Sublime

“This reform will not pass. Those who stand to lose will fight harder than those who stand to gain.” “Each of them thinks the other’s concessions are less painful. They are both wrong, of course. It’s just the asymmetry of losses.” “They would find it easier to renegotiate the agreement if they realized the pie was actually expanding. They’re not a

An obvious possibility is that everybody likes to sit as close to the rear as possible.

Regardless of how exactly one generates theories of other people's minds, it's clear that these theories profoundly affect moral decisions. Look, for example, at the ultimatum game, a staple of experimental economics. The rules of the game are simple, if a little bit unfair: an experimenter pairs two people together, and hands one of them ten dolla

Lawrence’s second element, the “biological,” concerned the components of war, “sensitive and illogical” human beings. Because of unknown human factors, commanders are forced to hold a body of men in reserve as a safeguard, thus stretching thin their other human resources. Lawrence worked to magnify his enemy’s ignorance: “We were to contain the ene

Rational behaviour is not defined by conformity with a set of axioms set down even by such distinguished thinkers as John von Neumann and Milton Friedman.

The reason is, in order for communication to be effective, it has to create what’s known as common knowledge, which is a string of embedded knowledge—you know, if you have two individuals, and I need to know that the other is going to show up to protest, the other needs to know that I’m going to show up to protest, and I need to know that he knows

 Part 1 - Introduction Mechanism Design - Programming human behavior through carefully designed incentives. Humans are goal-oriented machines that react to incentives. Incentives are produced by economic games that can be crafted and engineered. So we humans do something to reach a goal, and one of the most unifying goals is money. So we desi

Another approach is what legal scholar john a. powell calls “targeted universalism.” This entails setting a goal, determining what it would take to meet that goal, and recognizing that different groups will require different kinds and levels of aid if the goal is to be realized. One size does not fit all.

Windels suggested that La Guardia print a pad of forms reading: “I, Robert Moses, do hereby resign as _____ effective _____” and simply hand one to Moses whenever the commissioner threatened to resign. The technique worked; the next time Moses made the threat in person, La Guardia simply whipped out the pad, tore off the top form with a flourish an