November 10, 2017

From Malcolm Gladwell's What the Dog Saw:

[Human] beings have a seemingly fundamental tendency to compensate for lower risks in one area by taking greater risks in another.

As economists would say, they “consumed” the risk reduction, they didn’t save it.

From The New York Times (Ron Chernow on "What’s the most interesting thing you learned from a book recently?"):

I was quite bowled over by Isabel Wilkerson’s masterly saga, “The Warmth of Other Suns.” As Grant’s latest biographer, I’ve been steeped in the history of Southern race relations, but until I read her book I lacked the visceral, fingertip feel of what Jim Crow meant — the thousand and one indignities, overt and subtle, inflicted on long-suffering blacks. Amazing that the great migration from the South had never before received the large-scale narrative treatment it deserved. Thank you, Isabel.

From The Economist:

In the modern economy scale is increasingly important. The companies with the biggest hoards of data can train their machines most effectively; the social network that everyone else is on is most attractive to new users; the stock exchange with the deepest pool of investors is best for raising capital. These returns to scale create fewer, superstar firms clustered in fewer, superstar places. Everywhere else is left behind.

From Harper's:

German scientists found in common a sensation of visual overload among five subjects who reported a powerful desire to be blind.

From Tim Wu's The Attention Merchants (on Homo Distractus):

[A] species of ever shorter attention span known for compulsively checking his devices.