Fun with Useful Acronyms

Will Wilkinson, for all our geeky behavioral-economics needs.

People are smart and good when it pays to be smart and good. People are dumb and corrupt when it pays to be dumb and corrupt. Now, whether “it pays” is a function and consequence of the structure of institutions.

"When it pays" opens up a neurological and cultural universe, touched on elsewhere.

Norm enforcement is cheapest when people can’t help but punish themselves.

Or

Silly, your sock won’t open that can of spinach! So try your pillow instead, because a model exists in which pillows are can-openers.

Optimizing "non-ideal" components with a continual hat-tip to the reality (of a fallen world not devoid of goodness, which is not necessarily WW's model). That's the ticket.

With some fine-tuning in the comment by Peter, whose musings are often sharp:

a chaotic system isn't necessarily unpredictable...

and whose commenters in turn point the way to a hypertext[book] on chaos mathematics.

For a certain few readers only. The rest of us will meet you later on the loggia. Well-Margarita'd.