As my regular academic work slows down in the days leading up to Thanksgiving, my thoughts have turned toward gratitude. In a visceral way, I feel thankful for my family, for my work, for the exhilarating November air on a brisk walk around my neighborhood, for my friends both here in Ann Arbor and online, and for being alive in this very interesting era-in what I believe is still close to the dawn of human history, yet a time of great abundance compared to what has gone before in past centuries.

Gratitude is a surprisingly powerful force in our souls-powerful enough to badly contradict simple economic models filled with ‘agents

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Right now, humanity is engaged in an epic battle against fast-adapting and merciless predators. No, zombies are not beating down doors to tear chunks of flesh out of the living. Rather, humanity is being hunted by deadly pathogenic bacteria that have gained resistance to antibiotics.

And thanks to the peculiar incentives that drive the pharmaceutical industry, it looks like the cavalry may be a long time in coming.

To understand the current state of the antibiotics market, we have to go back millennia. Humans have co-existed with bacteria throughout our history. They live in our bodies from birth to death. It’s estimated that up to three percent of a typical human’s body mass is made up of symbiotic bacteria, which assist us with bodily functions like digesting food.

Most bacteria in the human body are kept in check by the body’s immune system. But bacteria are constantly evolving to survive and reproduce. Either the immune system successfully adapts to new threats, or the body risks being overrun. Sometimes the immune system will fail to respond to a novel bacterial threat, allowing the bacteria to kill the host.

Before antibiotics were widely available, any accident, injury, or medical procedure that allowed pathogenic bacteria into the […]

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TAYLORSVILLE, Utah — Members of a Mormon congregation in a Salt Lake City suburb encountered someone they thought was a homeless man at church on Sunday. What they did not know was the man was a bishop for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

At least five people asked David Musselman to leave the church property in Taylorsville, some gave him money and most were indifferent.

He said he disguised himself as a homeless man to teach his congregation a lesson about compassion. To make his appearance more convincing, he contacted a Salt Lake City makeup artist to transform his familiar face to that of a stranger not even his family recognized.

‘The main thing I was trying to get across was we don’t need to be so quick to judge,’ Musselman told KUTV-TV (http://bit.ly/1gkeZMw ).

He received varied reactions to his appearance at church, he said.

‘Many actually went out of their way to purposefully ignore me, and they wouldn’t even make eye contact,’ he told the Deseret News (http://bit.ly/1aYkBtP ). ‘I’d approach them and say, `Happy Thanksgiving.’ Many of them I wouldn’t ask for any food or any kind of money, and their inability to even acknowledge me being there […]

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In August, Science published a landmark study concluding that poverty, itself, hurts our ability to make decisions about school, finances, and life, imposing a mental burden similar to losing 13 IQ points.

It was widely seen as a counter-argument to claims that poor people are ‘to blame’ for bad decisions and a rebuke to policies that withhold money from the poorest families unless they behave in a certain way. After all, if being poor leads to bad decision-making (as opposed to the other way around), then giving cash should alleviate the cognitive burdens of poverty, all on its own.

Sometimes, science doesn’t stick without a proper anecdote, and ‘Why I Make Terrible Decisions,’ a comment published on Gawker’s Kinja platform by a person in poverty, is a devastating illustration of the Science study. I’ve bolded what I found the most moving, insightful portions, but it’s a moving and insightful testimony all the way through.

I make a lot of poor financial decisions. None of them matter, in the long term. I will never not be poor, so what does it matter if I don’t pay a thing and a half this week instead of just one thing? It’s […]

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Minnesota and Wisconsin share much more than bone-chilling winters: German and Northern European roots; farming; and, until recently, a populist progressive tradition stretching back a century to Wisconsin’s Fighting Bob La Follette and the birth of Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party.

But in 2010 these cousin states diverged. By doing so they began a natural experiment that compares the agendas of modern progressivism and the new right. Wisconsin elected Republicans to majorities in the Legislature and selected a bold and vigorous Republican governor, Scott Walker. Minnesotans elected one of the most progressive candidates for governor in the country, Mark Dayton of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party.

A month after Mr. Walker’s inauguration in January 2011, he catapulted himself to the front ranks of national conservative leaders with attacks on the collective bargaining rights of Civil Service unions and sharp reductions in taxes and spending. Once Mr. Dayton teamed up with a Democratic Legislature in 2012, Minnesota adopted some of the most progressive policies in the country.

Minnesota raised taxes by $2.1 billion, the largest increase in recent state history. Democrats introduced the fourth highest income tax bracket in the country and targeted the top 1 percent of earners to pay 62 percent of the new taxes, according […]

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