America's greatest gift

Evolution's Gift

A particular system of brain mechanisms, called the retinoid system, is proposed as the evolutionary adaptation responsible for the existence of subjectivity and our sense of being here in a surrounding 3D world. The structural and dynamic properties of the retinoid system successfully predict a novel conscious experience in which the brain constructs a vivid visual representation of an object ...

Eight Americas: A New Definition for “Americas”?

Sam Singer In their essay in October’s PLoS Medicine, Daniel Reidpath and Kit Yee Chan challenge the widely cited link between HIV-related stigma and the spread of the epidemic [1]. This is an important question, given the heavy emphasis on stigma in policies of the World Health Organization, the Joint United Programme on HIV/AIDS, and other public health institutions, but in making their argum...

Utilitarianism: The Greatest Good for the Greatest Number

A Gift of Time

How would people spend time if confronted by permanent declines in market work? We identify preferences off exogenous cuts in legislated standard hours that raised employers’ overtime costs in Japan around 1990 and Korea in the early 2000s. Using time-diaries from before and after these shocks, we estimate the probability that an individual would have been affected by the reform. Reduced-form e...

The Greatest Generation.