Word: notionalism
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...that sense, the notion of bringing down the monthly payments for homeowners who cannot meet the obligations of their mortgage payments makes them simply placeholders in the housing market. The government is encouraging people to put their modest wages into money pits, by helping them to remain in their homes through new mortgage modification programs. They are being herded into an economic trap that will require them to spend money on something which may never have any value to them just so that they can keep their current roofs over their heads...
Ericsson has become famous for the 10-year rule: the notion that it takes at least 10 years (or 10,000 hours) of dedicated practice for people to master most complex endeavors. Ericsson didn't invent the 10-year rule (it was suggested as early as 1899), but he has conducted many studies confirming it. Gladwell is a believer. "Practice isn't the thing you do once you're good," he writes. "It's the thing you do that makes you good...
This is what some economists call the paradox of thrift. The notion is generally credited to Englishman John Maynard Keynes--seemingly the source of every important economic idea these days--although he doesn't appear to have actually used the phrase. Paul McCulley, an economist and portfolio manager at bond giant Pimco, defines it like this: "If we all individually cut our spending in an attempt to increase individual savings, then our collective savings will paradoxically fall because one person's spending is another's income--the fountain from which savings flow." (See the top 10 financial collapses...
Biologists are a long way from understanding the entire genome, but as they get to know its parts better, they're getting a more precise comprehension of one of the most important features of evolution: how complex organs evolve. The notion that something as intricate as an eye could have evolved, Darwin wrote, "seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree." But he argued that new complex organs could evolve through a series of intermediate forms...
...common in the West to read about African lives in grim statistical terms, so we've become inured to these huge numbers of deaths. Making matters worse, the conflict in Congo is often seen as a hopelessly byzantine African tribal war, encouraging the damning notion that nothing will ever change. This, of course, creates a sense of hopelessness - and nothing cuts down on humanitarian, foreign and development assistance so much as the jaded diminution of hope. The nation most in need of investment gets the least by the cruel logic that it is the most broken. It is a self...