Gerhard Stoltz's Library tagged efficiency →  View Popular

Men who are married when they start graduate school are more likely than single men to graduate and to graduate more quickly. Married women, on the other hand, had no advantage over single women, so whatever the married men are getting in support from their spouses is not apparently duplicated.

Throughout all of this, cities, especially in the industrialised world, gain more power and influence, not just on the national scale (such as London, the British metropole), but on the global scale

“It is hard to say. But it’s at least worth entertaining the possibility that some strategic limitation on individual knowledge could improve the performance of a large and complex group that is trying to accomplish something collectively,” Pratt says

This isn't a "computers are taking over" fear, or an "unfriendly AI" fear--these systems could barely be called artificial intelligence. And that's precisely the problem. We're increasingly giving autonomy to computerized systems that lack anything other than simplistic algorithms for decision-making.

The second more substantial sense of "inevitable" demands a level of common acceptance and viability. A technology's use must come to dominate the technium or at least its corner of the technosphere. But more than ubiquity, the inevitable must contain a large-scale momentum, and proceed on its own determination beyond the free choices of several billion humans. It can't be diverted by mere social whims.

The preferences of the average group member, although derived from statistical observations of groups, became for some neoclassical economists an all-important benchmark for understanding all human behavior.

Pinaud, along with Liisa Tremere, a research assistant professor of brain and cognitive sciences, and Jin Jeong, a postdoctoral fellow in Pinaud's laboratory, demonstrated that increasing estrogen levels in brain regions that process auditory information caused heightened sensitivity of sound-processing neurons, which encoded more complex and subtle features of the sound stimulus.

Even the regulators can't keep up. A Senate study in 2002 found that the SEC had managed to fully review just 16 percent of the nearly 15,000 annual reports that companies submitted in the previous fiscal year; the recently disgraced Enron hadn't been reviewed in a decade.

The time to act is now. An exhaustive study by the Transparency Policy Project at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government—analyzing disclosure rules for everything from restaurant cleanliness to SUV rollover risk—found that there's a very brief window after any calamity for government to institute changes. (Wait too long and the special interests start regaining their confidence and pushing back.)

• Do more with less, do less with less, and finally do nothing with nothing. These are the steps of diminishing returns that started with the advent of the modern research university.