Duncan Watts

our future state of happiness correctly, and maybe never bought the lottery ticket. Rather than questioning our ability to make predictions about our future happiness, therefore, we simply conclude that we missed something important—a mistake we surely won’t make again.

thought they should have been paid thirteen cents. In other words, no matter what they were actually paid—and remember that some of them were getting paid ten times as much as others—everyone thought they had been underpaid

But as the article itself concedes, the history of previous attempts to “fix” politics has been disappointing.27

passing grade, should give one pause about the feasibility of designing incentive schemes to elicit desired behavior.26

But really what we’re saying is that the Mona Lisa is famous because it’s more like the Mona Lisa than anything else

focus on connecting.” Facebook, in other words, was successful because it had exactly the attributes of Facebook, even as the attributes themselves changed completely. Or consider a news story reviewing 2009 movies that inferred from the success of The Hangover that “relatable, non-thinking comedies … are the perfect balm for the recession,” implying in effect that The Hangover succeeded because moviegoers wanted to see a movie like The Hangover, and not something else. In all these cases, we want to believe that X succeeded because it had just the right attributes, but the only attributes

president, we routinely explain social trends in terms of what society “is ready for

version of emergence—the micro-macro problem—is arguably more complex and intractable than in any other discipline

When it comes to social phenomena, however, we do speak of “social actors” like families, firms, markets, political parties, demographic segments, and nation-states as if they act in more or less the same way as the individuals that comprise them

In social science, Thatcher’s philosophical position goes by the name of methodological individualism