibit lateral thinking and invention.

As Maoism and Marxism lose their grip, the dangers of nationalism as a defining value system become apparent, and religion remains under suspicion as a potentially powerful rival to the Communist Party and the authoritarian state, China’s leaders are eagerly rediscovering the country’s 2,500-year-old Confucian tradition.

Today there are over 29
million private businesses, which employ over 200 million people and generate
two-thirds of China’s industrial output.

The private sector’s spectacular growth
has led many observers to speculate that China is developing a capitalist class
that will overthrow the Chinese Communist Party and demand democracy based on
the principle of “no taxation without representation.”

Virginia Woolf, for example, famously declared that the task of the novelist is to "examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day ... [tracing] the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness."

The problem for those of us who believe that capitalism offers the best chance we have for leading meaningful and worthwhile lives is that in this debate, the devil has always had the best tunes to play. Capitalism lacks romantic appeal. It does not set the pulse racing in the way that opposing ideologies like socialism, fascism, or environmentalism can. It does not stir the blood, for it identifies no dragons to slay. It offers no grand vision for the future, for in an open market system the future is shaped not by the imposition of utopian blueprints, but by billions of individuals pursuing their own preferences. Capitalism can justifiably boast that it is excellent at delivering the goods, but this fails to impress in countries like Australia that have come to take affluence for granted.

This is because the radical green movement shares many features with old-style revolutionary socialism. Both are oppositional, defining themselves as alternatives to the existing capitalist system. Both are moralistic, seeking to purify humanity of its tawdry materialism and selfishness, and appealing to our ‘higher instincts.’ Both are apocalyptic, claiming to be able to read the future and warning, like Old Testament prophets, of looming catastrophe if we do not change our ways.

One type, known as driver pheromones, appears to affect the endocrine systems of others. Since the endocrine system plays a critical role in the timing of menstruation, there is at least a strong circumstantial case that the two are linked. "It's thought that there is a driver female who gives off something that changes the onset of menstruation in the other women,"

strippers who are ovulating average $70 in tips per hour; those who are menstruating make $35; those who are not ovulating or menstruating make $50.

In Europe’s capital, Brussels, technocrats, strategists and legislators increasingly see their role as being the global balancer between America and China.

And Europe’s influence grows at America’s expense. While America fumbles at nation-building, Europe spends its money and political capital on locking peripheral countries into its orbit. Many poor regions of the world have realized that they want the European dream, not the American dream.

What researchers are finding is that willpower is essentially a mental muscle, and certain physical and mental forces can weaken or strengthen our self-control.

Study subjects who drank sugar-sweetened lemonade, which raises glucose levels quickly, performed better on self-control tests than those who drank artificially-sweetened beverages, which have no effect on glucose.

People are thus untroubled in inviting divine retribution or the power of the state to harm other people they deem immoral. Bertrand Russell wrote, “The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists — that is why they invented hell.”

We all know what it feels like when the moralization switch flips inside us — the righteous glow, the burning dudgeon, the drive to recruit others to the cause.

We all know what it feels like when the moralization switch flips inside us — the righteous glow, the burning dudgeon, the drive to recruit others to the cause.

People are thus untroubled in inviting divine retribution or the power of the state to harm other people they deem immoral. Bertrand Russell wrote, “The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists — that is why they invented hell.”

Imagine the complete madness in trying to occupy a large Arab country in the middle of the Arab world, a culture we know precious little about, and who speaks a language only a handful of our specialists can speak, with armed forces which we have limited control of and with a large army of private soldiers .... The whole thing is a scandal ... a series of lies. I don't understand the motivation for the war, but suspect the real reason for the war, which one would suspect of a country which is a third oligarchy, a third plutocracy and a third theocracy, is that it simply is a profitable machine."

a growing national debt and a weakened dollar in tandem with a spiraling war budget, as well as America's lost credibility on the international stage due to the Iraq war and the situation in Afghanistan. Not to mention Guantanamo Bay, the use of torture and humiliation at Abu Ghraib and the CIA's rendition program.

compensation practices in the financial sector are deeply flawed and probably contributed to the ongoing crisis.

The typical manager of financial assets generates returns based on the systematic risk he takes – the so-called beta risk – and the value his abilities contribute to the investment process – his so-called alpha.

My first experience with out-of-control banking was when I watched the irresponsible lending that led to the devastating developing-country debt crises of the 1980s.

In fact, when people drank more expensive wines a part of the prefrontal cortex called the medial orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC) got significantly more excited. The scientists argue that the activity of mOFC can be used as a neural correlate for pleasure, so that more expensive wines not only tasted better but actually provided us with more "subjective utility," as an economist might say.

Because people expected to experience less pain, they ended up experiencing less pain. Just as our expectations about expensive wine influenced the taste of the wine itself - expensive wine is supposed to taste better - so do our expectations about pain affect our experience of pain.

pejorative

We've gone from 'vote for me or you'll end up poor' to 'vote for me or you'll end up dead'."

Simply put, candidates do themselves little good by reminding voters of their fears and leaving it at that, for evoking fears without also raising hopes is rarely a winning strategy.

Candidates who rely on crude scare tactics may be in for a surprise, however. New research has brought a more nuanced understanding of the power of fear: it can drive voters away from the protective authority figures who seem like its logical beneficiaries.

they become more committed to and identify more strongly with something that will endure long after they are gone. That can be an ideology, or it can be a larger entity such as one's nation, ethnicity or religion. In Spain, enough voters retreated to a Eurocentric, nationalistic world view opposing America's invasion of Iraq to tip the electoral balance.

Fear makes people more likely to go to the polls and vote, which reflects the power of negative emotions in general.

A big reason is that global warming, as an issue, lacks the characteristics that trigger fear, says Gilbert. The human brain has evolved to fear humans and human actions (such as airplane bombers), not accidents and impersonal forces