Culture & Society

Meg Leta Jones, Mac Milin Kiran and Cal Newport argue that the introduction of age verification mechanisms in proposed child online safety legislation may unintentionally result in an adults-only internet, as platforms opt to deny access to children rather than implement complex compliance measures. This potential outcome necessitates a fundamental debate about the intended audience of the internet and the balance between protecting children and preserving their rights to access and expression in the digital realm.

From the Kennedy family to Chile's Matte family, powerful and wealthy families often seek political office. New research by Patricio Duran, Marcelo Ortiz, and Michael Carney seek to understand what those politically active families have in common and discuss potential motivations.

Business and economic thought instituted at least since the Reagan revolution in the United States have promoted firms’ narrowly self-interested, profit-maximizing conduct even at the expense of consumers and workers. This paradigm leads to social distrust and insufficient cooperation. Steven C. Salop explains this distortion and proposes 10 guidelines by which firms can self-moderate their behavior to produce prosocial outcomes.

Alan D. Jagolinzer and Sander van der Linden highlight a dangerous trend of influencers who deliberately target corporations with disinformation, called “rage farming.” The authors use United Airlines to illustrate the damage this can cause to a business and argue that corporations should counter rage farming with proactive messaging rather than staying silent.

Excerpted from THE INFLUENCER INDUSTRY: The Quest for Authenticity on Social Media © 2023 by Emily Hund. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.

In an excerpt from her new book, Seeing Others, sociologist Michèle Lamont describes the impact of neoliberal ideas on the working class.

In new research, Matthew C. Ringgenberg, Chong Shu, and Ingrid M. Werner ask if academic research exhibits political slants. They develop a new measure of the political slant of research and study how it varies by discipline, demographics, and the political party of the sitting United States president. Finally, they show that their measure is related to the researchers' personal political ideology, suggestive of an ideological echo chamber in social science research.

The Big Fail co-author Bethany McLean — also co-host of Stigler Center podcast Capitalisn’t — sits down with ProMarket to discuss how concentration and played a role in the United States government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

And why happiness research matters for economics. An interview with Sam Peltzman.

Expert civil servants devise ever more sophisticated policies to tackle emergencies such as climate change. But when voters lose faith in experts, they vote for anti-elite populist leaders who promise to drain the swamp in the civil service. Gabriele Gratton and Barton E. Lee write that understanding populist voters’ calculations and mistrust is key to designing democratic institutions that can address the most pressing challenges of our times.