Paola Antonelli, MoMA’s design curator, talks about why she acquired 14 video games for the museum’s collection at an event in our office called “Design is Everywhere.” Photo: Ryan Lash

Whether we’re conscious of it or not, design affects us in hundreds — if not thousands of ways — each day. Just think back to your morning. A designer made the decisions that went into the craftsmanship of your bed, your futon, your mattress. A designer determined the form and materials of your toothbrush, your shower, your towel — helped create the experience of your first cup of coffee or tea. Less tangibly, a designer was involved in the way you caught up on the news or checked the weather. And that’s all before you’ve even left the house!

Design can be big — think of the subway systems or highways. Design can be small — think of the details in the fonts we stare at on screens and in books. But design is truly all around us. And so Thursday night in the TED office, we held a salon called “Design is Everywhere,” hosted by our Ideas Editor, Helen Walters. Over the course of the night, four speakers gave talks on their unique approaches to design.

First up was Jake Barton, whose media design firm Local Projects creates systems for museums to unearth works in whimsical ways, and to let the citizens of a city tell their stories in their own voice. In a very moving talk, he shared how the team approached creating the 9/11 Memorial and Museum. As Barton says, September 11 exists somewhere “between current events and history” and all of us – no matter where we were at the time — are witnesses to the event. He explained how the museum sees its mission as collecting stories of that day — even from museum visitors. He also explains how names on the memorial are arranged by an algorithm attuned to “meaningful adjacencies” of personal connections.

Next, came designer Ayşe Birsel, co-founder of Birsel + Seck, who has been called, among other things, the “Queen of Toilets,” for her innovative TOTO toilet seat. She calls her design process Deconstruction: Reconstruction. Birsel talked about her workshops, in which she asks people to rethink their greatest design product: their lives. She presented thoughtful maps and charts that different clients have made of their priorities, influences and loved ones, and how it helped them reconstruct — and ultimately express — what’s meaningful to them.

In November 2012, New York’s Museum of Modern Art acquired 14 video games for its design collection — causing a few gasps among art critics. How dare they place Pac-Man and Portal alongside Picasso and Picabia?! In a very funny talk, MoMA’s design curator Paola Antonelli makes the case that, yes, video games do belong in her museum. Why? Because, as one attendee tweets: ”Video games are the purest form of interaction design.”  She details how to acquire a video game for a museum (forget the game gear, get the code) and shares her wishlist for the next few acquisitions.

And finally, in a lighthearted and sharp-witted talk — the kind you could only expect from the cartoon editor for The New Yorker magazine — Bob Mankoff offered his reflections on the nature of good humor and gave tips to would-be cartoonists. (Hint: “That’s the nature of any creative activity – you’re mostly going to be rejected.”) While sharing scores of his favorite “idea drawings,” and divulging the intentions behind the magazine’s occasional abstruseness, he showed how no joke is funny unto itself. Context is everything.

“Design is Everywhere” was part of TED@250, a series of salons held at our New York office at 250 Hudson Street. Since our main conferences are only twice a year, TED@250 is an opportunity for talks that rethink headlines and respond to conversation happening in real time. It’s also a place for speakers with the kind of personal stories that simply work better on the small scale. Stay tuned. Some of these talks may be coming to TED.com.

Charles Duhigg talks about the incredible staying power of habits at TED@250 “A Better You.” Photo: Ryan Lash

Last night in the TED office, we held a salon all about spring cleaning — for your life. Themed ”A Better You,” the event featured four speakers with ideas on how to make a better, happier, more productive self.

First to speak was The Power of Habit author Charles Duhigg, a reporter for The New York Times who won a Pulitzer Prize last week for his series The iEconomy. Duhigg began his talk describing a habit he just couldn’t kick: Every day at around 3 pm, he would leave his desk and go to the cafeteria for a chocolate chip cookie. As a result he gained 8 pounds, and his wife was starting to make pointed comments. As he looked more closely at this habit, he realized why it was so hard to break — because habits become part of tightly wound behavior loops. Habits are extremely powerful: Bad ones can be harmful, he said, while good ones can improve all aspects of your life. He capped his talk with an unexpected example — Starbucks, which endows its employees with good conflict resolution habits in order to provide the customer service they are known for.

Tech writer Jill Duffy shares tips for taming one’s email inbox. Photo: Ryan Lash

Tech reporter Jill Duffy spoke next, giving nine useful tips on how to conquer email before it conquers you. Among them: Keep your unread emails to about a page, save canned responses or email templates so you don’t always end up typing the same thing, and don’t be afraid to delete emails — and let go of the obligations that they represent.

Jay Silver shows how a cat can take photos of itself — using a bowl of water and the Photo Booth program on a computer. Photo: Ryan Lash

You see a banana for eating; Jay Silver sees a yellow edible space bar for his keyboard. Silver, an MIT Media Lab Maker, brought in a bag of tricks to demonstrate how to hack everyday objects. He connected his laptop to two slices of pizza to use as a clicker to advance his slides, and painted a streak of ketchup — then played it like a piano. See more uses from his invention kit, MaKey MaKey »

Amy Webb concluded the program, giving a hilarious and heartbreaking talk about how she gamed the online dating system. Photo: Ryan Lash

Finally, author Amy Webb closed the night with a lesson in love, explaining how she reverse engineered online dating sites to find her perfect mate. Webb drew from her new book, Data: A Love Story, to explain what she did when she found herself frustrated with her online dating prospects. Since she’s a digital strategist, she naturally turned to data analysis. She devised a point system by which to rate all her prospects, only to realize that she had left out one important element from the equation: the competition. In this incredibly honest talk, she explained why she created 10 fake male accounts to scrape data about successful female candidates and how they presented information about themselves. (Note: optimistic language and photos with just enough skin.) Webb’s story has a happy ending. She is now married to Brian Woolf, who she met as a result of her data gathering. Sitting next to me in the audience, last night was the first time he heard her tell the story.

“A Better You” was part of TED@250, a new series of salons held at our New York headquarters at 250 Hudson Street. Since our main conferences are only twice a year, TED@250 is an opportunity for talks that rethink headlines and respond to conversation happening in real time. It’s also a place for speakers with the kind of personal stories that simply work better on the small scale. Stay tuned. Some of these talks may be coming to TED.com.

Helen Fisher: The brain in love

Inspired by Helen Fisher’s classic TED Talk, “The brain in love,” we invited three speakers with big ideas on relationships, sex and family to our New York office for a TED@250 salon, part of a program to tackle timely topics. Love was certainly in the air.

After a screening of the incredibly sweet office-romance film “Post-It Love,” Christian Rudder stepped to the stage. The co-founder and editorial director of OKCupid, Rudder set out to parse some of the data pouring into the site at all times from its users. For example, Rudder shared that when a man on the site writes a woman without any previous interaction, he has a 25% chance of getting a response from her. Meanwhile, women cold-writing men through the site have a 40% chance of a reply. Rudder shared another interesting tidbit — that half of responses are sent to a message are sent with seven hours. As Rudder put it to a big laugh, “Seven hours is basically the half-life of your hopes and dreams.”

But Rudder shared an inspiring bit of news. Every day, 500 people deactivate their OKCupid profiles because they met someone through the site. “All it takes is one,” says Rudder. This sentiment was echoed in the ahhhh-worthy Google video, “Parisian Love,” which tells a moving love story via search.

Bruce Feiler, author of Walking the Bible and the new book The Secrets of Happy Families, stepped up next to share the surprising thing that has revolutionized his family life: agile programming. A method of software development, agile breaks down large projects into small, do-able bits — allowing people throughout the process to give feedback as they go. Agile was developed in opposition to the “waterfall method,” where people in charge determine the flow of the project and people inside the process have no input.

Applying this to a family means creating detailed daily checklists. “You can’t underestimate the power of making a checkmark,” says Feiler. “It works in offices and it works with kids.” Agile in the home also involves having weekly meetings to talk about what went well over the course of seven days and what needs improvement. And Feiler reveals a surprising fact about his twin 8-year-olds: that they’re able to pick their own punishments and they generally give themselves harsher ones than their parents would have picked.

Finally, we heard from Esther Perel, author of Mating in Captivity, who spoke about keeping passion in long-term relationships now that human beings “live twice as long” as we used to. Perel nailed the basic challenge of modern relationships — that, on the one hand, they must satisfy our deep-seated need for security, dependability and permanence while at the same time meeting our equally strong need for adventure, mystery and the unexpected.

“Can we want what we already have?” Perel asked. The answer is yes. But because Perel sees desire as the space between the self and the other, she reveals that this can be achieved in some counter-intuitive ways — in part by being more selfish and savoring moments of absence. Her thoughts were truly surprising and inspiring.

Stay tuned for these great talks on TED.com and the TED Blog in the upcoming weeks. And a special thanks to Built It Green, who donated the wood for the beautiful backdrop you see in these images.

Photos by Cloe Shasha

In the final days of 2012, as Congress worked to hammer out a last-minute deal to avoid the fiscal cliff, it was difficult to turn on any American news source and not see political finger-pointing. Words like “extremist,” “angry” and “sharply divided” floated in the ether.

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has long been interested in how political choices are made — at TED2008, he delved into “the moral roots of liberals and conservatives.” So he seemed like the perfect speaker to invite to our New York office to tackle the question: can’t we all just get along?

His answer in short: yes. But the key is to understand that all of us are facing the same looming dangers, and make some critical changes in Congress that will allow us to work together on them.

Haidt begins today’s talk with an unsettling statement: A pack of giant asteroids are headed for the United States, and they will hit within 50 years. These, of course, are metaphorical asteroids. Says Haidt, “I’m talking about threats that are headed our way that are wrapped in a special energy field that polarizes us, and therefore paralyzes us.”

“Our problem — and our tragedy — is that in these hyper-partisan times, the mere fact that one side says, ‘Hey look! There’s an asteroid,’ means that the other side says ‘Huh? What? I’m not even going to look up,’” says Haidt. In this talk, he looks at the social psychology that leads us into this mess. “One of the most important principles of morality is that it binds and blinds: It binds us into teams that circle around sacred values but thereby makes us go blind to objective reality.”

In today’s must-see talk, Haidt gives powerful suggestions for how politicians and everyday Joes can get past the rhetoric and see that the other side usually has a point. His challenge to each and every one of us: to see all four asteroids.

After digesting Haidt’s talk, we still had many questions. So we called Haidt in his office to chat more on this issue.

Your talk got me thinking — on a personal level, what should I be doing and saying and thinking every day to defuse these tensions and break through a party lens?

Great question! I think the key is for us to all think about the word “demonization,” and do what we can to tone it down. That doesn’t mean that we all have to become centrists. My ideal is that we all have more constructive disagreement. So when you hear someone criticize a policy on the other side, that’s fine. But when you start hearing motive-mongering and demonization, stand up to it just as you would if it were something that was racist or sexist. If we avoid the demonization, disagreements can be positive.

Are there other key terms that you would love to see disappear from our political vocabulary?

“Extremist” is an easy one, because extremist just means somebody on the other side. Overall, we do need to watch our language — but it’s not so much specific words. It’s the claims that people on the other side are motivated by evil motives. The key to toning down demonization is to actually get to know some people on the other side and to build relationships with them. If your friend tells you something, you don’t demonize, you listen. But if your opponent does it, you jump right into lawyer mode and say, “Here are 10 reasons why you’re wrong.”

There was so much tension in Congress over the fiscal cliff. Do you think the kind of stalemate that we’ve been seeing is the natural product of a two-party system?

I don’t. A two-party system can work beautifully if there are other conditions that pull for moderation. But not if you systematically remove those conditions — like privacy to negotiate in secret. Now that we have C-SPAN and everything is televised, there is essentially no deliberation done on the floor of either chamber. So I think the two-party system as we presently have it is completely dysfunctional.

What do you think are the big differences between compromising on economic issues and compromising on social issues? Or have they both been so moralized that there’s no difference?

Economic issues are just as much moral issues as social issues. With the economic issues, however, such unbelievably vast amounts of money are at stake that unbelievably vaster amounts of money are spent on lobbying. Research shows that whatever political preferences the wealthiest few percent of the citizens have tends to be enacted into law.

So if social issues are not about money, where does that moral might come from?

If you assume that democracy is somehow supposed to reflect the will of the majority, then you would be interested in looking at the ways that reality diverges from that. On social issues, it diverges because it’s not the will of the majority — it’s the will of the most vocal. So on issues like gun control and abortion rights, it’s a question of: Who is most angry? Who is most energized?

Speaking of gun control, what do you think will happen on that issue? Do you see the right and the left uniting around the issue of gun violence anytime soon? It feels like, following the national horror of the Newtown massacre, there could be some consensus on this.

I see no sign that there will be any left-right agreement on this. If it was clear that gun control would greatly reduce the frequency of these atrocities, then I think we might see some movement. But it’s not clear. We did in fact have an assault weapons ban in the ’90s and it apparently didn’t do very much. As long as there’s any ambiguity, people are going to find evidence for whatever they want to believe.

For me, I find gun control to be the absolute number one social issue that I have the most difficulty seeing the other side of. What is the primary moral value that plays into being against stricter gun control?

Conservatives tend to see the world more in terms of good-versus-evil and, for some of them, the nightmare is a disarmed citizenry that can be preyed upon by criminals. They know that having a gun in the house would increase the risk of an accident for a member of their family, but they’re willing to take that risk.

Liberals are more prone to utopianism. For example, some liberals proposed that we should have gun-free communities, and we should put signs on them saying, “This is a gun-free community” — which of course conservatives made fun of, because you’re basically saying, “Come in and rob us! Don’t worry about getting shot!” Liberals are horrified by violence, and especially violence against children. So they demand a policy response. And while I want a policy response too, I think we have to make the response be based in the research on what will actually work.

We’ve talked about the left-right divide in politics, and I’m curious about what you’ve seen as a professor in the academic world. How similar or different is that dynamic?

In the academic world, most fields have gone from being predominantly liberal to being overwhelmingly liberal. It’s been a part of this general polarization of our society since the 1970s. There used to be liberal Republicans and there used to be conservative Democrats, but beginning in the ’60s — once Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act — we got the moral purification of the two parties. So the change first happens in Congress, and then once the two parties become purified, it’s like this giant electromagnet cranks up and starts ripping apart everything else. My own field of social psychology has always leaned to the left, but in the last 20 or 30 years the minority of conservatives has shrunk to be undetectable. And this is a problem for scholarship, I believe.

What do you think can be done about that?

Fortunately, we are the world’s experts in how to promote diversity. People are beginning to recognize that we need to be more careful about the things we say — about the things that might inadvertently create a hostile climate. But the larger picture is that polarization emanates from the elites. Congress and the media have become so amazingly polarized in the last 20 or 30 years; this then drives polarization in so many other realms of society.

In the House of Representatives, most districts are gerrymandered to some extent, and that means that there is very little payoff to a representative to be a centrist or a moderate. We can’t change the social trends that have contributed to polarization, but there are a lot of institutional changes that could be made: we can change the filibuster, we can change the way elections are run so that there are more open primaries, we can change the role of party leadership. At present, party leaders have so much power that they can enforce conformity by punishing any member who thinks for himself. The group NoLabels.org has a set of policy changes that could be adopted within the next few months.

I don’t blame the senators and representatives. Congress is full of good, decent, smart people who have devoted their lives to public service. They have come to Washington to try to make things better, and they are all frustrated as hell because they can’t do it. The system forces them to play this eternal game of blue team versus red team — country be damned.

What about the media? How should we deal with the partisan influence of our news sources, and what would a better source look like?

This is very hard because, in a free market, anger and conflict sells, and calm, reasoned analysis is dull. The First Amendment does many good things for us, but it means that there’s very little that we can do in terms of regulating the media. The best idea that I’ve heard comes from Kathleen Hall Jamieson at the University of Pennsylvania, who is arguing that there is a legal warrant for us to hold television stations and cable stations liable for truth in advertising. When they air a political ad which is full of lies, it should be just as if they advertised for some kind of snake oil that claims to cure cancer. That’s one of the only ideas I’ve encountered. The media is one of the most difficult areas to change.

In your talk, you mentioned four asteroids. Are there any smaller asteroids that you didn’t get the chance to mention that we should be looking out for?

The idea of an asteroid is something that, if not attended to, will become even worse. Think about plastics and chemicals in our food supply. The FDA and the EPA are so limited in what they’re allowed to do, and we’re all exposed to massive amounts of chemicals. The left sees this and wants regulation — and the right says no.

Now, one that the right sees: declining national greatness. America was the greatest nation of the 20th century. It was a force for good in the world, and it is losing that. I do think that the right is concerned about declining national greatness, and I think they’re right to be.

Tell me about The Asteroids Club. What is it, and what kind of future do you see for it?

I was invited to give this TEDx talk on civility at TEDxMidAtlantic, and I developed the metaphor of asteroids coming at us. Just on a whim, I bought the website name AsteroidsClub.org. I had recently formed a working relationship with Liz Joyner and Steve Seibert, who run ToTheVillageSquare.org, and they had some ideas for how we could make this an actual club that brings people together. So we’re giving it a try.

Rather than looking for common ground, we’re just trying to get people to see multiple threats. This might be easier because you don’t have to say that you’re wrong about anything. A successful evening will be one in which the people on the other side can begin to see your asteroids and you can, perhaps for the first time, see theirs.

Something that you wrote in an op-ed for The New York Times last year really stuck with me. You said, “When your opponent is the devil, bargaining and compromise are themselves forms of sacrilege.” That is a really powerful statement. How, then, can we ever get people to listen to issues that they find so fundamentally threatening?

The first step is relationships. As our society gets more and more segregated by lifestyle — as the blue districts get bluer and the red districts get redder, as the Internet allows us to segregate into gated moral communities — we have to make the effort. I am hopeful that my book The Righteous Mind should give people at least some things to talk about. If you can, start off any conversation with praise, saying, “You and I may disagree on many things, but one thing I read about your side that I thought was interesting was that you folks believe X. Tell me more about that?” That is a completely different way of starting a conversation than with a challenge.

Most of us don’t get to meet people on the other side that often, and when you do, take a chance. If you’re the sort of person who comes to TED, who loves new ideas, well — the biggest single repository of new ideas that you’ve not been exposed to is probably going to be found on the other side of the political aisle.

Watch Watch Haidt talk about the Asteroids Club on MSNBC’s The Cycle >>

The term “fiscal cliff” is controversial. So Adam Davidson, the New York Times Magazine columnist and co-host of NPR’s Planet Money, prefers to call it “the self-imposed, self-destructive arbitrary deadline about resolving an inevitable problem.”

In today’s talk, filmed in TED’s New York office on Monday, Davidson explains what the fiscal cliff is and why it is so contentious. The easiest way to understand the fiscal cliff is to look at the graph below. In it, the Congressional Budget Office projects two future scenarios, the solid line showing what will happen if Bush-era tax cuts are allowed to expire in January and if government spending on everything other than major programs were cut significantly. The dotted line is what would happen if Congress opts to extend Bush-era tax cuts and does not curb government spending.

“Sometime in the next 20 years, if Congress does absolutely nothing, we’re going to hit a moment where the world’s investors and bond-buyers say, ‘We don’t trust America anymore. We’re not going to lend them any money except at really high interest rates.’ And at that moment, our economy collapses,” says Davidson. “We’re there in 20 years — we have lots of time to avoid that crisis. The fiscal cliff is one more attempt at getting the two sides to resolve the crisis.”

The crudest breakdown of the disagreement: Democrats see the way to solve the crisis as increasing taxes, especially on the rich. Meanwhile, Republicans see the key to ending the crisis as lowering government spending, to the point where taxes can be lowered too.

“When you think about the economy through these two different lenses, you understand why this crisis is so hard to solve,” says Davidson. “The worse the crisis gets, the higher the stakes, the more each side thinks they know the answer and that the other side is just going to ruin everything.”

There is hope, though, says Davidson. While Congress is embroiled in this battle, the American people are in general “moderate, pragmatic Centrists” when it comes to fiscal policy. By large, Davidson says Americans agree on the major government expenditures — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid — though they see room for tweaks to make these systems more stable. (Defense spending, that’s another issue.) “We get to fight about all sorts of other issues — we get to hate each other on gun control, abortion, the environment — but on these fiscal issues, we are not as nearly divided as people say,” says Davidson.

In fact, when it comes to the American population at large, party identification isn’t as strong as it seems, says Davidson.

“We tend in this country to talk about Democrats and Republicans, and think there’s little group over there called Independents that’s maybe 2%,” says Davidson. “That is not the case and it has not been the case for most of modern American history.”

So, will Congress be able to diffuse the ideological butting-of-heads and solve this crisis, or will the United States drop off the edge of the fiscal cliff?

If history is any indicator, a compromise will emerge. As Davidson points out in his talk, deep-rooted battles about money have been a regular feature of American history. Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson battled about whether there should be a central bank. In 1913, there was a battle over the Federal Reserve. And then came disagreement about the gold standard, which was abandoned in 1933.

“Each of those times, we were on the verge of collapse, and nothing happened at all,” says Davidson. “Throughout it all, the dollar has been one of the most long-standing, stable, reasonable currencies — no matter how scared we’re supposed to be.”

To hear Davidson’s powerful metaphors for how both American political parties think about the economy, watch his talk. And below, some of our favorite Adam Davidson stories from Planet Money, “It’s the Economy” and more.

The ‘Mad Men’ Economic Miracle, The New York Times Magazine (Dec. 4, 2012)

Cliffhangers may have been around for more than a thousand years — since at least the composition of “One Thousand and One Nights” — but no one has monetized them as brilliantly as cable networks. In order to get paid, Charles Dickens had to sell the next chapter of his serialized novels; in order to sell advertising, ABC had to order more episodes of its hit show “Lost.” But for the next several months, AMC is converting our eagerness into millions of dollars without showing a single new episode.

Cable TV has developed one of the most clever business models in our modern economy.

Read the full column >>

The Giant Pool of Money, This American Life (May 8, 2008)

This American Life producer Alex Blumberg teams up with NPR’s Adam Davidson for the surprisingly entertaining story of how the U.S. got itself into a housing crisis. They talk to people who were actually working in the housing, banking, finance and mortgage industries, about what they thought during the boom times, and why the bust happened. And they explain that a lot of it has to do with the giant global pool of money.

Listen to this classic episode >>

This Man Makes Beautiful Suits, But He Can’t Afford To Buy One, Planet Money (Sept. 7 2012)

Peter Frew is one of a tiny number of people left in the United States who can — entirely on his own, using almost no machinery — make a classic bespoke suit. He can measure you, draw a pattern, cut the fabric and then hand-stitch a suit designed to fit your body perfectly.

Frew spent more than a decade as an apprentice for a remarkable tailor in his native Jamaica. He now sells his suits for about $4,000. Since New York is filled with very rich people who see their suits as an essential uniform, Frew has all the orders he can handle.

When I first heard about Frew and his remarkable skill, I thought: That guy must make a fortune. I was wrong.

Listen to the episode >>

Skills don’t pay the bills, The New York Times Magazine (Nov. 20, 2012)

Earlier this month, hoping to understand the future of the moribund manufacturing job market, I visited the engineering technology program at Queensborough Community College in New York City. I knew that advanced manufacturing had become reliant on computers, yet the classroom I visited had nothing but computers. As the instructor Joseph Goldenberg explained, today’s skilled factory worker is really a hybrid of an old-school machinist and a computer programmer. Goldenberg’s intro class starts with the basics of how to use cutting tools to shape a raw piece of metal. Then the real work begins: students learn to write the computer code that tells a machine how to do it much faster.

Nearly six million factory jobs, almost a third of the entire manufacturing industry, have disappeared since 2000.

Read the full column >>

What Do the Dow’s Daily Swings Mean? Not Much, Planet Money (Feb. 9, 2012)

Turn on the news on any given day, and you’re likely to hear about the Dow Jones industrial average. It is the most frequently checked, and cited, proxy of U.S. economic health. But a lot of people — maybe most — don’t even know what it is. It’s just the stock prices of 30 big companies, summed up and roughly averaged. That’s it.

And what does the daily movement of this number have to do with the lives of most Americans? Not much.

Listen to the episode >>

The Haiti Aid Dilemma, Frontline (June 2010)

Read more on this story >>

My Big Fat Belizean, Singaporean Bank Account, The New York Times Magazine (July 24, 2012)

Earlier this month, I decided to see how hard it would be to set up my own offshore bank account. I figured it would be pretty difficult, because I’m not rich and don’t have a team of tax lawyers to oversee my money and because the E.U. and U.S. governments have been cracking down on tax havens by imposing stricter tax-sharing requirements. So I proceeded with some caution.

Read the full column >>

Looking for a High-Tech Job? Try Cotton, Planet Money (May 27, 2011)

Unemployment is still at 9 percent, leaving more than 12 million Americans without work. But there are bright spots in the U.S. economy. Planet Money and Wired Magazine have spent the last six months scouring economic data and interviewing people around the country to find out what areas of our economy are doing well. It’s part of a series called Smart Jobs.

Let me boil our findings down to one quick tip. If you want a job — a good job, a job that will be around for a while and pays well — find a company that creates some new product or service that nobody else has.

For example: a greenhouse in Memphis, Tennessee.

Listen to the story >>

The term “fiscal cliff” has gained traction in the U.S. news in the past few months, at least in part because it paints a vivid metaphorical picture. Popularized by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, the term refers to the ill economic consequences that could occur if Congress does not change its course on several policies by January 1, 2013 — including the expiration of Bush-era tax cuts and automatic spending cuts that were agreed to in 2011. But for Congress to act, Democrats and Republicans need to find some general agreement on how to bridge the gap between the federal government’s revenues and spending. Let’s just say that’s been slow to come.

As the deadline nears, we invited three speakers — social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, data visualizationist Jer Thorp and “Planet Money” co-host Adam Davidson — to our New York office for a TED@250 salon, part of a new program to reimagine the headlines. The idea: to give us a deeper understanding of the issue and why it has been so darn difficult for American political parties to work together in recent times.

First to the stage was Jonathan Haidt, who explored “The moral roots of liberals and conservatives” at TED2008. Haidt began his talk with a dramatic statement: Four asteroids are headed for the United States, and they will hit within 50 years.

These, of course, are allegorical asteroids — climate change that could flood many of our major cities, the federal debt rising to the point where a welfare state may become untenable, a growing rise in inequality which is making us deeply distrustful of each other, and the breakdown of marriage which feeds into disparity in income. The problem, as Haidt explains it, is that the current American political climate makes it very difficult to see all four as true problems.

“In our hyper-politicized time, one person says, ‘Look! An asteroid is coming.’ And the other person won’t even look up,” says Haidt. “Retiring members of Congress say that it’s become like gang warfare.”

In his talk, Haidt looks at the social underpinnings that create this type of polarization, where fingers are pointed while real data is ignored. And he also presents several ideas for what could help relieve these tensions and get politicians working together to solve problems. One of his simplest ideas is to shift Congress’ schedule to three weeks on, one week off. This way, members of Congress will be forced to make homes in Washington, D.C., instead of flying home every week. With more politicians living in the Capitol, they’d socialize and meet each other’s families, allowing them to build common ground where the idea, “Hey, the other guy might have a point,” could surface.

At TEDxVancouver, Jer Thorp urged us to “Make data more human.” Today, he shared a fascinating project, “The Colour Economy,” in which he gave screen pixels a very human ability — to trade their red, green and blue values in pursuit of a profit. As the colored bits moved on a screen, stratifications emerged — a situation which feels all too familiar.

Thorp’s point is that data visualization can help us understand how and why things happen, and can inspire new realizations. Currently, says Thorp (shown above), there are a mishmash of images and metaphors that cloud our understanding of the economy. Could creative uses of data — data fiction, data poetry, data theater — gives us new ways of thinking?

Finally, Adam Davidson spoke, describing the fiscal cliff as “a self-imposed arbitrary deadline,” that both parties need to resolve, though neither wants to make the first move and be seen as weak. In other words, it’s a game of chicken, fueled by partisan anger.  “The worse the crisis gets, the more each side thinks they have the answer,” says Davidson.

But what’s so curious, he explains, is that the American population isn’t as polarized as one would think, and people even tend to agree — for the most part — on what kinds of decisions we should make about the federal budget. For example: When asked, people want Social Security and Medicare to stay strong.  “The American people tend to be moderate, pragmatic centrists,” says Davidson. “You’d think that if you add up Democrat and Republican, you get the American people, but that’s not what the data shows … Forty percent of people consider themselves independent.”

American history, says Davidson, is full of skirmishes about money. And yet the dollar has remained one of the most stable currencies. So when it comes to the fiscal cliff, he urges, “Instead of talking about it in vague terms that feed partisanship, let’s talk about it as what it really is — a really solvable math problem. Though not one where we’re all going to get what we want.“

After an election that seemed to bring partisanship to a fever pitch, there seemed to be a pulling together this weekend as the nation mourned those killed in the school shooting in Connecticut on December 14. When asked if he thought the same polarization would happen with gun control that has been happening over the economy, Haidt shared enthusiasm that this could be an issue that highlights commonality and brings across-the-divide cooperation. As we arrived back at our desks from the salon, a new headline appeared on NYTimes.com that suggested this may be the case: “Newtown Shooting May Cool Washington’s Partisan Passions.”