Useful for research and trend analysis ...

The National Data Book contains a collection of statistics on social and economic conditions in the United States. Selected international data are also included. The Abstract is also your Guide to Sources of other data from the Census Bureau, other Federal agencies, and private organizations.

Statistical Abstract of the United States, 2004-2005

These findings call into question some approaches to computer simulations of social dynamics.

Formal Aspects of the Emergence of Institutions

"This is the first paper to provide positive evidence of the relationship of this neuropeptide to the complex social behavior we call trust."

Watchdog groups worry that this type of research is another step toward marketers controlling what we buy or who we vote for.

"It's a critical question in diplomacy."

Sniff This and Fork It Over

The style is impressionistic, covering a huge canvas with a light brush. The chapter on cities, for instance, describes deftly the flair, and the stink, of great cities but relegates their social history to endnotes and references. If the book has a weak point, it is the exceptional facility of Seabright's writing—sometimes his verve threatens to carry him away. But then, this may well be intentional: The book is obviously not meant as an exercise in planned economy, but as an excursion, without blinkers and without apprehension, through a tumultuous crowd of ideas.

The Man of the Crowd

We're calling this Global 3.0. The subject is globalization. Now, we've all heard about globalization for years, but like all dynamic, really important ideas, this one keeps changing. It broadens, it gets more and more interesting. So, here, we are taking a third look at globalization.

Global 3.0

Did you know Godiva was a unit of the Campbell Soup Company?

Rising incomes, flattening prices and easily available credit have given so many Americans access to such a wide array of high-end goods that traditional markers of status have lost much of their meaning.

Everyone, meanwhile, appears to be blending into a classless crowd, shedding the showiest kinds of high-status clothes in favor of a jeans-and-sweatsuit informality.

Social competition used to be played out largely at the neighborhood level, among people in roughly the same class.

In the last 30 years or so, however, as people have become increasingly isolated from their neighbors, a barrage of magazines and television shows celebrating the toys and totems of the rich has fostered a whole new level of desire across class groups.

Millions of Americans who could not have dreamed of buying their own homes two decades ago are now doing so in record numbers. A flood of credit is now available to many financially vulnerable families and extended in a reckless and aggressive manner in many cases without thought to implications.

"People want to participate in our brand because we are an affordable luxury," said Gene Dunkin, president of Godiva North America, a unit of the Campbell Soup Company.

When the Joneses Wear Jeans

Creating a communications infrastructure that fosters a healthy democracy has been a concern of the United States since its founding. Newspaperman and intellectual Walter Lippmann once noted that the real trouble with both the press and representative democracy is "the failure of self-governing people to transcend their casual experience and their prejudice by inventing, creating, and organizing a machinery of knowledge." In MemeStreams, that machinery may finally have arrived.

Group Rethink

Have you stood in front of a newsstand lately? 400 Star-laden Pages. 115 Things To Do With Cheese. The 27 Faces Of Infidelity. Numbers and lists dominate the mediascape. Why? Is it a brutish apotheosis of private property—thoughts as things, and the more the better? Is it the end of civilization? In a word (actually, over 1,500 of them!), yes.

I'm curious about what our trust in lists means—from the New York Times' "100 Notable Books of the Year" and the Fortune 500, to the endless gush of long and short lists for book prizes. Why are we such suckers for numbers? To me, numbers flaunt a kind of bogus, unearned power, like border officials, or the doormen of trendy clubs.

But lists are deeply American; the possibility of rising up the list from the bottom of the heap to Number One is what the American Dream is all about.

So here is a list of thirteen possible reasons why, for better or worse, human beings love to list.

13 Reasons For List Lust

In The March of Unreason, Dick Taverne expresses his concern that irrationality is on the rise in Western society, and argues that public opinion is increasingly dominated by unreflecting prejudice and an unwillingness to engage with factual evidence. Discussing topics such as genetically modified crops and foods, organic farming, the MMR vaccine, environmentalism, the precautionary principle, and the new anti-capitalist and anti-globalization movements, he argues that the rejection of the evidence-based approach nurtures a culture of suspicion, distrust, and cynicism, and leads to dogmatic assertion and intolerance. Science, with all the benefits it brings, is an essential part of a civilized and democratic society: it offers the most hopeful future for humankind.

March Of Unreason: Science, Democracy, And The New Fundamentalism

Once a leader in Internet innovation, the United States has fallen far behind Japan and other Asian states in deploying broadband and the latest mobile-phone technology. This lag will cost it dearly. By outdoing the United States, Japan and its neighbors are positioning themselves to be the first states to reap the benefits of the broadband era: economic growth, increased productivity, and a better quality of life.

Down to the Wire