For most of us we use only the numerical literacy necessary to stay employed. And even fewer of us think about numbers in a way where we can see their intrinsic value. We think about a million dollars, in a very loose, abstract way.
Pretty much any number after a thousand becomes mostly symbolic in our heads, rarely representative of the actual value in comparison to anything we could actually measure with our hands.
Source: medium.com
Have mechanisms like democratization really fostered an enduring trend of peaceful co-existence, or is this just a statistical fluke—a normal interlude of relative calm before another global-scale conflagration?
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In a recent paper, economists at the University of Chicago reported that working for a socially responsible company motivated employees to act immorally. In one experiment, people were hired to transcribe images of short German texts and paid 10 percent upfront, with the remaining payment being delivered if they completed the transcriptions, or if they declared the documents too illegible to transcribe. When they were told that, for every job completed or marked illegible, 5 percent of their wages would be donated to Unicef’s educational programs, the instances of cheating rose by 25 percent, compared to where no charitable donation was offered.
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