What’s the point of crazy new ideas when politicians can’t even manage to balance a budget? Can new ideas genuinely change the world? Now, your (very reasonable) gut response might be: They can’t - people will stubbornly stick to the old ideas that they’re comfortable with. The thing is, we know that ideas have changed over time. Yesterday’s avant-garde is today’s common sense. Simon Kuznets willed the idea of the GDP into being. The randomistas upset the apple cart of foreign aid by forcing it to prove its efficacy. The question is not can new ideas defeat old ones; the question is how.Research suggests that sudden shocks can work wonders. James Kuklinski, a political scientist at the University of Illinois, discovered that people are most likely to change their opinions if you confront them with new and disagreeable facts as directly as possible. Take the success of right-wing politicians who were already warning of “the Islamic threat” back in the 1990s, but didn’t get much attention until the shocking destruction of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. Viewpoints that had once been fringe suddenly became a collective obsession.If it is true that ideas don’t change things gradually but in fits and starts - in shocks - then the basic premise of our democracy, our journalism, and our education is all wrong. It would mean, in essence, that the Enlightenment model of how people change their opinions - through information-gathering and reasoned deliberation - is really a buttress for the status quo. It would mean that those who swear by rationality, nuance, and compromise fail to grasp how ideas govern the world. A worldview is not a Lego set where a block is added here, removed there. It’s a fortress that is defended tooth and nail, with all possible reinforcements, until the pressure becomes so overpowering that the walls cave in.American psychologist Solomon Asch demonstrated that group pressure can even cause us to ignore what we can plainly see with our own eyes. In a now-famous experiment, he showed test subjects three lines on a card and asked them which one was longest. When the other people in the room (all Asch’s coworkers, unbeknownst to the subject) gave the same answer, the subject did, too - even when it was clearly erroneous. It’s no different in politics. Political scientists have established that how people vote is determined less by their perceptions about their own lives than by their conceptions of society. We’re not particularly interested in what government can do for us personally; we want to know what it can do for us all. When we cast our vote, we do so not just for ourselves, but for the group we want to belong to.But Solomon Asch made another discovery. A single opposing voice can make all the difference. When just one other person in the group stuck to the truth, the test subjects were more likely to trust the evidence of their own senses. Let this be an encouragement to all those who feel like a lone voice crying out in the wilderness: Keep on building those castles in the sky. Your time will come.Question 1What is the primary argument of the passage?Rational and deliberate thought is the most effective way to change public opinion.Political affiliations and voting behaviors are mainly determined by group benefits.Significant changes in public opinion occur in response to dramatic events.Group pressure always leads individuals to conform to the majority opinion.

The passage below is accompanied by a set of questions. Choose the best answer to each question.What’s the point of crazy new ideas when politicians can’t even manage to balance a budget? Can new ideas genuinely change the world? Now, your (very reasonable) gut response might be: They can’t - people will stubbornly stick to the old ideas that they’re comfortable with. The thing is, we know that ideas have changed over time. Yesterday’s avant-garde is today’s common sense. Simon Kuznets willed the idea of the GDP into being. The randomistas upset the apple cart of foreign aid by forcing it to prove its efficacy. The question is not can new ideas defeat old ones; the question is how.Research suggests that sudden shocks can work wonders. James Kuklinski, a political scientist at the University of Illinois, discovered that people are most likely to change their opinions if you confront them with new and disagreeable facts as directly as possible. Take the success of right-wing politicians who were already warning of “the Islamic threat” back in the 1990s, but didn’t get much attention until the shocking destruction of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. Viewpoints that had once been fringe suddenly became a collective obsession.If it is true that ideas don’t change things gradually but in fits and starts - in shocks - then the basic premise of our democracy, our journalism, and our education is all wrong. It would mean, in essence, that the Enlightenment model of how people change their opinions - through information-gathering and reasoned deliberation - is really a buttress for the status quo. It would mean that those who swear by rationality, nuance, and compromise fail to grasp how ideas govern the world. A worldview is not a Lego set where a block is added here, removed there. It’s a fortress that is defended tooth and nail, with all possible reinforcements, until the pressure becomes so overpowering that the walls cave in.American psychologist Solomon Asch demonstrated that group pressure can even cause us to ignore what we can plainly see with our own eyes. In a now-famous experiment, he showed test subjects three lines on a card and asked them which one was longest. When the other people in the room (all Asch’s coworkers, unbeknownst to the subject) gave the same answer, the subject did, too - even when it was clearly erroneous. It’s no different in politics. Political scientists have established that how people vote is determined less by their perceptions about their own lives than by their conceptions of society. We’re not particularly interested in what government can do for us personally; we want to know what it can do for us all. When we cast our vote, we do so not just for ourselves, but for the group we want to belong to.But Solomon Asch made another discovery. A single opposing voice can make all the difference. When just one other person in the group stuck to the truth, the test subjects were more likely to trust the evidence of their own senses. Let this be an encouragement to all those who feel like a lone voice crying out in the wilderness: Keep on building those castles in the sky. Your time will come.Question 1What is the primary argument of the passage?Rational and deliberate thought is the most effective way to change public opinion.Political affiliations and voting behaviors are mainly determined by group benefits.Significant changes in public opinion occur in response to dramatic events.Group pressure always leads individuals to conform to the majority opinion.

Could we think of this in the sense that allowing creative minds in to come up with ideas, we are increasing out pool of solutions, and possibly even increasing the size of the industry thus increasing access to even larger profits?

The capital-budgeting process aims to systematically sort good ideas from bad ones.

Adair Turner, an academic, policymaker, and member of the House of Lords, in his new book, “Between Debt and the Devil: Money, Credit, and Fixing Global Finance”, argues that countries facing the predicament of onerous debts, low interest rates, and slow growth should consider a radical but alluringly simple option: create more money and hand it out to people. “A government could, for instance, pay $1000 to all citizens by electronic transfer to their commercial bank deposit accounts,” Turner writes. People could spend the money as they saw fit: on food, clothes, household goods, vacations, drinking binges—anything they liked. Demand across the economy would get a boost, Turner notes, “and the extent of that stimulus would be broadly proportional to the value of new money created.”The figure of a thousand dollars is meant to be strictly illustrative. It could just as easily be five thousand dollars or ten thousand dollars — however much was needed to drag the economy out of the doldrums. The funding would come from the central bank, the Federal Reserve, which would exploit its legal right to create money. Central banks do this by printing notes and manufacturing coins, but they can also create money by issuing electronic credits to commercial banks, such as JP Morgan and Citibank. Under Turner’s proposal, that’s what the Fed would do—give banks newly created money, which would be passed along to their account holders. Merry Christmas, everyone!It’s a deadly serious proposal, actually, and its author is a sixty-year-old English technocrat renowned for his intellect and his independence. If, despite Turner’s impressive credentials, the words “hyperinflation,” “Weimar Republic,” and “Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe” are whirling around in your head, he would certainly understand. “My proposals will horrify many economists and policymakers, and in particular central bankers,” he writes. “‘Printing money’ to finance public deficits is a taboo policy. It has indeed almost the status of a mortal sin.”But it’s also a proposal that serious economists have broached before. In 1969, Milton Friedman argued that money financing could provide an alternative to Keynesian debt financing. Faced with a chronic shortfall of demand in the economy, Friedman said, the government could print a bunch of money and drop it from helicopters. In 2003, Ben Bernanke, who was then a governor at the Fed, suggested that such “helicopter drops,” or their electronic equivalent, could provide the Japanese government with a way to lift its economy out of a decade-long slump. In Britain, Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour Party, had suggested that the Bank of England could pay for some infrastructure spending by printing money.So far, these ideas have gained little traction. Bernanke, after taking over the Fed, in 2006, seldom mentioned his earlier proposal. Even Paul Krugman, who is usually a big supporter of stimulus programs, has distanced himself from Modern Monetary Theory, pointing to the danger of inflation from excessive monetary growth. Turner, however, insists that creating money may be the only way of generating a decent rate of economic growth and escaping the current predicament.

The capital-budgeting process aims to systematically sort good ideas from bad ones.Group of answer choicesTrueFalse