Brian Scott Gallagher is the Communications Director at Ethical Systems.
Not long ago, NPR spoke with the descendants of the eminent economist John Maynard Keynes. In 1930, Keynes speculated about the future in an essay titled, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” famously suggesting that, by 2030, Americans would enjoy a 15-hour workweek. It is perhaps one of the most depressingly wrongheaded predictions, concerning societal progress, […]
Listening to one of our latest episodes on Breaking the Fever—our podcast in partnership with Preventable Surprises—I was struck by the acuity of one remark in particular. It was about the mind of a whistleblower, the motivations and sense of identity at play. In retrospect, it wasn’t so surprising to hear. Our interviewee, the entrepreneur […]
Perhaps nothing more perfectly encapsulates Michele Wucker’s idea of a “gray rhino”—an obvious threat, a crisis we see coming—than the COVID-19 pandemic. And perhaps no one more perfectly represents the onlooker—who doesn’t get out of the charging rhino’s way—than Donald Trump. After introducing the concept, the inverse of Nassim Taleb’s “black swan,” in 2013, Wucker […]
I admit it. In the last several years or so, I have bandied about the statistic that a fifth of CEOs are psychopaths. It seems to be conventional wisdom, or at least a predominant presumption, that high-power positions tend to select for awful people. If you start typing, “Most CEOs…” into Google, revealing “suggested” searches […]
When Christina Fang was a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, in the Wharton School of Business, she took a course on behavioral decision making and it blew her away. It fascinated her that people and firms can deviate systematically from rational and optimal behavior in many contexts, ranging from everyday decisions to high-stakes […]
There was a moment, in our recent Breaking the Fever podcast episode, when I felt compelled to pause the recording. I wanted to linger on what our guest, Robert Brotherton, an expert on the psychology of conspiracy thinking and author of Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe in Conspiracy Theories, had said. Today, in America, he […]
On the potentially toxic combination of management culture and modern surveillance.
Damon Silvers has had the working class’ back since his youthful days at Harvard College.
Call me naive but I was shocked as an undergraduate to see, in a serious book about George Orwell, an unserious profanity preceding the table of contents. Within the first few pages I read that the author, Christopher Hitchens, dedicated his book “To Robert Conquest — premature anti-fascist, premature anti-Stalinist, poet and mentor, and founder […]
Over the last decade, Andrew Taggart has made a name for himself. Outlets like Quartz and Big Think have described him as a gadfly-for-hire, a practical philosopher who offers his conversational and philosophical acumen to the likes of Silicon Valley venture capitalists and entrepreneurs, among others. He told The Guardian that he has executives question whether the existence […]
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