Book Notes

Question 1

“One way in which Mother Nature has perhaps helped adolescents unbuckle themselves from their parents is to march their circadian rhythms forward in time, past that of their adult mothers and fathers”

Excerpt From
Why We Sleep
Matthew Walker
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Question 2

“The changes in deep NREM sleep always precede the cognitive and developmental milestones within the brain by several weeks or months, implying a direction of influence: deep sleep may be a driving force of brain maturation, not the other way around.”

Excerpt From
Why We Sleep
Matthew Walker
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Question 3

“There are two main culprits of drowsy-driving accidents. The first is people completely falling asleep at the wheel. This happens infrequently, however, and usually requires an individual to be acutely sleep-deprived (having gone without shut-eye for twenty-plus hours). The second, more common cause is a momentary lapse in concentration, called a microsleep. These last for just a few seconds, during which time the eyelid will either partially or fully close. They are usually suffered by individuals who are chronically sleep restricted, defined as getting less than seven hours of sleep a night on a routine basis.”

Excerpt From
Why We Sleep
Matthew Walker
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Question 4

“YOU DO NOT KNOW HOW SLEEP-DEPRIVED YOU ARE WHEN YOU ARE SLEEP-DEPRIVED
The third key finding, common to both of these studies, is the one I personally think is the most harmful of all. When participants were asked about their subjective sense of how impaired they were, they consistently underestimated their degree of performance disability.”

Excerpt From
Why We Sleep
Matthew Walker
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Question 5

“YOU DO NOT KNOW HOW SLEEP-DEPRIVED YOU ARE WHEN YOU ARE SLEEP-DEPRIVED
The third key finding, common to both of these studies, is the one I personally think is the most harmful of all. When participants were asked about their subjective sense of how impaired they were, they consistently underestimated their degree of performance disability.”

Excerpt From
Why We Sleep
Matthew Walker
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Question 6

“After thirty years of intensive research, we can now answer many of the questions posed earlier. The recycle rate of a human being is around sixteen hours. After sixteen hours of being awake, the brain begins to fail. Humans need more than seven hours of sleep each night to maintain cognitive performance. After ten days of just seven hours of sleep, the brain is as dysfunctional as it would be after going without sleep for twenty-four hours. Three full nights of recovery sleep (i.e., more nights than a weekend) are insufficient to restore performance back to normal levels after a week of short sleeping. Finally, the human mind cannot accurately sense how sleep-deprived it is when sleep-deprived.”

Excerpt From
Why We Sleep
Matthew Walker
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Question 7

“They believed that by inserting a nap at the front end of an incoming bout of sleep deprivation, you could insert a buffer, albeit temporary and partial, that would protect the brain from suffering catastrophic lapses in concentration. They were right. ”

Excerpt From
Why We Sleep
Matthew Walker
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Question 8

“No matter what you may have heard or read in the popular media, there is no scientific evidence we have suggesting that a drug, a device, or any amount of psychological willpower can replace sleep. Power naps may momentarily increase basic concentration under conditions of sleep deprivation, as can caffeine up to a certain dose.”

Excerpt From
Why We Sleep
Matthew Walker
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Question 9

“Insufficient sleep does not, therefore, push the brain into a negative mood state and hold it there. Rather, the under-slept brain swings excessively to both extremes of emotional valence, positive and negative.
”

Excerpt From
Why We Sleep
Matthew Walker
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Question 10

“There is no major psychiatric condition in which sleep is normal. This is true of depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder (once known as manic depression)…Indeed, many of the brain regions commonly impacted by psychiatric mood disorders are the same regions that are involved in sleep regulation and impacted by sleep loss. Further, many of the genes that show abnormalities in psychiatric illnesses are the same genes that help control sleep and our circadian rhythms.”

Excerpt From
Why We Sleep
Matthew Walker
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Question 11

“the hippocampus—the information “in-box” of the brain that acquires new facts. There was lots of healthy, learning-related activity in the hippocampus in the participants who had slept the night before. However, when we looked at this same brain structure in the sleep-deprived participants, we could not find any significant learning activity whatsoever. It was as though sleep deprivation had shut down their memory in-box, and any new incoming information was simply being bounced”

Excerpt From
Why We Sleep
Matthew Walker
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Question 12

“In other words, if you don’t sleep the very first night after learning, you lose the chance to consolidate those memories, even if you get lots of “catch-up” sleep thereafter. In terms of memory, then, sleep is not like the bank. You cannot accumulate a debt and hope to pay it off at a later point in time. Sleep for memory consolidation is an all-or-nothing event. ”

Excerpt From
Why We Sleep
Matthew Walker
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Question 13

“When we wake each morning, our brains can once again function efficiently thanks to this deep cleansing.
So what does this have to do with Alzheimer’s disease? One piece of toxic debris evacuated by the glymphatic system during sleep is amyloid protein—the poisonous element associated with Alzheimer’s disease…wakefulness is low-level brain damage, while sleep is neurological sanitation.”

Excerpt From
Why We Sleep
Matthew Walker
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Question 14

“I have always found it curious that Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan—two heads of state that were very vocal, if not proud, about sleeping only four to five hours a night—both went on to develop the ruthless disease.”

Excerpt From
Why We Sleep
Matthew Walker
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Question 15

“I should note that in many of these studies, the relationship between short sleep and heart failure remains strong even after controlling for other known cardiac risk factors, such as smoking, physical activity, and body mass. A lack of sleep more than accomplishes its own, independent attack on the heart.”

Excerpt From
Why We Sleep
Matthew Walker
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Question 16

“every experiment that has investigated the impact of deficient sleep on the human body has observed an overactive sympathetic nervous system. For as long as the state of insufficient sleep lasts, and for some time thereafter, the body remains stuck in some degree of a fight-or-flight state”

Excerpt From
Why We Sleep
Matthew Walker
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Question 17

“That’s precisely what researchers did to a group of overweight men and women who stayed in a medical center for an entire fortnight. However, one group of individuals were given just five and a half hours’ time in bed, while the other group were offered eight and a half hours’ time in bed.
Although weight loss occurred under both conditions, the type of weight loss came from very different sources. When given just five and a half hours of sleep oppurtunity, more than 70 percent of the pounds lost came from lean body mass—muscle, not fat. Switch to the group offered eight and a half hours’ time in bed each night and a far more desirable outcome was observed, with well over 50 percent of weight loss coming from fat while preserving muscle”

Excerpt From
Why We Sleep
Matthew Walker
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Question 18

“However, that flu shot is only effective if your body actually reacts to it by generating antibodies…Those participants who obtained seven to nine hours’ sleep in the week before getting the flu shot generated a powerful antibody reaction, reflecting a robust, healthy immune system…Perhaps the sleep-deprived individuals could still go on to produce a more robust immune reaction if only they were given enough recovery sleep time? It’s a nice idea, but a false one”

Excerpt From
Why We Sleep
Matthew Walker
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Question 19

“Cancers are known to use the inflammation response to their advantage. For example, some cancer cells will lure inflammatory factors into the tumor mass to help initiate the growth of blood vessels that feed it with more nutrients and oxygen. Tumors can also use inflammatory factors to help further damage and mutate the DNA of their cancer cells, increasing the tumor’s potency. Inflammatory factors associated with sleep deprivation may also be used to help physically shear some of the tumor from its local moorings, allowing the cancer to up-anchor and spread to other territories of the body.”

Excerpt From
Why We Sleep
Matthew Walker
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Question 20

“REM sleep can therefore be considered as a state characterized by strong activation in visual, motor, emotional, and autobiographical memory regions of the brain, yet a relative deactivation in regions that control rational thought”

Excerpt From
Why We Sleep
Matthew Walker
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Question 21

“Concentrations of a key stress-related chemical called noradrenaline are completely shut off within your brain when you enter this dreaming sleep state. In fact, REM sleep is the only time during the twenty-four-hour period when your brain is completely devoid of this anxiety-triggering molecule. Noradrenaline, also known as norepinephrine…The theory proposed that a contributing mechanism underlying the PTSD is the excessively high levels of noradrenaline within the brain that blocks the ability of these patients from entering and maintaining normal REM-sleep dreaming…the repetitive nightmares reported in PTSD patients—a symptom so reliable that it forms part of the list of features required for a diagnosis of the condition. If the brain cannot divorce the emotion from memory across the first night following a trauma experience, the theory suggests that a repeat attempt of emotional memory stripping will occur on the second night…Prazosin was gradually lowering the harmful high tide of noradrenaline within the brain, giving these patients healthier REM-sleep quality…prazosin has become the officially approved drug by the VA for the treatment of repetitive trauma nightmares, and has since received approval by the US Food and Drug Administration for the same benefit.”

Excerpt From
Why We Sleep
Matthew Walker
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Question 22

“It postulated that the process of REM-sleep dreaming accomplishes two critical goals: (1) sleeping to remember the details of those valuable, salient experiences, integrating them with existing knowledge and putting them into autobiographical perspective, yet (2) sleeping to forget, or dissolve, the visceral, painful emotional charge that had previously been wrapped around those memories.”

Excerpt From
Why We Sleep
Matthew Walker
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Question 23

“Upon awakenings from NREM sleep, participants did not appear to be especially creative, solving few of the anagram puzzles. But it was a different story when I woke them up out of REM sleep, from the dreaming phase. Overall, problem-solving abilities rocketed up, with participants solving 15 to 35 percent more puzzles when emerging from REM sleep compared with awakenings from NREM sleep or during daytime waking performance!”

Excerpt From
Why We Sleep
Matthew Walker
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Question 24

“As with the effects of REM sleep on our emotional and mental well-being explored in the previous chapter, the latter would prove that REM sleep is necessary but not sufficient. It is both the act of dreaming and the associated content of those dreams that determine creative success…The content of one’s dreams, more than simply dreaming per se, or even sleeping, determines problem-solving success.”

Excerpt From
Why We Sleep
Matthew Walker
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Question 25

“How can I understand and connect that which I have recently learned with that I already know, and in doing so, discover insightful new links and revelations?” Moreover, “What have I done in the past that might be useful in potentially solving this newly experienced problem in the future?” Different from solidifying memories, which we now realize to be the job of NREM sleep, REM sleep, and the act of dreaming, takes that which we have learned in one experience setting and seeks to apply it to others stored in memory.”

Excerpt From
Why We Sleep
Matthew Walker
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Question 26

“The content of one’s dreams, more than simply dreaming per se, or even sleeping, determines problem-solving success”

Excerpt From
Why We Sleep
Matthew Walker
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Question 27

“grasping the ball bearings. Only then would Edison ease back and allow sleep to consume him whole. At the moment he began to dream, his muscle tone would relax and he would release the ball bearings, which would crash on the metal saucepan below, waking him up. He would then write down all of the creative ideas that were flooding his dreaming mind.”

Excerpt From
Why We Sleep
Matthew Walker
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Question 28

“sleepwalking, sleep talking, sleep eating, sleep texting, sleep sex, and, very rarely, sleep homicide…Understandably, most people believe these events happen during REM sleep as an individual is dreaming, and specifically acting out ongoing dreams. However, all these events arise from the deepest stage of non-dreaming (NREM) sleep, and not dream (REM) sleep…Trapped between the two worlds of deep sleep and wakefulness, the individual is confined to a state of mixed consciousness—neither awake nor asleep. In this confused condition, the brain performs basic but well-rehearsed actions, such as walking over to a closet and opening it, placing a glass of water to the lips, or uttering a few words or sentences…There are the clear and unmistakable slow electrical waves of deep NREM sleep, with no sign of fast, frenetic waking brainwave activity.”

Excerpt From
Why We Sleep
Matthew Walker
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Question 29

“After falling asleep on the couch around 1:30 a.m. while watching television, Parks arose and got in his car, barefoot. Depending on the route, it is estimated that Parks drove approximately fourteen miles to his in-laws’ home. Upon entering the house, Parks made his way upstairs, stabbed his mother-in-law to death with a knife he had taken from their kitchen”

Excerpt From
Why We Sleep
Matthew Walker
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Question 30

“ insomnia, researchers have focused on examining the biological causes that underlie emotional turmoil. One common culprit has become clear: an overactive sympathetic nervous system, which, as we have discussed in previous chapters, is the body’s aggravating fight-or-flight mechanism”

Excerpt From
Why We Sleep
Matthew Walker
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Question 31

“Researchers have placed healthy sleepers and insomnia patients in a brain scanner and measured the changing patterns of activity as both groups try to fall asleep. In the good sleepers, the parts of the brain related to inciting emotions (the amygdala) and those linked to memory retrospection (the hippocampus) quickly ramped down in their levels of activity as they transitioned toward sleep, as did basic alertness regions in the brain stem. This was not the case for the insomnia patients. Their emotion-generating regions and memory-recollection centers all remained active. This was similarly true of the basic vigilance centers in the brain stem that stubbornly continued their wakeful watch. All the while the thalamus—the sensory gate of the brain that needs to close shut to allow sleep—remained active and open for business in insomnia patients.
Simply put, the insomnia patients could not disengage from a pattern of altering, worrisome, ruminative brain activity”

Excerpt From
Why We Sleep
Matthew Walker
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Question 32

“Cataplectic attacks are not random, but are triggered by moderate or strong emotions, positive or negative. Tell a funny joke to a narcoleptic patient, and they may literally collapse in front of you…A narcoleptic patient is banished to a monotonic existence of emotional neutrality…Instead, what the strong emotion has triggered is the total (or sometimes partial) body paralysis of REM sleep without the sleep of the REM state itself. Cataplexy is therefore an abnormal functioning of the REM-sleep circuitry within the brain,”

Excerpt From
Why We Sleep
Matthew Walker
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Question 33

“When orexin is released down onto your brain stem, the switch has been unambiguously flipped, powering up the wakefulness-generating centers of the brain stem. Once activated by the switch, the brain stem pushes open the sensory gate of the thalamus, allowing the perceptual world to flood into your brain, transitioning you to full, stable wakefulness.
At night, the opposite happens. The sleep-wake switch stops releasing orexin onto the brain stem”

Excerpt From
Why We Sleep
Matthew Walker
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Question 34

“Alcohol sedates you out of wakefulness, but it does not induce natural sleep. The electrical brainwave state you enter via alcohol is not that of natural sleep; rather, it is akin to a light form of anesthesia…First, alcohol fragments sleep, littering the night with brief awakenings. Alcohol-infused sleep is therefore not continuous and, as a result, not restorative. Unfortunately, most of these nighttime awakenings go unnoticed by the sleeper since they don’t remember them”

“Second, alcohol is one of the most powerful suppressors of REM sleep that we know of…The pent-up REM-sleep pressure erupts forcefully into waking consciousness, causing hallucinations, delusions, and gross disorientation. The technical term for this terrifying psychotic state is “delirium tremens.”

Excerpt From
Why We Sleep
Matthew Walker
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Question 35

“your core temperature needs to decrease by 2 to 3 degrees Fahrenheit, or about 1 degree Celsius. For this reason, you will always find it easier to fall asleep in a room that is too cold than too hot”

Excerpt From
Why We Sleep
Matthew Walker
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Question 36

“Most of us are unaware of an even greater danger that lurks within the alarm clock: the snooze button. If alarming your heart, quite literally, were not bad enough, using the snooze feature means that you will repeatedly inflict that cardiovascular assault again and again within a short span of time”

Excerpt From
Why We Sleep
Matthew Walker
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This material may be protected by copyright.

Question 37

“Consider that the original Star Wars movies—some of the highest-grossing films of all time—required more than forty years to amass $3 billion in revenue. It took Ambien just twenty-four months to amass $4 billion in sales profit, ”

Excerpt From
Why We Sleep
Matthew Walker
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Question 38

“Nevertheless, the US Department of Defense subverted this ruling, authorizing twenty-hour interrogations of detainees in Guantánamo Bay between 2003 and 2004. Such treatment remains permissible to this day of writing”

Excerpt From
Why We Sleep
Matthew Walker
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Question 39

“NREM sleep was left largely intact, but the amount of REM sleep was reduced to a fraction of its regular quantity.”

“REM sleep is what stands between rationality and insanity.”

“It is the lack of REM sleep—that critical stage occurring in the final hours of sleep that we strip from our children and teenagers by way of early school start times—that creates the difference between a stable and unstable mental state.”

Excerpt From
Why We Sleep
Matthew Walker
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Question 40

“Our children didn’t always go to school at this biologically unreasonable time. A century ago, schools in the US started at nine a.m. As a result, 95 percent of all children woke up without an alarm clock”

Excerpt From
Why We Sleep
Matthew Walker
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This material may be protected by copyright.

Question 41

“The resulting oxygen debt will reflexively force the brain to awaken the child briefly throughout the night so that several full breaths can be obtained, restoring full blood oxygen saturation. However, this prevents the child from reaching and/or sustaining long periods of valuable deep NREM sleep.”

Excerpt From
Why We Sleep
Matthew Walker
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Question 42

“Human social behavior is complex and often nearly inscrutable, but this book provides a framework for helping readers make sense of it, especially the parts that are otherwise counterintuitive. Why do people laugh? Who’s the most important person in the room (and how can I tell)? Why are artists sexy? Why do so many people brag about travel? Does anyone really, truly believe in creationism?”

Excerpt From
The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life
Robin Hanson
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Question 43

“Because others are judging us, we’re eager to look good. So we emphasize our pretty motives and downplay our ugly ones. It’s not lying, exactly, but neither is it perfectly honest.”

Excerpt From
The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life
Robin Hanson
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Question 44

“Finally, we can correlate the average body size (of each primate species) with the amount of time they spend grooming. If grooming were strictly a hygienic activity, we’d expect larger species—those with more fur—to spend more time grooming each other. But in fact there’s no correlation…The political function of grooming also explains why grooming time across species is correlated with the size of the social group, but not the amount of fur.14 Larger groups have, on average, greater political complexity, making alliances more important but also harder to maintain.”

Excerpt From
The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life
Robin Hanson
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Question 45

“Note that these primates don’t need to be conscious of their political motivations. As far as natural selection is concerned, all that matters is that primates who do more social grooming fare better than primates who do less. Primates are thereby endowed with instincts that make them feel good when they groom each other, without necessarily understanding why they feel good.”

Excerpt From
The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life
Robin Hanson
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Question 46

“Now, as we mentioned earlier, it would be a mistake to call these animal motives “hidden,” at least in the psychological sense…Knowledge suppression is useful only when two conditions are met: (1) when others have partial visibility into your mind; and (2) when they’re judging you, and meting out rewards or punishments, based on what they “see” in your mind…Just as camouflage is useful when facing an adversary with eyes, self-deception can be useful when facing an adversary with mind-reading powers”

Excerpt From
The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life
Robin Hanson
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Question 47

“Collective enforcement, then, is the essence of norms. This is what enables the egalitarian political order so characteristic of the forager lifestyle.
If you refrain from hitting people because you’re afraid they’ll hit you back, that’s not a norm. If you’re afraid of speaking out against a dangerous regime because you’re worried about retaliation from the regime itself, that’s not a norm. But if you’re worried that your neighbors might disapprove and even coordinate to punish you, then you’re most likely dealing with a norm. It’s this third-party, collective enforcement that’s unique to humans.”

“Collective enforcement, then, is the essence of norms. This is what enables the egalitarian political order so characteristic of the forager lifestyle.
If you refrain from hitting people because you’re afraid they’ll hit you back, that’s not a norm. If you’re afraid of speaking out against a dangerous regime because you’re worried about retaliation from the regime itself, that’s not a norm. But if you’re worried that your neighbors might disapprove and even coordinate to punish you, then you’re most likely dealing with a norm. It’s this third-party, collective enforcement that’s unique to humans.”

Excerpt From
The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life
Robin Hanson
https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewBook?id=0
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Question 48

“Weapons are a game changer for two reasons. First, they level the playing field between weak and strong members of a group.”

“Once weapons enter the picture, physical strength is no longer the most crucial factor in determining a hominid’s success within a group. It’s still important, mind you, but not singularly important. In particular, political skill—being able to identify, join, and possibly lead the most effective coalition—takes over as the determining factor.”

Excerpt From
The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life
Robin Hanson
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Question 49

“In Chapter 2, we discussed how humans, like all animals, are competitive and selfish, and argued that competition was an important driving force in the evolution of our big brains. Then, in this chapter, we discussed how humans, unlike other animals, learned to limit wasteful intra-species competition by the use of norms.
Careful readers will have noticed the tension between these two facts. Specifically, if norms succeed at restricting competition, it reduces the incentive to be a clever competitor.”

“So successful norm-enforcement should have caused human brains to shrink.
But of course our brains didn’t shrink—they ballooned. And this wasn’t in spite of our norms, but because of them. To find out why, we turn to the topic of cheating.”

Excerpt From
The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life
Robin Hanson
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Question 50

“Our ancestors did a lot of cheating. How do we know? One source of evidence is the fact that our brains have special-purpose adaptations for detecting cheaters.3 When abstract logic puzzles are framed as cheating scenarios, for example, we’re a lot better at solving them”

“But of course, if our ancestors needed to evolve brains that were good at cheater-detection, it’s because their peers were routinely trying to cheat them—and those peers were also our ancestors”

Excerpt From
The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life
Robin Hanson
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Question 51

“The most basic way to get away with something—whether you’re stealing, cheating on your spouse, or just picking your nose—is simply to avoid being seen. One of our norm-evasion adaptations, then, is to be highly attuned to the gaze of others, especially when it’s directed at us. Eyes that are looking straight at us jump out from a crowd.5 Across dozens of experiments, participants who were being watched—even just by cartoon eyes—were less likely to cheat”

Excerpt From
The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life
Robin Hanson
https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewBook?id=0
This material may be protected by copyright.

Question 52

“illustrates common knowledge using email.11 If you invite your friends to a party using the “To” and “Cc” fields, the party will be common knowledge—because every recipient can see every other recipient. But if you invite your guests using the “Bcc” field, even though each recipient individually will know about the party, it won’t be common knowledge. We might refer to information distributed this way, in the “Bcc” style, as closeted”

“Everyone saw the king was naked, but at the same time, everyone was worried that other people might believe the con men—so no adult was willing to speak up and risk looking like a fool”

“And a secret can be widely known without being openly known—the closeted lesbian’s sexuality, for example, or the fact that the emperor is naked.”

Excerpt From
The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life
Robin Hanson
https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewBook?id=0
This material may be protected by copyright.

Question 53

“Pretexts. These function as ready-made excuses or alibis.
*Discreet communication. Keeping things on the down-low.
*Skirting a norm instead of violating it outright.
*Subtlety. In honor cultures, an open insult is considered ample provocation for violence. In contrast, an insult that’s subtle enough not to land “on the record” will often get a pass.

All of these techniques work by the same mechanism, in that they prevent a norm violation from becoming full common knowledge, which makes it more difficult to prosecute.”

“ a pretext doesn’t need to fool everyone—it simply needs to be plausible enough to make people worry that other people might believe it.”

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Question 54

“If norms are supposed to discourage competition, then why do we still need big brains? A plausible answer is that our norms are only partially enforced, so we need big brains to figure out how to cheat”

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Question 55

“The red milksnake, utterly harmless, wears stripes to pose as a deadly coral snake. Some orchid species mimic other flowers in order to attract pollinating bees, but without providing any nectar in return.1 Dozens of species use eye spots to trick other animals into thinking they’re being watched. Possums, lizards, birds, and sharks “play dead,” hoping to dissuade predators who are interested only in live prey”

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Question 56

“ou might suppose, given how important health is to our happiness (not to mention our longevity), it would be a domain to which we’d bring our cognitive A-game.”

“Smokers, but not nonsmokers, choose not to hear about the dangerous effects of smoking.8 People systematically underestimate their risk of contracting HIV (human immunodeficiency virus),9 and avoid taking HIV tests.”

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Question 57

“The first—what we’ll call the Old School—treats self-deception as a defense mechanism.”

“Our egos and self-esteem are fragile and need to be shielded from distressing information, like the fact that we probably won’t win the upcoming competition, or the fact that we may be sick with some lurking cancer.”

“Why would Nature, by way of evolution,15 design our brains this way? Information is the lifeblood of the human brain; ignoring or distorting it isn’t something to be undertaken lightly. If the goal is to preserve self-esteem, a more efficient way to go about it is simply to make the brain’s self-esteem mechanism stronger, more robust to threatening information. Similarly, if the goal is to reduce anxiety, the straightforward solution is to design the brain to feel less anxiety for a given amount of stress.
In contrast, using self-deception to preserve self-esteem or reduce anxiety is a sloppy hack and ultimately self-defeating.”

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Question 58

“In other words, mixed-motive games contain the kind of incentives that reward self-deception.”

“Another way to look at it is that self-deception is useful only when you’re playing against an opponent who can take your mental state into account. You can’t bluff the blind forces of Nature, for example.”

“why do we distort the truth to ourselves? What’s the benefit of self-deception over a simple, deliberate lie?
There are many ways to answer this question, but they mostly boil down to the fact that lying is hard to pull off. For one thing, it’s cognitively demanding. Huckleberry Finn, for example, struggled to keep his stories straight and was eventually caught in a number of lies”

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Question 59

“There are at least four ways that self-deception helps us come out ahead in mixed-motive scenarios. We’ll personify them in four different archetypes: the Madman, the Loyalist, the Cheerleader, and the Cheater.”

“I call it the Madman Theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We’ll just slip the word to them that, “for God’s sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about communism. We can’t restrain him when he’s angry — and he has his hand on the nuclear button” and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.30”

“There’s a famous Chinese parable illustrating the Loyalist function of our beliefs:

Zhao Gao was a powerful man hungry for more power. One day he brought a deer to a meeting with the emperor and many top officials, calling the deer a “great horse.” The emperor, who regarded Zhao Gao as a teacher and therefore trusted him completely, agreed that it was a horse—and many officials agreed as well. Others, however, remained silent or objected. This was how Zhao Gao flushed out his enemies. Soon after, he murdered all the officials who refused to call the deer a horse.31”

“It’s also why blind faith is an important virtue”

“The goal of cheerleading, then, is to change other people’s beliefs. And the more fervently we believe something, the easier it is to convince others that it’s true. The politician who’s confident she’s going to win no matter what will have an easier time rallying supporters”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” the Cheater says in response to an accusation. “My motives were pure.”

“When we deceive ourselves about our own motives, however, it becomes much harder for others to prosecute these minor transgressions”

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Question 60

“Psychologists call this modularity. Instead of a single monolithic process or small committee, modern psychologists see the brain as a patchwork of hundreds or thousands of different parts or “modules,”

“blindsight, which typically follows from some kind of brain damage, like a stroke to the visual cortex. Just like people who are conventionally blind, blindsighted patients swear they can’t see. But when presented with flashcards and forced to guess what’s on the card, they do better than chance.”

“ In other words, we can act on information that isn’t available to our verbal, conscious egos. And conversely, we can believe something with our conscious egos”

“No matter how fervently a person believes in Heaven, for example, she’s still going to be afraid of death. This is because the deepest, oldest parts of her brain—those charged with self-preservation—haven’t the slightest idea about the afterlife.”

“Even more dramatic examples of rationalization can be elicited from patients suffering from disability denial…Apart from their bizarre denials, these patients are otherwise mentally healthy and intelligent human beings…
“They will confabulate and rationalize and forge counterfeit reasons until they’re blue in the face.”

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Question 61

“Press secretaries can’t say that because they have no power to make or revise policy. They’re simply told what the policy is, and their job is to find evidence and arguments that will justify the policy to the public…In many ways, its job—our job—isn’t to make decisions, but simply to defend them.”

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Question 63

“They were, in other words, merely play fighting. And what Bateson realized was that, in order to play fight, the monkeys needed some way to communicate their playful intentions—some way to convey the message, “We’re just playing.” Without one or more of these “play signals,” one monkey might misconstrue the other’s intentions, and their playful sparring could easily escalate into a real fight”

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Question 64

“When we laugh at our own actions, it’s a signal to our playmates that our intentions are ultimately playful (although we may seem aggressive). This is the kind of laugh a young child might give after play hitting an adult or other child,29 or that adults give when they’re gently poking fun at someone. It’s the behavioral equivalent of “Just kidding!” or a winking emoji at the end of a text message . When we laugh in response to someone else’s actions, however, it’s a statement not about intentions but about perceptions. It says, “I perceive your actions as playful; I know you’re only kidding around.” ”

“If she laughs first, it means she feels safe, so you can feel safe too. But if you laugh first, she’s liable to take offense. How could you feel safe when she hasn’t given the “all clear” (you insensitive clod)”

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Question 65

“But where there’s danger, there’s also an opportunity for exploratory play.”

“Thus we use laughter to gauge and calibrate social boundaries—both behavioral boundaries (norms) and group membership boundaries (who deserves how much of our empathy)”

“The Contest” in which the characters wager to see who can hold out the longest without masturbating. The dialogue is careful to dance around the actual word “masturbate,” but you weren’t born yesterday; you know what they’re talking about. And the fact that masturbation is played for laughs tells you most of what you need to know about the topic: first, that it’s a taboo, not something you’ll want to discuss in front of grandma; and second, that it’s commonplace and more or less acceptable, at least in the eyes of mainstream TV-watching Americans. Society may not fully condone it, but it won’t get you labeled a deviant. It’s a norm violation, but also benign.
Laughter, then, shows us the boundaries that language is too shy to make explicit. In this way, humor can be extremely useful for exploring the boundaries of the social world”

“And yet what fans say they love about Burr is that he’s honest—“refreshingly,” “brutally,” “devastatingly” honest.
So which is it? Is he just joking or telling the truth?”

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Question 66

“ we do so little original research to determine where to donate. Original research generates private information about which charities are worthy, but in order to signal how prosocial we are, we need to donate to charities that are publicly known to be worthy.”

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Question 67

“Why does charity make us attractive to mates, teammates, and social gatekeepers?” In other words, which qualities are we demonstrating when we donate, volunteer, or otherwise act selflessly? Here again there are a few different answers.
The most obvious thing we advertise is wealth, or in the case of volunteer work, spare time.”

“This is the same logic that underlies our tendency toward conspicuous consumption, conspicuous athleticism, and other fitness displays”

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Question 68

“For example, someone who gives between $500 and $999 might be called a “friend” or “silver sponsor,” while someone who gives between $1,000 and $1,999 might be called a “patron” or “gold sponsor.” If you donate $900, then, you’ll earn the same label as someone who donates only $500. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of donations to such campaigns fall exactly at the lower end of each tier.30 Put another way: very few people give more than they’ll be recognized for.”

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The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life
Robin Hanson
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Question 69

“For example, bartenders with a high school diploma make 61 percent more, and those with a college diploma make an additional 62 percent, relative to their less credentialed peers. For waiters, these gains are 135 percent and 47 percent, and for security guards, they are 60 percent and 29 percent.3 Yet high school and college teach little that is useful for being a bartender, waiter, or security guard. Why do employers pay so much for unused learning?”

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The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life
Robin Hanson
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Question 70

“Individual students can expect their incomes to rise roughly 8 to 12 percent for each additional year of school they complete. Nations, however, can expect their incomes to rise by only 1 to 3 percent for each additional year of school completed by their citizens on average.13 If schooling actually works by improving individual students, then we would expect the improvements for individual students to be cumulative across a nation”

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The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life
Robin Hanson
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Question 71

“For example, if the value of a college degree were largely a function of what you learned during your college career, we might expect colleges to experiment with giving students a comprehensive “exit exam” covering material in all the courses they took”

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Robin Hanson
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Question 72

“The more school is about credentialing (rather than learning), the less the nation as a whole stands to benefit from more years of it. If only a small amount of useful learning takes place, then sending every citizen to an extra year of school will result in only a small increase in the nation’s overall productivity”

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The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life
Robin Hanson
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Question 73

“Compulsory state-sponsored education traces its heritage to a relatively recent, and not particularly “scholarly,” development: the expansion of the Prussian military state in the 18th and 19th centuries.”

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Question 74

“Modern schools also seem to change student attitudes about fairness and equality. While most fifth graders are strict egalitarians, and prefer to divide things up equally, by late adolescence, most children have switched to a more meritocratic ethos”

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Question 75

“These interlocking pieces work together, creating strong social incentives for individuals to act (selfishly) in ways that benefit the entire religious community. And the net result is a highly cohesive and cooperative social group. A religion, therefore, isn’t just a set of”

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Question 76

“To lock in the benefits of cooperation, then, a community also needs robust mechanisms to keep cheaters at bay.”

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Question 77

“ it never makes sense to take a resource and just throw it away or burn it up. But add a few other humans to the scene, and suddenly it can be perfectly rational—because, as we’ve seen many times, sacrifice is socially attractive.30 Who makes a better ally: someone who’s only looking out for number one or someone who shows loyalty, a willingness to sacrifice for others’ benefit?”

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The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life
Robin Hanson
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Question 78

“Less symbolically, many practices also serve to stigmatize practitioners in the eyes of outsiders. By wearing “strange” clothes or refusing to eat from the same plates as secular folk, members of a given sect lose standing in broader society (while gaining it within the sect, of course).”

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Question 79

“Certainly all this cooperative niceness has its advantages, and groups full of nice people tend to outcompete those full of nasty people. The problem, of course, is how to keep cheaters from ruining the party.
One solution, as we’ve seen, is costly signaling, which helps keeps less-committed people out of the group.”

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The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life
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Question 80

“After you’ve paid a lot of dues, made a lot of friends, and accumulated a lot of social capital over the years, the threat of being kicked out of a group becomes especially frightening. And this, in turn, reduces the need for expensive monitoring.”

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The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life
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Question 81

“Our species, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear, is wired to form social bonds when we move in lockstep with each other.48 This can mean marching together, singing or chanting in unison, clapping hands to a beat, or even just wearing the same clothes.”

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The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life
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Question 82

“the value of holding certain beliefs comes not from acting on them, but from convincing others that you believe them. This is especially true of religious beliefs. They aren’t particularly useful or practical for individuals in isolation, and yet we experience large social rewards for adopting them and/or punishment for not adopting them. This is what it means for a belief to be an orthodoxy. Whether you accept it can make the difference between the warm embrace of fellowship and the cold shoulder of ostracism”

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The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life
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Question 83

“which were almost always “up” (in health terms) for our ancestors—until one day we’re stricken with diabetes or a heart attack. In military landscapes, we learn to show bravery, earning ever more respect from our comrades—right up until we take a bullet. Drug addicts seek ever-more-pleasurable highs until they overdose.”

“In all of these cases, instincts that are adaptive in one context can lead us fatefully astray in another. But we shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that the instincts are necessarily maladaptive, or that the people acting on them are hopelessly foolish or deluded.”

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The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life
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Question 84

“The biggest lesson from Part I is that we ignore the elephant because doing so is strategic. Self-deception allows us to act selfishly without having to appear quite so selfish in front of others. If we admit to harboring hidden motives, then, we risk looking bad, thereby losing trust in the eyes of others. And even when we simply acknowledge the elephant to ourselves, in private, we burden our brains with self-consciousness and the knowledge of our own hypocrisy”

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Question 85

“Hypocrisy,” writes La Rochefoucauld, “is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.” In other words, it’s taxing to be a hypocrite, but that very tax is a key disincentive to bad behavior.7”

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The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life
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Question 86

“We should take a similar approach when reforming a preexisting institution by first asking ourselves, “What are this institution’s hidden functions, and how important are they?” Take education, for example. We may wish for schools that focus more on teaching than on testing. And yet, some amount of testing is vital to the economy, since employers need to know which workers to hire. So if we tried to cut too much from school’s testing function, we could be blindsided by resistance we don’t understand—because those who resist may not tell us the real reasons for their opposition”

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Question 87

“One promising approach to institutional reform is to try to acknowledge people’s need to show off, but to divert their efforts away from wasteful activities and toward those with bigger benefits and positive externalities. For example, as long as students must show off by learning something at school, we’d rather they learned something useful (like how to handle personal finances) instead of something less useful (like Latin)”

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Question 88

“Even if a philanthropist’s motives are selfish, her behaviors need not be—and we would be fools to conflate these two ways of measuring virtue.”

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Question 89

“ It is a wonderful quirk of our species that the incentives of social life don’t reward strictly ruthless behavior. Leaders who are too domineering are often penalized. Rampant lying and cheating are often caught and punished. Freeloaders frequently get the boot. At the same time, people are often positively rewarded—with friendship, social status, a better reputation—for their service to others. As if our oversized brains and hairless skin didn’t make us an uncanny enough species, our genes long ago decided that, in the relentless competition to survive and reproduce, their best strategy was to build ethical brains.”

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Question 90

“ So pointing to lower rates of marriage among the poor as the main reason for their poverty is akin to pointing to higher rates of homeownership among the affluent as the primary reason for their prosperity, confusing effect for cause. Homeownership doesn’t lead to financial stability; it leads to more financial stability.”

Excerpt From
Poverty, by America
Matthew Desmond
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Question 91

“There is no evidence that the United States has become stingier over time. The opposite is true.[11]
This makes the country’s stalled progress on poverty even more baffling. Decade after decade, the poverty rate has remained flat even as federal relief has surged. How could thisbe?”

Excerpt From
Poverty, by America
Matthew Desmond
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Question 92

“The line curves slightly up, then slightly down, then back up again over the years, staying steady through Democratic and Republican administrations, rising in recessions and falling in boom years. There is no real improvement here, just a long stasis.”

Excerpt From
Poverty, by America
Matthew Desmond
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Question 93

“But when President Bill Clinton reformed welfare in 1996, replacing the old model with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), he transformed the program into a block grant that gives states considerable leeway in deciding how to distribute the money. As a result, states have come up with rather creative ways to spend TANF dollars.
Nationwide, for every dollar budgeted for TANF in 2020, poor families directly received just 22 cents”

Excerpt From
Poverty, by America
Matthew Desmond
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Question 94

“If we have more than doubled government spending on poverty and achieved so little, one reason is because the American welfare state is a leaky bucket.[21] A dollar allocated to an antipoverty program does not mean a dollar will ultimately reach a needy family.”

Excerpt From
Poverty, by America
Matthew Desmond
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Question 95

“The politicians who wring their hands about “the border crisis” know full well that the undocumented population peaked over fifteen years ago, in 2007. Yet employers have not responded to a shrinking undocumented workforce by hiring native-born workers at competitive wages. Instead, they have responded by automating their jobs (using machines instead), hiring other immigrants, like those on H-2A visas (Americans don’t exactly queue up for immigrant jobs), or simply closing up shop.”

Excerpt From
Poverty, by America
Matthew Desmond
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Question 96

“America’s obsession with incarceration has removed scores of poor people from their families, strictly controlling when they can call their children, spouses, and loved ones, and then releasing them back into society with a criminal record that impedes their already dim job and housing prospects. In the history of the nation, there has only been one other state-sponsored initiative more antifamily than mass incarceration, and that was slavery.
”

Excerpt From
Poverty, by America
Matthew Desmond
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Question 97

“(Did the undocumented workers choose the terms of their arrangement? If they migrated as adults, yes, they did. But just because desperate people accept and even seek out exploitative conditions doesn’t make those conditions any less exploitative.)[5]
More shifting in chairs. It’s more complicated than that, some will say. Most social problems are complicated, of course, but a retreat into complexity is more often a reflection of our social standing than evidence of critical intelligence.”

Excerpt From
Poverty, by America
Matthew Desmond
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Question 98

“Democrats push the idea that raising the minimum wage will create jobs by increasing spending, as workers will have more money in their pockets. Republicans fret that raising the minimum wage will cost jobs, echoing Stigler. You can find studies that support both positions, but the bulk of the evidence suggests that the employment effect of raising the minimum wage is inconsequential.”

Excerpt From
Poverty, by America
Matthew Desmond
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Question 99

“If he manned the grill at a McDonald’s in Denmark, his paycheck would have been double what it was in Emeryville.[13]”

Excerpt From
Poverty, by America
Matthew Desmond
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Question 100

“It wasn’t always this bad. Between the late 1940s and the late 1970s, the American economy expanded and shared its bounty. Honest work delivered a solid paycheck, and a big reason why had to do with union power. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, nearly a third of all U.S. workers carried union cards.”

Excerpt From
Poverty, by America
Matthew Desmond
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Question 101

“By excluding Black workers, unions prevented the American labor movement from ever realizing its full potential.[15]”

Excerpt From
Poverty, by America
Matthew Desmond
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Question 102

“. When workers refused to return to work, President Reagan fired all of them. The public’s response was muted, and corporate America learned that it could crush unions with minimal blowback.”

Excerpt From
Poverty, by America
Matthew Desmond
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Question 103

“The negative effects of unions have been wildly overstated, and there is now evidence that they play a role in boosting company productivity, for example by reducing turnover.[19] ”

Excerpt From
Poverty, by America
Matthew Desmond
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Question 104

“We were promised economic dynamism in exchange for inequality,” write Eric Posner and Glen Weyl in their book, Radical Markets. “We got the inequality, but dynamism is actually declining.”[20]”

Excerpt From
Poverty, by America
Matthew Desmond
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Question 105

“The United States now offers some of the lowest wages in the industrialized world, a feature that has swelled the ranks of the working poor, most of whom are thirty-five or older.”

Excerpt From
Poverty, by America
Matthew Desmond
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Question 106

“Yet Belgium, Canada, Italy, and many other countries haven’t experienced the kind of wage stagnation and surge in income inequality that the United States has. Why? A big reason is that those countries managed to keep their unions.[25] Which means this is largely about power.”

Excerpt From
Poverty, by America
Matthew Desmond
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Question 107

“Lousy, underpaid work is not an indispensable, if regrettable, by-product of capitalism, as some pro-business defenders claim today. (This notion would have scandalized capitalism’s earliest defenders.”

Excerpt From
Poverty, by America
Matthew Desmond
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Question 108

“ Before the rise of this chopped-up or “fissured” workplace, large firms standardized wages and benefits for all their employees. This had an equalizing effect, raising the income of, say, a janitor at an automobile factory. Today, temp agencies compete over who can offer the cheapest labor. OnContracting, a staffing agency, estimates that U.S. tech companies like Google and Apple can save an average of $100,000 each year per job by using their services.”

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Poverty, by America
Matthew Desmond
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Question 109

“Just three corporations alone—Meta, Amazon, and Comcast—spent more in 2022 than all labor unions combined”

Excerpt From
Poverty, by America
Matthew Desmond
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Question 110

“Work is not what keeps scores of low-paid Americans from plunging into deep poverty. The government is. It’s the government that helps these families access healthcare (through Medicaid), that helps them eat (food stamps), and that boosts their incomes (the Earned Income Tax Credit).”

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Poverty, by America
Matthew Desmond
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Question 111

“Our biggest antipoverty program for the working poor is the Earned Income Tax Credit”

“But perhaps the primary reason the EITC enjoys such widespread support is because it functions as a generous handout to corporations. Among the loudest champions of the EITC have been multinational businesses, whose low wages are effectively subsidized through the program.”

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Poverty, by America
Matthew Desmond
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Question 112

“The first time we did a strike, I felt very nervous,” he told me. But when he showed up in his work uniform and saw thousands of other fast food workers in theirs, he found his voice. It felt like church.
On a Tuesday night in May 2015, the Emeryville City Council voted to raise the city’s minimum wage to almost $16 an hour by 2019. In July 2022, the city’s minimum wage was set at $17.68, among the highest in the nation.
When I spoke to Julio in the winter of 2019, he was making $15 an hour at Burger King and $15.69 at a large hotel, where he worked as a room attendant. He could now afford to work less, logging around forty-eight hours a week when things were slow and sixty hours when they weren’t.”

Excerpt From
Poverty, by America
Matthew Desmond
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Question 113

“ Vocal segments of the American public, those with brain space to spare, seem to believe the poor should change their behavior to escape poverty. Get a better job. Stop having children. Make smarter financial decisions. In truth, it’s the other way around: Economic security leads to better choices.[43]”

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Poverty, by America
Matthew Desmond
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Question 114

“For much of the migration, Blacks often paid double what white tenants had previously been charged for the worst housing in the city. As late as 1960, median rent in Detroit was higher for Blacks than for whites. In The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson sums up the pattern: “The least-paid people were forced to pay the highest rents for the most dilapidated housing owned by absentee landlords trying to wring the most money out of a place nobody cared about.”

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Poverty, by America
Matthew Desmond
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Question 115

“Why have rents shot up so fast? Experts tend to offer the same rote answers to this question. There’s not enough housing supply, they say, and too much demand. Government regulation and zoning restrictions have made building more expensive, and these costs are passed on to renters. Landlords must charge more just to earn a decent rate of return.”

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Poverty, by America
Matthew Desmond
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Question 116

“We need more housing; no one can deny that. But rents have jumped even in cities with plenty of apartments to go around. At the end of 2021, almost 19 percent of rental units in Birmingham, Alabama, sat vacant, as did 12 percent of those in Syracuse, New York. Yet rent in those areas increased by roughly 14 and 8 percent, respectively, over the previous two years”

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Poverty, by America
Matthew Desmond
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Question 117

“Why do landlords in poor neighborhoods make more? Because their regular expenses (especially their mortgages and property tax bills) are considerably lower than those in more affluent neighborhoods, but their rents are only slightly lower.”

Excerpt From
Poverty, by America
Matthew Desmond
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Question 118

“But it does mean that those who try to make as much money landlording as they would make in a conventional job—or who try to reproduce the security that comes with saving for retirement for most of your adult life by investing in rental housing—can often only do so by squeezing their tenants.”

Excerpt From
Poverty, by America
Matthew Desmond
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Question 119

“Even if Lakia had had a decent credit score, and even if she’d managed to save enough for a down payment, her chances of securing a mortgage for an affordable home would have remained slim because banks aren’t interested in financing the kind of homes she could afford. With no access to such mortgages, poor families must pay high rents on otherwise affordable homes. In the not-so-distant past (from 1934 to 1968), banks didn’t do business in poor and Black communities because the federal government refused to insure mortgages there. Today, banks don’t do much business in these same neighborhoods because they can make more money elsewhere”

Excerpt From
Poverty, by America
Matthew Desmond
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Question 120

“Redlining may no longer be official U.S. policy, but poor and predominately Black neighborhoods, and even whole towns, continue to function as “mortgage deserts.”

Excerpt From
Poverty, by America
Matthew Desmond
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Question 121

“in 2019, the largest banks in America charged customers $11.68 billion in overdraft fees. Just 9 percent of account holders paid 84 percent of these fees. Who were the unlucky 9 percent? Customers who carried an average balance of less than $350. The poor were made to pay for their poverty.[18]”

Excerpt From
Poverty, by America
Matthew Desmond
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Question 122

“But the deregulation of the banking sector in the 1980s ushered the money changers back into the temple by removing strict usury limits. Interest rates soon reached 300 percent, then 500 percent, then 700”

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Poverty, by America
Matthew Desmond
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Question 123

“Payday lenders do not charge high fees because lending to the poor is risky—even after multiple extensions, most borrowers pay up. Lenders extort because they can.”

Excerpt From
Poverty, by America
Matthew Desmond
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Question 124

“The five states with the lowest unemployment (Alaska, Hawaii, North Carolina, Rhode Island, and Vermont) had retained some or all of the benefits. States that had cut unemployment benefits did not experience significant job growth. What they did experience was a decline in consumer spending, since the cuts left their citizens with less money, which slowed local economies.[5]
Other studies found no evidence that unemployment benefits were causing workers to stay home”

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Poverty, by America
Matthew Desmond
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Question 125

“ A review of the research in Science concluded that “the welfare system does not foster reliance on welfare so much as it acts as insurance against temporary misfortune.”

Excerpt From
Poverty, by America
Matthew Desmond
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Question 126

“There are no official estimates of the total amount of government aid that goes unclaimed by low-income Americans, but the number is in the hundreds of billions of dollars a year. Consider the amount of money left on the table by low-income workers who don’t apply for the Earned Income Tax Credit. Roughly 7 million people who could receive the credit don’t claim it, collectively passing up $17.3 billion annually”

Excerpt From
Poverty, by America
Matthew Desmond
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Question 127

“. In 2020 the federal government spent more than $193 billion on homeowner subsidies, a figure that far exceeded the amount spent on direct housing assistance for low-income families ($53 billion). Most families who enjoy those subsidies have six-figure incomes and are white. Poor families lucky enough to live in government-owned apartments often have to deal with mold and even lead paint, while rich families are claiming the mortgage interest deduction on first and second homes.”

Excerpt From
Poverty, by America
Matthew Desmond
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Question 128

“When all taxes are accounted for, we’re all effectively taxed at the same rate. On average, poor and middle-class Americans dedicate approximately 25 percent of their income to taxes, while rich families are taxed at an effective rate of 28 percent, just slightly higher. The four hundred richest Americans are taxed at 23 percent, the lowest rate of all”

Excerpt From
Poverty, by America
Matthew Desmond
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Question 129

“How do we square this? How do we reconcile the fact that massive government tax benefits go unnoticed by middle- and upper-class families who claim them, which in turn spreads resentment among those families toward a government perceived to be giving handouts to poor families”

Excerpt From
Poverty, by America
Matthew Desmond
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Question 130

“In Japan, Great Britain, Estonia, the Netherlands, and several other countries, citizens don’t file taxes; the government does it automatically”

Excerpt From
Poverty, by America
Matthew Desmond
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Question 131

“. Here’s the bottom line: The most recent data compiling spending on social insurance, means-tested programs, tax benefits, and financial aid for higher education show that the average household in the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution receives roughly $25,733 in government benefits a year, while the average household in the top 20 percent receives about $35,363.[36] Every year, the richest American families receive almost 40 percent more in government subsidies than the poorest American families.”

Excerpt From
Poverty, by America
Matthew Desmond
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Question 132

“A major driver of this trend was the biggest tax cut in U.S. history. The Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, proposed by Congressman Jack Kemp and signed into law by President Reagan, reduced federal tax revenues by more than 13 percent over four years. The act included across-the-board cuts to income taxes, including a 20 percentage point reduction in the top marginal tax rate, and slashed estate taxes as well. Republican overexuberance rocked the economy.”

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Poverty, by America
Matthew Desmond
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Question 133

“Reagan reduced funding for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, not by 20 or 40 percent, but by almost 70 percent. The agency whose budget was once second only to the Department of Defense, the agency that had replaced slums with (once) safe and dependable housing, soon couldn’t pay for its buildings’ trash collection or elevator repair.[11]”

Excerpt From
Poverty, by America
Matthew Desmond
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Question 134

“For example, by the early aughts most of Atlanta’s public schools had less than three white students. In 2022, 16 percent of Atlanta’s public school students were white, in a city with a 38 percent white population.[15]”

Excerpt From
Poverty, by America
Matthew Desmond
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Question 135

“President Trump called his signature policy achievement “the biggest tax cut in U.S. history.” It wasn’t, but it was plenty big and will reduce public investment by an estimated $1.9 trillion by 2027.[18] ”

Excerpt From
Poverty, by America
Matthew Desmond
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Question 136

“How much would it cost to end poverty—not to reduce it by 10 percent or even cut it in half, but to abolish it entirely? In 2020, the gap separating everyone in America below the poverty line and the poverty line itself amounted to $177 billion”

Excerpt From
Poverty, by America
Matthew Desmond
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Question 137

“One hundred and seventy-seven billion dollars is less than 1 percent of our GDP. Americans throw away more than that amount in food every year.[13]”

Excerpt From
Poverty, by America
Matthew Desmond
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Question 138

“ The IRS now estimates that the United States loses more than $1 trillion a year in unpaid taxes, most of it owing to tax avoidance by multinational corporations and wealthy families.”

Excerpt From
Poverty, by America
Matthew Desmond
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Question 139

“Since 1962, the effective tax rate for poor, working-class, and middle-class Americans has increased, while it has decreased for the top 10percent of income earners, and particularly for the richest among us. This is absurd. We should bump up the top marginal tax rate—perhaps to 50 percent, as it was in 1986; or 70percent, as it was in 1975—”

Excerpt From
Poverty, by America
Matthew Desmond
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Question 140

“Meanwhile, at 21 percent, the corporate tax rate in America is the lowest it’s been in more than eighty years. We could fund a good deal of antipoverty initiatives by increasing it to 35percent, as it was from 1993 through 2017, or to 46 percent, as it was from 1979 through 1986.[17]”

Excerpt From
Poverty, by America
Matthew Desmond
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Question 141

“After the Great Recession that began in 2008, families in the bottom half of the income distribution had to wait nearly ten years before their incomes returned to pre-recession levels.”

Excerpt From
Poverty, by America
Matthew Desmond
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Question 142

“ The Emergency Rental Assistance program, in tandem with other pandemic aid like the expanded Child Tax Credit, had cut the eviction filing rate in half in city after city across the United States. Eviction rates were lower than they had ever been on record.[30]”

Excerpt From
Poverty, by America
Matthew Desmond
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Question 143

“When we refuse to recognize what works, we risk swallowing the lie that nothing does. We risk imagining the future only as more of the same. We risk giving in to despair, perhaps the most exculpating of all emotions, and submitting to cynicism, perhaps the most conservative of all belief systems.”

Excerpt From
Poverty, by America
Matthew Desmond
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Question 144

“By one estimate, simply collecting unpaid federal income taxes from the top 1 percent of households would bring in some $175 billion a year. We could just about fill the entire poverty gap in America if the richest among us simply paid all the taxes they owed.[34]”

Excerpt From
Poverty, by America
Matthew Desmond
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Question 145

“The Fight for $15 campaign, led by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), hasn’t focused on a single franchise (a specific McDonald’s store) or even a single company (McDonald’s) but has brought together workers from several fast food chains. In Seattle, New York City, and elsewhere, these workers successfully pressured elected officials to raise wages for all workers in their cities. Here is a new kind of labor power, one that strives to organize whole regions,”

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Poverty, by America
Matthew Desmond
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Question 146

“those of us who consider America’s experiment with public housing an abject failure, recalling those segregated, Soviet-style towers in cities like Chicago and St. Louis, towers that in the end had become so decrepit and violent that dynamiting them felt like a kindness. But I recommend withholding judgment until you visit Via Verde, a gorgeous affordable housing complex in the South Bronx”

Excerpt From
Poverty, by America
Matthew Desmond
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Question 147

“Public housing works for the lucky minority of poor families who benefit from it. By extending its reach, we could provide permanent, affordable housing to many more—even all—low-income Americans”

Excerpt From
Poverty, by America
Matthew Desmond
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Question 148

“This requires doing our homework, looking into a company’s track record. Trying to mail a package? UPS drivers are unionized, but FedEx drivers are not. Need a drink? Rolling Rock and Miller are union-made. Want some candy? The people who make Jolly Ranchers are unionized.[28] Increasingly, American consumers are considering the environmental impact of their purchases. We should consider their poverty impact, too.”

Excerpt From
Poverty, by America
Matthew Desmond
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Question 149

“Inquilinxs Unidxs por Justicia (United Renters for Justice), a tenants’ rights organization in Minneapolis that goes by the abbreviation IX. The organization was made up of security guards, store clerks, night-shift custodians, immigrants, and young people. The members of IX didn’t want to live in public housing or subsidized apartments. They didn’t even want to own their own homes. What they wanted was to buy their apartment buildings from their landlord and turn them into a tenant-owned cooperative”

Excerpt From
Poverty, by America
Matthew Desmond
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Question 150

“Platforms such as DoneGood and Buycott steer customers toward businesses fairly compensating their workers. The nonprofit organization B Lab certifies companies that meet high social and environmental standards, scoring on the basis of worker compensation and benefits, job flexibility, potential for worker ownership, and a host of other criteria. If given the choice between a company that is B Lab certified and one that is not, let’s choose the businesses that are doing right by their workers and the planet.”

Excerpt From
Poverty, by America
Matthew Desmond
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Question 151

“While exclusionary zoning makes it illegal to develop affordable housing, inclusionary zoning makes it illegal not to. That’s the stronger version anyway, mandating that new developments set aside a percentage of their units for low-income families. The weaker version is voluntary, providing developers with incentives if they include affordable housing in their blueprints, usually in the form of tax relief or a “density bonus” that allows them to build more”

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Poverty, by America
Matthew Desmond
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Question 152

“ In the United States, the state leading the way on this is New Jersey. Nearly every suburban jurisdiction in the state has affordable housing. Why? Because in a series of landmark decisions, the New Jersey Supreme Court not only prohibited exclusionary zoning but also required all municipalities to provide their “fair share” of affordable housing, the fair share being calculated by the demographics of each town. If municipalities fail to do their part, courts can make them, redrawing the lines of a town’s zoning map to allow affordable housing projects to move forward”

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Poverty, by America
Matthew Desmond
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Question 153

“Once those plans are inked, it doesn’t take long for developers to bid on the job because they can make more money on multifamily complexes than stand-alone homes, even when they rent out a share of their units to low-income families. This strategy has allowed New Jersey to create thousands of affordable units without a dime of state or federal money.[9]”

Excerpt From
Poverty, by America
Matthew Desmond
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Question 154

“Do affordable housing developments cause property values to decline? If they are built poorly and not maintained, then yes, just as any kind of neglected housing would. But studies have found that when affordable housing blends into the surrounding community, and when it is well managed and well distributed instead of being clustered in one place, it has zero effect on property values.[10]”

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Poverty, by America
Matthew Desmond
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Question 155

“Romney wanted the U.S. government to finally stop subsidizing segregation. His idea so enraged white suburbanites that Nixon smothered it and eventually forced Romney out of office”

Excerpt From
Poverty, by America
Matthew Desmond
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Question 156

“How was President Johnson able to break through congressional gridlock to deliver the civil rights acts, the Great Society, and the War on Poverty? The civil rights movement forced his hand by putting unrelenting pressure on lawmakers.”

Excerpt From
Poverty, by America
Matthew Desmond
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