The Grey Lady Today

1. Some brain injuries make people more like consequentialists: "Damage to an area near the center of the brain, several inches behind the eyes, transforms the way people make moral judgments in life-or-death situations, scientists are reporting.  In a new study, people with this rare injury expressed increased willingness to kill or harm another person if doing so would save others’ lives."

2. Apropos Alex, here is Dave Leonhardt on credit: "It’s easy to see everything since then as a step in the wrong direction, to romanticize a time when debt was less common.  But think about what life was like before easy money.  Think about how hard it would be to buy a house or pay for college if a 42 percent interest rate still seemed normal. Some of the changes are surprisingly recent.  Just a generation ago, a temporary setback, like illness, divorce or job loss, was much more likely to force a family to take drastic measures than it is today.  That’s in large measure because of debt, which allows families to smooth out the rough edges of their financial lives.

You can see this change in the national statistics on consumer spending.  Since the early 1990s, the peaks in spending growth rates haven’t been as high as they were in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, but the valleys haven’t been as low, either.  Not coincidentally, recessions have come less often over the last two decades and they have been fairly mild."