Sublime

The effects of early moves and longer exposure to less deprived neighborhoods are clear in this much larger dataset of millions of people. Moreover, the consequences are broad, involving higher incomes later in life, higher probability of being married, greater likelihood of attending college, better health, and fewer teenage pregnancies.

In our view, the key to understanding how societies evolve is to understand factors that determine the costs and rewards of employing violence. Every human society, from the hunting band to the empire, has been informed by the interactions of megapolitical factors that set the prevailing version of the “laws of nature.”

We’re all trapped in the bodies of sly, social-climbing opportunists shaped to survive the savanna by policing each other.

“How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature that interest him in the fortunes of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.”

powerfully bind us together. Mark Granovetter, a sociologist at Stanford University, named this force “the strength of weak ties,”32 social relationships of people whom we don’t know that can bolster an individual’s prospects and well-being.33 It

The science of complex systems is the study of how local interactions can lead to global consequences.

Most of us know this to some degree. If we spend time with athletes we tend to get fit; if we spend time with criminals, it is only a matter of time before we break the law ourselves. In 2009, James Fowler and Nicholas Christakis published a