Good Entropy

Unco Junto: The Myth of the ‘National Conversation’ | Center for Inquiry

In practical terms “Let’s start a national conversation” often means “People who disagree with me on a specific issue should listen to what I have to say, realize that I’m right, and address it in the way I want.”

…rather than countering the criticism they receive, often fall back the claim that they are only “trying to start a national conversation.” It’s become the lofty, media-savvy equivalent of smugly ending one’s sentence with “I’m just sayin!” This cowardly use of the phrase “national conversation” would be better off retired.

All About Pete | Current Affairs

It also provides irrefutable evidence that no serious progressive should want Pete Buttigieg anywhere near national public office.

What every CEO needs to know about superstar companies | McKinsey

Among the world’s largest companies, economic profit is distributed unequally along a power curve, with the top 10 percent of firms capturing 80 percent of positive economic profit.

As economic profits grow larger, so do economic losses at the other end of the distribution. The bottom 10 percent of companies destroy as much value as the top 10 percent create, and today’s bottom-decile companies have 1.5 times more economic loss, on average, than their counterparts of 20 years ago (Exhibit 1). That means for every company that creates economic value, there is another company that destroys economic value. Yet these value-destroying companies continue to survive, holding on to their resources for increasingly longer durations and continuing to attract capital. A growing number are turning into “zombie” companies, unable to generate enough cash flow even to sustain interest payments on their debts. The impact of these economic losses goes beyond these companies’ investors, managers, and workers: it drives down the returns for healthy companies that compete for the same resources or profits.

The Challenge of Going Off Psychiatric Drugs | The New Yorker

Millions of Americans have taken antidepressants for many years. What happens when it’s time to stop?

Immigration, inequality and intergenerational mobility in the US | VOX, CEPR Policy Portal

A growing literature finds that the persistence of economic status is strongest in unequal societies such as Britain or Italy, and weaker in countries like the Scandinavian welfare states. While the US ranks among the least equal and mobile countries in the developed world, recent work shows that it contains places that span the global mobility distribution. In this column, we linked these two observations by studying the microcosm of Europe that arose as millions of immigrants crossed the Atlantic and settled over a century ago.

When a Question of Science Brooks No Dissent – Quillette

How are educated and credentialed people able to get things so wrong? By remaining ignorant about technical matters. And as I see it, trained scientists offer scant help. At yet another campus event intended to alert our students to the threat of climate change, the speaker, an earth-science faculty member, expressed at the outset his irritation at being challenged on occasion with skeptical questions when he had spent decades educating the public on this matter. During the discussion period that followed his talk, I took the speaker to task for making what I saw as a preemptory strike to silence young people in attendance who, perhaps giving climate change serious consideration for the first time, might have wished to press him on his more provisional assertions. As an educator, he should have welcomed challenging questions from them, I maintained, not tried to shut them down. “We hear it said often enough,” I concluded, “but still we forget what our job is: Not to tell the students what to think, but rather to teach them how to think for themselves.”

Motivated Reasoning Is Disfiguring Social Science – Quillette

Motivated Reasoning Is Disfiguring Social Science