So why was there so much economic growth after World War II? Stiglitz says one reason is “the legacy of the Roosevelts, the legacy that government made a difference.” In making the case for government he also points out that “government has played an important catalytic role in a whole variety of other areas. If you think about our modern economy, you think about Internet, you think about biotech, you think about telecommunications and all of these things rest on government-funded basic research.”
Having the opportunity and the privilege of working in government and with some truly great people at this relatively young age has taught me that what Stiglitz says in his speech tends to lean more towards the way things actually are than not, but it is obfuscated by ineffective leadership, decision-makers, and press. The thing is, government has always been about creating tools which advance society, bringing people together, and finding solutions to rather complex problems—it has only been about stirring up war and keeping “the other guys” at bay for a much shorter amount of time, and putting the will of financiers and investors for even shorter than that. As the realities of our failures become more apparent, my thoughts are that those once-desirable ideals are again espoused, in favor of pushing past the clutter and mindless gridlock, the emotionally-charged words, and the money (especially the money), which have stifled innovation in this country for far too long.
On that note, Stiglitz goes on to say that having a strong economy is also about paying for what you get. I believe that while that is probably meant in a monetary sense, that this does not mean one couldn’t give back in other ways too. Money is an easy way to pass off real motivation for things, but if the spirit behind the paper was seen and expressed in its raw form, it has the potential to change the equation, transform conversation and debate, push for a truly information-rich culture, and solve problems the size of mountains.
Like most of the greatest addictions, the first step is often admitting that you have a problem…
Rick Warren was on ABC’s This Week yesterday, and Jake Tapper asked him what he thought about President Obama’s suggestion that God tells us to care for those less fortunate than ourselves.
“I do not believe in wealth redistribution, I believe in wealth creation.” -…
Poverty in America officially has a new face: women. More than half of the 46.2 million Americans living in poverty are women, and 29 percent of adult women are more likely to be poor than adult men. From 2009 to 2010, more than 1 million additional children also fell into poverty, and the numbers continue to rise.
On Sunday, March 18, broadcaster Tavis Smiley will convene a diverse all-woman panel of thought leaders, opinion makers, and influencers to examine the growing numbers of women and children falling into poverty. The event takes place at New York University’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, and is free and open to the public. Details here.
Reading Charles Murray and all the commentary about the sources of moral collapse among working-class whites, I’ve had a nagging question: is it really all that bad?
I mean, yes, marriage rates are way down, and labor force participation is down among prime-age men (although not as much as some of the rhetoric might imply), But it’s generally left as an implication that these trends must be causing huge social ills. Are they?
Well, one thing oddly missing in Murray is any discussion of that traditional indicator of social breakdown, teenage pregnancy. You can see why — because it has actually been falling like a stone:
And what about crime? It’s soaring, right? Wrong:
So here’s a thought: maybe traditional social values are eroding in the white working class — but maybe those traditional social values aren’t as essential to a good society as conservatives like to imagine.
Whatever the case, the concentration of marriage among the richest Americans is amplifying the increase in income inequality.
Rich men are marrying rich women, creating doubly rich households for them and their children. And the poor are staying poor and alone.
Brent Ahsley:
Anything that is knowable is a part of the universe of truth that has no owner and no bounds. The invention or discovery of anything results in the exposure of one or more hitherto undocumented universal truths to the collected human record.
The true and original purpose of copyright and patents is to create a temporary legal fiction which acts in many respects like ownership, conferring upon an individual person rights to control the use and dissemination of morsels of universal truth which they had the luck and/or tenacity to first identify, so they can be recompensed for their contribution to the universe’s growing stockpile of exposed truth for the benefit of all humanity.
The legal expansion to include corporate personhood and subsequent term extensions tending towards permanence of the legal assignment of ownership equivalence amounts to the expropriation and destruction of large parts of humanity’s natural knowledge resources.
It’s not too much different from bulldozing the rainforest.
Last week we told you about America’s most unequal city, Bridgeport, Connecticut. This week, we’re taking you to Sheboygan, Wisconsin, the most equal city in America. Benjamin Carlson reports:
Residents say the city reminds them of how America used to be, when there was no such thing as a “middle-class crisis.”
“I guess I am not real surprised,” wrote Helene Capizzi of the Sheboygan Public Library in an email to The Daily. “Sheboygan reminds me a lot of what it was like to grow up in Milwaukee in the ’60s. We’re always a decade or two behind the trends, but I think that’s what we like!”
Indeed, visitors to this modest, quaint town might be excused for thinking they stepped out of a time machine from the Eisenhower or Kennedy years. Here, polka bands still draw crowds in the summer, parents safely let their kids roam unsupervised and busy manufacturers keep pumping out goods proudly “made in the USA.”
While employment in the relatively well-paying manufacturing sector has plummeted nationally, now accounting for less than 10 percent of jobs, in Sheboygan, one-third of workers hold jobs with manufacturing firms that produce everything from plastic wares to shower heads for luxury spas.
Excellent article. I keep wondering why more people aren’t up in arms about all of the abortion restrictions. I think it has a lot to do with the fact that we’ve never lived in a time of illegal abortion. Also, there is such shame attached to the procedure. If a woman enjoys sex, does not want a baby, accidentally gets pregnant, and chooses to terminate the pregnancy, she is painted as a harlot. Or irresponsible. But definitely immoral. This is why rape & incest exceptions piss me off. If the aim of anti-abortion activists is about the baby, then it doesn’t matter how the baby is conceived.
It’s a choice between women and potential babies, which women should win every time, since without us, there are no babies. Do we value the independence of adult women, or do we prioritize a dependent fetus? It’s a bitch of a choice, but it’s an obvious one.
I also think that it’s more satisfying for people to fight for new rights than to protect existing ones. We want to see gay people enjoy the same rights as all citizens. That’s a no-brainer. We take the right to safe & legal abortions for granted because we never had to fight for it. But it’s looking more & more likely that we will be fighting for it. Either women are equal citizens with bodily independence, or we are not. Who is making that decision for us?
October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month. Domestic Violence is all about power and control. Not about something wrong with you or something you did wrong.
You may be in an emotionally abusive relationship if your partner:
- Calls you names, insults you or continually criticizes you.
- Does not trust you and acts jealous or possessive.
- Tries to isolate you from family or friends.
- Monitors where you go, who you call and who you spend time with.
- Does not want you to work.
- Controls finances or refuses to share money.
- Punishes you by withholding affection.
- Expects you to ask permission.
- Threatens to hurt you, the children, your family or your pets.
- Humiliates you in any way.
You may be in a physically abusive relationship if your partner has ever:
- Damaged property when angry (thrown objects, punched walls, kicked doors, etc.).
- Pushed, slapped, bitten, kicked or choked you.
- Abandoned you in a dangerous or unfamiliar place.
- Scared you by driving recklessly.
- Used a weapon to threaten or hurt you.
- Forced you to leave your home.
- Trapped you in your home or kept you from leaving.
- Prevented you from calling police or seeking medical attention.
- Hurt your children.
- Used physical force in sexual situations.
You may be in a sexually abusive relationship if your partner:
- Views women as objects and believes in rigid gender roles.
- Accuses you of cheating or is often jealous of your outside relationships.
- Wants you to dress in a sexual way.
- Insults you in sexual ways or calls you sexual names.
- Has ever forced or manipulated you into to having sex or performing sexual acts.
- Held you down during sex.
- Demanded sex when you were sick, tired or after beating you.
- Hurt you with weapons or objects during sex.
- Involved other people in sexual activities with you.
- Ignored your feelings regarding sex.
Women don’t have to live in fear:
- In the U.S., call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233 (SAFE).
- UK: call Women’s Aid at 0808 2000 247.
- Canada: National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-363-9010.
- Australia: National Domestic Violence Hotline 1800 200 526.
- Or visit International Directory of Domestic Violence Agencies for a worldwide list of helplines, shelters, and crisis centers.
Male victims of abuse can call:
- In the US, The Domestic Abuse Helpline for Men & Womenspecializes in supporting male victims of abuse and offers a 24-hour helpline: 1-888-7HELPLINE (1-888-743-5754).
- UK: ManKind Initiative offers a national helpline at 01823 334244.
- Australia: One in Three Campaign offers help and resources for male victims.
Domestic Violence; It’s EVERYBODY’S Business.
Call your local shelter and ask how you can support their efforts this month.
Americans, I have some bad news for you:
You have the worst quality of life in the developed world – by a wide margin.
If you had any idea of how people really lived in Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and many parts of Asia, you’d be rioting in the streets calling for a better life. In fact, the average Australian or Singaporean taxi driver has a much better standard of living than the typical American white-collar worker.
I know this because I am an American, and I escaped from the prison you call home.
I have lived all around the world, in wealthy countries and poor ones, and there is only one country I would never consider living in again: The United States of America. The mere thought of it fills me with dread.
Consider this: you are the only people in the developed world without a single-payer health system. Everyone in Western Europe, Japan, Canada, Australia, Singapore and New Zealand has a single-payer system. If they get sick, they can devote all their energies to getting well. If you get sick, you have to battle two things at once: your illness and the fear of financial ruin. Millions of Americans go bankrupt every year due to medical bills, and tens of thousands die each year because they have no insurance or insufficient insurance. And don’t believe for a second that rot about America having the world’s best medical care or the shortest waiting lists: I’ve been to hospitals in Australia, New Zealand, Europe, Singapore, and Thailand, and every one was better than the “good” hospital I used to go to back home. The waits were shorter, the facilities more comfortable, and the doctors just as good.
This is ironic, because you need a good health system more than anyone else in the world. Why? Because your lifestyle is almost designed to make you sick.
Read the rest of the article » here
How far have American women come since winning the right to vote in 1920? Eve Weinbaum and Rachel Roth addressed this question in an Aug. 26 Op-Ed, “Beyond suffrage,” bringing up issues that elicited backlash on our discussion board. Surprised by the reaction — in, ahem, 2011 — they offer this reply.
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Why I’m raising my son to be a nerd - CNN.com
(via chameli) |
The cost of a single gunshot
- No one can put a price on a human life or a family’s suffering, but policy experts can calculate the price society pays.
—
“It has always been the simple things that we don’t consider with these costs,’’ says Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley, who has focused on victim services and compensation during her 5-year tenure. “Take cleanup costs of crime scenes, where someone has been shot. Once that investigation ends and the police have left the scene and the emergency workers are gone, the residents are often left with a mess on their hands. Costs can run into the thousands - changing locks, replacing windows or doors, hazardous cleanup of blood and bodily fluids.’’
And those are just the smaller bills.
…
Rev. Eugene Rivers, executive director of the Ella J. Baker House in Dorchester, says he has seen at first hand the impact violence can have on a single home.
“I’m certainly no medical expert, but I think I can argue that I’m something of a social scientist, and I can tell you that I’ve seen a terrible joke related to this issue come true,’’ says Rivers. “I know a man who survived a shooting only to die not too much later of a heart attack. He was not an old man. He was not an unhealthy man. And he was not experiencing complications from his injury, which had been healed for some time. He died, his family tells me - and they say his doctors told them - from the weight of the crippling stress that comes into your life when you survive something like this. I have seen entire families deal with this in ways ‘normal’ families can’t fathom.’’
If their 25 per cent, or the great bulk of it, is off-limits, then it’s impossible to see any good resolution of the current US crisis. It’s unsurprising that lots of voters are unwilling to pay higher taxes, even to prevent the complete collapse of public sector services. Median household income has been static or declining for the past decade, household wealth has fallen by something like 50 per cent (at least for ordinary households whose wealth, if they have any, is dominated by home equity) and the easy credit that made the whole process tolerable for decades has disappeared. In these circumstances, welshing on obligations to retired teachers, police officers and firefighters looks only fair.
In both policy and political terms, nothing can be achieved under these circumstances, except at the expense of the top 1 per cent. This is a contingent, but inescapable fact about massively unequal, and economically stagnant, societies like the US in 2010.
[…]
And the fares of the have versus the have-nots continue to diverge. A new survey found that 64% of the public doesn’t have enough funds on hand to cope with a $1000 emergency. Wages are falling for 90% of the population. And disabuse yourself of the idea that the rich might decide to bestow their largesse on the rest of us. Various studies have found that upper class individuals are less empathetic and altruistic than lower status individuals.
This outcome is not accidental. Taxes on top earners are the lowest in three generations. Yet their complaints about the prospect of an increase to a level that is still awfully low by recent historical standards is remarkable.
Given that this rise in wealth has been accompanied by an increase in the power of those at the top, is there any hope for achieving a more just society? Bizarrely, the self interest of the upper crust argues in favor of it. Profoundly unequal societies are bad for everyone, including the rich.
[…]
It’s easy to see how “big status differences” alone have an impact. The wider income differentials are, the less people mix across income lines, and the more opportunties there are for stratification within income groups. Thus a decline in income can easily put one in the position of suddenly not being able to participate fully or at all in one’s former social cohort (what do you give up, the country club membership? the kids’ private schools? the charities on which you give enough to be on special committees?). And lose enough of these activities that have a steep cost of entry but are part of your social life, and you lose a lot of your supposed friends. Making new friends over the age of 35 is not easy.
[…]
You might argue: Why do these results matter to rich people, who can live in gated compounds? If you’ve visited some rich areas in Latin America, particularly when times generally are bad, marksmen on the roofs of houses are a norm. Living in fear of your physical safety is not a pretty existence.
Japan, which made a conscious decision to impose the costs of its post bubble hangover on all members of society to preserve stability, has gotten through its lost two decades with remarkable grace. The US seems to be implementing the polar opposite playbook, and there are good reasons to think the outcome of this experiment will be ugly indeed.
