Nabila Tabassum Chowdhury > Recent Status Updates

"We now know that we live in a sticky economy where nothing moves very fast"

"One implication of this is that any large imbalance between labor and capital should get corrected."

"The biggest of these experiments, which involved more than two thousand participants paid to deactivate Facebook for a month, found that those who stopped using Facebook were happier across a range of self-reported measures of happiness and well-being and, interestingly,no more bored (perhaps less). They seemed to have found other ways to keep themselves amused, including spending more time with friends and family."

"When a tree gets cut down in Nairobi, GDP counts the labor used and the wood produced, but does not deduct the shade and the beauty that are lost."

"He predicts one factor that will accelerate growth: we will be able to slow down the aging of the brain. Which of course would give us more time to have better ideas."

"Innovation seems to be everywhere. But how could there be all this innovation without any sign of economic growth?"

" It captures the fact that workers with the same education level working with the same machines and inputs (what economists refer to as capital) produce more output today for each hour they work than they did last year."

"To make ourselves feel better, economists have given it its own name: total factor productivity, or TFP. (The famous growth economist Robert Solow defined TFP to be “a measure of our ignorance.”) Growth in total factor productivity is what is left after we have accounted for everything we can measure."

"In other words, we need to reestablish the credibility of the public conversation about policy, and prove that it is not just a way to use big words to justify doing very little. And of course we need to try to do what it will take to assuage the anger and deprivation so many feel, while acknowledging it will be neither easy nor quick."

"The most effective way to combat prejudice may not be to directly engage with people’s views, natural as that might seem. Instead, it may be to convince citizens it is worth their while to engage with other policy issues. That leaders who promise them a great deal and even make grand gestures toward it may not actually deliver much more than those gestures, in part because doing anything more is not easy."

"Given that, they might as well vote for the guy who looks or sounds like them. In other words, ethnic or bigotted voting is often just an expression of indifference."

"Voters do realize political leaders choose to play the ethnic or race card when convenient. Part of the reason they still vote for those politicians is they are deeply cynical about the political system, having convinced themselves all politicians are more or less alike."

"Suppose homeowners are happy to live in mixed neighborhoods, but not in neighborhoods mostly dominated by another group. Then they must live in fear of the day when, by chance perhaps, a few of their own move out and are replaced by the other."

"Competition undermined contact. These somewhat less optimistic results make the important point that contact may not be enough to produce tolerance; it may be necessary to have shared goals."

"In particular, he held that reduced prejudice would result when the contact happened in a setting where there was equal status between the groups in the situation, common goals, intergroup cooperation, and the support of authorities, law, or custom. Extremely contentious integration is unlikely to produce these conditions."

"Allport’s original hypothesis was that contact would reduce prejudice, but only if some conditions were satisfied."

"Self-discrimination undermines confidence and test performance."

"These quotas are much resented by the upper castes, resulting in frequent protests and lawsuits challenging the validity of the law, especially on the grounds that a disproportionate share of the reserved slots end up with the more privileged among the lower castes, who perhaps need them less."

"In India, the debate is framed in terms of the actual quotas in educational institutions and government jobs for the castes historically discriminated against."

"One implication of this evidence is that diversity in the student body of educational institutions is valuable in and of itself, because it durably affects preferences."

"Familiarity performed its magic."

"As we have already seen, our reaction to the other is closely tied to our self-confidence. Only a social policy founded on respect for the dignity of the individual can help make the average citizen more open to ideas of toleration."

"In the worst case, the winner can then use the power gained in this way to take control of the media to shut down any alternative voice, so there is no more competition to worry about."

"The winner does not need to deliver economic or social benefits even to his own supporters as long as the supporters worry enough about the possibility of takeover by the other side; knowing that, he or she will do their best to stoke those fears."

"As we lose the ability to listen to each other, democracy becomes less meaningful and closer to a census of the various tribes, who each vote based more on tribal loyalties than on a judicious balancing of priorities. The biggest coalition of tribes wins, even if its candidate is a known child molester, or worse."

"Correcting slant requires an understanding of what the source’s slant is."

"On balance, the option to choose slanted material made users less partisan. The reason is they understood exactly how biased the source they chose was, and partly undid the bias, while being receptive to the information; whereas with randomly assigned stories, users did not recognize the bias and therefore remained skeptical about the content, not changing their opinion much."

"A study found that 55 percent of the content diffused by news sites and media in France is almost entirely cut and pasted, but the source is only mentioned in less than 5 percent of the cases."

"Even if political polarization did not wait for the internet, it is hard to be entirely sanguine about the effects of the virtual social networks and the internet on our policy preferences, and the ways they are expressed."

"This was also the first year political consultants played a key role in designing and testing messages, which is something that as social scientists interested in the design and testing of innovations, including in messaging, we find rather disturbing.""