2. Russ Roberts is eloquent on trade.
3. More funny stuff from Yoram Bauman.
4. GMU, Feb.16, I am speaking on Haiti.
5. Scott Sumner on the Great Depression, in a nutshell.
7. Articles which communicate awe are most likely to be emailed.
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5. “I don’t know what ended the Great Depression, and don’t really discuss it in my manuscript, but I suspect it had something to do with the German invasion of France, which led to a military mobilization in the US and elsewhere.”
I think this is backwards. The war caused the depression and the beginning of the war ended the uncertainty about the war, so the war began at about the deepest trough, also known as the point of capitulation. The war itself did not end the depression although it did spur a lot of useless activity (stimulus). It was the specter of war that weighed on the economies of the world and the fact that once it started it would eventually end that killed the specter. The recovery was about discounting the future dominance of the United States. Crazy, huh?
> But it turns out that readers have more exalted tastes, according to the Penn researchers, Jonah Berger and Katherine A. Milkman. People preferred e-mailing articles with positive rather than negative themes, and they liked to send long articles on intellectually challenging topics.
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> Perhaps most of all, readers wanted to share articles that inspired awe, an emotion that the researchers investigated after noticing how many science articles made the list.
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> But it turns out that readers have more exalted tastes, according to the Penn researchers, Jonah Berger and Katherine A. Milkman. People preferred e-mailing articles with positive rather than negative themes, and they liked to send long articles on intellectually challenging topics.
> Perhaps most of all, readers wanted to share articles that inspired awe, an emotion that the researchers investigated after noticing how many science articles made the list.
Eh. Emotional signaling is still social signaling.
7. There’s a lot of Theory of Moral Sentiments stuff revealed in that article, especially the last few paragraphs where they note that article-forwarders want sympathy between themselves and the recipients. That’s easier when there’s a positive rather than negative emotional coloring.
But positive emotions tend not to be that high in intensity, so it takes something awe-inspiring or sublime to do the trick.
This also explains why pop music has been so dreadful since 1991 — too negative (too much anger and whining in particular, which are the least sympathy-generating of the negative emotions). And the positive stuff like Hanson or John Mayer is way too sappy-wappy, unlike “I Want You Back” or something like that.
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