Are the Rich Jerks? See the Science

F. Scott Fitzger­ald was right. The rich real­ly are dif­fer­ent from you or me. They’re more like­ly to behave uneth­i­cal­ly.

That’s the find­ing of a group of stud­ies by researchers at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Berke­ley. The research shows that peo­ple of high­er socioe­co­nom­ic sta­tus are more like­ly to break traf­fic laws, lie in nego­ti­a­tions, take val­ued goods from oth­ers, and cheat to increase chances of win­ning a prize. The result­ing paper, “High­er Social Class Pre­dicts Increased Uneth­i­cal Behav­ior,” [PDF] was pub­lished last year in the Pro­ceed­ings of the Nation­al Acad­e­my of Sci­ences.

Per­haps most sur­pris­ing, as this sto­ry by PBS New­sHour eco­nom­ics reporter Paul Sol­man shows, is that the ten­den­cy for uneth­i­cal behav­ior appears not only in peo­ple who are actu­al­ly rich, but in those who are manip­u­lat­ed into feel­ing that they are rich. As UC Berke­ley social psy­chol­o­gist Paul Piff says, the results are sta­tis­ti­cal in nature but the trend is clear. “While hav­ing mon­ey does­n’t nec­es­sar­i­ly make any­body any­thing,” Piff told New York mag­a­zine, “the rich are way more like­ly to exhib­it char­ac­ter­is­tics that we would stereo­typ­i­cal­ly asso­ciate with, say, ass­holes.”

via Dan­ger­ous Minds

The Faces of Great Physicists on International Currency

neils-bohr-currency

Click for larg­er image

Amer­i­cans some­times com­plain that, unlike the cur­ren­cy of many oth­er coun­tries, which fea­ture por­traits of artists, sci­en­tists, and writ­ers, U.S. dol­lar bills don’t tend to fea­ture intel­lec­tu­als. But one could, I think, make the case for Ben­jamin Franklin, who must cer­tain­ly count as a man of let­ters, and did illus­trate an impor­tant physics les­son when he flew that kite with a key on it. Still, that does­n’t exact­ly make him a physi­cist, as res­i­dents of Aus­tria, New Zealand, Scot­land, and Croa­t­ia, all of whom have used bills embla­zoned with the faces of physi­cists, well know.

einsteinmoney

It does, how­ev­er, get Franklin a place on Uni­ver­si­ty of Mary­land physi­cist Edward F. Redish’s page “Physi­cists on the Mon­ey,” which was fea­tured on Jason Kot­tke’s site yes­ter­day. Redish high­lights 24 bills bear­ing por­traits of not­ed fig­ures through­out the his­to­ry of physics, includ­ing, at the top of the post, the Dan­ish 500-kro­ner note that pic­tures quan­tum the­o­rist Niels Bohr. Just above we have the uni­ver­sal­ly rec­og­niz­able dishevel­ment of Albert Ein­stein, who found his way onto Israel’s five-pound note by, among oth­er achieve­ments, com­ing up with the gen­er­al the­o­ry of rel­a­tiv­i­ty. Below you’ll see a physi­cist you may not have heard of, let alone spent: tenth-cen­tu­ry schol­ar Abu Nasr Al-Fara­bi, pic­tured on Kaza­khstan’s one-tenge note. Redish’s delight­ful­ly retro site also offers a col­lec­tion of physi­cists on stamps, and links to a page with more sci­en­tist- and math­e­mati­cian-bear­ing ban­knotes.

alfarabimoney

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Physics Cours­es

Do Physi­cists Believe in God?

Lis­ten as Albert Ein­stein Reads ‘The Com­mon Lan­guage of Sci­ence’ (1941)

The Karl Marx Cred­it Card – When You’re Short of Kap­i­tal

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­lesA Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

An Introduction to Great Economists — Adam Smith, the Physiocrats & More — Presented in New MOOC

Last fall, Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabar­rok, two econ pro­fes­sors from George Mason Uni­ver­si­ty, launched MRUni­ver­si­ty, a MOOC plat­form that brings eco­nom­ics cours­es to the larg­er world. (If Tyler Cowen’s name sounds famil­iar, it’s prob­a­bly because you’re already famil­iar with his blog Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion or his “Eco­nom­ic Scene” col­umn for the New York Times.) Fast for­ward to this spring, and MRUni­ver­si­ty now offers cours­es on The Euro­zone Cri­sis, Mex­i­co’s Econ­o­my, The Amer­i­can Hous­ing Finance Sys­tem, and, as of this month, The Great Econ­o­mists. The short course descrip­tion for Great Econ­o­mists: Clas­si­cal Eco­nom­ics and its Fore­run­ners reads:

Who were the first eco­nom­ic thinkers? What are the very ori­gins of eco­nom­ic thought? What did ear­li­er econ­o­mists under­stand but has been lost to the mod­ern world? Why is Adam Smith the great­est econ­o­mist of all time? How did the eco­nom­ic issues of the 18th and 19th cen­turies shape the thoughts of the clas­si­cal econ­o­mists? This class, which cov­ers the his­to­ry of eco­nom­ic thought up until the “Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion” in the 1870s, will answer all of these ques­tions and many oth­ers.

The course starts with Galileo and the the­o­ry of val­ue; touch­es on Mon­tesquieu and Man­dev­ille; offers to an intro­duc­tion to Mer­can­til­ism and the Phys­iocrats, and then real­ly comes to focus on David Hume and most­ly Adam Smith and his clas­sic trea­tise, The Wealth of Nations (find it in our col­lec­tion of Free eBooks), before turn­ing to lat­er thinkers and peri­ods.

You can sign up for The Great Econ­o­mists here. And it will be added to our list of 300 MOOCs from Great Uni­ver­si­ties.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion Uni­ver­si­ty Launch­es, Bring­ing Free Cours­es in Eco­nom­ics to the Web

60-Sec­ond Adven­tures in Eco­nom­ics: An Ani­mat­ed Intro to The Invis­i­ble Hand and Oth­er Eco­nom­ic Ideas

Read­ing Marx’s Cap­i­tal with David Har­vey (Free Course)

Bitcoin, the New Decentralized Digital Currency, Demystified in a Three Minute Video

They sound like some­thing out of sci­ence fic­tion, but Bit­coins are get­ting just a lit­tle bit more real every day. They’re intan­gi­ble and invis­i­ble, but bit­coins recent­ly attract­ed some real invest­ment cap­i­tal from the Win­klevoss twins, who first dreamed up the idea for Face­book — or so their law­suit argued.

A bit of back­ground: Bit­coins are a vir­tu­al cur­ren­cy sys­tem. They were pro­grammed by an anony­mous programmer(s?) in 2009. There are a lim­it­ed num­ber of pos­si­ble bit­coins that can ever be traded—21 million—and the “coins” become avail­able incre­men­tal­ly. That process is crowd­sourced (any­body can mint bit­coins) but it requires solv­ing com­plex encryp­tion prob­lems. Most bit­coin min­ers have an army of com­put­er hard­ware to do the work for them.

What can a bit­coin buy? It depends. The currency’s val­ue has been gyrat­ing wild­ly in recent weeks, from a val­ue of just a few dol­lars up to $266 and then back down to about $100. So far bit­coins are accept­ed as cur­ren­cy by some­what shady elec­tron­ics web­sites that claim to be send­ing a mes­sage to big retail­ers: start accept­ing the vir­tu­al cur­ren­cy or miss out on a big mar­ket share (that hasn’t devel­oped yet).

Last week came the announce­ment that Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss—former rivals to Mark Zuckerberg—own one per­cent of all the bit­coins in cir­cu­la­tion, the biggest stake so far. That news inspired debate over what, exact­ly, bit­coins are and whether they’re impor­tant.

They aren’t the first vir­tu­al cur­ren­cy and they aren’t being used wide­ly in com­merce. Some econ­o­mists have weighed in to say that unless peo­ple stop hord­ing bit­coins as an invest­ment and start spend­ing them, they are mean­ing­less. The bit­coin exper­i­ment may show the way to a dig­i­tal cur­ren­cy of the future. But, until it pans out, we rec­om­mend that you hang onto your dol­lars. And if you’re still try­ing to get your arms around the whole con­cept of the bit­coin, we sug­gest spend­ing a few min­utes with the video primer above.

Kate Rix writes about dig­i­tal media and edu­ca­tion. Vis­it her web­site: .

 

Dan Ariely’s MOOC, “A Beginner’s Guide to Irrational Behavior,” Starts Monday

Back in Novem­ber we gave you a heads up on A Begin­ner’s Guide to Irra­tional Behav­ior, a MOOC being cre­at­ed by Dan Ariely. If you’re a fre­quent vis­i­tor to our site, you know that Ariely is a pro­fes­sor of psy­chol­o­gy and behav­ioral eco­nom­ics at Duke Uni­ver­si­ty, who has pre­vi­ous­ly explained by why well-inten­tioned peo­ple lie, and why CEOs repeat­ed­ly get out­sized bonus­es that have no basis in ratio­nal­i­ty. Ariely’s six-week course final­ly begins tomor­row (Mon­day the 25th), so, before you miss the boat, reserve your free seat today.

A Begin­ner’s Guide to Irra­tional Behav­ior now appears on our  list of 300 Free MOOCs from Great Uni­ver­si­ties.

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In Under Three Minutes, Hans Rosling Visualizes the Incredible Progress of the “Developing World”

Hans Rosling knows how to make a con­cise, pow­er­ful point. His mas­tery of sta­tis­tics and visu­al aids does­n’t hurt. Behold, for instance, the Karolin­s­ka Insti­tute Pro­fes­sor of Inter­na­tion­al Health visu­al­iz­ing the health of 200 coun­tries over 200 years with 120,000 data points. His abil­i­ty to con­dense vast amounts of infor­ma­tion into short bursts while pro­vid­ing the widest pos­si­ble con­text for his points nat­u­ral­ly endears him to the TED audi­ence, which val­ues coun­ter­in­tu­itive intel­lec­tu­al impact deliv­ered with the utmost suc­cinct­ness. We pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured a TED Talk from where­in the excitable pro­fes­sor explains world pop­u­la­tion growth and pros­per­i­ty with props bought at IKEA. (The man comes from Swe­den, after all. One must rep­re­sent.) Now, on Bill Gates’ Youtube chan­nel, you can watch Rosling’s short­est and slick­est video yet: “The Riv­er of Myths.”

Open­ing with a visu­al­iza­tion of 1960’s world child mor­tal­i­ty num­bers graphed against the num­ber of chil­dren born per woman, Rosling uses his sig­na­ture method of sta­tis­ti­cal-ani­ma­tion show­man­ship to explode myths about the poten­tial of devel­op­ing nations. We see that, as a coun­try’s wealth ris­es, its health ris­es; as its health ris­es, its child mor­tal­i­ty drops; and as its child mor­tal­i­ty drops, so does its num­ber of chil­dren born per woman, which leads to a sus­tain­able over­all pop­u­la­tion size. He then exam­ines the sep­a­rate regions of Ethiopia, for­mer­ly a devel­op­men­tal lag­gard, show­ing that the cap­i­tal Addis Aba­ba ranks repro­duc­tive­ly among the devel­oped nations, while only remote regions lag behind. “Most peo­ple think the prob­lems in Africa are unsolv­able, but if the poor­est coun­tries can just fol­low the path of Ethiopia, it’s ful­ly pos­si­ble that the world will look like this by 2030.” We then see a pro­jec­tion of all the world’s nations clus­tered in the small-fam­i­ly, low-mor­tal­i­ty cor­ner of the graph. “But to ensure this hap­pens, we must mea­sure the progress of coun­tries. It’s only by mea­sur­ing we can cross the riv­er of myths.” Have you heard a more pow­er­ful argu­ment for the use­ful­ness of sta­tis­tics late­ly?

Relat­ed con­tent:

Hans Rosling Uses Ikea Props to Explain World of 7 Bil­lion Peo­ple

200 Coun­tries & 200 Years in 4 Min­utes, Pre­sent­ed by Hans Rosling

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Classic, The Foundation Trilogy, Dramatized for Radio (1973)

Tire­less New York Times colum­nist and Nobel-prize win­ning Prince­ton econ­o­mist Paul Krug­man has long played the role of Cas­san­dra, warn­ing of dis­as­ters while the archi­tects of pol­i­cy look on, shake their heads, and ignore him. I’ve some­times won­dered how he stands it. Well, it turns out that, like many peo­ple, Krugman’s long view is informed by epic nar­ra­tive. Only in his case, it’s nei­ther ancient scrip­ture nor Ayn Rand. It’s the Isaac Asi­mov-penned Foun­da­tion Tril­o­gy, which Krug­man, in a recent Guardian piece, dis­sects in detail as a series that informed his views as a teenag­er, and has stayed with him for four and a half decades.

The hero of the tril­o­gy, Hari Sel­don, is a math­e­mati­cian, whose par­tic­u­lar branch of math­e­mat­ics, called psy­chohis­to­ry, allows him to make mas­sive, large-scale pre­dic­tions of the future. This sci­ence informs “The Sel­don Plan” that silent­ly guides the com­ing of a new Galac­tic Empire thou­sands of years into the future. If it sounds a bit arid in para­phrase, it isn’t, even though Asimov’s char­ac­ters tend to be thin and his descrip­tions lack in poet­ry. “Tol­stoy this isn’t,” Krug­man tells us.

But the nov­els work as bril­liant spec­u­la­tive fic­tion, teth­ered to the famil­iar his­to­ry of West­ern civ­i­liza­tion by res­o­nances with ancient Rome, mer­can­tile Europe, and old New York. Instead of space opera or fan­ta­sy, Krug­man describes Asimov’s fic­tion as anti-action, anti-prophe­cy. The protagonist’s “pre­science comes from his math­e­mat­ics.” And this, believe it or not, is fas­ci­nat­ing, at least for Krug­man. Because for him they func­tion as reminders that “it’s pos­si­ble to have social sci­ence with the pow­er to pre­dict events and, maybe, to lead to a bet­ter future.” Krug­man writes:

They remain, unique­ly, a thrilling tale about how self-knowl­edge – an under­stand­ing of how our own soci­ety works – can change his­to­ry for the bet­ter. And they’re every bit as inspi­ra­tional now as they were when I first read them, three-quar­ters of my life ago.

He admits that the sen­ti­ments of Asimov’s fic­tion present us with a “very bour­geois ver­sion of prophe­cy,” but then, eco­nom­ics is a very bour­geois sci­ence, most­ly con­cerned with one emo­tion, “greed.” Nonethe­less, Krug­man believes in the pow­er of “good eco­nom­ics to make cor­rect pre­dic­tions that are very much at odds with pop­u­lar prej­u­dices.” And we could all do with few­er of those.

Asimov’s Hugo-win­ning tril­o­gy was adapt­ed for eight, one-hour radio-dra­ma episodes in 1973. Lis­ten to the first install­ment above, and down­load or stream the remain­ing episodes at the links below:

Part 1 |MP3| Part 2 |MP3| Part 3 |MP3| Part 4 |MP3| Part 5 |MP3| Part 6 |MP3| Part 7 |MP3| Part 8 |MP3|

Or lis­ten to the Spo­ti­fy ver­sion up top.

You can find this audio list­ed in our col­lec­tion of Free Audio Books.

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

Dan Ariely Presents “A Beginner’s Guide to Irrational Behavior” in Upcoming MOOC

Here’s one thing you can look for­ward to ear­ly next year. Dan Ariely, a well-known pro­fes­sor of psy­chol­o­gy and behav­ioral eco­nom­ics at Duke Uni­ver­si­ty, will present A Begin­ner’s Guide to Irra­tional Behav­ior as a Mas­sive Open Online Course (MOOC). If you’ve been with us for a while, you’re already famil­iar with Ariely’s work. You’ve seen his videos explain­ing why well-inten­tioned peo­ple lie, or why CEOs repeat­ed­ly get out­sized bonus­es that defy log­ic. And you know that eco­nom­ics, when looked at close­ly, is a much messier affair than many ratio­nal choice the­o­rists might care to admit.

Now is your chance to delve into Ariely’s research and dis­cov­er pre­cise­ly how emo­tion shapes eco­nom­ic deci­sions in finan­cial and labor mar­kets, and in our every­day lives. The six-week course (described in more detail here) does­n’t begin until March 25th, but you can reserve your seat today. It’s all free. And keep in mind that stu­dents who mas­ter the mate­ri­als cov­ered in the class will receive a cer­tifi­cate at the end of the course.

Oth­er poten­tial­ly inter­est­ing MOOCs com­ing ear­ly next year include:

Our list of 175 Mas­sive Open Online Cours­es has now been updat­ed to include all cours­es start­ing in Jan­u­ary, Feb­ru­ary and March of next year.

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