Sublime

“contingent contracts” in the negotiation lingo, have three major benefits:6 1. They align the incentives of the parties. In the Frasier negotiation, once a ratings-based incentive is built into the contract, Paramount has a strong financial incentive to produce shows that keep the ratings up, which is exactly what NBC wants too. 2. They allow the

humanity’s most intractable disagreements.

The take-home message from Schelling’s story—that incentives sometimes backfire—is familiar to psychologists.

This suggests a far more sophisticated understanding of “the risk/reward trade-off” and “the equity premium” than is generally accepted in the realm of modern portfolio theory, and, by extension, the EMH: Bonds are likely to get a lower return than stocks not because they are less “risky” (which in that context is even more questionably interpreted

philos can be conditional or even selfish.

Recent articles embracing the benefits of human extinction include the New Yorker’s “The Case for Not Being Born,” NBC News’s “Science Proves Kids Are Bad for Earth. Morality Suggests We Stop Having Them,” and the New York Times polemic “Would Human Extinction Be a Tragedy?”

John Rawls, however, was deeply suspicious of that idea. If a man is brilliant, he argued, why should he be praised for being so? He was merely fortunate for being born intelligent. If he has a strong work ethic, he just happened to win the lottery for hardworking traits. And if one boy was strong enough to survive a terrible disease and a weaker

Gyre Carling