Steven Pinker Helps You Deal With Awkward Dates
And other smart solutions to everyday problems we came across this week.
Every once in a while, the intellectual elite step out of their ivory towers and offer us guidance on humble, workaday problems — like handling our romances and our finances. This week, we got some practical tips from some very smart people.
This Week on the Next Big Idea Podcast
Awkward dates, cancel culture, and the necessity of norms.
What is common knowledge? As
lays out in his new book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . .: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life, it is not conventional wisdom. Instead, it’s when everyone knows something and everyone knows that and everyone knows it. That may sound loopy, but the implications of common knowledge — how it’s produced, sustained, and manipulated — are profound.“It’s common knowledge,” Steve tells Rufus, “that makes humans human. Humans are not solitary. What makes humans humans is that we coordinate in groups — from couples to nations to, in some cases, the entire world — and I think common knowledge is the underpinning, the cement, the foundation of that ability to coordinate.” Listen to our conversation on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, or YouTube.
Book Bite of the Week
If the economy’s so good, why do we all feel so broke?
The headlines say the economy is booming, unemployment is low, and growth is strong. But most Americans feel like they’re falling behind, working harder every year just to stay in place. So who’s right—the statistics or the people?
is the former Comptroller of the Currency under President Clinton and founder of the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity, which develops better economic indicators. His new book, The Mismeasurement of America, argues that the statistics themselves are misleading—and steering policymakers to make disastrous decisions. Pick up a copy of the book on Amazon or check out Gene’s summary here on the Next Big Idea app.This week, Book of the Day is brought to you by Headamentals: How Leaders Can Crack Negative Self-Talk―a concise, actionable guide that helps leaders silence negative self-talk before it spirals into toxic team-talk. Pick up your copy today.
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This Week on the Next Big Idea Daily Podcast
What does it take to build a company that lasts?
It’s certainly not easy—about half of all small businesses fail within five years, and even large companies struggle to make it to the decade mark. So how do some businesses last for generations, even centuries? According to Eric Becker, founder and chairman of the wealth management firm Cresset, those companies—which he calls Centurions— have figured out how to play the long game. Pick up a copy of his new book The Long Game: A Playbook of the World’s Most Enduring Companies or listen now on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
Happy Pub Week!
I feel smarter just hearing about these new books that came out this week: The Emergent Mind: How Intelligence Arises in People and Machines by Gaurav Suri and Jay McClelland; Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship by Bruce Schneier and Nathan Sanders; Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves from the Tyranny of the Automobile by Sarah Goodyear, Doug Gordon, and Aaron Naparstek; The Winner’s Curse: Behavioral Economics Anomalies, Then and Now by Richard Thaler and Alex Imas; and Fixed: Why Personal Finance Is Broken and How to Make It Work for Everyone by John Campbell and Tarun Ramadorai.
Do the smart thing and put one or more of these on your reading list.