Quotes from Jonathan Rauch

But replacing a personal or tribal network, one which is small or local or familial or private or affiliative, with a liberal network, one which is large and global and impersonal and public and critical, changes the game.

This is, more or less, what the great twentieth-century philosopher of science Karl R. Popper and his followers have called the principle of falsifiability. Science is distinctive, not because it proves true statements, but because it seeks systematically to disprove (falsify) false ones.

Second, the empirical rule. If people follow it in deciding who is right and who is wrong, then no one gets special say simply on the basis of who he happens to be. The empirical rule is, No one has personal authority: you may claim that a statement has been established as knowledge only insofar as the method used to check it gives the same result regardless of the identity of the checker, and regardless of the source of the statement.

the continuous and systematic onslaught against political machines and insiders by progressivism, populism, and libertarianism—three very different political reform movements which nonetheless all regard transactional politics as at best a necessary evil and more often as corrupt and illegitimate. This attack, though well intentioned, has badly damaged the country's governability, a predictable result (and one accurately predicted more than fifty years ago).

Those two rules define a decision-making system which people can agree to use to figure out whose opinions are worth believing. Under this system, you can do anything you wish to test a statement, as long as you follow the rules, which effectively say: • The system may not fix the outcome in advance or for good (no final say). • The system may not distinguish between participants (no personal authority).

People feel if they're not achieving all they could, they're inherently flawed," said Coleman. "Shame in general causes people to withdraw and shut down.

They may disagree on a lot of things, but they regard lying and making stuff up as a firing offense.

There is nothing like absolute certainty in the whole field of our knowledge," writes Popper.

The fact that I have these people whom I'm emotionally and spiritually accountable to really helps prevent that. I tell them what's going on in my life, and they tell me, and I feel like

if I did something like that, I'd have to tell them. I don't want to have to show up and say, 'Yeah, I've had a fight with my wife and slept at the Holiday Inn.

All of that, however, is clear only in hindsight.

Almost imperceptibly, our values shift, our expectations recalibrate, our brains reorganize, all in ways that lead to an upturn in late middle age and then to surprising happiness in late adulthood.

I'm wasting my life … I haven't done anything worthwhile in years … I need to move somewhere else, do something else, anything … How come I'm not on the Sunday talk shows? How come I'm not in charge of something, like a business?

Persons who dismiss stories such as those of Keith John Sampson as merely "anecdotal" need to be reminded that the plural of "anecdote" is "data.

It was as if, having met so many of my own goals, some perverse organ of my brain was busy creating new, spurious ones.

could not suppress comparisons of myself with others. How come I'm not doing what he or she is doing? Look where she is, and look where I am. Pathetic!

If realists have one view in common, it is that parties play (or should play) a central role in governing but have been too often overlooked or marginalized by the reforms of recent decades. A

Second, the post-midlife upturn is no mere transient change in mood: it is a change in our values and sources of satisfaction, a change in who we are. It often brings unexpected contentment that extends into old age and, yes, even into frailty and illness.

by extending our life spans, modern medicine and public health have already added more than a decade to the upturn,

What if I had become a chronically dissatisfied person?

she lived from fellowship to fellowship,

Happiness Around the World: The Paradox of Happy Peasants and Miserable Millionaires

traveling to places like China, Vietnam, and Mongolia to learn how to help the poor in countries undergoing rapid social and economic change.

Activists demanded that economists pay more attention to inequality, which economic development had often seemed to exacerbate.