How America Can Bring Back Manufacturing 10-15

Smokestacks belching hazardous gases, rivers so polluted they catch fire, workers in identical overalls turning bolts with wrenches: For many Americans, the word “manufacturing” conjures up negative, old-fashioned images. Or, we think of it as something that takes place in less-developed nations, as has increasingly been the case. Many have said that factories will continue to locate wherever the work can be done most cheaply, despite political messaging about bringing back manufacturing jobs.

Manufacturing accounts for about 13% of the U.S. economy. Should we even focus on trying to “bring it back,” now that information and services — the “knowledge economy” — seems a more promising path? Andrew Liveris firmly believes we should. In fact, he said in a recent talk at the University of Pennsylvania that manufacturing is essential to our knowledge economy, and to America’s competitiveness on the global stage.

Liveris is the executive chairman of DowDuPont, a $73 billion holding company (the two giant chemical companies merged in September), and Chairman and CEO of The Dow Chemical Company. He has advised both the Obama and Trump administrations on manufacturing issues. (Liveris was head of Trump’s now-defunct American Manufacturing Council.)

The author of Make It in America: The Case for Reinventing the Economy, in which he writes that America’s economic growth and prosperity depends upon a strong manufacturing sector, Liveris was interviewed at Penn’s Perry World House during Penn Global Week by Wharton School Dean Geoffrey Garrett. Garrett referred to Liveris “the cheerleader of advanced manufacturing.”

A Key Difference

Garrett stated that President Trump has been talking about bringing U.S. economic growth back up to the level it was before the 2008 Great Recession. Since World War II the economy has typically increased about 4% a year, but in 2016, the economy grew just 1.6%. What would it take to see those higher numbers again, he asked?

Liveris commented that the very nature of growth has changed dramatically because human civilization is going through “one of its every-few-hundred-years massive tipping point,” due to digitization. He said this phenomenon was as disruptive as Ford’s introduction of mass-produced cars in the horse-and-carriage era. This tipping point is causing enormous dislocation, including the elimination of jobs and the loss of meaningful work. Moreover, he said, “the job of 20 or 30 years ago is paying less — wage rates are down and all of that — so there are a lot of unhappy and angry people out there.”

And America is under-prepared, including from a policy point of view, he said. Liveris talked about the profound implications for business leaders as the forces of globalization collide with the forces of digitization. He said most corporations are not yet nimble enough to re-design themselves to accommodate these trends.

Yet, he said, substantial economic expansion is possible. “In the immediate term, can we get 3.5% growth in this country? You bet we can,” said Liveris. He noted that instituting policies to spur foreign direct investment would help as they did in the Clinton and Reagan eras. He also cited tax reform, infrastructure spending and business deregulation as important factors. He added, though, that the U.S. currently has “a massive, massive issue in how our government is functioning,” so change is not likely to happen overnight.

According to Liveris, there is a widespread lack of understanding among the public of what today’s manufacturing — which he referred to as advanced manufacturing — actually consists of. (Definitions vary, but the OECD defines advanced manufacturing technology as computer-controlled or micro-electronics-based equipment used to make products.) Liveris stated, “We are generating a new wave of technology to generate a knowledge economy. And a knowledge economy will need things made. They’ll just be made differently.”

Advanced manufacturing might include making smartphones, solar cells for roofs, batteries for hybrid cars, or innovative wind turbines. Liveris said he had visited a DowDuPont factory the previous week that is working on advanced compasses to enable wind turbines with blades the size of football fields. The goal is to produce blades light and efficient enough to make wind power a viable reality. “That’s technology. That’s advanced manufacturing,” he said.

“In the immediate term, can we get 3.5% growth in this country? You bet we can.”

He asked the audience to envision “a knowledge economy based on the collision and intersection of the sciences.” Those who think the tech revolution is only about “the Facebooks and the Googles, connectivity and all that,” are dead wrong, he said.

Not Enough Work, or Not Enough Workers?

Doesn’t the use of more robotics and automation lead to job loss? Garrett asked. Or, is the problem that workers aren’t appropriately skilled to fill new kinds of jobs? Liveris said he was firmly in the second camp. “I have job openings now at Dow and at DuPont that I can’t get the skills for. And engineering jobs open.”

He elaborated that the way machines provide insights is changing, and noted, “We humans will have to read those insights. I can’t [find] enough of those humans. That’s the issue we’re dealing with in this country.”

Liveris said that 7.5 million technology jobs left America between 2008 and 2016 because the country wasn’t supplying appropriate candidates. The reaction of many businesses was to re-locate to “the Chinas, the Indias, the places that were supplying that sort of skill.” In the United States right now, he said, there are half a million technology jobs open, but American educational institutions are only graduating roughly between 50,000 and 70,000 candidates per year, so there’s a “massive under-supply.” In the next three years, there will be 3.5 million jobs created, and Liveris said the U.S. might only be able to fill about 1.5 million of them through a combination of graduation and immigration. “Unless immigration is fooled with, which is a whole other issue.”

According to Liveris, a critical reason for America to revive its manufacturing sector is to promote innovation. “Something that we at Dow and many of us in manufacturing know: If you have the shop floor, if you make things, you have the prototype for the next thing, so you can innovate.” Conversely, if you stop making those things, your R&D diminishes dramatically, he said.

Liveris said that 7.5 million technology jobs left America between 2008 and 2016 because the country wasn’t supplying appropriate candidates.

The U.S. should be incentivizing the technologies that America is good at, said Liveris. Everybody knows about Silicon Valley, Liveris noted, but fewer know that the U.S. is prominent in advanced sensors, which are critical to the progress of the Internet of Things (IoT) sector. Other areas in which America stands out are lightweight compasses and 3D printing. He noted that technologies like these have been developed at various institutions “in a somewhat haphazard way, which is very American. That’s great. That’s creativity.” But, he said, shouldn’t we as a country double down on the things we do best and become the world leader?

Liveris called advanced manufacturing “the best path for the United States” and said, “We’re so naturally suited for it if we’d just get the policies to help us.” He believes that the U.S. should already be at the most advanced layer of economic development based on technology. “We have cheap money, we’ve got skills, we’ve got low-cost energy. We should be having an investment boom in this country,” he said.

He noted, though, that we have created barriers to investment that are preventing this from happening. Borrowing an expression from Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Liveris said that there were two kinds of countries in the world: red tape countries (hampered by bureaucracy and over-regulation) and red carpet countries (welcoming to investors). The U.S. has unfortunately become a red tape country, he said.

He called investment “the biggest job creator out there,” and stated that Germany for example has figured out how to do this. “It’s the poster child of investment in Europe.” China, too, has mastered it, and “other countries who want to trade with the United States are mastering it because they incentivize it.”

“If you have the shop floor, if you make things, you have the prototype for the next thing, so you can innovate.”

Closing America’s Education Gap

A big proponent of STEM education, Liveris said that American schools are not graduating the workers we need. “We have convinced ourselves that a four-year college degree of the skills we used to have in the last century is what we should still keep producing.” He said that re-tooling American education needs to happen immediately, with STEM education incorporated at every level including elementary school.

Liveris said DowDuPont is funding a STEM-dedicated school, in conjunction with Michigan State University, in Dow Chemical’s home base of Midland, Michigan. The school will offer curricula for kindergarten through 12^th grade, with MSU course offerings for college students, according to the Michigan news site MLive.

The pilot school will also provide teacher enrichment programs. Liveris said that American teachers need to be better trained and rewarded. “We do something very bad in this country, which is we don’t celebrate teachers at the elementary, middle and high school level. We should be putting them on pedestals. And giving them the skills to teach STEM.”

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Calculator shows hidden costs of fatigued workforce 10-13

A Fatigue Cost Calculator reveals that a U.S. employer with 1,000 workers can lose about $1.4 million dollars annually due to costs associated with exhausted workers.

Sleep disorders and sleep deficiency are hidden costs that affect employers across the U.S. Seventy percent of Americans admit that they routinely get insufficient sleep, and 30 percent of U.S. workers and 44 percent of night-shift workers report sleeping less than six hours a night. In addition, an estimated 50 million–70 million people have a sleep disorder, often undiagnosed. In total, the costs attributable to sleep deficiency in the U.S. were estimated to exceed $410 billion in 2015, equivalent to 2.28 percent of the gross domestic product.

Analysis of existing data, using a new Fatigue Cost Calculator developed through the Sleep Matters Initiative at Brigham Health for the National Safety Council (NSC), reveal that a U.S. employer with 1,000 workers can lose about $1.4 million dollars each year in absenteeism, diminished productivity, health care costs, accidents, and other occupational costs associated with exhausted employees, many of whom have undiagnosed and untreated sleep disorders.

Introduced at the NSC Congress and Expo, the Fatigue Cost Calculator is free online. Employers can use it to determine how much money a tired workforce costs their business by entering specific data — including workforce size, industry, and location — to predict the prevalence of sleep deficiency and common sleep disorders among their employees. Using an algorithm generated by integrating information from sleep science literature and publicly available government data, the calculator can estimate both the prevalence of employee sleep deficiency and the resulting financial loss.

It also estimates the savings that might be expected from implementation of a sleep health education program that includes screening for untreated sleep disorders, such as obstructive sleep apnea and insomnia.

“We estimate that the costs of fatigue in an average-sized Fortune 500 company consisting of approximately 52,000 employees is about $80 million annually,” said Matthew Weaver, a scientist with the Brigham Health Sleep Matters Initiative who helped develop the calculator.

The mission of the Sleep Matters Initiative, led by investigators from Brigham Health and Harvard Medical School, is to improve treatment of sleep and circadian disorders in order to improve health, safety, and performance, and to promote change in social norms around sleep health.

“Promotion of healthy sleep is a win-win for both employers and employees, enhancing quality of life and longevity for workers while improving productivity and reducing health care costs for employers,” said Charles A. Czeisler, director of the Division of Sleep and Circadian Disorders at Brigham and Women’s and Baldino Professor of Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

“Additionally, occupational fatigue-management programs can increase knowledge of sleep disorders, educate participants on the impact of reduced alertness due to sleep deficiency, and teach fatigue countermeasures, as well as screen for untreated sleep disorders.”
Other findings revealed by the Fatigue Cost Calculator include:

• A national transportation company with 1,000 employees likely loses more than $600,000 a year because of tired employees. Motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of workplace deaths, underscoring the need for alert, attentive employees.
• More than 250 employees at a 1,000-worker national construction company likely have sleep disorders, which increase the risk of being injured or killed on the job. The construction industry has the highest number of on-the-job deaths each year.

• A single employee with obstructive sleep apnea can cost an employer more than $3,000 a year in excess health care costs.

• An employee with untreated insomnia is present but not productive for more than 10 full days of work annually, and accounts for at least $2,000 in excess health care costs.

• An average Fortune 500 company could save nearly $40 million a year if half of its workforce engaged in a sleep-health program.

“This research reinforces that sleepless nights hurt everyone,” said Deborah A.P. Hersman, president and CEO off the National Safety Council. “Many of us have been conditioned to just power through our fatigue, but worker health and safety on the job are compromised when we don’t get the sleep we need. The calculator demonstrates that doing nothing to address fatigue costs employers a lot more than they think.”

Development of the Fatigue Cost Calculator was supported by a contract from the National Safety Council to the Brigham and Women’s Physicians Organization. 

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Benefits of crying: Why it's good to shed a few tears 10-13

Image credit : Shyam's Imagination Library

Crying is a natural response humans have to a range of emotions, including sadness, grief, joy, and

frustration. But does crying have any health benefits?

It is not unusual to cry, and both sexes cry more than people may assume. In the United States, women cry an average of 3.5 times per month and men cry an average of 1.9 times a month.
This article explores why people cry and what health benefits crying may have.

Crying is a natural response to emotions or irritants like dust in the eyes.

Humans produce three types of tears:

• Basal: The tear ducts constantly secrete basal tears, which are a protein-rich antibacterial liquid that help to keep the eyes moist every time a person blinks.
• Reflex: These are tears triggered by irritants such as wind, smoke, or onions. They are released to flush out these irritants and protect the eye.
• Emotional: Humans shed tears in response to a range of emotions. These tears contain a higher level of stress hormones than other types of tears.

When people talk about crying, they are usually referring to emotional tears.

Benefits of crying

People may try to suppress tears if they see them as a sign of weakness, but science suggests that doing so could mean missing out on a range of benefits. Researchers have found that crying:

1. Has a soothing effect

Self-soothing is when people:

• regulate their own emotions
• calm themselves
• reduce their own distress

A 2014 study found that crying may have a direct, self-soothing effect on people. The study explained how crying activates the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS), which helps people relax.

2. Gets support from others

As well as helping people self-soothe, crying can help people get support from others around them.
As this 2016 study explains, crying is primarily an attachment behavior, as it rallies support from the people around us. This is known as an interpersonal or social benefit.

3. Helps to relieve pain

Research has found that in addition to being self-soothing, shedding emotional tears releases oxytocin and endorphins.
These chemicals make people feel good and may also ease both physical and emotional pain. In this way, crying can help reduce pain and promote a sense of well-being.

4. Enhances mood

Crying may help lift people's spirits and make them feel better. As well as relieving pain, oxytocin and endorphins can help improve mood. This is why they are often known as "feel good" chemicals.

5. Releases toxins and relieves stress

When humans cry in response to stress, their tears contain a number of stress hormones and other chemicals.
Researchers believe that crying could reduce the levels of these chemicals in the body, which could, in turn, reduce stress. More research is needed into this area, however, to confirm this.

6. Aids sleep

A small study in 2015 found that crying can help babies sleep better. Whether crying has the same sleep-enhancing effect on adults is yet to be researched.
However, it follows that the calming, mood-enhancing, and pain-relieving effects of crying above may help a person fall asleep more easily.

7. Fights bacteria

Crying helps to kill bacteria and keep the eyes clean as tears contain a fluid called lysozyme.
A 2011 study found that lysozyme had such powerful antimicrobial properties that it could even help to reduce risks presented by bioterror agents, such as anthrax.

8. Improves vision

Basal tears, which are released every time a person blinks, help to keep the eyes moist and prevent mucous membranes from drying out.

As the National Eye Institute explains, the lubricating effect of basal tears helps people to see more clearly. When the membranes dry out, vision can become blurry.

When to see a doctor

Crying has a number of health benefits, but frequent crying may be a sign of depression.

Crying in response to emotions such as sadness, joy, or frustration is normal and has a number of health benefits.

However, sometimes frequent crying can be a sign of depression. People may be depressed if their crying:

• happens very frequently
• happens for no apparent reason
• starts to affect daily activities
• becomes uncontrollable

Other signs of depression include:

• having trouble concentrating, remembering things, or making decisions
• feeling fatigued or without energy
• feeling guilty, worthless, or helpless
• feeling pessimistic or hopeless
• having trouble sleeping or sleeping too much
• feeling irritable or restless
• not enjoying things that were once pleasurable
• overeating or undereating
• unexplained aches, pains, or cramps
• digestive problems that do not improve with treatment
• persistent anxiety
• suicidal thoughts or thoughts of self-harm

If a person is experiencing symptoms of depression, or someone they know is, then they should talk to a doctor.
Should a person feel suicidal, or know someone who is feeling that way, they should call:

• emergency services 

Takeaway

Crying is a normal human response to a whole range of emotions that has a number of health and social benefits, including pain relief and self-soothing effects.

However, if crying happens frequently, uncontrollably, or for no reason, it could be a sign of depression. If this is the case, it is a good idea to speak to a doctor. 

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A zero-index waveguide 10-13

A zero-index waveguide stretches a wave of light infinitely long, creating a constant phase throughout the wire.(Image courtesy of Second Bay Studios/Harvard SEAS)


In 2015, researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) developed the first on-chip metamaterial with a refractive index of zero, meaning that the phase of light could be stretched infinitely long. The metamaterial represented a new method to manipulate light and was an important step forward for integrated photonic circuits, which use light rather than electrons to perform a wide variety of functions.

Now, SEAS researchers have pushed that technology further – developing a zero-index waveguide compatible with current silicon photonic technologies. In doing so, the team observed a physical phenomenon that is usually unobservable — a standing wave of light.

The research is published in ACS Photonics. The Harvard Office of Technology Development has filed a patent application and is exploring commercialization opportunities.

“We were able to observe a breath-taking demonstration of an index of zero."

When a wavelength of light moves through a material, its crests and troughs get condensed or stretched, depending on the properties of the material. How much the crests of a light wave are condensed is expressed as a ratio called the refractive index — the higher the index, the more squished the wavelength.

When the refractive index is reduced to zero the light no longer behaves as a moving wave, traveling through space in a series of crests and troughs, otherwise known as phases. Instead, the wave is stretched infinitely long, creating a constant phase.  The phase oscillates only as a variable of time, not space.

This is exciting for integrated photonics because most optical devices use interactions between two or more waves, which need to propagate in sync as they move through the circuit. If the wavelength is infinitely long, matching the phase of the wavelengths of light isn’t an issue, since the optical fields are the same everywhere.

But after the initial 2015 breakthrough, the research team ran into a catch-22. Because the team used prisms to test whether light on the chip was indeed infinitely stretched, all of the devices were built in the shape of a prism. But prisms aren’t particularly useful shapes for integrated circuits. The team wanted to develop a device that could plug directly into existing photonic circuits and for that, the most useful shape is a straight wire or waveguide.

The researchers — led by Eric Mazur, the Balkanski Professor of Physics — built a waveguide but, without the help of a prism, had no easy way to prove if it had a refractive index of zero.
Then, postdoctoral fellows Orad Reshef and Philip Camayd-Muñoz had an idea.

Usually, a wavelength of light is too small and oscillates too quickly to measure anything but an average. The only way to actually see a wavelength is to combine two waves to create interference.

Imagine strings on a guitar, pinned on either side. When a string is plucked, the wave travels through the string, hits the pin on the other side and gets reflected back — creating two waves moving in opposite directions with the same frequency. This kind of interference is called a standing wave.

Reshef and Camayd-Muñoz applied the same idea to the light in the waveguide. They “pinned-down” the light by shining beams in opposite directions through the device to create a standing wave.

The individual waves were still oscillating quickly but they were oscillating at the same frequency in opposite directions, meaning at certain points they canceled each other out and other points they added together, creating an all light or all dark pattern. And, because of the zero-index material, the team was able to stretch the wavelength large enough to see.

This may be the first time a standing wave with infinitely-long wavelengths has ever been seen.

Real-time, unprocessed video of standing waves of light in a 15-micrometer-long, zero-index waveguide taken with an infrared camera. The perceived motion is caused by atmospheric disturbances to the free- standing fibers that couple light onto the chip, changing the relative phase between the two incoming beams. Credit: Harvard SEAS



“We were able to observe a breath-taking demonstration of an index of zero,” said Reshef, who recently accepted a position at the University of Ottawa. “By propagating through a medium with such a low index, these wave features, which in light are typically too small to detect directly, are expanded so you can see them with an ordinary microscope.”

“This adds an important tool to the silicon photonics toolbox,” said Camayd-Muñoz. “There's exotic physics in the zero-index regime, and now we're bringing that to integrated photonics. That's an important step, because it means we can plug directly into conventional optical devices, and find real uses for zero-index phenomena. In the future, quantum computers may be based on networks of excited atoms that communicate via photons. The interaction range of the atoms is roughly equal to the wavelength of light. By making the wavelength large, we can enable long-range interactions to scale up quantum devices.”

The paper was co-authored by Daryl I. Vulis, Yang Li and Marko Loncar, Tiantsai Lin Professor of Electrical Engineering at SEAS. The research was supported by National Science Foundation and was performed in part at the Center for Nanoscale Systems (CNS).

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How Richard Thaler's simple insights led to Nobel Prize. 10-11

Shyam's Insights :

The new found enthusiasm for behavioral economics and the consequent focus on the quality content available on this subject is like a boon and bonanza for students of Behavioral Sciences like me, which is keeping us busy in both reading the content. 

Behavioral economics, studies the effects of psychological, social, cognitive, and emotional factors on the economic decisions of individuals and institutions,more generally, of the impact of different kinds of behavior, in different environments of varying experimental values.

Behavioral economics doesn't recognise  the bounds of rationality, and often times recognises and gives credibility to unbound irrational economic behavioral models. These typically integrate insights from psychology, neuroscience and microeconomic theory; in so doing, these behavioral models cover a range of concepts, methods, and fields.

Now the article

Richard H. Thaler, the “father of behavioral economics,” has this week won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work in that field. Thaler has long been known for challenging a foundational concept in mainstream economics — namely, that people by-and-large behave rationally when making purchasing and financial decisions. Thaler’s research upended the conventional wisdom and showed that human decisions are sometimes less rational than assumed, and that psychology in general — and concepts such as impulsiveness — influence many consumer choices in often-predictable ways.

Once considered an outlier, behavioral economics today has become part of generally accepted economic thinking, in large part thanks to Thaler’s ideas. His research also has immediate practical implications. One of Thaler’s big ideas – his “nudge theory”  – suggests that the government and corporations, to take one example, can greatly influence levels of retirement savings with unobtrusive paperwork changes that make higher levels of savings an opt-out rather than an op-in choice. In fact, he co-authored a book, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness, which became a best-seller.

In this Knowledge@Wharton interview, Katherine Milkman, a Wharton professor of operations, information and decisions — and a behavioral economist herself — discusses Thaler’s influence in economics and the practical applications of his ideas already underway. She attributes part of his success to his great clarity in thinking and in writing. She had interviewed professor Thaler for Knowledge@Wharton in 2016 regarding his then-new book, Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics.



An edited transcript of the conversation follows.

Knowledge@Wharton: It must be an exciting time for behavioral economists such as yourself to see one of their leading lights recognized this way. Could you give us a brief sketch of the key concepts in behavioral economics, and how they differ from mainstream views of economics? And also, why is Thaler such a leader in the field?

Milkman: Standard economics makes assumptions about the rationality of all of us, and essentially assumes that we all make decisions like perfect decision-making machines, like Captain Spock from Star Trek who can process information at the speed of light, and crunch numbers, come up with exactly the right solution.

“Humans are not perfectly rational…. We have impulse-control problems, we have social preferences. We care about what happens to other people instead of being entirely selfish.”

In reality, that’s not the way humans make decisions. We often make mistakes. And Richard Thaler’s major contribution to economics was to introduce a series of predictable ways that people make errors, and to make it acceptable to begin modeling those kinds of deviations to make for a richer and more accurate description of human behavior in the field of economics.

Knowledge@Wharton: What would be a classic example of a decision that an economist would expect someone to make rationally, but in fact they don’t?

Milkman: Well, a great example from Richard’s own work relates to self-control challenges. And he has talked about the cashew problem, or the challenge, if you’re at a dinner party, of resisting the bowl of cashews that you know will spoil your dinner.

A traditional economist would expect that’s not a challenge. No one should have any difficulty withstanding that temptation. They should know it will spoil their dinner; we don’t need the cashews. And Thaler noted that, in fact, everyone struggles with this, and everyone breathes a sigh of relief when a host puts away that bowl of cashews so they’re not reachable and they’re not in front of everyone anymore.

It seems small, but it actually highlights a major challenge for humans with self-control, which can perhaps explain the obesity epidemic, and under-saving for retirement, the under-education among many groups. The range of things that this simple observation can begin to shed light on is just extraordinary. And that’s only one of his contributions.

Knowledge@Wharton: It’s this idea that human beings happen to be impulsive a lot of times, and that should be taken into account. They aren’t sitting there with calculators all the time figuring out an economic decision or a financial decision.

Milkman: That’s exactly right. That’s the contribution that Richard Thaler made to economics in a nutshell: that humans are not perfectly rational, sitting there with calculators. We have impulse-control problems, we have social preferences. We care about what happens to other people instead of being entirely selfish. We are limited in our rationality in a number of ways, and he has pointed that out over the last 50 years, and highlighted opportunities for policy makers to improve the lives of billions of people by taking these insights into account.

Knowledge@Wharton: It appears a little odd that these ideas were consigned to the corner for so long. Now people are talking about them more.

Milkman: I think that’s right. At some level it took a personality like Richard Thaler; he’s someone who likes to break the mold and misbehave, which is the title of his autobiography. It took someone like that to point out the absurdity of the assumptions in a standard economic model, and help change the assumptions so that we could start doing the science better.

Knowledge@Wharton: And those standard models, they worked really well a lot of the time, maybe even most of the time — it’s just that when they didn’t work, it could be a major failing. Is that right?

Milkman: I think that’s right. And it also meant there was an opportunity for improvement. So even if they were working fairly well much of the time, they weren’t actually fully accurate. And so the more accurate we can make them, the more opportunities we have to make better policy and so on.

Knowledge@Wharton: Let’s talk about some of the practical applications of his ideas. Thaler was a government advisor not long ago. Perhaps you could tell us about his contributions and about how he has a lot of practical ideas for how his concepts can be put to use.

Knowledge@Wharton: Let’s talk about some of the practical applications of his ideas. Thaler was a government advisor not long ago. Perhaps you could tell us about his contributions and about how he has a lot of practical ideas for how his concepts can be put to use.

Let me give you a really concrete example from that book that I think is incredibly powerful. He points out that whenever we walk into a cafeteria, we’re faced with a wide range of options about what to put on our tray. Something comes first, something comes last, and the first thing we encounter is much more likely to be the thing we purchase and eat than the last thing, because we have an empty tray when we encounter that very first option.

“It took a personality like Richard Thaler … to point out the absurdity of the assumptions in a standard economic model.”

What this means is that whoever laid out the cafeteria was actually, whether or not they meant to, influencing our choices dramatically depending on where they place certain foods. The first thing we encounter is much more likely to end up on our plate, as I just said, and therefore whatever they place first, whether it was broccoli or chocolate cake, was more likely to end up on our tray.

There’s no such thing as neutral choice architecture. Thaler pointed out that we should try to architect environments where people are making decisions in a way that, in his words, nudges us towards better choices. So why not put the broccoli first and the chocolate cake last in order to help people be healthier in a cafeteria?

Thaler also talks a lot about how to improve retirement savings outcomes using similar understandings of psychology. For instance, why not assume that people want to save for retirement and allow them to opt out rather than what was historically typically done when you signed up or started working at a new employer, which was to assume people didn’t want to enroll unless they said please sign me up for the retirement savings program. With small changes [in] the environments where we make choices, that don’t restrict choice in any way … we can have a huge impact on human life for the better.

Knowledge@Wharton: Another interesting idea — along the same lines — is that you agree in advance that when you get a raise in the future, a bigger chunk of that would go into your retirement than just the standard percentage based on what you had chosen in advance. It turns out through the “miracle” of compounding interest that these things can make a huge difference at retirement.

Milkman: That’s right. And you had specifically asked about how governments were using this. I also want to note many folks in governments read the book Nudge, and there are now literally hundreds of offices in governments around the world that have developed what they lovingly refer to as Nudge Units, where they’re trying these insights from this field to try to improve outcomes for citizens.

And we have one in the U.S. government, we have one that was founded I believe in 2015 if I’m getting my dates right. And before that, the very first Nudge Unit came in the U.K. under David Cameron, and it was literally referred to as the Nudge Unit. Now it’s called the Behavioral Insights Team and they have operations in the U.S. and in the UK. They’re helping many cities in the U.S. improve their outcomes for citizens. And so he’s just had an enormous impact, not only here but abroad.

Knowledge@Wharton: Thaler won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work in behavioral economics, but as we were talking earlier you noted he considers himself a behavioral scientist. Can you talk about the distinctions there?

Milkman: One of the things that is important about Richard Thaler’s work is that it bridges disciplines, and so while many economic Nobel Prizes are awarded to people who are truly only economists and only recognized in economics, some go to people who have impacted a far wider range of fields, and this is one of those.

So Richard Thaler often refers to himself not only as a behavioral economist but as a behavioral scientist, because there’s a community that includes many who aren’t economists who are doing this work that is spurred by his ideas, his thinking about peculiarities of human behavior that aren’t captured by economic science.

So behavioral science is a broader term. It includes psychologists, many folks in business schools who don’t have an identity as a psychologist or an economist. You can find the stray neuroscientists and sociologists who think of themselves as behavioral scientists as well.

Knowledge@Wharton: It’s interesting that there’s the word “behavioral” in here, and “psychology.” I don’t hear the word “emotion,” when it would appear that that is part of it all. We talk about emotional intelligence — is that somehow connected to this idea? That also seems to be an area that is slightly outside of the strictly rational, and it applies to behavior, and it is talked about oftentimes in the work setting.

Milkman: That’s a great question. I think that emotions specifically haven’t been exactly the center of Richard’s work, but at some level they are an underpinning of all behavioral science, and all of behavioral economics, because if you fundamentally ask where do these deviations from optimal decision making come from, many are driven by emotions.

So a lot of Richard’s work looking at social preferences — for instance, the fact that we intrinsically seem to care about other people’s outcomes and not only our own — is fundamentally the result of emotion. We emotionally care about other people; we have an emotional reaction when we see something happening that we think is unfair to someone else.

“The very first Nudge Unit came in the U.K. under David Cameron, and it was literally referred to as the Nudge Unit.”

You can also think about an emotional reaction, or a visceral reaction leading to impulse control problems in many situations, and his work on self-control then is all about emotions.  So while he doesn’t typically get recognized for being a scholar of emotions, at some level everything we have learned about limited rationality is somehow connected to emotions it seems.

Knowledge@Wharton: So tell me some of the ways that he has influenced many other researchers, including yourself.

Milkman: Well he opened up new fields of inquiry that really weren’t in existence before he began doing this work. I personally study self-control and nudging, and those are two things that were not really being studied by the community of behavioral scientists in nearly the same way, not with the same lens, before he came along and made them central to behavioral economics and created this field, along with his predecessor, Daniel Kahneman, who was also a Nobel laureate roughly 15 years ago. Thaler has been instrumental in opening up doors for young scientists to think about things that previously weren’t talked about by rigorous academics.

Knowledge@Wharton: What are some of the things you are looking at that you might not have looked at if you hadn’t had that influence in your life?

Milkman: Well one of my areas is looking at something I call the Fresh Start Effect. We’ve done research showing that at the beginning of new cycles in our lives, like the start of a new year would be a very obvious one to think about, but also the start of a new week, following birthdays, we have renewed self-control and extra motivation to pursue our goals.

And we find that people visit the gym at a higher rate at the beginning of these new cycles, for instance, and they’re more likely to search the term “diet” on Google at the start of these new cycles, and they’re more likely to create goal contracts on goal-setting websites. And that draws directly on Richard Thaler’s work, pointing out that we don’t treat time and money as if it is simply all the same and fungible; we actually use what he calls “mental accounts.”

So we think of time as having these categories, or money as having these categories, and we don’t move money around between the categories — or move time around. So a new year is a new account, it’s a new category, and we treat it differently. When we have that new year, in my work we show that it feels like a fresh start — we feel like all our failings from last year, that’s a separate category, it’s behind us.

And Richard has used this mental accounting theory to explain lots of anomalies in the way people engage with their personal finances among other things. So that’s an example of something that influenced my work.

Knowledge@Wharton: Regarding Thaler’s work, I read that, for example, if you create something called a heating account in your personal budget, you end up spending more on heating. How does one influence the other?

Milkman: The idea is that we treat money as if it is labeled. So say you get a gift certificate — this is the study I actually did in graduate school — to use at the grocery store where you shop for groceries every week. Say it’s for $10. Well you’re just $10 richer overall in all of life, right, because you were going to spend at least $10 at the grocery store next week anyway, since you go there every week.
But because you label money, instead of feeling like, “Oh, I have $10 dollars for whatever I want this week; I can go to the movies or out for lunch an extra time,” we feel like that money is labeled for groceries and we act richer in our grocery account. We actually go splurge and buy things like seafood that we wouldn’t normally buy instead of just buying whatever extra thing would make us happier in life.

So it’s a labeling phenomenon, when money comes in in one place, we think of it as only usable in that one place in spite of the fact that traditional economics would say we should recognize all money as totally fungible. It’s just another $10 in your pocket.

Knowledge@Wharton: What haven’t I asked you about Richard Thaler that would be important for people to understand?

Milkman: I think one of the most amazing things about Richard is how well he writes, and how simple his insights about human behavior are, and easy for anyone to appreciate. He’s actually the first scholar of behavioral economics whom I read when I was a graduate student actually studying computer science and business. I picked up a wonderful collection of his essays in a book called The Winner’s Curse about anomalies and the way that economic agents behave.

I was immediately captivated because it was so incredibly simple and elegant, and funny and true, and I think many of the scholars who have been influenced by him wouldn’t have been as influenced if it weren’t for his incredible ability to communicate in that way. So for anyone listening and anyone thinking about being either a scholar or a communicator in other ways, it just emphasizes the importance of clear, simple writing, and clear, simple examples to have a huge impact on the world.

Knowledge@Wharton: Is there any other kind of theory, or set of theories or ideas, out there that is emerging — that people are thinking about — that could be parallel to behavioral economics and that probably will turn out to be important, but people just don’t get it yet?

Milkman: Well, one of Richard Thaler’s disciples — and his disciples are all incredibly impressive in their own right — is Sendhil Mullainathan, an economist at Harvard who thinks the next big thing is how machine learning will change social science. And I think he’s on to something; I think that could be the next revolution in the social sciences — using machine learning to better predict everything.

Knowledge@Wharton: So we’re heading to a future of algorithms, I guess.

Milkman: Well, certainly a future where algorithms do more to help social science.

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What Ants Mice Monkeys can teach us about the impact of stress 10-13

Stress is a common feeling, and it seems we’re dealing with more of it in our lives than ever before. Work, finances, relationships — all have the ability to create chronic stress that can lead to anxiety, depression and other issues. Two Penn Integrates Knowledge (PIK) professors — Michael Platt, a Wharton marketing professor and professor of neuroscience and psychology at Penn, and Shelley Berger, a Penn professor of cell and development biology and director of The Epigenetics Institute, have teamed up in an interdisciplinary approach to learn more about how stress affects individuals.

Platt and Berger recently spoke about their research and its implications on the Knowledge@Wharton show on SiriusXM channel 111. 



Following is an edited transcript of the conversation. 

Knowledge@Wharton: Tell us the background behind this research.

Shelley Berger: It’s something we’ve been interested in for some time. The research I’ve been doing is focused on epigenetics, which has led into this interest in the environment and how it affects behavior. But in recent years, we’ve become very interested in the brain from work we started on the ant system. We actually have an ant lab at the Perelman School of Medicine. We’ve been interested in ants and studying their behavior. They’ve been a great model for behavior. Recently, we became interested in mouse behavior and studying the brain and epigenetics in the brain. Through conversations with Michael, that led to how this whole thing began on crossing species and studying mouse, primate and even human.

Knowledge@Wharton: Give us a better understanding of epigenetics.

Berger: Epigenetics is the study of how the environment affects the way genes are expressed. We commonly think about mutations affecting genes and gene expression. But epigenetics is the study of how the environment can affect the way genes are turned on and off without mutation. Specifically, it’s the effect of how chemicals coming in from the environment through our bodies can sort of decorate the proteins that associate with the DNA and change the way genes are turned on and off. That’s of great interest because many things are coming in from the environment, including stress. We’re talking about psychological effects and stress, and that can lead to changes in the brain. Post-traumatic stress disorder is a great example.

“Burnout is the number-one topic that I hear about from our MBA students, and they want to do how to deal with that…. Stress is everywhere.” –Michael Platt

Knowledge@Wharton: Michael, tell us about your interest in this research?

Michael Platt: We have been interested in behavior for a long time. We got interested in how genes affect the development of the structure and function of the brain and nervous system to ultimately produce behavior. Of course, that equation leaves out the central role of epigenetics that Shelley just described, which is that the same genes in the same body in a different environment can lead to very different outcomes. If you imagine yourself living with lots of family support, for example, you might respond better to the stresses of the environment — to a stock market crash, to problems in the economy, etc. But if you are living alone without any social support, then that stressful event or the long-term stress can be much more impactful on your body and your brain.

Shelley and I met two years ago, when I had just arrived here from Duke University…. As we were talking, we began to realize that we were interested in very similar things, although our expertise is very complementary. We had been working on the neurophysiology of behavior, the neurophysiology of social behavior and how genetics might influence that. But we had really no expertise in epigenetics at all.

Knowledge@Wharton: How will this research lead to a better understanding of the human brain and how it reacts to stress from environmental factors?

Berger: We’ve been studying mouse behavior for the past five years, and you can model stress in mice. There’s a method called “fear conditioning” by which you subject the mouse to stress, and then you can study what happens to the brain. How are learning and memory affected by the stress of fear conditioning?

We had been working with post-mortem human brains from people who had suffered neuro-degeneration from Alzheimer’s Disease, so we’d been developing a lot of methodology to study parts of the brain. Humans are difficult because, of course, they’re not experimental animals. We have to work out all the methods to carry out high-resolution studies of these chemical marks in the brain from human post-mortem samples. Then, starting to get interested in some results we had in mouse, we thought that the crossover between fear conditioning in mouse and PTSD in human could be really interesting. We got in touch with a guy who has a bio-bank of humans who had suffered from PTSD. We can take these methods that we’ve developed in mouse, then fine-tuned in human post-mortem brains through our work on Alzheimer’s, and now we can look at PTSD in humans. Michael filled in the middle part with primate research, which is a great link between the two.

Platt: Right. As useful as a mouse is for understanding a lot of the basic processes that we think are involved in the response of the human brain to stress, sometimes that translation is not perfect. That reflects the fact that mice and humans last shared a common ancestor much longer ago than humans and monkeys. For that reason, the human brain and the monkey brain are much more similar than the human brain and the mouse brain. There are certain aspects of behavior, in terms of behavioral complexity and social complexity, that are shared between humans and monkeys, that are less well-paralleled in the mouse.

The monkey gives us the capability to look at some of these other issues like social support and how that might help with the problems that one encounters with social competition. This is very different from what mice experience. People and monkeys live in groups for a good reason. It allows you to do things that you can’t do alone, like evade predators or chase away other groups and get resources. On the other hand, when you’re living in a group, you have to compete with everybody else. That’s a source of stress that I think we all can easily identify with.

This is a beautiful partnership because it has the potential to lead to understandings that can lead to new treasuries. Also, putting my Wharton hat on, this kind of project can potentially illuminate ways in which we might be able to mitigate stress, say, within the workplace. That’s a huge problem these days. Burnout is the number-one topic that I hear about from our MBA students, and they want to do how to deal with that. You hear the same thing from residents who are training in medicine. Stress is everywhere.

Berger: The beautiful thing about the primates, with respect to humans, is that humans are not an experimental animal — we don’t know exactly what their social situation is in its entirety. But scientists watch [primates] all the time. Michael has scientists working with him, watching these animals in their natural habitat, so they know exactly what sort of place they have in the social spectrum. We can’t know all that about humans. As much as we get metadata about humans — that we can get information about their background — they’re not experimental animals. We can’t control and know.

“We’re not talking about the kinds of stresses our kids go through over smartphones. We’re talking about the kinds of things that really impede your ability to function.” –Shelley Berger

Knowledge@Wharton: That space between mouse and monkey feels like it’s very important because there’s more of a more recent link between monkey and human than human and mouse.

Platt: I think that’s why these studies need to be done. There are very few places where you can really do them and where people will collaborate to try to discover those links and make the connections. I think what Shelley can do in her lab, with really exquisite techniques and technologies that allow you to hone in on the mechanism, we can closely approximate in primates. But it’s not the same kind of thing that we can do.

On the other hand, what we can provide is a much richer understanding of the social environment and all of the other factors that might affect an individual in how they respond to stress and how that ultimately leads to changes in behavior. The particular population of monkeys that we study evolves. This is a population in which individuals are free to fight and to flee and to breed. Some monkeys do better than others. That means that whatever traits those individuals have — traits that allow them to offer stress, to make alliances and connections — can be passed on to the next generation. We can see these kinds of changes in the population over time. That’s almost impossible to see in people.

Knowledge@Wharton: If you find enough links, you’re talking about being able to deal with a lot of prevalent medical issues — burnout, depression, suicide, PTSD.

Platt: It’s really compelling to see the data. There has been a lot of attention paid to a new report that analyzed the incredible increase in depression and anxiety, especially in teenagers, after the introduction of smartphones in the 2000s. There does seem to be, potentially, some link to the kinds of technological environments in which we find ourselves. I think one implication is that it leads to social disconnection, which I think reinforces what we’ve learned both in people and in monkeys that having social support is really critical. If you don’t have it, then things really fall apart.

Knowledge@Wharton: The social support is not as much of a factor when you’re talking about mice. But perhaps it is for ants because of how they live in colonies, correct?

Berger: That’s an astute observation. Ants are a great model for complex social interactions, and there are very few models like that. That’s why the medical school supports us to have an ant lab. They see the great translational aspects of studying ants and their social interactions.

Knowledge@Wharton: How do you think that information could play out when you’re talking about dealing with stress?

Berger: I’ll go back to our mouse research, which we’re translating both ways to the ants and would love to translate it to the monkeys and definitely to humans. We discovered that the machinery to make one of the chemicals that’s placed on the genes to regulate them is associated with the genes. It’s an enzyme that makes this chemical, and that enzyme can be inhibited. We think if we inhibit that enzyme, we can alter learning and memory in mouse. This is the kind of experiment you can do in mouse. We can’t do it in primates because they’re too complicated.

One of the things we’ve been talking about is whether an inhibitor like that could be relevant to humans. We’re not talking about the kinds of stresses our kids go through over smartphones. We’re talking about the kinds of things that really impede your ability to function.

Knowledge@Wharton: Going back to the business aspect, if these discoveries lead to treatments down the road, that could chip away at some pieces of the health care problem in this county.
Platt: Sure, and hopefully down the road is not so far down the road. The enzyme that Shelley’s talked about, it’s quite clear that one could imagine developing a drug to target that specific mechanism. If you had a combat veteran who was exposed to a blast or something else incredibly stressful, you could potentially deliver that drug at the right place and the right time and block the formation of bad memories. That would be an incredible opportunity.

“If you had a combat veteran who was exposed to a blast or something else incredibly stressful, you could potentially deliver [a] drug at the right place and the right time and block the formation of bad memories.” –Michael Platt

The other extension of this are ways of trying to mitigate stress before it leads to something. We’re talking about chronic stress rather than acute stress. Are there ways that we can prevent it? There are a lot of options that people are exploring, such as improving your social connections, mindfulness and meditation, exercise. We know those things are all really good. We just don’t know how they work.

Knowledge@Wharton: Is there a difference between people who handle stress really well and those who don’t?

Platt: This is a really tricky and interesting and important question. Is it something you’re born with or something you can teach? There is fabulous work from Penn professor Angela Duckworth on grit, which is this resilience. It seems like some people have a great reservoir of grit, while it’s harder for others to demonstrate it. That leads to the question of whether you can develop it. Can you train it? Can you educate people to display that grit more often? If so, then that’s another approach to dealing with life stress.

Berger: It seems to me that the monkeys are the place to study that because Michael’s group sees which monkeys are accepted.

Platt: One thing that’s really fascinating about the monkeys that we study is that they have personalities, just like people do. The big five personality instruments that you would apply to a person, you could do the same with a monkey. We’ve done that, and their personalities are consistent over time. A monkey who’s very timid and anxious when he’s 6 months old is going to be similarly timid and anxious when he’s an adolescent. A monkey who is very bold or very aggressive, you’ll see those patterns continue. It’s not 100%. It’s not like it’s genetically determined. I think that’s where the fascinating thing is. Maybe 25% or 50% is purely genetic, and the rest is environment in how they respond to it. That’s why this is so important.

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North Korea 'could kill almost four million people in Seoul and Tokyo with retaliatory nuclear attack' 10-10

A US military assault on North Korea could prompt a last gasp retaliatory nuclear attack by Pyongyang on Seoul and Japan killing as many as 3.8 million people, according to a new analysis of the destructive potential of Kim Jong-un arsenal.

Donald Trump has repeatedly warned that all options remain on the table – including the use of force – in dealing with the North Korean threat.

However, analysts say the US is hamstrung by Pyongyang’s growing weapons stockpile and the fact that major population centres lie well within its range.

A detailed analysis by 38 North, a programme at the US-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, has crunched the numbers, based on North Korea’s likely arsenal of as many as 25 weapons with possible yields of up to 250 kilotons, of the sort tested last month.
Using population density figures and blast radius estimates, Michael Zaguruk, calculated that a single detonation over Seoul could kill almost 800,000 people and over Tokyo would kill almost 700,000.

Those numbers rise to a combined total of almost four million dead if North Korea manages to launch multiple rockets carrying its latest thermonuclear bomb.
And that is without considering the effects of radioactive fallout.

The numbers are a sobering reminder of the difficulties of dealing with Mr Kim and his nuclear arsenal.

Mr Zaguruk explains the possible measures available to the US and the possible response.
“This could include such options as attempting to shoot down the test missiles or possibly attacking North Korea’s missile testing, nuclear related sites, missile deployment areas or the Kim regime itself,” he writes.

“The North Korean leadership might perceive such an attack as an effort to remove the Kim family from power and, as a result, could retaliate with nuclear weapons as a last gasp reaction before annihilation.”

Meanwhile, North Korea continues to press ahead with its nuclear and missile programmes.
Fresh reports circulated on Friday that a long-range missile, capable of reaching the west coast of the US, was being prepared for testing.

Anton Morozov, a member of the Russian lower house of parliament's international affairs committee, made the claim after returning from a visit to North Korea.

"They are preparing for new tests of a long-range missile. They even gave us mathematical calculations that they believe prove that their missile can hit the west coast of the United States," he said, according to the RIA news agency.

"As far as we understand, they intend to launch one more long-range missile in the near future. And in general, their mood is rather belligerent."

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