
An overwhelming majority—95 percent—of Americans are confused about the state of global poverty. A survey from the late Hans Rosling’s web project Gapminder assessed the public’s knowledge on that subject. The survey asked twelve thousand people in fourteen countries if, over the last two decades, the proportion of the world’s population living in extreme poverty has a)
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I recently golfed with a friend who works at a large corporation. When the topic of work came up, we swapped stories about our mutual loathing of Facebook. I complained about its algorithm changes, which make it much more difficult to reach our audience. She complained about the mass amounts of personal data her company
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Pew Research recently ran a report on political engagement in America. What caught my eye was the short, seven-question civics test embedded below. As Pew explains, four of the questions in particular, including those about the Electoral College, presidential term limits, and Senate procedures, reveal a lot about American knowledge of government. Perhaps it’s no
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When was the last time you read a book about economics? If your answer is “when I was in high school” or “I have never read a book on such a boring topic”, here are some suggestions in ascending order of difficulty that might help you get into economics. 1. Economics in One Lesson (Henry
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“Being informed” has been regarded as one of the highest virtues in the post-Enlightenment era of the West. And for the majority of this era, “being informed” has largely meant following the news and current events on a daily basis. So much did the ritual of checking the news each morning and evening become part
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It took me a long time to come to grips with the nature of the state. Once I had done so, at least so far as the fundamentals are concerned, I found it almost amusing to ponder how so many analysts and writers, some of them deep, first-rate thinkers, discuss the matter. For the great
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