Why You Can’t Stop Creating Problems in Your Mind

If you feel like you can’t stop worrying, can’t stop creating problems for yourself, can’t stop shifting your anxiety from one corner of your life to the next, can’t just sit back and enjoy and be grateful and happy, it’s not because there’s something wrong with you. There’s something wrong with your understanding of the human brain and happiness.

We weren’t built to be “happy” in the way we think of happiness: carefree, grateful, excited.

We were born to survive, which is to create.

Suffering dissolves when we focus on creating rather than feeling. Instead of being at the whim of how the world makes us feel, we focus on how we can create what we want from what exists.

Good and bad become irrelevant when the focus isn’t “What can I enjoy?” But, rather, “What can I create?”

Link here.

People Like You More Than You Think, a New Study Suggests

Several factors are likely driving the liking gap, Cooney says. For one thing, people may be so hyper-focused on their side of the conversation that they can’t accurately gauge how the other person is feeling. “We don’t know what other people are thinking, and so we substitute our own thoughts about ourselves for what other people think,” Cooney explains. “We’re basically projecting what we think of our own performance, and assume that’s what other people think of us.”

People tend to be harder on themselves than they are on new acquaintances. After a conversation, you can look back on everything you said wrong and mentally correct it, or remember instances when you were funnier, kinder or more eloquent. You don’t have the same mental catalogue for someone you’ve just met, so you may “take them more at face value and be much more charitable,” Cooney says.

That’s a potential problem, since underselling yourself socially may promote sadness and anxiety, or cause you to miss out on valuable personal interactions, Cooney says. While the study didn’t look into strategies for overcoming the liking gap, Cooney says simply knowing it exists is a good place to start.

“We always have this post-mortem with ourselves. That little voice in your head turns on, and you start thinking about your conversation,” Cooney says. “Be suspicious of this voice and its accuracy.”

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Financial Times’s Martin Wolf on finance as “a jungle inhabited by wild beasts”

The purchasers of promises will know that the sellers normally know much more than they do about their prospects. The name for this is “asymmetric information.” They will also know that those who have no intention of keeping their word will always make more attractive promises than those who do. This is “adverse selection.” They will know that even those who are inclined to be honest may be tempted… not to keep their promises. The source of this is “moral hazard.” The answer to adverse selection and moral hazard… is to collect more information. But this too has a drawback: “free-riding”… [T]hose who have made no investment in collecting [information] can benefit from the costly efforts of those who have… That will, in turn, reduce the incentive to invest in such information, thereby making markets subject to the vagaries of “rational ignorance.” If the ignorant follow those they deem to be better informed, there will be “herding.” Finally, where uncertainty is pervasive and inescapable — who, for example, knows the chances of nuclear terrorism or the economic impact of the internet? — the herds are likely both to blow and ultimately to burst “bubbles.”

Link here.

Partisanship’s a Helluva Drug — And It’s Reshaping the Economy

To test whether partisans used surveys to express their true beliefs about the economy or instead engaged in expressive reporting after the 2016 presidential election, we relied upon online search data from Bing in conjunction with survey data from MSN to estimate partisan purchasing behavior both before and after the election (all data used in this study was both anonymous and opt-in).

Time and again, search data have been shown to be strongly associated with real-world behavior, especially purchasing behavior. It’s a powerful predictor of economic activity—used to accurately predict a variety of economic indicators, including the stock market, automobile sales and housing prices—and is a significantly better predictor of consumption than consumer confidence indices.

For the purposes of our study, though, search is particularly useful because it assesses whether partisans actually changed their behavior, not just their opinions, during the post-election period. If partisan survey responses are just expressive reporting, there should be no change in searches for houses or cars. If, on the other hand, partisan survey responses represent genuine perceptions of the economy, this should be reflected in partisans’ search patterns.

Our study found that after Trump’s election, Democrats, as members of the losing party, became less likely to purchase cars and invest in real estate, as demonstrated by search patterns, even when controlling for geographic and demographic variation. And despite Republicans’ extremely high reported confidence in the economy, our study did not find a meaningful change in their purchasing patterns—all of which suggests that the positive consumer confidence numbers Trump likes to cite may not accurately represent many Americans’ economic experiences or behavior.

Link here.

The lesson we refuse to learn about Republican voters

This isn't just because Trump is a uniquely effective demagogue — though he is. It's also because the bulk of Republican voters simply do not reside in the same moral and epistemological world as the rest of the country, including its centrist establishment. These Republicans don't believe or trust anything they read in the mainstream media, or anything a Democrat or Republican critic of the president says. And they have no interest in or respect for high-minded statements of principle (about, say, the rule of law) that purport to transcend partisanship.

What these Republicans care about is prevailing against their opponents, period. Accusing these GOP voters of double standards is beside the point. It's true that if any Democratic president had been accused of even one-tenth of the charges swirling around Trump, Republicans would be calling for blood. But what does it prove to point this out? That Republicans are hypocrites? Sure they are. Proudly. They hate it when their enemies break norms and laws, and they love it when their teammates do the same thing. That's the mindset of someone willing to fight dirty. That's what they think it takes to win.

Link here.

Breaking the ‘Medici Vicious Circle’ – monopolization trends in advanced economies

On the product markets side, since 1997, more than 75 percent of the U.S. sectors experienced an increase in concentration levels as measured by the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index rising more than 50 percent on average across the U.S. economy. In line with the stock markets concentration evidence mentioned earlier, the size of the average publicly listed company in the U.S. as measured by market capitalization, went from $1.2 billion to $3.7 billion in constant dollars.

Three factors drive the above figures.

One: Entrepreneurship is on a decline. The rate of new company formations has fallen from 15 percent in 1975 to 14 percent in the 1980s, to 11 percent in 1995. In 2015, the rate was just above 8 percent. The quality of the new company formations, as measured by life expectancy of the firms and tangible returns on investment, have also deteriorated.

Two: Firms are getting larger not through organic growth in revenues, but through M&As. Over 1997-2017, average annual volumes of global M&A activities amounted to roughly one half of the entire nominal global GDP growth. At the end of May, global M&A deal flow was running double on the same period of 2017 to reach a total of $1.5 trillion of announced deals. U.S.-only deals account for about 37 percent of the global total in M&A transactions – a share that is more than 2.5 times greater than the relative share of the U.S. economy in global GDP on PPP-adjusted terms.

Three: The demise of the medium-sized firms. In the 1980s, only 20 percent of mid-cap companies had negative earnings per share. By 2015, that number stood at 50 percent.

Link here.