Nautilus Magazine: Don’t Tell Your Friends They’re Lucky

Frank says his research ideas often come from his own experience, and his work on luck is no exception. His latest book, Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy, argues that the role of luck in life, and specifically in economic success, is not as widely appreciated as it should be. The book claims that if the prosperous were more cognizant of luck’s role in their success they would be more supportive of government efforts to spread opportunity, and of the higher taxes they’d have to pay as a result. [...]

So, even if luck counts for only 1 percent, you’re going to see the winners most of the time won’t be the most talented people. Most of the time they’ll be among the luckiest of all the contestants. Let luck count for more than 1 percent, and it’s very easy to construct narratives where it matters enormously more. [...]

Choosing your parents, what genes you get, what kind of upbringing you’re going to get, and the country where they live is the hugest dimension of all the chance events that effect outcomes in your life. You can’t affect any of those, but we can affect those. We can make the investments that make our environment one that if you work hard and have some talent you’ve got a reasonable chance to succeed, at least on a decent scale, unlike Somalia where no matter how hard you work and how talented you are you’re not ever going to get anywhere. We could affect that outcome. We can’t do it as an individual, but collectively we could affect that outcome.

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Quartz: From dictatorship to LGBT paradise: Taiwan’s road towards marriage equality

Same-sex marriage has been discussed on and off in the past decade, but proposals never got far. The issue regained momentum in 2016 in part after Jacques Picoux, a French-born resident of Taiwan, apparently committed suicide in October. He had reportedly become depressed after his Taiwanese partner of 35 years died of cancer and Picoux had been forbidden from taking part in medical decisions towards the end of his life. [...]

LGBT rights are relatively strong in Taiwan in large part because the island has a vibrant civil society. Taiwanese endured almost four decades of rule by the repressive Kuomintang party, under which thousands disappeared, were imprisoned, or were murdered in a period known as the “White Terror.” Causes ranging from women’s rights to opposition to nuclear power blossomed in the 1980s as democratization set in, and exploded with the lifting of martial law in 1987. “Taiwan society will not allow Taiwan to go backwards to the days of the KMT,” says Chen Mei-hua, a women’s rights activist and sociologist at National Sun Yat-Sen University in Kaohsiung. [...]

Education is another reason for Taiwan’s progressive atmosphere. In 2004 it passed the Gender Equity Education Act, requiring schools to teach gender equality and diversity. That was a response to the death, still unsolved, of a junior-high student, Yeh Yung-chih, whose body was found in the bathroom in his school in 2000. Yeh was known to have been bullied for displaying “feminine” tendencies, and his story remains a rallying cry for LGBT people in Taiwan. [...]

Finally, some attribute Taiwan’s progressive attitudes to its racial diversity, its relatively small Christian population, and a tradition of religious tolerance. Buddhism, which does not have teachings about homosexuality, also remains an important religion in Taiwan, and in 2012 a same-sex couple tied the knot in a Buddhist ceremony.

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The Guardian: Without path from protest to power, the Women's March will end up like Occupy

Today’s social activists have succumbed to one of the most enduring myths of contemporary American protest: the comforting belief that if you can get enough people into the streets from diverse demographics, largely unified behind a clear message, then our representatives will be forced to heed the crowd’s wishes.

If this story has ever been true, and I’m not so sure it has, then it hasn’t been the case since 1963, when 250,000 people marched on Washington for “jobs and freedom” and heard Martin Luther King Jr deliver his I Have a Dream speech. Less than a year later, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned discrimination based on “race, color, religion, sex or national origin” in employment and housing.

But let’s be real: there are countless counter-examples of marches on Washington that failed: the 1913 march of women to demand the right to vote, the 1978 march for the Equal Rights Amendment, the 1986 Great Peace March for Global Nuclear Disarmament, the Million Man March of 1995, the 2004 March for Women’s Lives, the inauguration protests against George W Bush’s second term in 2005 … the list is practically endless. Activists have a tendency to ignore repeated failure in favor of overemphasizing one or two anomalous minor victories.

The absolute failure of the 15 February 2003 anti-war protest, the largest synchronized global march in human history, was the last gasp of this tactic. Today’s nominally democratic governments would be more concerned by the absence of our marches, as that might suggest something darker is in the works.

The only way to attain sovereignty – the supreme authority over the functioning of our government – is to use social protest to win elections or win wars. Either we can march to the ballot box or the battleground; there is no third option.

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CityLab: Where Europe's GDP Is Rising And Falling

Most people have a pretty clear idea of which countries in Europe are richer and which are poorer. Income levels thin out the farther south and east you go on the continent, you might assume, while Scandinavia and Germany enjoy the highest income levels. [...]

Overall, wealth is poorly distributed across the European Union, as made clear by March 2016 maps of regional GDP using the latest figures available from Eurostat. Meanwhile, the regions that have seen the largest decreases in per capita GDP aren’t necessarily the ones you’d expect. [...]

The map above, which is adjusted for each nation to show comparable purchasing power, demonstrates how much wealth varies from one region to the next. The former eastern bloc almost universally comes in below average, except for the regions around some of its largest cities: Bucharest, Budapest, Bratislava, Prague, and Warsaw. Iceland, Norway, and Switzerland, meanwhile, emerge as the only states where every region exceeds average wealth.

The rest of the continent is an uneven mosaic, especially in the U.K. At the upper end of the scale, three areas are especially wealthy: London, the region around Oxford, and Northern Scotland’s Aberdeenshire (the landing point for the country’s offshore oil and gas extraction). Elsewhere, West Wales and County Durham have a per capita GDP so much lower that it places them in the same category as Southern Italy or Romania.

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CityLab: New York's Early Skyscrapers, Transplanted to Paris

What would Paris look like if you combined it with New York?

You could spend all day dreaming about a mashup of the French capital’s grand boulevards interspersed with Manhattan’s skyscrapers—or you could jump head-first into a beautifully vintage alternate reality created by Paris architect and photographer Luis Fernandes and shared on his blog, Haussmanhattan. Using old photos of both cities to create striking collages of urban landscapes that seem strangely real. In Haussmanhattan’s elegant visual creations, the Flatiron Building reappears on the prow of the Île de la Cité, the Woolworth Building pokes out from clouds next to the Eiffel Tower, while the neck of the Invalides’ dome is stretched into a cloud-scratchingly high cylinder towering over the city.

The results are eerily effective thanks to the careful choice of black and white photos. It also sticks to Manhattan landmarks finished well before World War II, whose masonry facades blend more easily into Parisian surroundings. Curiously, the result of this combination of aesthetics of 1920s Paris and 1920s Manhattan turns out to be somewhat familiar to people who have visited the Eastern Bloc. The combination of broad European-style boulevards with tall towers still clad in historicist embellishments at times looks rather like Moscow or Kiev, where elaborate Stalinist towers hover over wide, tree-lined avenues. Haussmanhattan’s hybrid city might look like a delightful place to explore, but most of us will be glad that it’s striking combination of Baron Haussman and Ernest Flagg remains fictional.

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