The First Map of How Our Brain Organizes Everything We See

by Monica Diana Bercea

NeuroRelay
December 27, 2012

A research published in the Cell Press journal Neuron on the 20th of December 2012 (Alexander G. Huth, Shinji Nishimoto, An T. Vu, Jack L. Gallant. "A Continuous Semantic Space Describes the Representation of Thousands of Object and Action Categories across the Human Brain." Neuron, 2012; 76 (6): 1210) describes the first developed map of how our brain sorts everything we see.

While neuromarketers aim to understand how people make sense of the thousands of advertisements that flood their retinas each day, scientists at the University of California have found that the brain is wired to put in order all the categories of objects and actions that we see. They have created the first interactive map of how the brain organizes these groupings, and you may see it below (it looks like fractals, doesn’t it?):

“Humans can recognize thousands of categories. Given the limited size of the human brain, it seems unreasonable to expect that every category is represented in a distinct brain area,” says first author Alex Huth, a graduate student working in Dr. Jack Gallant’s laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley.

Here is a video of the author that explains his work:

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Timur Kuran, "The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East"

Princeton University Press
2010

In the year 1000, the economy of the Middle East was at least as advanced as that of Europe. But by 1800, the region had fallen dramatically behind--in living standards, technology, and economic institutions. In short, the Middle East had failed to modernize economically as the West surged ahead. What caused this long divergence? And why does the Middle East remain drastically underdeveloped compared to the West? In The Long Divergence, one of the world's leading experts on Islamic economic institutions and the economy of the Middle East provides a new answer to these long-debated questions.

Timur Kuran argues that what slowed the economic development of the Middle East was not colonialism or geography, still less Muslim attitudes or some incompatibility between Islam and capitalism. Rather, starting around the tenth century, Islamic legal institutions, which had benefitted the Middle Eastern economy in the early centuries of Islam, began to act as a drag on development by slowing or blocking the emergence of central features of modern economic life--including private capital accumulation, corporations, large-scale production, and impersonal exchange. By the nineteenth century, modern economic institutions began to be transplanted to the Middle East, but its economy has not caught up. And there is no quick fix today. Low trust, rampant corruption, and weak civil societies--all characteristic of the region's economies today and all legacies of its economic history--will take generations to overcome.

The Long Divergence opens up a frank and honest debate on a crucial issue that even some of the most ardent secularists in the Muslim world have hesitated to discuss.

Timur Kuran is professor of economics and political science and the Gorter Family Professor of Islamic Studies at Duke University. He is the author of Islam and Mammon: The Economic Predicaments of Islamism (Princeton).

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Yannis M. Ioannides, "From Neighborhoods to Nations: The Economics of Social Interactions"

Princeton University Press
Press Release
December 2012

Just as we learn from, influence, and are influenced by others, our social interactions drive economic growth in cities, regions, and nations--determining where households live, how children learn, and what cities and firms produce. From Neighborhoods to Nations synthesizes the recent economics of social interactions for anyone seeking to understand the contributions of this important area. Integrating theory and empirics, Yannis Ioannides explores theoretical and empirical tools that economists use to investigate social interactions, and he shows how a familiarity with these tools is essential for interpreting findings. The book makes work in the economics of social interactions accessible to other social scientists, including sociologists, political scientists, and urban planning and policy researchers.

Focusing on individual and household location decisions in the presence of interactions, Ioannides shows how research on cities and neighborhoods can explain communities' composition and spatial form, as well as changes in productivity, industrial specialization, urban expansion, and national growth. The author examines how researchers address the challenge of separating personal, social, and cultural forces from economic ones. Ioannides provides a toolkit for the next generation of inquiry, and he argues that quantifying the impact of social interactions in specific contexts is essential for grasping their scope and use in informing policy.

Revealing how empirical work on social interactions enriches our understanding of cities as engines of innovation and economic growth, From Neighborhoods to Nations carries ramifications throughout the social sciences and beyond.

Yannis M. Ioannides is the Max and Herta Neubauer Professor of Economics at Tufts University.

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Income and Democracy: Lipset's Law Revisited

by Anke Hoeffler, Robert H. Bates and Ghada Fayad

International Monetary Fund
Working Paper No. 12/295
December 17, 2012

We revisit Lipset‘s law, which posits a positive and significant relationship between income and democracy. Using dynamic and heterogeneous panel data estimation techniques, we find a significant and negative relationship between income and democracy: higher/lower incomes per capita hinder/trigger democratization. Decomposing overall income per capita into its resource and non-resource components, we find that the coefficient on the latter is positive and significant while that on the former is significant but negative, indicating that the role of resource income is central to the result.

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Albert O. Hirschman (1915–2012)

Princeton University
Institute for Advanced Study
December 12, 2012

Renowned social scientist Albert O. Hirschman, whose highly influential work in economics and politics in developing countries has had a profound impact on economic thought and practice in the United States and beyond, died at the age of 97 on December 10 at Greenwood House in Ewing Township, N.J. Hirschman was Professor Emeritus in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, where he had served on the Faculty since 1974.

“Albert Hirschman developed innovative methods for promoting economic and social growth through his study of the intellectual underpinnings of economic policies and political democracy,” said Robbert Dijkgraaf, Director and Leon Levy Professor at the Institute. “An impassioned observer who sought to understand the world as well as change it, Albert will be sorely missed by the Institute community and by the international community at large where his voice has influenced and guided advancement for more than half a century.”

Over the course of his long and extraordinarily productive career, Hirschman earned a reputation for progressive, lucid and brilliantly argued contributions to economics, the history of ideas and the social sciences. He explored a vast range of topics, inspired by the complexity of human behavior and social reality rather than by traditional economic models. He applied a subtle and iconoclastic perspective to reappraising conventional wisdom, resulting in original work that was a constant stimulus to critical thought in the social sciences. In a 1993 interview with Carmine Donzelli, Hirschman noted, “The idea of trespassing is basic to my thinking. Attempts to confine me to a specific area make me unhappy. When it seems that an idea can be verified in another field, then I am happy to venture in this direction. I believe this is a simple and useful way of discovering ‘related’ topics.”

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Commerce Claus: The behavioral economics of Christmas

by George Loewenstein and Cass R. Sunstein

New Republic
December 20, 2012

Some economists dislike Christmas. They allege that it “destroys value,” which is, in Econoland, the first and only sin. The economist Joel Waldfogel, author of Scroogenomics, goes so far as to contend that the winter holiday season is “an orgy of value destruction.”

Waldfogel’s main concern is that the value of gifts to their recipients is typically far lower than the money that was spent on them. He found that of the $65 billion spent on winter holiday gifts in 2009, about 20 percent was wasted, in the sense that the gifts were worth that much less to the recipient than they cost. And indeed, it is an inescapable fact of life that people who receive holiday gifts often don’t much like what they get. If you’ve ever been presented with a sweater that you would never wear in public or electronic equipment whose purpose escapes you, you will understand what Waldfogel is talking about.

In hard economic times, when both the government and ordinary people are trying desperately to save money, this is a sobering analysis. We don’t propose that Congress should try to solve the debt crisis by requiring people to give holiday season money to the Treasury Department rather than spending it on presents. But mis-giving does no good for anyone, and we have a few ideas about how to make it through the season a bit more easily.

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Saving Economics from the Economists

by Ronald Coase

Harvard Business Review
December 2012

Economics as currently presented in textbooks and taught in the classroom does not have much to do with business management, and still less with entrepreneurship. The degree to which economics is isolated from the ordinary business of life is extraordinary and unfortunate.

That was not the case in the past. When modern economics was born, Adam Smith envisioned it as a study of the “nature and causes of the wealth of nations.” His seminal work, The Wealth of Nations, was widely read by businessmen, even though Smith disparaged them quite bluntly for their greed, shortsightedness, and other defects. The book also stirred up and guided debates among politicians on trade and other economic policies. The academic community in those days was small, and economists had to appeal to a broad audience. Even at the turn of the 20th century, Alfred Marshall managed to keep economics as “both a study of wealth and a branch of the study of man.” Economics remained relevant to industrialists.

In the 20th century, economics consolidated as a profession; economists could afford to write exclusively for one another. At the same time, the field experienced a paradigm shift, gradually identifying itself as a theoretical approach of economization and giving up the real-world economy as its subject matter. Today, production is marginalized in economics, and the paradigmatic question is a rather static one of resource allocation. The tools used by economists to analyze business firms are too abstract and speculative to offer any guidance to entrepreneurs and managers in their constant struggle to bring novel products to consumers at low cost.

This separation of economics from the working economy has severely damaged both the business community and the academic discipline. Since economics offers little in the way of practical insight, managers and entrepreneurs depend on their own business acumen, personal judgment, and rules of thumb in making decisions. In times of crisis, when business leaders lose their self-confidence, they often look to political power to fill the void. Government is increasingly seen as the ultimate solution to tough economic problems, from innovation to employment.

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