A Big Little Idea Called Legibility

Often, our first tactic for making change is information. To improve diets, we tell kids about the links between donuts, soda, obesity, and diabetes. To improve efficiency, we inform staff about new procedures or values. These educational interventions draw upon the power of authoritative information to change minds and behavior. While this tactic

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Starting in the 1960s, the social and legal institutions of America were remade to try to eliminate unfair choices by people in positions of responsibility. The new legal structures reflected a deep distrust of human authority in even its more benign forms—a teacher’s authority in the classroom, or a manager’s judgments about who’s doing the job, o

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To impose a single logic on a society is a kind of violence. In 1925, Mahatma Gandhi famously included ‘science without humanity’ and ‘knowledge without character’ alongside ‘politics without principle’ and ‘commerce without morality’ in what he called ‘Seven Social Sins’. He might have added ‘singular solutions to complex problems’ to these admoni

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