Pandora’s Box: Amendment via Con-Con

In the children’s fairytale “The Three Bears,” Goldilocks tastes three bowls of porridge and prefers the one left by the smallest bear because it was neither too hot nor too cold, but “just right.” The moral of the story, the so-called Goldilocks principle, has been adapted by scholars in a variety of fields who use it to refer to situations and conditions in their respective disciplines that are “just right.” Astrobiologists, for instance, talk about the “Goldilocks Zone” which is the distance that a planet’s orbit can be from its star to maintain temperatures on the surface that are “just right” for water to remain liquid (Burrows 2019). Likewise, economists use the term a “Goldilocks Economy” to describe a perfect state in which there is stability, growth, and full employment (Chen 2019).