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Why Not a Three-Day Week?
The New Yorker: In 1930, John Maynard Keynes posed a question about the economic future of society: “What can we reasonably expect the level of our economic life to be, a hundred years hence? What are the economic possibilities for our grandchildren?” To Keynes, the answer was clear: the rapid accumulation of capital, combined with technological advances, had already, by his estimates, improved the average quality of life in the West fourfold since the Industrial Revolution, and there was no reason why that trend shouldn’t continue.
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Playing Video Games Can Help Or Hurt, Depending On Whom You Ask
NPR: Parents worry that video games are bad for kids, but the evidence on how and why they may be harmful has been confusing. "Most of popular media puts the most emphasis of concern on aggression," says psychologist Jay Hull from Dartmouth College. "But aggression is just the tip of the iceberg." So Hull looked at other negative behaviors that could be affected by gaming, including binge drinking, smoking cigarettes and unprotected sex. His study found that teenagers who regularly play violent video games such as Manhunt and the Grand Theft Auto series are more likely to take those risks. The study was published Monday in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
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To Work Better, Work Less
The Atlantic: Between 1853 and 1870, Baron Haussmann ordered much of Paris to be destroyed. Slums were razed and converted to bourgeois neighborhoods, and the formerly labyrinthine city became a place of order, full of wide boulevards (think Saint-Germain) and angular avenues (the Champs-Élysées). Poor Parisians tried to put up a fight but were eventually forced to flee, their homes knocked down with minimal notice and little or no recompense. The city underwent a full transformation—from working class and medieval to bourgeois and modern—in less than two decades' time. Every August, Paris now sees another rapid transformation. Tourists rule the picturesque streets. Shops are shuttered.
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Combat Stress Among Veterans Is Found to Persist Since Vietnam
The New York Times: Most veterans who had persistent post-traumatic stress a decade or more after serving in the Vietnam War have shown surprisingly little improvement since then, and a large percentage have died, a new study finds, updating landmark research that began a generation ago. Members of minorities who enlisted before finishing high school were especially likely to develop such war-related trauma, as were those veterans who had killed multiple times in combat, the study found.
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Visual Exposure Predicts Infants’ Ability to Follow Another’s Gaze
Following another person’s gaze can reveal a wealth of information critical to social interactions and also to safety. Gaze following typically emerges in infancy, and new research looking at preterm infants suggests that it’s visual experience, not maturational age, that underlies this critical ability. The research is published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
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Trauma of War, Illusion of Growth
Back in 2009, the U.S. Army undertook a dramatic transformation of its own culture. The country had been at war for almost a decade, with many soldiers repeatedly deployed to the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. The intense and cumulative stress of protracted conflict was taking a devastating toll—reflected in high rates of post-traumatic stress disorder, family problems, and an all-time high in suicides. In response, the Army leadership embraced psychological science, especially some ideas of positive psychology that had previously been antithetical to the military’s warrior ethos.
