AI could improve your life by removing bottlenecks between what you want and what you get

Want to turn many experiences from the equivalent of ordering from a menu to getting a personalized meal? AI is poised to help. Julia Garan/iStock via Getty Images

Bruce Schneier, Harvard Kennedy School

Artificial intelligence is poised to upend much of society, removing human limitations inherent in many systems. One such limitation is information and logistical bottlenecks in decision-making.

Traditionally, people have been forced to reduce complex choices to a small handful of options that don’t do justice to their true desires. Artificial intelligence has the potential to remove that limitation. And it has the potential to drastically change how democracy functions.

AI researcher Tantum Collins and I, a public-interest technology scholar, call this AI overcoming “lossy bottlenecks.” Lossy is a term from information theory that refers to imperfect communications channels – that is, channels that lose information.

Multiple-choice practicality

Imagine your next sit-down dinner and being able to have a long conversation with a chef about your meal. You could end up with a bespoke dinner based on your desires, the chef’s abilities and the available ingredients. This is possible if you are cooking at home or hosted by accommodating friends.

But it is infeasible at your average restaurant: The limitations of the kitchen, the way supplies have to be ordered and the realities of restaurant cooking make this kind of rich interaction between diner and chef impossible. You get a menu of a few dozen standardized options, with the possibility of some modifications around the edges.

That’s a lossy bottleneck. Your wants and desires are rich and multifaceted. The array of culinary outcomes are equally rich and multifaceted. But there’s no scalable way to connect the two. People are forced to use multiple-choice systems like menus to simplify decision-making, and they lose so much information in the process.

People are so used to these bottlenecks that we don’t even notice them. And when we do, we tend to assume they are the inevitable cost of scale and efficiency. And they are. Or, at least, they were.

The possibilities

Artificial intelligence has the potential to overcome this limitation. By storing rich representations of people’s preferences and histories on the demand side, along with equally rich representations of capabilities, costs and creative possibilities on the supply side, AI systems enable complex customization at scale and low cost. Imagine walking into a restaurant and knowing that the kitchen has already started work on a meal optimized for your tastes, or being presented with a personalized list of choices.

There have been some early attempts at this. People have used ChatGPT to design meals based on dietary restrictions and what they have in the fridge. It’s still early days for these technologies, but once they get working, the possibilities are nearly endless. Lossy bottlenecks are everywhere.

Imagine a future AI that knows your dietary wants and needs so well that you wouldn’t need to use detail prompts for meal plans, let alone iterate on them as the nutrition coach in this video does with ChatGPT.

Take labor markets. Employers look to grades, diplomas and certifications to gauge candidates’ suitability for roles. These are a very coarse representation of a job candidate’s abilities. An AI system with access to, for example, a student’s coursework, exams and teacher feedback as well as detailed information about possible jobs could provide much richer assessments of which employment matches do and don’t make sense.

Or apparel. People with money for tailors and time for fittings can get clothes made from scratch, but most of us are limited to mass-produced options. AI could hugely reduce the costs of customization by learning your style, taking measurements based on photos, generating designs that match your taste and using available materials. It would then convert your selections into a series of production instructions and place an order to an AI-enabled robotic production line.

Or software. Today’s computer programs typically use one-size-fits-all interfaces, with only minor room for modification, but individuals have widely varying needs and working styles. AI systems that observe each user’s interaction styles and know what that person wants out of a given piece of software could take this personalization far deeper, completely redesigning interfaces to suit individual needs.

Removing democracy’s bottleneck

These examples are all transformative, but the lossy bottleneck that has the largest effect on society is in politics. It’s the same problem as the restaurant. As a complicated citizen, your policy positions are probably nuanced, trading off between different options and their effects. You care about some issues more than others and some implementations more than others.

If you had the knowledge and time, you could engage in the deliberative process and help create better laws than exist today. But you don’t. And, anyway, society can’t hold policy debates involving hundreds of millions of people. So you go to the ballot box and choose between two – or if you are lucky, four or five – individual representatives or political parties.

Imagine a system where AI removes this lossy bottleneck. Instead of trying to cram your preferences to fit into the available options, imagine conveying your political preferences in detail to an AI system that would directly advocate for specific policies on your behalf. This could revolutionize democracy.

Ballots are bottlenecks that funnel a voter’s diverse views into a few options. AI representations of individual voters’ desires overcome this bottleneck, promising enacted policies that better align with voters’ wishes. Tantum Collins, CC BY-ND

One way is by enhancing voter representation. By capturing the nuances of each individual’s political preferences in a way that traditional voting systems can’t, this system could lead to policies that better reflect the desires of the electorate. For example, you could have an AI device in your pocket – your future phone, for instance – that knows your views and wishes and continually votes in your name on an otherwise overwhelming number of issues large and small.

Combined with AI systems that personalize political education, it could encourage more people to participate in the democratic process and increase political engagement. And it could eliminate the problems stemming from elected representatives who reflect only the views of the majority that elected them – and sometimes not even them.

On the other hand, the privacy concerns resulting from allowing an AI such intimate access to personal data are considerable. And it’s important to avoid the pitfall of just allowing the AIs to figure out what to do: Human deliberation is crucial to a functioning democracy.

Also, there is no clear transition path from the representative democracies of today to these AI-enhanced direct democracies of tomorrow. And, of course, this is still science fiction.

First steps

These technologies are likely to be used first in other, less politically charged, domains. Recommendation systems for digital media have steadily reduced their reliance on traditional intermediaries. Radio stations are like menu items: Regardless of how nuanced your taste in music is, you have to pick from a handful of options. Early digital platforms were only a little better: “This person likes jazz, so we’ll suggest more jazz.”

Today’s streaming platforms use listener histories and a broad set of features describing each track to provide each user with personalized music recommendations. Similar systems suggest academic papers with far greater granularity than a subscription to a given journal, and movies based on more nuanced analysis than simply deferring to genres.

A world without artificial bottlenecks comes with risks – loss of jobs in the bottlenecks, for example – but it also has the potential to free people from the straightjackets that have long constrained large-scale human decision-making. In some cases – restaurants, for example – the impact on most people might be minor. But in others, like politics and hiring, the effects could be profound.

Bruce Schneier, Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. 

Do you eat with your eyes, your gut or your brain? A neuroscientist explains how to listen to your hunger during the holidays

The particular stressors of the holiday season can make it difficult to listen to your body. InspirationGP/iStock via Getty Images

Alex Johnson, Michigan State University

The holiday season is upon us, and with it, opportunities to indulge in festive treats. The proverbial saying “you eat with your eyes first” seems particularly relevant at this time of year.

The science behind eating behavior, however, reveals that the process of deciding what, when and how much to eat is far more complex than just consuming calories when your body needs fuel. Hunger cues are only part of why people choose to eat. As a scientist interested in the psychology and biology that drives eating behavior, I’m fascinated with how the brain’s experiences with food shape eating decisions.

So how do people decide when to eat?

Eating with your eyes

Food-related visual cues can shape feeding behaviors in both people and animals. For example, wrapping food in McDonald’s packaging is sufficient to enhance taste preferences across a range of foods – from chicken nuggets to carrots – in young children. Visual food-related cues, such as presenting a light when food is delivered, can also promote overeating behaviors in animals by overriding energy needs.

In fact, a whole host of sensory stimuli – noises, smells and textures – can be associated with the pleasurable consequences of eating and influence food-related decisions. This is why hearing a catchy radio jingle for a food brand, seeing a television ad for a restaurant or walking by your favorite eatery can shape your decision to consume and sometimes overindulge.

Your senses feast on food as much as your stomach does. Catherine McQueen/Moment via Getty Images

However, your capacity to learn about food-related cues extends beyond just stimuli from the outside world and includes the internal milieu of your body. In other words, you also tend to eat with your stomach in mind, and you do so by using the same learning and brain mechanisms involved in processing food-related stimuli from the outside world. These internal signals, also called interoceptive cues, include feelings of hunger and fullness emanating from your gastrointestinal tract.

It’s no surprise that the signals from your gut help set the stage for when to eat, but the role these signals play is more profound than you might expect.

Trust your gut

Feelings of hunger or fullness act as important interoceptive cues influencing your decision-making around food.

To examine how interoceptive states shape eating behaviors, researchers trained laboratory rats to associate feelings of hunger or satiety with whether they receive food or not. They did this by giving rats food only when they were hungry or full, such that the rats were forced to recognize those internal cues to calculate whether food would be available or not. If a rat is trained to expect food only when hungry, it would generally avoid the area where food is available when it feels full because it does not expect to be fed.

However, when rats were injected with a hormone that triggers hunger called ghrelin, they approached the food delivery location more frequently. This suggests that the rats used this artificial state of hunger as an interoceptive cue to predict food delivery and subsequently behaved like they expected food.

Interoceptive states are sufficient to shape feeding behaviors even in the absence of external sensory cues. One particularly striking example comes from mice that have been genetically engineered to be unable to taste food but nevertheless show preferences for specific foods solely by caloric content. In other words, rodents can use internal cues to shape their food-related decision-making, including when and where to eat and which foods they prefer.

These findings also suggest that feelings of hunger and the detection of nutrients is not restricted to the stomach. They also involve areas of the brain important for regulation and homeostasis, such as the lateral hypothalamus, as well as centers of the brain involved in learning and memory, such as the hippocampus.

What happens in vagus

The gut-brain axis, or the biochemical connection between your gut and your brain, shapes feeding behaviors in many ways. One of them involves the vagus nerve, a cranial nerve that helps control the digestive tract, among other things.

The vagus nerve rapidly communicates nutrient information to the brain. Activating the vagus nerve can induce a pleasurable state, such that mice will voluntarily perform a behavior, such as poking their nose through an open port, to stimulate their vagus nerve. Importantly, mice also learn to prefer foods and places where vagal nerve stimulation occurred.

Your gut and brain are intimately connected.

The vagus nerve plays an essential role in not only communicating digestive signals but also an array of other interoceptive signals that can affect how you feel and behave. In people, vagal nerve stimulation can improve learning and memory and can be used to treat major depression.

Benefits of interoceptive awareness

Your body’s capacity to use both external and internal cues to regulate how you learn and make decisions about food highlights the impressive processes involved in how you regulate your energy needs.

Poor interoceptive awareness is associated with a range of dysfunctional feeding behaviors, such as eating disorders. For instance, anorexia may result when interoceptive signals, such as feelings of hunger, are unable to trigger the motivation to eat. Alternatively, the inability to use the feeling of fullness to dampen the rewarding and pleasurable consequences of eating palatable food could result in binge eating.

Your interoceptive signals play an important role in regulating your daily eating patterns. During the holidays, many stressors from the outside world surround eating, such as packed social calendars, pressures to conform and feelings of guilt when overindulging. At this time, it is particularly important to cultivate a strong connection to your interoceptive signals. This can help promote intuitive eating and a more holistic approach to your dietary habits. Rather than fixating on external factors and placing conditions on your eating behavior, enjoy the moment, deliberately savor each bite and provide time for your interoceptive signals to function in the role they are designed to play.

Your brain evolved to sense your current energy needs. By integrating these signals with your experience of your food environment, you can both optimize your energetic needs and enjoy the season.

Alex Johnson, Associate Professor of Behavioral Neuroscience, Michigan State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. 

Untangling the genetics that underlie our facial features

After turning up hundreds of genes with hard-to-predict effects, some scientists are now probing the grander developmental processes that shape face geometry

When Eric Mueller, who was adopted, first saw a photograph of his birth mother, he was overcome by how alike their faces were. It was, he wrote, “the first time I ever saw someone who looked like me.” The experience led Mueller, a photographer in Minneapolis, into a three-year project to photograph hundreds of sets of related people, culminating in the book Family Resemblance.

Such resemblances are commonplace, of course — and they point to a strong underlying genetic influence on the face. But the closer scientists look into the genetics of facial features, the more complex the picture gets. Hundreds, if not thousands, of genes affect the shape of the face, in mostly subtle ways that make it nearly impossible to predict a person’s face from examining the impact of each gene in turn.

As researchers learn more, some are starting to conclude that they need to look elsewhere to develop an understanding of faces. “Maybe we’re chasing the wrong thing when we’re trying to create gene-level explanations,” says Benedikt Hallgrímsson, a developmental geneticist and evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Calgary, Canada.

Instead, Hallgrímsson and others think they may be able to group genes into teams that work together as the face forms. Understanding how these teams work, and the developmental processes they affect, should be much more manageable than trying to sort out the effects of hundreds of individual genes. If they’re right, faces may turn out to be less complicated than we think.

Plotting the facial landscape

When geneticists first set out to understand faces, they started with the low-hanging fruit: identifying the genes responsible for facial abnormalities. In the 1990s, for example, they learned that a mutation in one gene causes Crouzon syndrome — characterized by wide-set, often bulging eyes and an underdeveloped upper jaw — while a mutation in a different gene leads to the down-slanting eyes, small lower jaw and cleft palate of Treacher Collins syndrome. It was a start, but such extreme cases said little about why normal faces vary as much as they do.

Then, beginning about a decade ago, geneticists began to take a different approach. First, they quantified thousands of normal faces by identifying landmarks on each person’s face — tip of chin, corners of lips, tip of nose, outside corner of each eye, and so forth — and measuring the distances between them. Then they screened the genomes of those individuals, to see whether any genetic variants corresponded with particular facial measurements, an analysis known as a genome-wide association study, or GWAS (pronounced jee-wass).

Some 25 GWASs of facial shape have been published to date, with over 300 genes identified in total. “Every single region is explained by multiple genes,” says Seth Weinberg, a craniofacial geneticist at the University of Pittsburgh. “There’s some genes pushing outward and others pushing inward. It’s the total balance that ends up becoming you, and what you look like.”

Not only are there a slew of genes involved in each particular facial region, the variants uncovered thus far don’t account well for the specifics of each face. In a survey of the genetics of faces in the 2022 Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics, Weinberg and his colleagues gathered GWAS results on the faces of 4,680 people of European ancestry. Known genetic variants explained only about 14 percent of the differences in faces. An individual’s age accounted for 7 percent, sex for 12 percent, and body mass index for about 19 percent of variation, leaving a whopping 48 percent completely unexplained.

Clearly, something important in determining the shape of faces isn’t captured by GWASs. Of course, some portion of that missing variation must be explained by environment — in fact, researchers have noted that certain parts of the face, including the cheeks, lower jaw and mouth, do seem more susceptible to environmental influences such as diet, aging and climate. But another clue to that missing factor, many researchers agree, lies within the unique genetics of individual families.

Variants great and small

If faces were simply the sum of hundreds of tiny genetic effects, as the GWAS results imply, then every child’s face should be a perfect blend, halfway between its two parents, Hallgrímsson says, for the same reason that flipping a coin 300 times will almost always yield roughly 150 heads. Yet you only have to look at certain families to see that’s not the case. “My son has his grandmother’s nose,” says Hallgrímsson. “That must mean there are genetic variants that have large effects within families.”

But if some face genes do have large effects that are visible within the families that carry them, why don’t they show up in a GWAS? Perhaps the variants are too rare in the general population. “Facial shape is really a combination of common and rare variation,” says Peter Claes, an imaging geneticist at KU Leuven in Belgium. As a possible example, he points to French actor Gérard Depardieu’s distinctive nose. “You don’t know the genetics yet, but you feel this is a rare variant,” he says.

A few other distinctive facial features that run in families, such as dimples, cleft chins and unibrows, could also be candidates for such rare, high-impact variants, says Stephen Richmond, an orthodontic researcher at the University of Cardiff, Wales, who studies facial genetics. To look for such rare variants, though, researchers will need to move beyond GWASs to explore large datasets of whole-genome sequences — a task that will have to wait until such sequences, linked to facial measurements, become much more abundant, says Claes.

Another possibility is that the same gene variants that have small effects most of the time could have larger effects within certain families. Hallgrímsson has seen this in mice: He and his colleagues, notably Christopher Percival, now at Stony Brook University, introduced mutations that affect craniofacial shape into three inbred lineages of mice. They discovered that the three lineages ended up with quite different facial shapes. “The same mutation in a different strain of mice can have a different effect, sometimes even the opposite effect,” says Hallgrímsson.

If something similar happens in people, it’s possible that within a particular family — as with a particular strain of mice — the family’s unique genetic background may make certain face shape variants more powerful. But proving that this happens in people, without the aid of inbred strains, is likely to be difficult, Hallgrímsson says.

A better approach, Hallgrímsson thinks, might be to look at the developmental processes that underlie how faces are formed. Developmental processes involve teams of genes that work together — often to regulate the activity of still other genes — to control how specific organs and tissues form during embryonic development. To identify processes linked to face shape, Hallgrímsson and his team first used fancy statistics to find genes that affect craniofacial variation in over 1,100 mice. Then they turned to genetics databases to identify the developmental processes that each gene was a part of. The analysis flagged three processes as especially important: cartilage development, brain growth and bone formation. It’s possible, Hallgrímsson speculates, that individual differences in the rate and timing of these three processes (and likely some others) might be a big part of the explanation for why one person’s face differs from another’s.

Intriguingly, it appears that some of these teams of genes may have “captains” that direct the activity of other team members. Researchers trying to understand facial variation might thus be able to focus on the action of these captain genes rather than hundreds of individual genetic players. Support for this notion comes from an intriguing new study by Sahin Naqvi, a geneticist at Stanford University, and his colleagues.

Naqvi began with a paradox. He knew that most developmental processes are so finely tuned that even modest changes in the activity of the genes regulating them can cause severe developmental problems. But he also knew that small differences in those very same genes are likely the reason his own face looks different from his neighbor’s. How, Naqvi wondered, could both of these ideas be true?

To try to reconcile these two contradictory notions, Naqvi and his colleagues decided to focus on one regulatory gene, SOX9, which controls the activity of many other genes involved in the development of cartilage and other tissues. If a person has only one working copy of SOX9, the result is a craniofacial disorder called Pierre Robin sequence, characterized by an underdeveloped lower jaw and numerous other problems.

Naqvi’s team set out to reduce SOX9 activity little by little and measure what effect that had on the genes it regulates. To do so, they genetically engineered human embryonic cells so that they could dial down SOX9’s regulatory activity at will. Then the researchers measured the effect of six different SOX9 levels on the activity of the other genes. Would the genes under SOX9’s control maintain their activity despite small changes in SOX9, thus keeping development stable, or would their activity decline in proportion to changes in SOX9?

The genes fell into two classes, the team found. Most of them didn’t change their activity unless SOX9 levels fell to 20 percent or less of normal. That is, they seemed to be buffered against even relatively large changes in SOX9. This buffering — possibly the result of other regulatory genes compensating for reductions in SOX9 — would help keep development finely tuned.

But a small subset of the genes turned out to be sensitive to even small changes in SOX9, dialing their own activity up or down in lockstep with it. And those genes, the scientists found, tended to affect jaw size and other facial features altered in Pierre Robin sequence. In fact, these unbuffered genes seem to determine how much, or how little, a regular face resembles a Pierre Robin one. At one end of the range lie the underdeveloped jaw and other structural changes of Pierre Robin sequence. And at the other end? “You can think of the anti-Pierre Robin as an overdeveloped jaw, elongated with a prominent chin — kind of like me, actually,” says Naqvi.

In essence, SOX9 captains a team of genes that define one direction, or axis, in which faces can vary: from more to less Pierre-Robin-like. Naqvi is now looking to see whether other teams of genes, each captained by a different regulatory gene, define additional axes of variation. He suspects, for example, that genes sensitive to small changes in a gene called PAX3 might define an axis relating to the shape of the nose and forehead, while those sensitive to another called TWIST1 — which, when mutated, leads to premature fusing of the skull bones — could define an axis relating to how elongated the skull and forehead are.

Other evidence hints that Naqvi might be on the right track in thinking that faces vary along predefined axes. For example, geneticist Hanne Hoskens, Claes’s former student and now a postdoc in Hallgrímsson’s lab, sorted people’s faces according to how closely they resembled the prominent forehead, flattened nose and other features characteristic of achondroplasia, the most common form of dwarfism. (Think of the actor Peter Dinklage, for example.) Those at the more dwarflike end of the range tended to have different variants of genes related to cartilage development than those with less dwarflike faces, she found.

If similar patterns occur for other developmental pathways, this may set guardrails that restrict the way faces develop. That could help geneticists cut through the complexities to extract broader principles underlying facial shape. “There is a limited set of directions along which faces can vary,” says Hallgrímsson. “There are enough directions that there is a tremendous amount of variation, but it’s a small subset of the geometric possibilities we see. And it’s because these axes are determined by developmental processes, and there are relatively few developmental processes.”

Until more results are in, it’s too early to say whether this new approach really holds an important key to explaining why one person’s face looks different from another’s — and the shock of recognition Eric Mueller experienced when he saw his mother’s picture for the first time. But if Hallgrímsson, Naqvi and their colleagues are on the right track, focusing on developmental pathways may offer a way to part the thicket of hundreds of genes that for so long has obscured our understanding of faces.

New Zealand’s quest to save its rotund, flightless parrots

DNA sequencing, GPS tracking and tailored diets are slowly restoring the endangered kākāpō

Kākāpō are avid walkers, wandering on strong legs for miles at a time and hiking up mountains to find mates. They’re keen climbers too, clambering up New Zealand’s 65-foot-high rimu trees on large claws to forage for red berries on the tips of the conifer’s branches.

But there’s one thing that the world’s heaviest parrot species can’t do: fly. With their bulky frames — males weigh up to nine pounds — and waddling gait, they have little chance of outrunning predators like stoats and feral cats. When threatened, the nocturnal parrots freeze, relying on their moss-green feathers to act as camouflage.

New Zealand was once a land of flightless birds like the extinct moa — no terrestrial mammalian predators in sight. That changed in the 13th century, when Māori voyagers brought rats and dogs, and again in the 19th century, when European settlers brought more rats, cats and mustelids like weasels, stoats and ferrets. These predators have played a major role in putting at risk some 300 native species on New Zealand’s two main islands and smaller offshore islands, taking an especially heavy toll on flightless birds like kākāpō.

Now listed as critically endangered, the kākāpō teetered on the edge of extinction in the mid-1900s due to hunting, predators and land clearance. From the 1970s, conservation efforts focused on managing the remaining kākāpō on the country’s offshore islands, where predators are systematically eradicated. Due to those ongoing efforts, which include breeding programs, veterinary treatment and supplementary food, parrot numbers have grown from fewer than 60 in 1995 to more than 200 today.

That success, plus lack of space in offshore islands, led New Zealand’s Department of Conservation and Ngāi Tahu, the Māori tribe whose people serve as traditional guardians of the kākāpō, to find a new habitat for the parrots. Starting in July 2023, relocations began to the 8,400-acre Sanctuary Mountain Maungatautari, a predator-free haven enclosed by one of the world’s longest pest-proof fences.

So far, 10 male parrots have moved to the reserve — the first time the species is living back on the mainland in almost half a century. Researchers are tracking their locations and conducting regular health checkups to assess whether the birds can thrive there.

If male parrots start hiking to the ridgetops, serenading female kākāpō with deep “booms” and high-pitched “chings,” they might be in shape to breed, says conservation biologist Andrew Digby, science advisor for kākāpō at the Department of Conservation. “We might start looking at bringing females in.”

Kākāpō have much lower fertility than other parrots. Since the 1980s, fewer than half their eggs have hatched, which is thought to be partly due to inbreeding. Left to their own devices, they breed only when rimu trees bear masses of fruit, every two to four years, with females laying one to four eggs.

Recently, researchers have started to explore how genomic data can contribute to kākāpō survival. Such studies can help wildlife managers boost genetic diversity and resilience in threatened species, says evolutionary biologist Cynthia Steiner of the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance.

In one important study published in 2023, researchers analyzed whole-genome sequence data for 169 parrots — nearly all of those living when the research began in 2018. That work yielded crucial insights, including genetic variations affecting aspects of kākāpō chick development, like height and growth rate. This could help scientists predict how quickly baby birds will grow, and initiate veterinary interventions should the growth rates deviate, says Joseph Guhlin, a genomicist with Genomics Aotearoa at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand.

Scientists also found that some kākāpō have genetic resistance to aspergillosis, a fungal respiratory disease. In 2019, an outbreak affected 21 birds and killed nine. If another outbreak occurs, vulnerable parrots could be isolated and treated ahead of time, Guhlin says.

As of October 2023, all parrots in the sanctuary were doing well, although the first four arrivals lost a bit of weight. Thanks to GPS trackers attached to each bird, “we can see that they’ve been bouncing around all over the place,” Digby says. But the survival of kākāpō beyond fenced-in sanctuaries depends on the success of Predator Free 2050, an ambitious initiative to eradicate some of the introduced predators most harmful to New Zealand’s native wildlife by 2050.

“Eradications are a high-cost, high-risk, high-reward strategy,” says ecologist Stephen Hartley of Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington. Hartley thinks it may be possible to get rid of possums, because they breed slowly and are easy to detect, but that rats and mustelids will be nearly impossible to eliminate without introducing some form of genetic or biological control, such as gene editing or introducing a parasite to prevent them from reproducing.

If all goes as planned, people across New Zealand may one day be able to see and hear the parrots from their own backyards. For now, they can traipse through the forest sanctuary the parrots now call home. “Transferring them to Maungatautari is a good first step,” Digby says. “It brings kākāpō back to where people are.”

Rina Diane Caballar is a freelance journalist based in New Zealand. She covers tech and its intersections with science, society and the environment. Find her at rinacaballar.com.

How Red Sea attacks on cargo ships could disrupt deliveries and push up prices – a logistics expert explains

The Suez Canal is a busy shipping lane but companies are diverting ships to other routes following attacks on vessels. Mariusz Bugno/Shutterstock

Gokcay Balci, University of Bradford

Attacks on international cargo ships in the Red Sea from Houthi-controlled Yemen have seen several cargo vessels hit by missiles and drones in recent days.

In response, global shipping companies and cargo owners – including some of the world’s largest container lines such as Maersk, as well as energy giant BP – have diverted ships from the Red Sea. So far, more than 40 container ships have been diverted, with many rerouted to less direct channels than the Suez Canal – an artificial waterway in Egypt that connects the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea.

Opened in 1869, the Suez Canal is one of the busiest canals in the world, carrying around 12% of global trade. In 2022, 23,583 ships used this route. Any disruptions can have severe knock-on effects as these ships deliver goods from one country to another. Ultimately, this can even feed into the prices you pay for certain goods, as well as the time it takes to get things delivered from overseas.

Remember when the container vessel Ever Given got stuck in the Suez Canal for six days in 2021? It affected the shipping lane for weeks, playing havoc with global supply chains and disrupting global trade flow to the tune of billions. Previously, when the Suez Canal closed between 1967 and 1975 due to the six-day war between Israel and a group of Arab states, global trade was also negatively affected. Ships had to sale around South Africa’s Cape of Good Hope instead – a much longer route.

While there is also a Northern Sea route that ships can take, it is not navigable in winter season and not yet commercially viable for many shipping companies. And so, the Suez Canal is the shortest and most suitable sea route between Asia and Europe.

The Suez Canal (solid line) allows ships to make a much shorter journey between Asia and Europe. Otherwise, they are forced to sail around the Cape of Good Hope (dotted line). Dimitrios Karamitros/Shutterstock

Longer journeys will impact global supply chains

The sailing time between eastern Asia and western Europe can increase by about 25-35% when ships use the Cape route. For instance, a vessel travelling at 13.8 knots per hour (the current average speed of global container ships) between Shanghai, China and the Port of Felixstowe in the UK will see its sailing time increase from an average of 31 days to 41 days when sailing around the Cape.

It’s even worse for exporters shipping goods from say Italy to Dubai – the Cape route could take them 160% more time than the Suez route (12 days versus 32 days). These sailing times could be more for container vessels as they stop at other ports along their routes.

When it comes to comparing costs for the two routes though, the figures are not straight forward. Vessels passing through Suez Canal need to pay a toll. This can be as much as US$700,000 (£550,000) for a vessel carrying 20,000 containers (a typical large container vessel commonly used for east to west trades). But the Cape route could still cost 10% more, even with the canal transit fee, according to research published in 2022. The exact cost difference also depends on current fuel prices, as well as size and the type of vessel.

But it will be the reduced shipping capacity due to longer transit times, not the increased operating costs of shipowners, that will really weigh on global supply chains. This is because freight rates (the price companies pay to transport goods) depend on supply and demand.

It was a supply and demand imbalance that caused shipping costs to skyrocket during the COVID pandemic. Shipping supply was reduced because of disruptions, but demand increased because people were spending more on goods than services during lockdown. This time, the magnitude of freight rate increases is unlikely to be as large because there is no indication of a surge in demand for shipping services.

The Ever Given got stuck in the Suez Canal, disrupting global supply chains, in 2021. Corona Borealis Studio/Shutterstock

How shipping disruption affects you

If you live in the UK and have ordered new sofa from a manufacturer in China, you could expect a delay of at least ten days. The prices of certain products could also rise if freight levels increase significantly. An International Monetary Fund forecast shows a doubling of shipping costs could increase consumer price inflation by 0.7% percent.

However, sea freight activity generally has a marginal impact on most consumer prices – it only makes up 0.35% of prices for some types of clothing, for example. On the other hand, oil prices could spike if more energy companies follow BP and stop using Suez Canal, especially if this disruption persists over time. The price of Brent Crude – a global benchmark for oil – has already risen from US$73 on December 12 to about US$78 on December 18 2023.

Although you might not have to pay more for the products you buy, there is another cost of this situation, for people and the planet: increased carbon emissions. More than 3,000 extra nautical miles will be taken by vessels using Cape route, which could generate around 30-35% more carbon emissions than if these ships were sailing the Suez route. The shipping industry already creates 3% of global emissions.

Shipowners will be forced to keep diverting ships from the Red Sea if attacks on vessels continue. Of course, it remains to be seen when and how this problem will be solved. Until it is, uncertainty and change could continue to affect your pocket – and the planet.

Gokcay Balci, Assistant Professor in Logistics and Supply Chain, University of Bradford

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. 

Is Hamas the same as ISIS, the Islamic State group? No − and yes

A Palestinian militant rides on the back of a motorcycle near a crossing between Israel and the northern Gaza Strip on Oct. 7, 2023. Ahmed Zakot/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

Brian Glyn Williams, UMass Dartmouth

In the aftermath of Hamas’ bloody raid into Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, many Israelis and people around the world equated the newly ultraviolent and audacious Palestinian militant organization with the world’s deadliest terrorist group, ISIS – the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for example, linked the two groups directly on Oct. 25, 2023, stating: “Hamas is ISIS and ISIS is Hamas.” President Joe Biden and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin made similar comparisons. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Hamas killing families “brings to mind the worst of ISIS.”

There are plenty of reasons for Israel to want the world to think Hamas is ISIS – including the hope of marshaling the sort of overseas support that led to the 2014 creation of the 86-member Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS. In fighting between 2014 and 2019, the coalition reclaimed all the territory the Islamic State group had seized in Iraq and Syria.

And it is true that the Oct. 7 attack displayed tactics that are remarkably similar to those of the Islamic State group. But as a scholar of ISIS specifically, and Middle Eastern militants in general, I am inclined to agree with those who say the comparison between the two terrorist groups overlooks their underlying differences. The similarities are on the surface, in methods and tactics – but their goals and ideologies remain vastly different.

Fundamental differences

As various news articles have pointed out, the Islamic State is a Sunni group militantly opposed to the Shia branch of Islam and calls Shiites “rafida,” which means “rejecter of Allah.” While it is true that most Palestinians in Gaza are Sunni, Shia-led Iran is Hamas’ primary benefactor.

And Hamas and ISIS have even met in battle. Bloody clashes between ISIS and Hamas in 2015 resulted from efforts by Islamic State supporters to establish ISIS affiliates in the Hamas-dominated Gaza Strip and the neighboring Sinai Peninsula.

In January 2018, leaders of the Islamic State group in the Sinai declared war on the “Hamas tyrants” via a lengthy online video that included the execution of a Hamas member.

The two groups’ differences also include their divergent goals. The Islamic State group aims to create a global theocracy based on the principles of fundamentalist Sunni Islam, with no national or territorial borders.

Hamas, by contrast, is narrowly focused on constructing a Palestinian national state by “armed resistance to the occupation” of the Palestinian territories by Israel.

So it’s pretty clear that Hamas is not ISIS. But it’s not that simple either.

Hamas fired rockets into Israel as part of the Oct. 7, 2023, attack. AP Photo/Hatem Moussa

Interconnections and exchanges

Despite their differences, there are several similarities, including the fact that both groups are on the U.S. list of foreign terrorist organizations. The two organizations have on occasion also shared common strategic, if not necessarily ideological, goals. And, as became obvious on Oct. 7, their tactics have become similar, though in service of different objectives.

My long study of Islamic State fighting tactics, including field research in Iraq, leads me to believe Hamas has recently undergone a radical ISIS-inspired transformation that has not yet gotten widespread public attention. Prior to its Oct. 7 blitz, Hamas’ actions were limited to lobbing imprecise rockets and digging tunnels into Israel to kidnap or kill small numbers of Israelis.

But as University of Miami professor and expert in the study of jihadism Nathan S. French has noted in El Pais, “Hamas operatives – like other Islamist and jihadist groups – borrow, steal and appropriate tactics and strategies from other similar political, guerrilla, or militant movements.” And it seems that Hamas has borrowed tactics from ISIS.

It’s likely that Hamas learned from the hundreds of Palestinians who joined both the core ISIS caliphate in Syria and Iraq and the ISIS affiliate in the Sinai.

And despite their differences, Hamas officials have in the past met directly with leaders of the Islamic State in the Sinai. Those meetings were likely linked to collaboration between the two groups for specific actions that benefited their respective goals, such as weapons smuggling, undermining Egyptian government influence in the Sinai and transporting injured Islamic State fighters to Gaza for medical treatment.

In October 2023, an article in the U.K. newspaper The Times cited an intelligence official who said, “It’s clear that the two movements have worked together close enough over the past few years to copy each other’s methods, learn tactics and train on weapons they have procured together.”

Tactical similarities

In many ways, Hamas’ Oct. 7 surprise attack resembled ISIS attacks, such as a June 2014 blitz in which Islamic State group fighters burst out of secret desert bases to conquer much of northern Iraq, including the country’s second-largest city, Mosul.

Both groups’ attacks took their opponents by complete surprise, indicating a high degree of secrecy and advanced preparation. And both assaults utilized “technicals” – pickup trucks with machine guns mounted in their cargo beds and carrying squads of fighters. Both attacking forces used commercial drones to provide air support for their troop movements. And both organizations deployed suicide-attack fighters known as “inghimasi,” Arabic for “plungers into battle.”

On Oct. 7, Hamas fighters reportedly left black ISIS war banners at the scene of several attacks. There were also videos posted online that appeared to show Hamas fighters singing popular ISIS war songs as they stormed into Israel.

Made for the media

An additional notable similarity is that Hamas released ISIS-style videos of the horrific atrocities it inflicted on Israelis. The Islamic State group’s media approach involved disseminating videos of mutilation, rape, amputation, slavery, suicide warfare, torture and mass murder.

On and after Oct. 7, Hamas fighters similarly uploaded videos and images of their executions of cowering Israeli civilians and other atrocities to a Telegram channel. These visuals made their way to X – formerly known as Twitter – and TikTok and other platforms.

Israel Defense Forces spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari has specifically said those videos are part of why Israel has been equating Hamas with the Islamic State group.

The Times of Israel came to a similar conclusion, noting: “Looking at images of the Hamas assault, it is fair to assume that Hamas learned a lesson from the ISIS terror playbook.”

Rape as a weapon

Another tactic new to Hamas, but not to ISIS, was the alleged rape and mutilation of girls and women. Hamas has denied the allegations. Islamic State religious scholars have previously sanctioned violence against women and told fighters to rape non-Muslim women “to make them Muslim.”

Similarly, Israel Defense Forces officials have said the Hamas religious leaders gave their fighters ISIS-like religious texts based on extremist interpretations of traditional Islamic jurisprudence telling them captives were “the spoils of war.”

All these developments indicate that ISIS has had an influence on Hamas, even if their goals remain quite different – or in direct opposition.

Brian Glyn Williams, Professor of Islamic History, UMass Dartmouth

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. 

Why 14th Amendment bars Trump from office: A constitutional law scholar explains principle behind Colorado Supreme Court ruling

On Jan. 6, 2021, then-President Donald Trump exhorted followers to object to the results of the 2020 presidential election. AP Photo/Evan Vucci

Mark A. Graber, University of Maryland

In 2024, former President Donald Trump will face some of his greatest challenges: criminal court cases, primary opponents and constitutional challenges to his eligibility to hold the office of president again. The Colorado Supreme Court has pushed that latter piece to the forefront, ruling on Dec. 19, 2023, that Trump cannot appear on Colorado’s 2024 presidential ballot because of his involvement in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.

The reason is the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1868, three years after the Civil War ended. Section 3 of that amendment wrote into the Constitution the principle President Abraham Lincoln set out just three months after the first shots were fired in the Civil War. On July 4, 1861, he spoke to Congress, declaring that “when ballots have fairly, and constitutionally, decided, there can be no successful appeal back to bullets.”

The text of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment states, in full:

“No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”

To me as a scholar of constitutional law, each sentence and sentence fragment captures the commitment made by the nation in the wake of the Civil War to govern by constitutional politics. People seeking political and constitutional changes must play by the rules set out in the Constitution. In a democracy, people cannot substitute force, violence or intimidation for persuasion, coalition building and voting.

The power of the ballot

The first words of Section 3 describe various offices that people can only hold if they satisfy the constitutional rules for election or appointment. The Republicans who wrote the amendment repeatedly declared that Section 3 covered all offices established by the Constitution. That included the presidency, a point many participants in framing, ratifying and implementation debates over constitutional disqualification made explicitly, as documented in the records of debate in the 39th Congress, which wrote and passed the amendment.

Senators, representatives and presidential electors are spelled out because some doubt existed when the amendment was debated in 1866 as to whether they were officers of the United States, although they were frequently referred to as such in the course of congressional debates.

No one can hold any of the offices enumerated in Section 3 without the power of the ballot. They can only hold office if they are voted into it – or nominated and confirmed by people who have been voted into office. No office mentioned in the first clause of Section 3 may be achieved by force, violence or intimidation.

A required oath

The next words in Section 3 describe the oath “to support [the] Constitution” that Article 6 of the Constitution requires all office holders in the United States to take.

The people who wrote Section 3 insisted during congressional debates that anyone who took an oath of office, including the president, were subject to Section 3’s rules. The presidential oath’s wording is slightly different from that of other federal officers, but everyone in the federal government swears to uphold the Constitution before being allowed to take office.

These oaths bind officeholders to follow all the rules in the Constitution. The only legitimate government officers are those who hold their offices under the constitutional rules. Lawmakers must follow the Constitution’s rules for making laws. Officeholders can only recognize laws that were made by following the rules – and they must recognize all such laws as legitimate.

This provision of the amendment ensures that their oaths of office obligate officials to govern by voting rather than violence.

Donald Trump takes the presidential oath of office on Jan. 20, 2017. Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call

Defining disqualification

Section 3 then says people can be disqualified from holding office if they “engaged in insurrection or rebellion.” Legal authorities from the American Revolution to the post-Civil War Reconstruction understood an insurrection to have occurred when two or more people resisted a federal law by force or violence for a public, or civic, purpose.

Shay’s Rebellion, the Whiskey Insurrection, Burr’s Rebellion, John Brown’s Raid and other events were insurrections, even when the goal was not overturning the government.

What these events had in common was that people were trying to prevent the enforcement of laws that were consequences of persuasion, coalition building and voting. Or they were trying to create new laws by force, violence and intimidation.

These words in the amendment declare that those who turn to bullets when ballots fail to provide their desired result cannot be trusted as democratic officials. When applied specifically to the events on Jan. 6, 2021, the amendment declares that those who turn to violence when voting goes against them cannot hold office in a democratic nation.

A chance at clemency

The last sentence of Section 3 announces that forgiveness is possible. It says “Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability” – the ineligibility of individuals or categories of people to hold office because of having participated in an insurrection or rebellion.

For instance, Congress might remove the restriction on office-holding based on evidence that the insurrectionist was genuinely contrite. It did so for repentant former Confederate General James Longstreet .

Or Congress might conclude in retrospect that violence was appropriate, such as against particularly unjust laws. Given their powerful anti-slavery commitments and abolitionist roots, I believe that Republicans in the House and Senate in the late 1850s would almost certainly have allowed people who violently resisted the fugitive slave laws to hold office again. This provision of the amendment says that bullets may substitute for ballots and violence for voting only in very unusual circumstances.

After fleeing Union forces, Confederate president Jefferson Davis, at center climbing into the carriage, was arrested on May 10, 1865. Buyenlarge/Getty Images

A clear conclusion

Taken as a whole, the structure of Section 3 leads to the conclusion that Donald Trump is one of those past or present government officials who by violating his oath of allegiance to the constitutional rules has forfeited his right to present and future office.

Trump’s supporters say the president is neither an “officer under the United States” nor an “officer of the United States” as specified in Section 3. Therefore, they say, he is exempt from its provisions.

But in fact, both common sense and history demonstrate that Trump was an officer, an officer of the United States and an officer under the United States for constitutional purposes. Most people, even lawyers and constitutional scholars like me, do not distinguish between those specific phrases in ordinary discourse. The people who framed and ratified Section 3 saw no distinction. Exhaustive research by Trump supporters has yet to produce a single assertion to the contrary that was made in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. Yet scholars John Vlahoplus and Gerard Magliocca are daily producing newspaper and other reports asserting that presidents are covered by Section 3.

Significant numbers of Republicans and Democrats in the House and Senate agreed that Donald Trump violated his oath of office immediately before, during and immediately after the events of Jan. 6, 2021. Most Republican senators who voted against his conviction did so on the grounds that they did not have the power to convict a president who was no longer in office. Most of them did not dispute that Trump participated in an insurrection. A judge in Colorado also found that Trump “engaged in insurrection,” which was the basis for the state’s Supreme Court ruling barring him from the ballot.

Constitutional democracy is rule by law. Those who have demonstrated their rejection of rule by law may not apply, no matter their popularity. Jefferson Davis participated in an insurrection against the United States in 1861. He was not eligible to become president of the U.S. four years later, or to hold any other state or federal office ever again. If Davis was barred from office, then the conclusion must be that Trump is too – as a man who participated in an insurrection against the United States in 2021.

Mark A. Graber, University System of Maryland Regents Professor of Law, University of Maryland

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

A bottle of scotch recently sold for $2.7 million – what’s behind such outrageous prices?

In November 2023, a bottle of Macallan Scotch whisky fetched the highest price of all time for a bottle of wine or spirits. Wiktor Szymanowicz/Future Publishing via Getty Images

Hovig Tchalian, University of Southern California

When a rare bottle of Scotch whisky sold for US$2.7 million in November 2023, I was stunned, but I wasn’t surprised.

The whiskey market has been booming for some time.

Bourbon brands like Pappy Van Winkle from Buffalo Trace distillery are selling for astronomical prices in the secondary market. Japanese whiskies, which have become popular over the past decade, now fetch prices up to 50 times higher what they did a decade ago.

And in July 2022, a single Ardbeg whisky barrel, aged since 1975, with enough liquid for about 500 bottles, sold at auction for around $19 million. In 1997, the entire Ardbeg distillery had been purchased by Glenmorangie Distillery for roughly $11 million.

How could a single cask of Scotch whisky sell for nearly twice the value of an entire distillery purchased just over two decades earlier?

I’ve been studying specialty markets for a decade, and I see at least two stories to unpack.

One is economic, where items in low supply, like rare bottles or barrels, sell for high prices. And prices in the whiskey market have been rising rapidly over the last two decades, fueled in part by investors. Some investors see luxury collectibles, such as high-end whiskey bottles or casks, as an alternative to other assets like stocks and bonds. (There are, however, signs that the luxury market is softening due to oversupply.)

But a second, overlooked – and arguably more interesting – explanation is social. It revolves around the increasing focus on the purported authenticity of craft products – especially ones like Scotch whisky, which trade on their heritage as much as their flavor.

A ‘brown spirit’ boom

The history of whiskey is one of booms and busts.

Whiskey has been produced in Scotland and Ireland since at least the late 1400s. The spirit spread to the rest of Europe in the mid-to-late 1700s. The late 1800s and early 1900s were boom years, especially for Irish whiskey. The period also witnessed innovations such as aging the spirit in oak barrels, which enhances its flavor. (Scotch, Japanese, Canadian and Indian whisky is spelled without the “e,” and Irish and American whiskey is spelled with the “e.” Whiskey is the general category label.)

In the U.S., Prohibition moved distilling underground until it made a midcentury comeback. Famously, the advent of “white spirits” like vodka and gin pushed down prices of “brown spirits” like whiskey starting in the 1970s. This led to what Scotch distillers call the “whisky loch,” or “lake” – the accumulation of large stores of matured whisky and the resulting shuttering of many whisky producers.

But whiskey has made a comeback since 2000. Prices of some bottles, including highly prized single-malt whiskies produced at a single distillery, have risen by almost 600% over the last decade. American bourbon has also seen a spike in interest – and prices – since at least 2016.

Long perceived as an inferior knockoff of Scotch whisky, Japanese whiskies have also experienced price surges. The House of Suntory, the oldest Japanese distiller, recently announced its own substantial price increases in the primary market, in some cases by as much as 100%. And India, long the largest consumer of Scotch whisky, is also seeing its distilleries produce their own single-malt whiskies and gradually move up-market [https://www.theiwsr.com/the-volatility-of-indian-whisky-markets/].

While these increases have largely been confined to the higher end of the market, prices of affordable bottles have gone up, too.

Japanese whiskies have become more popular in the 21st century. Tristan Fewings/Getty Images

Craving real connections

Not long after the sale of the 1926 Macallan for $2.7 million, Merriam-Webster named “authentic” its 2023 word of the year.

The term’s popularity can be attributed to advances in artificial intelligence – and, with it, misinformation. But much of the focus on authenticity is also the result of the longing for more in-person connections in an increasingly virtual world. People want authentic experiences – or what look like authentic experiences. And that includes the products that they buy.

Authenticity is a notoriously difficult concept to define. But it tends to revolve around following a set of internal or external standards. That might mean following your values or your heart in order to cultivate your best, most real or most authentic self. When it comes to products – think vintage cars, artisanal foods or craft beer – it could mean those products must meet certain criteria to be considered authentic. For example, according to standards defined by the microbrewery movement, in order for craft beer to be considered authentic, it must be produced in-house in small batches.

These sorts of distinctions can be difficult for the average consumer to grasp, and authenticity can be easy to fake. The beer brand Samuel Adams, for instance, attempts to signal its authenticity by associating itself with the people, places and events of the American Revolution. But the brewery also got in trouble for marketing itself as a craft beer without making its beer in-house.

Putting a price on authenticity

Intangible qualities make whiskey special – aspects such as the aroma, or “nose”; its complexity; and its lingering flavor, or “finish.”

But to boost whiskey’s value, purveyors of high-end whiskey convey the product’s heritage.

A whiskey’s unique locale – what wine enthusiasts call “terroir” – matters greatly to its perceived authenticity.

King Charles III – then the Prince of Wales – sniffs a glass of whisky during a 1994 visit to a distillery on the Scottish island of Islay. Chris Bacon/PA Images via Getty Images

During and after the whisky loch, scotch producers realized they were sitting on large stocks of unsold whisky. Much of that whisky was produced and aged starting in the 1960s, before the advent of automation, faster distilling and new ingredients. The desire to return to those more authentic, simpler times allowed distillers to rewrite the stories of those stores.

Scotch whisky has a long-standing reputation as more historically significant – and, therefore, more authentic. Despite research suggesting that even most expert judges can’t distinguish different categories of whisky, a Scotch whisky bottle can sell for as much as 100 times the price of a similarly aged – and similarly complex – Canadian whisky.

One recent study of Canadian whisky showed how distilleries can even use their physical features and local character to enhance perceptions of their spirits’ authenticity. Bottles from older distilleries were deemed more authentic – and could sell for more. Those from newer, factorylike buildings had less appeal to consumers.

There’s a miragelike nature to all of this. A product can be considered authentic if everyone believes and acts like it is.

It should come as no surprise, then, that the history of whiskey is one of perception, not necessarily quality. And this perception helps drive its economic fortunes.

So the next time you search for a nice bottle of whiskey for yourself or as a gift, consider the story and history that’s amplifying its price.

Hovig Tchalian, Assistant Professor of Entrepreneurship, University of Southern California

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.