Checkout the book Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive by Bruce Schneier. Here is a description:
Liars and Outliers reaches across academic disciplines to develop an understanding of trust, cooperation, and social stability. From the subtle social cues we use to recognize trustworthy people to the laws that punish the noncompliant, from the way our brains reward our honesty to the bank vaults that keep out the dishonest, keeping people cooperative is a delicate balance of rewards and punishments. It’s a series of evolutionary tricks, social pressures, legal mechanisms, and physical barriers.
In the absence of personal relationships, we have no choice but to substitute security for trust, compliance for trustworthiness. This progression has enabled society to scale to unprecedented complexity, but has also permitted massive global failures.
At the same time, too much cooperation is bad. Without some level of rule-breaking, innovation and social progress become impossible. Society stagnates.
The New Yorker has an article titled “The Caging of America.” Here is an excerpt:
For most privileged, professional people, the experience of confinement is a mere brush, encountered after a kid’s arrest, say. For a great many poor people in America, particularly poor black men, prison is a destination that braids through an ordinary life, much as high school and college do for rich white ones. More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.
The chart above comes from The Dish post titled “Does Facebook Expand Our Horizons?“
The NYT has an article by Patricia Cohen titled “A Sharper Mind, Middle Age and Beyond.” Here is an excerpt:
As it turns out, one essential element of mental fitness has already been identified. “Education seems to be an elixir that can bring us a healthy body and mind throughout adulthood and even a longer life,” says Margie E. Lachman, a psychologist at Brandeis University who specializes in aging. For those in midlife and beyond, a college degree appears to slow the brain’s aging process by up to a decade, adding a new twist to the cost-benefit analysis of higher education — for young students as well as those thinking about returning to school.
Dr. Lachman is one of the principal investigators for what could be considered the Manhattan Project of middle age, an enormous study titled Midlife in the United States, or Midus. This continuing examination of Americans’ physical and emotional health and habits gained momentum in the 1990s as the first wave of baby boomers were settling into their fifth decade and running up against their own biases against aging. More than 7,000 people 25 to 74 years old were drafted to participate so that middle-agers could be compared with those younger and older. And with a new $21 million grant from the National Institute on Aging, the Midus team is beginning its third round of research this month.
Checkout the book by Bella DePaulo titled Singlism: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How to Stop It. Here is an excerpt from it:
Are you among those who prefer to dwell in the dark? Or maybe you are one who believes that there really isn’t anything to see here. If you are, well let me tell you, you have lots of company. I named the bias of singlism to make it more recognizable, in hopes that every time the word was uttered or read, a puff of old-fashioned consciousness-raising would waft through the air. Sometimes that happens. I’ve gotten reports of that delicious sweet scent of recognition — the putting into place of the pieces that had no real substance or form until they were named. The “aha!” moment of the downside of single life. It is not about not having The One. (Or, for those who want The One, it is not just about that.) It is about the assumptions people make about you — nearly all of them damning — when all they know is that you are single. It is about the expectation that you will stay late at work or cover for the couples, because how could you have a life of your own if you are single. It is about the question you are asked — “So why are you single?” — that in its parallel form would be considered entirely inappropriate, ludicrous, or insulting if turned on the asker (“So why are you married?”) It is about the full price or even surcharge you pay for health insurance, car insurance, travel packages, membership dues, and more, all of which subsidize the discounts that go to couples. It is about the headlines that proclaim (erroneously), that if only you would marry, you would become lastingly happier and healthier and live longer. And it is about a whole lot more.
