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In Afghanistan, grief is never far away. “You are always losing somebody,” says Sakena Yacoobi. A native of Afghanistan, Yacoobi has lost friends and colleagues to bombings and kidnappings. She has seen routine health matters turn fatal for want of basic medical care. When the losses pile up and Yacoobi gets to feeling “a little down,” she asks her bodyguard to drive her to a nearby preschool. There, it doesn’t take long before this short woman in a hijab is smiling. “I see kids singing, drawing, playing, learning. Their happiness is my happiness,” she says, “and I am ready to go 100 miles per hour again.” For more than a decade, Yacoobi has devoted her considerable energies to rebuilding educational opportunities in a country that had almost forgotten how to learn. The Afghan Institute of Learning (AIL), which she founded in 1995, now reaches 350,000 women and girls annually with programs that extend from preschool through university. In addition, men and boys benefit from AIL’s leadership training, which promotes peaceful strategies for resolving conflict. AIL also provides health education, operates medical clinics, and teaches income-generating vocational skills like carpet weaving. Through all these initiatives, AIL emphasizes critical thinking “so that…

In recent decades, many economists have advised governments to stabilize, privatize, and liberalize markets. Economists do know how markets work, and they can often predict how mature market economies will respond to certain events and policies. But developing economies lack both mature markets and the institutions that support them—including institutions that define property rights, enforce contracts, convey prices, and bridge gaps between buyers and sellers. These are precisely the institutions that political leaders must establish and then modify as economic growth introduces new problems and opportunities. The work of the Commission on Growth and Development tended to confirm that political leaders play pivotal roles in the success—and the failure—of economic development. As detailed in its publication The Growth Report, the commission closely examined 13 nations whose gross domestic product (GDP) grew at least 7 percent a year for at least 25 years after World War II. In other words, these economies at least doubled in size each decade. Although these high-growth countries used different economic models and political structures and had different resources and histories, their governments followed broadly similar paths. Often ushered in by a crisis, new leadership chose a promising economic model and then stabilized the nation long…

In June 2009, people going about their ordinary routines in Stockholm encountered a series of perplexing and—most important—fun diversions. One day, commuters at the Odenplan subway station found that the staircase had been replaced with a musical piano keyboard, replete with sound. Young and old alike abandoned their usual ride on the adjacent escalator to scamper up and down the steps. Couples played duets. Children picked out tunes with their parents. Dedicated soloists hopped up and down, losing track of their destinations. During the one-day test, 66 percent more people than usual chose the stairs over the escalator. Meanwhile, pedestrians out for a stroll in a municipal park came upon the World’s Deepest Rubbish Bin—a trash receptacle with sound effects that made it seem as though items were falling into a deep chasm. Some onlookers circled the container, peering inside to get a glimpse of the mighty crater within. A child eager to hear the sound of falling trash scooped up litter off the ground and threw it in. Apparently she was not alone in her enthusiasm: The acoustically enhanced trash can attracted more than twice as much trash—158 pounds in total—as a neighboring ordinary bin. Other passersby came across…

Like any primate species worthy of its opposable thumbs, we humans like our social hierarchies. Yet too much inequality wrecks our health, rocks our politics, and chafes our social ties, find scholars across the social sciences. These same scholars also hotly debate where inequality comes from, yet arrive at little consensus. A new study of 21 modern small-scale societies around the world, however, finds a clear pattern in the disparities: “How much inequality there is in a society depends on how inheritable the wealth is, which in turn depends on the kind of wealth that it is,” says economist Samuel Bowles, director of the behavioral sciences program at the Santa Fe Institute and one of the study’s lead authors. Specifically, parents in crop farming and herding economies tend to value and create material wealth (such as land, cows, and money), which they then pass on to their offspring. Over time, this inherited wealth accumulates in certain households, widening the gaps between the haves and have-nots. In contrast, parents in subsistence farming and hunting-gathering economies tend to rely on and generate other kinds of capital, including embodied wealth (like height, strength, and skills) and relational might (such as social alliances and…