With a timely new foreword by Robert Frank, this groundbreaking book explores the very meaning of happiness and prosperity in America today. Although middle-income families don't earn much more than ...they did several decades ago, they are buying bigger cars, houses, and appliances. To pay for them, they spend more than they earn and carry record levels of debt. Robert Frank explains how increased concentrations of income and wealth at the top of the economic pyramid have set off "expenditure cascades" that raise the cost of achieving many basic goals for the middle class. Writing in lively prose for a general audience, Frank employs up-to-date economic data and examples drawn from everyday life to shed light on reigning models of consumer behavior. He also suggests reforms that could mitigate the costs of inequality. Falling Behind compels us to rethink how and why we live our economic lives the way we do.
Success and Luck Frank, Robert H
2016, 2016., 20160419, 2016-04-19
eBook, Book
FromNew York Timesbestselling author and economics columnist Robert Frank, a compelling book that explains why the rich underestimate the importance of luck in their success, why that hurts everyone, ...and what we can do about it
How important is luck in economic success? No question more reliably divides conservatives from liberals. As conservatives correctly observe, people who amass great fortunes are almost always talented and hardworking. But liberals are also correct to note that countless others have those same qualities yet never earn much. In recent years, social scientists have discovered that chance plays a much larger role in important life outcomes than most people imagine. InSuccess and Luck, bestselling author andNew York Timeseconomics columnist Robert Frank explores the surprising implications of those findings to show why the rich underestimate the importance of luck in success-and why that hurts everyone, even the wealthy.
Frank describes how, in a world increasingly dominated by winner-take-all markets, chance opportunities and trivial initial advantages often translate into much larger ones-and enormous income differences-over time; how false beliefs about luck persist, despite compelling evidence against them; and how myths about personal success and luck shape individual and political choices in harmful ways.
But, Frank argues, we could decrease the inequality driven by sheer luck by adopting simple, unintrusive policies that would free up trillions of dollars each year-more than enough to fix our crumbling infrastructure, expand healthcare coverage, fight global warming, and reduce poverty, all without requiring painful sacrifices from anyone. If this sounds implausible, you'll be surprised to discover that the solution requires only a few, noncontroversial steps.
Compellingly readable,Success and Luckshows how a more accurate understanding of the role of chance in life could lead to better, richer, and fairer economies and societies.
Systematic reviews of diagnostic test accuracy (DTA) studies are fundamental to the decision making process in evidence based medicine. Although such studies are regarded as high level evidence, ...these reviews are not always reported completely and transparently. Suboptimal reporting of DTA systematic reviews compromises their validity and generalisability, and subsequently their value to key stakeholders. An extension of the PRISMA (preferred reporting items for systematic review and meta-analysis) statement was recently developed to improve the reporting quality of DTA systematic reviews. The PRISMA-DTA statement has 27 items, of which eight are unmodified from the original PRISMA statement. This article provides an explanation for the 19 new and modified items, along with their meaning and rationale. Examples of complete reporting are used for each item to illustrate best practices.
Under the Influence Frank, Robert H
2021, 2020, 2020-01-28, 2021-10-12
eBook
From New York Times bestselling author and economics columnist Robert Frank, bold new ideas for creating environments that promise a brighter future Psychologists have long understood that social ...environments profoundly shape our behavior, sometimes for the better, often for the worse. But social influence is a two-way street—our environments are themselves products of our behavior. Under the Influence explains how to unlock the latent power of social context. It reveals how our environments encourage smoking, bullying, tax cheating, sexual predation, problem drinking, and wasteful energy use. We are building bigger houses, driving heavier cars, and engaging in a host of other activities that threaten the planet—mainly because that's what friends and neighbors do.In the wake of the hottest years on record, only robust measures to curb greenhouse gases promise relief from more frequent and intense storms, droughts, flooding, wildfires, and famines. Robert Frank describes how the strongest predictor of our willingness to support climate- friendly policies, install solar panels, or buy an electric car is the number of people we know who have already done so. In the face of stakes that could not be higher, the book explains how we could redirect trillions of dollars annually in support of carbon-free energy sources, all without requiring painful sacrifices from anyone.Most of us would agree that we need to take responsibility for our own choices, but with more supportive social environments, each of us is more likely to make choices that benefit everyone. Under the Influence shows how.
Diabetic retinopathy, an oculardisease, is governed by systemic as well as local ocular factors. These include primarily chronic levels of blood glucose. Individuals with chronically elevated blood ...glucose levels have substantially more, and more severe, retinopathy than those with lower blood glucose levels. The relationship of blood glucose to retinopathy is continuous, with no threshold although individuals with hemoglobin A1c levels (a measure of chronic glycemia) <6.5%, generally develop little or no retinopathy. Blood pressure levels have been claimed to influence retinopathy development and progression, but multiple controlled clinical trials of antihypertensive agents in diabetic subjects have produced only weak evidence of benefit from blood pressure lowering on the incidence and progression of diabetic retinopathy. Elevated blood lipids seem to play a role in the progression of retinopathy, and two trials of fenofibrate, a lipid-lowering agent that has not proved effective in preventing cardiovascular disease, have shown benefit in preventing retinopathy progression. The mechanism of this effect may not, however, be directly related to the reduction in blood lipids. Finally, there is strong, but only circumstantial, evidence for a genetic or epigenetic influence on the pathogenesis of diabetic retinopathy. Despite the power of large-scale epidemiologic studies and modern molecular biological and computational techniques, the gene or genes, which predispose or protect against the development and progression of diabetic retinopathy remain elusive.
We provide an account of clause-boundedness in multiple sluicing that also captures its exceptions. Clause-boundedness arises whenever an embedded clause’s subject is not coreferential with a topical ...discourse referent in the embedding clause. Our account ties clause-boundedness to discourse factors. We discuss implementations that import sensitivity to information structure into the syntax, and compare our approach with recent work—in particular, Grano and Lasnik 2018 and “short source” accounts (most recently, Abels and Dayal 2017, 2021)—and demonstrate that these accounts both under- and overgenerate. The empirical coverage of our account argues against purely syntacticized agreement-based approaches to clause-boundedness.
Because trusting strangers can entail high risk, an ability to infer a potential partner's trustworthiness would be highly advantageous. To date, however, little evidence indicates that humans are ...able to accurately assess the cooperative intentions of novel partners by using nonverbal signals. In two studies involving human-human and human-robot interactions, we found that accuracy in judging the trustworthiness of novel partners is heightened through exposure to nonverbal cues and identified a specific set of cues that are predictive of economic behavior. Employing the precision offered by robotics technology to model and control humanlike movements, we demonstrated not only that experimental manipulation of the identified cues directly affects perceptions of trustworthiness and subsequent exchange behavior, but also that the human mind will utilize such cues to ascribe social intentions to technological entities.
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