On The Gist, writer Matt Bruenig makes the case for electing Bernie Sanders and explains why the candidate’s top economic advisors say his policies could bring 5.3 percent gross national product growth. For the Spiel, a post-Oscars joke recap.
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The Netflix documentary series Making a Murderer raises important questions about how investigators and prosecutors do their jobs. Cato's Tim Lynch and Shawn Armbrust of the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project comment.
On Start the Week Mary-Ann Sieghart asks why some people succeed while others fail. She talks to the journalist Helen Pearson about the Life Project, a study of the health, wellbeing and life chances of thousands of British children, started in 1946. The television producer Joseph Bullman also charts a series of families back to the Victorian times to look at social mobility through the generations. The psychologist Oliver James wades into the nature/ nurture debate by arguing that we are the result of our environment and upbringing, but the scientist Marcus Munafò says there is increasing evidence of genetic links to who we are and what we do.
Producer: Katy Hickman.
On The Gist, we speak with the brilliant comic mind Neal Brennan about his new one-man comedy show 3 Mics. It’s showing at the Lynn Redgrave Theater in New York City through mid-March. For the Spiel, a crazy 24 hours in presidential politics. What a country!
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It?s a life and death situation ? the world is at its last line of defence against some pretty nasty bacteria and there are no new antibiotics. But it?s not the science that?s the big problem, it the economics. Despite the $40 billion market worldwide there?s no money to be made in antibiotics so big pharma have all but stopped their research. Why is this and how do we entice them back in? Wesley Stephenson finds out.
(Image: Computer artwork of bacteria - credit: Science Photo Library)
Home Depot raises the roof. Restoration Hardware gets hammered. And Domino's delivers. Our analysts discuss some of the week's earnings news and dig into some field research on the Chicken McGriddle. Corporate governance expert and film critic Nell Minow talks Apple vs. Uncle Sam and shares her Oscar picks. Plus, we share details on The Motley Fool's 1st-ever digital pass to our recent investing conference in San Diego. To learn more go to digitalpass.fool.com .
There is a school of thought that groups often bring out the worst in humankind. Think only of the Charles Mackay book on “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds,” the U.S. Founding fathers’ visceral fear of ‘mob rule,’ or the influential social science of Gustave Le Bon and others during the French Third Republic.
And yet, as a university student future social psychologist Stephen Reicher often witnessed sublime behavior from collections of people. He saw that groups could foster racism – and they could foster civil rights movements. What he saw much of the time was group behavior “completely at odds with the psychology I was learning.”
“In a sense, you could summarize the literature: ‘Groups are bad for you, groups take moral individuals and they turn them into immoral idiots.’
“I have been trying to contest that notion,” he tells interview David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast, “[and] also to explain how that notion comes about.”
In a longer-than-normal podcast, Reicher explains how group mentality can bring out the best in individuals and reviews the history of crowd psychology and some of its fascinating findings that have enormous policy implications in a world of mass protest and terroristic threat.
For example, in discussing studies on the escalation of violence, Reicher explains how indiscriminate responses by authorities can create violence rather than defuse it, a useful lesson for Western countries dealing with generally peaceful populations that may still produce a few terrorist inductees from their ranks.
Reicher is the Wardlaw professor at the School of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of St. Andrews. A fellow of the British Academy, his most widespread recognition outside the academy comes from his work with Alexander Haslam on the BBC Prison Study, or The Experiment. He is also the co-author of several books, including 2001’s Self and Nation: Categorization, Contestation and Mobilization, with Nick Hopkins, and 2014’s Psychology of Leadership with Haslam.
On The Gist, why the Oscars matter to the future of Hollywood. We discuss the ideas behind #OscarsSoWhite with Slate’s Aisha Harris and NPR TV critic Eric Deggans. Aisha recently wrote “Why Creed’s Best Picture Snub Matters” and Eric Deggans is the author of Race-Baiter. For the Spiel, scary Trump supporters.
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On January 25, 2016, the Supreme Court decided Amgen Inc v. Harris without oral argument. Former employees of an Amgen subsidiary had participated in a benefit plan that offered ownership of Amgen stock. When the value of Amgen stock fell in 2007, stockholders filed a class action against plan fiduciaries alleging a breach of fiduciary duties, including the duty of prudence, under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974. Although the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit initially reversed a district court decision dismissing the class action complaint, the U.S. Supreme Court then vacated the Ninth Circuit’s judgment and remanded the case in light of the Supreme Court’s then-recent decision Fifth Third Bancorp v. Dudenhoeffer, which set forth the standards for stating a claim for breach of the duty of prudence against fiduciaries who manage employee stock ownership plans. -- On remand, the Ninth Circuit reiterated its conclusion that the plaintiffs’ complaint stated a claim for breach of fiduciary duty, and the Supreme Court again granted certiorari. In a per curiam opinion the Court reversed the judgment of the Ninth Circuit by a vote of 9-0, holding that the Circuit had failed to properly evaluate the complaint. In its current form, the Supreme Court concluded, the complaint failed to state a claim for breach of the duty of prudence. In remanding the case, however, the Court indicated that the district court could decide in the first instance whether the stockholders might amend their complaint in order to adequately plead a claim for breach of the duty of prudence. -- To discuss the case, we have George T. Conway III, who is Partner, Litigation at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz.