Not all Golden Rules are alike; two kinds emerged over time. The negative version instructs restraint; the positive encourages intervention. One sets a baseline of at least not causing harm; the other points toward aspirational or idealized beneficent behavior. While examples of these rules abound, too many to list exhaustively, let these versions suffice for our purpose here: "What is hateful to you do not do to another" and "Love another as yourself." Both versions insist on caring for others, whether through acts of omission, such as not injuring, or through acts of commission, by actively intervening. Yet while these Golden Rules encourage an agent to care for an other, they do not require abandoning self-concern altogether. The purposeful displacement of concern away from the ego nonetheless remains partly self-referential. Both the negative and the positive versions invoke the ego as the fundamental measure against which behaviors are to be evaluated.

Spatial reference points are larger than themselves. This isn't really a paradox: landmarks are themselves, but they also define neighborhoods around themselves. In a paradigm that has been repeated on many campuses, researchers first collect a list of campus landmarks from students. Then they ask another group of students to estimate the distances between pairs of locations, some to landmarks, some to ordinary buildings on campus. The remarkable finding is that distances from an ordinary location to a landmark are judged shorter than distances from a landmark to an ordinary location. So, people would judge the distance from Pierre's house to the Eiffel Tower to be shorter than the distance from the Eiffel Tower to Pierre's house. Like black holes, landmarks seem to pull ordinary locations toward themselves, but ordinary places do not. This asymmetry of distance estimates violates the most elementary principles of Euclidean distance, that the distance from A to B must be the same as the distance from B to A. Judgments of distance, then, are not necessarily coherent.

On the European continent, Kant rejected the utilitarian defense of liberalism but put forward a compatible case for the autonomy that comes only to the person free to choose his own conception of the good life. J.S. Mill himself took inspiration from other German liberals, nothing in the frontispiece to On Liberty the work of a contemporary, Wilhelm von Humboldt. But this moment of convergence of German and Anglo-American liberalism was soon to pass. With Hegel, and then Marx, German intellectual thought centrally explored the deficiencies in the ethic of individualism held to characterize liberal societies. The transmission of ideas from Kant to Hegel to Marx is so dramatic as to rival the initial flow of thought from Plato to Aristotle to Augustine.

There is no neutral position from which to evaluate the benefits and burdens of new technologies. Consider the mass-produced Ford Model T at the beginning of the twentieth century or self-driving cars in the twenty-first century. With cars, we weigh benefits of autonomous mobility and swift transport against human congestion and earth-devastating pollution. And so it is with photography. Since its inception, skeptics worried that widespread and uncontrolled photography would destabilize communities and governments by spreading lies and invading privacy. This anxiety arose in the early years of the Kodak camera, when its popularity combined with the spread of yellow journalism to produce invasive and misleading photographs. These concerns persist today with ubiquitous digital camera phones, deep-fake videos, and the viral internet. Then and now, arguments about how cameras work and the power of photographic expression concern personal lives, international politics, and public justice.

Protopia is a state of becoming, rather than a destination. It is a process. In the protopian mode, things are better today than they were yesterday, although only a little better. It is incremental improvement or mild progress. The "pro" in protopian stems from the notions of process and progress. This subtle progress is not dramatic, not exciting. It is easy to miss because a protopia generates almost as many new problems as new benefits. The problems of today were caused by yesterday's technological successes, and the technological solutions to today's problems will cause the problems of tomorrow. This circular expansion of both problems and solutions hides a steady accumulation of small net benefits over time. Ever since the Enlightenment and the invention of science, we've managed to create a tiny bit more than we've destroyed each year. But that few percent positive difference is compounded over decades into what we might call civilization. Its benefits never star in movies.

The debates between social and cultural anthropologists concern not the differences between the concepts but the analytical priority: which should come first, the social chicken or the cultural egg? British anthropology emphasizes the social. It assumes that social institutions determine culture and that universal domains of society (such as kinship, economy, politics, and religion) are represented by specific institutions (such as the family, subsistence farming, the British Parliament, and the Church of England) which can be compared cross-culturally. (In contrast) American anthropology emphasizes the cultural. It assumes that culture shapes social institutions by providing the shared beliefs, the core values, the communicative tools, and so on that make social life possible. It does not assume that there are universal social domains, preferring instead to discover domains empirically as aspects of each society's own classificatory schemes ― in other words, its culture. And it rejects the notion that any social institution can be understood in isolation from its own context.

We can presume that the components of love proposed by Sternberg can be found in all cultures. Intimacy, passion, and commitment are most likely cultural universals. Evidence of this comes from many sources, including cultural anthropology, psychological research, and love poetry from across the world. What does appear to vary across cultures, however, is the emphasis placed on the different components of love and on different types of relationships. In collectivist cultures like those found in Asia and Africa, relationships with family may take priority over relationships with lovers and friends. In individualistic cultures, like those of Northern Europe and North America, friendships and romantic relationships compete with family for priority (and often win). Likewise, the concept of duty (similar to Sternberg's concept of commitment) is absolutely central to Chinese Confucianism. In contrast, judging by the mountains of romance novels, love songs, and beauty products found in North America, it is the passionate side of love that is prized in this culture.

The term ‘law' has been used in a wide variety of ways. In the first place, there are scientific laws or what are called descriptive laws. These describe regular or necessary patterns of behavior found in either natural or social life. The most obvious examples are found in the natural sciences; for instance, in the laws of motion and thermodynamics advanced by physicists. But this notion of law has also been employed by social theorists, in an attempt to highlight predictable, even inevitable, patterns of social behavior. This can be seen in Engels's assertion that Marx uncovered the ‘laws' of historical and social development, and in the so-called ‘laws' of demand and supply which underlie economic theory. An alternative use, however, treats law generally as a means of enforcing norms or standards of social behavior. Sociologists have thus seen forms of law at work in all organized societies, ranging from informal processes usually found in traditional societies to the formal legal systems typical of modern societies. By contrast, political theorists have tended to understand law more specifically, seeing it as a distinctive social institution clearly separate from other social rules or norms and only found in modern societies.

The future of our high-tech goods may lie not in the limitations of our minds, but in our ability to secure the ingredients to produce them. In previous eras, such as the Iron Age and the Bronze Age, the discovery of new elements brought forth seemingly unending numbers of new inventions. Now the combinations may truly be unending. We are now witnessing a fundamental shift in our resource demands. At no point in human history have we used more elements, in more combinations, and in increasingly refined amounts. Our ingenuity will soon outpace our material supplies. This situation comes at a defining moment when the world is struggling to reduce its reliance on fossil fuels. Fortunately, rare metals are key ingredients in green technologies such as electric cars, wind turbines, and solar panels. They help to convert free natural resources like the sun and wind into the power that fuels our lives. But without increasing today's limited supplies, we have no chance of developing the alternative green technologies we need to slow climate change.

Thanks to newly developed neuroimaging technology, we now have access to the specific brain changes that occur during learning. Even though all of our brains contain the same basic structures, our neural networks are as unique as our fingerprints. The latest developmental neuroscience research has shown that the brain is much more malleable throughout life than previously assumed; it develops in response to its own processes, to its immediate and distant "environments," and to its past and current situations. The brain seeks to create meaning through establishing or refining existing neural networks. When we learn a new fact or skill, our neurons communicate to form networks of connected information. Using this knowledge or skill results in structural changes to allow similar future impulses to travel more quickly and efficiently than others. High-activity synaptic connections are stabilized and strengthened, while connections with relatively low use are weakened and eventually pruned. In this way, our brains are sculpted by our own history of experiences.

Theodore Berger has achieved successes with long-term memory regeneration by using implanted chips to replace damaged parts of the hippocampus in rats. Berger and his team at the University of Southern California have succeeded in recording and transforming into computer code memories that have been stored for an extended period of time in the hippocampus of these animals. They had the rats perform a memory task. Then, they downloaded and transformed the memory of that task into digital code. Afterwards, they removed the section of the rats' hippocampus that carried these memories and replaced that bit of the brain with a special computer chip, onto which they reloaded the artificially stored memories. They found that the rats' memories could be fully restored using this technique.

The human genome contains an enormous amount of information to guide the construction of a complex organism. In a growing number of cases, particular genes can be tied to aspects of cognition, language, and personality. When psychological traits vary, much of the variation comes from differences in genes: identical twins are more similar than fraternal twins, and biological siblings are more similar than adoptive siblings, whether raised together or apart. A person's temperament and personality emerge early in life and remain fairly predictable throughout the lifespan. And both personality and intelligence show few or no effects of children's particular home environments within their culture: children reared in the same family are similar mainly because of their shared genes. Furthermore, neuroscience is showing that the brain's basic architecture develops under genetic control.

A firm is deciding whether to invest in shipbuilding. If it can produce at sufficiently large scale, it knows the venture will be profitable. But one key input is low-cost steel, and it must be produced nearby. The company's decision boils down to this: if there is a steel factory close by, invest in shipbuilding; otherwise, don't invest. Now consider the thinking of potential steel investors in the region. Assume that shipyards are the only potential customers of steel. Steel producers figure they'll make money if there's a shipyard to buy their steel, but not otherwise. Now we have two possible outcomes ― what economists call "multiple equilibria." There is a "good" outcome, in which both types of investments are made, and both the shipyard and the steelmakers end up profitable and happy. Equilibrium is reached. Then there is a "bad" outcome, in which neither type of investment is made. This second outcome also is an equilibrium because the decisions not to invest reinforce each other.

Experts have identified a large number of measures that promote energy efficiency. Unfortunately many of them are not cost effective. This is a fundamental requirement for energy efficiency investment from an economic perspective. However, the calculation of such cost effectiveness is not easy: it is not simply a case of looking at private costs and comparing them to the reductions achieved. There are significant externalities to take into account and there are also macroeconomic effects. For instance, at the aggregate level, improving the level of national energy efficiency has positive effects on macroeconomic issues such as energy dependence, climate change, health, national competitiveness and reducing fuel poverty. And this has direct repercussions at the individual level: households can reduce the cost of electricity and gas bills, and improve their health and comfort, while companies can increase their competitiveness and their productivity. Finally, the market for energy efficiency could contribute to the economy through job and firms creation.

Cost of production concepts are not very useful to the understanding of the economics of agriculture, just as cost of production of pizza is not very useful to understanding the pizza industry. A more appropriate comparison, given the nature of joint production in agriculture, is the relation of cost of production of pizza to the structural understanding of the restaurant industry. Too great a reliance on cost of production is a danger because of the inherent weaknesses of analyses that follow, the resources devoted to cost of production which would be better used elsewhere, and the limited focus of issues which can result from its emphasis. Cost of production seems, on the surface, to be a useful and basic element to economic analysis. Further, noneconomists relate well to the concept of cost of production, while supply functions, input demand functions, length-of-run and other important issues are less obvious concepts. As a result, cost of production often becomes considered as an end rather than a tool with limited analytic capability.

Businesspeople make decisions with fundamental uncertainty about the future. In his book, Risk, Uncertainty and Probability, Frank Knight made a distinction between economists' concept of risk and the different sort of uncertainty in almost all business decisions. Risk, he said, refers to something that can be measured by mathematical probabilities. In contrast, uncertainty refers to something that cannot be measured because there are no objective standards to express probabilities. Theoretical economists have been struggling ever since to make sense of how people handle such true uncertainty. Jack Welch's phrase "straight from the gut" sums up their efforts: Decisions that matter for investment are intuitive rather than analytical. That intuition is a social process that follows the laws of psychology ― and in particular, since group decisions are being made, social psychology.