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James Goodman

Human rights: The gay divide | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...rovoked-backlash-elsewhere-gay

society psychology human rights sexuality politics rights

shared by James Goodman on 14 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • James Goodman on 14 Oct 14
     
    "THERE was a teenager in Arizona in the 1970s who "could no more imagine longing to touch a woman than longing to touch a toaster". But he convinced himself that he was not gay. Longing to be "normal", he blamed his obsession with muscular men on envy of their good looks. It was not until he was 25 that he admitted the truth to himself-let alone other people. In 1996 he wrote a cover leader for The Economist in favour of same-sex marriage. He never thought it would happen during his lifetime. Yet now he is married to the man he loves and living in a Virginia suburb where few think this odd. The change in attitudes to homosexuality in many countries-not just the West but also Latin America, China and other places-is one of the wonders of the world (see article). This week America's Supreme Court gave gay marriage another big boost, by rejecting several challenges to it; most Americans already live in states where gays can wed. But five countries still execute gay people: Iran hangs them; Saudi Arabia stones them. Gay sex is illegal in 78 countries, and a few have recently passed laws that make gay life even grimmer. The gay divide is one of the world's widest (see article). What caused it? And will tolerance eventually spread? Two steps forward and one back The leap forward has been startlingly quick. In the 1950s gay sex was illegal nearly everywhere. In Britain, on the orders of a home secretary who vowed to "eradicate" it, undercover police were sent out to loiter in bars, entrap gay men and put them in jail. In China in the 1980s homosexuals were rounded up and sent to labour camps without trial. All around the world gay people lived furtively and in fear. Laws banning "sodomy" remained in some American states until 2003. Today gay sex is legal in at least 113 countries. Gay marriages or civil unions are recognised in three dozen and parts of others. In most of the West it is no longer socially acceptable to be homophobic. Gay life in C
James Goodman

You're not as kinky as you think - NYPOST.com - 0 views

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research sex kink book review sexuality

shared by James Goodman on 29 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • “Sex therapists haven’t known which interests are common and which are rare,” Ogas says. “We probably now know more than ever before.”Among their more surprising findings: Straight men enjoy a wider variety of erotica than imagined, including sites devoted to elderly women and transsexuals. Foot fetishes aren’t a deviance; men are evolutionarily wired to look for small feet, which are a sign of high estrogen production, which itself is a sign of fertility. Gay men and straight men have nearly identical brains, and their favorite body parts, in order of preference, line up exactly: chests, buttocks, feet. Straight men prefer heavy women to thin ones. Straight women enjoy reading about and watching romances between two men — it’s not about the sex, which is downplayed, but the emotion, which is the focus. (The largest audience for “Brokeback Mountain,” says the book, was straight women.) Straight men have a fascination with other men’s penises, which may be conscious or unconscious.“The research, as far as I can tell, is pretty damn sound,”
  • Sex therapists haven’t known which interests are common and which are rare
James Goodman

Are Women Better Decision Makers? - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...en-better-decision-makers.html

society psychology politics health

shared by James Goodman on 07 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • James Goodman on 07 Dec 14
     
    " Across a variety of gambles, the findings were the same: Men took more risks when they were stressed. They became more focused on big wins, even when they were costly and less likely. Levels of the stress hormone cortisol appear to be a major factor, according to Ruud van den Bos, a neurobiologist at Radboud University in the Netherlands. He and his colleagues have found that the tendency to take more risks when under pressure is stronger in men who experience a larger spike in cortisol. But in women he found that a slight increase in cortisol seemed actually to improve decision-making performance."
James Goodman

Philip Pilkington: Debt and the Decay of the Myth of Liberal Individualism « ... - 0 views

www.nakedcapitalism.com/...-of-liberal-individualism.html

financial crisis economy society politics capitalism debt myth

shared by James Goodman on 08 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • The myth of the unbounded individual, the lone merchant with the devil-may-care attitude toward his fellow men allowed Smith to conceive of a society in which men might live without close ties to one another and yet a society which would not descend into barbarism. Emotional distance, a lack of love or compassion, need not descend into violence and murder, according to Smith, because of the principles of disinterested commerce and exchange which he thought that he had uncovered in Man.This is the legacy that Smith has left us today. Not just in the field of economics, but also as a sort of moral or mythic code by which we arrange our social intercourse in mass society. When we step into a shop and purchase a good or a service we are acting as Smithian individuals. We see ourselves as unbounded to those around us and free to make whatever decisions we please. And we believe that once the transaction is complete we can wash our hands of it.The problem is that this is not true and it probably never has been. Today, instead, we see all too clearly the importance of debt. Debt is what ties us together. We may be in the position of creditor or in the position of debtor – or we may even be in the position of neither – but debt affects all of us. Even those of us that balance our books perfectly and do not engage in any form of lending nevertheless rely on banking systems and systems of government founded on the simple and timeless principles of debt. And it is these principles that bind us together.
  • We are not, in any way, “men who owe no obligation to one another”. Our entire social system is founded on obligation and interconnectedness. This was likely true even in Smith’s time, but his genius was to have hidden it from view and in doing so to construct the founding myth of liberal individualism as it exists in modern times.Yet today the debt issue explodes once more. And because Smith’s mythology cannot contain it we see all around us anxiety together with its attendant primitive emotions such as envy, anger, spite and malice and, in countries such as Greece, a general collapse of the entire social economy. We see politicians obsessed over government debt sending their countries into ruin simply because they adhere to a redundant mythology. In short, we see the chaos that terrified Smith of a society in which, in his words, injustice prevails.
  • What Smith gave to humanity in his founding of economics was a great lie with which to structure our newly forming nation-states and mass societies. But it was a lie that was in many ways quite fragile. And it is this lie that we see cracking up all around us today. The question is whether we, as a species, will continue to live within this crumbling fiction or whether we can construct a different mythological system founded on principles that are a closer fit to our really existing circumstances.Almost every moral pillar of our contemporary societies – from the discipline of economics, to ideas that dominate about what constitutes good statesmanship – militates against the formation of such a new mythology. And, as psychopathology teaches us well, people are quite stubborn in their giving up of their mythologies, despite their possibly high degree of dysfunction. But given that the stakes are rather high and humans are a fairly adaptive species, we may surprise ourselves yet.
James Goodman

Zoë Triska: The Worst Word Ever - 0 views

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word society sexuality children sex psychology

shared by James Goodman on 24 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • James Goodman on 24 Sep 12
     
    But why do some women, in particular, seem to hate words like "moist" and "panties" more than men do? Carol Lloyd in Salon offers one possibility: "The word 'moist' straddles the same cultural polarities of shame and openness that still haunt modern female sexuality. After all, moist is now mostly used with positive connotations to describe baked goods and soil, but it still harbors its less than appealing root meanings. First cited in the English language in 1374, the word came from the French word 'moiste,' for damp, which came from the Latin words for moldy, slimy and musty."
James Goodman

The Hazards of Manhood by Michael Schwalbe - YES! Magazine - 0 views

www.yesmagazine.org/...the-hazards-of-manhood

psychology health manhood society politics

shared by James Goodman on 18 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • James Goodman on 18 Mar 13
     
    "Teaching males to seek feelings of worth through displays of power, toughness, and competitiveness turns male bodies into readily exploitable generators of profit. The costs to all but the tiny few who appropriate these profits are enormous: ruined bodies and minds, premature death, perpetual war, depression and drug use, interpersonal violence, and the abuse of women and others who are not men in good standing."
James Goodman

Should Moms Hate Childless Women? » Sociological Images - 0 views

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psychology society people women

shared by James Goodman on 29 May 13 - No Cached
  • James Goodman on 29 May 13
     
    "Pop culture constantly re-affirms these narratives. It frequently naturalizes the idea that women should turn to men, and not women, to reinforce their value. Portraying women as in competition is part of that. The "trophy wife" vs. the "busy mom" is one of those match-ups. "
James Goodman

Is Loneliness a Public Policy Problem? - Zach McDade - The Atlantic Cities - 0 views

www.theatlanticcities.com/...5686

psychology society people loneliness isolation brain health

shared by James Goodman on 29 May 13 - No Cached
  • James Goodman on 29 May 13
     
    Is Loneliness a Public Policy Problem? Zach McDade May 23, 2013 9 Comments Is Loneliness a Public Policy Problem? Shutterstock inShare3 Share Print Share on emailEmail Urban Institute MORE FROM THE URBAN INSTITUTE: The "Disconnected Youth" Paradigm Stemming the Tide of Federal Prison Growth The Continued Decline of North Korea Is a Case for Inclusive Politics A fascinating recent article in The New Republic reviewed a body of new science documenting the pernicious physiological effects of loneliness. Researchers have shown that loneliness-more formally, the want of intimacy-exacerbates a host of ailments, including Alzheimer's disease, obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, neurodegenerative diseases, and even cancer. The share of Americans who report "not feeling close to people" at any given time is 30 percent and growing, and deemed by some a social health crisis. Should public policy researchers and practitioners care about something as intangible and inaccessible as loneliness? I'll give you three reasons why I think we should. First, some background… Feeling lonely actually sends misleading hormonal signals that physically change the molecular structure of the brain. According to the article, this "wrenches a whole slew" of bodily systems out of whack, causing loneliness to be seen by some as a risk factor for death as great as smoking. Who tends to be affected by loneliness, according to this research? Women more than men, blacks more than whites, the less-educated, the unemployed, the retired, anyone different. In other words, many of the same people affected by today's long-term unemployment and wealth disparities, persistent poverty, and isolation. If loneliness exacerbates these ills, it will further diminish people's ability to engage in economically and socially valuable and productive activities, which in turn could exacerbate loneliness. Three reasons why loneliness should be a p
James Goodman

Harold Meyerson: The party that truly believes in redistribution - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...2-afff-d6c7f20a83bf_story.html

society politics economy health wall street

shared by James Goodman on 26 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • James Goodman on 26 Sep 12
     
    Indeed, the United States has experienced an upward redistribution so profound that it affects far more than incomes. Whole sectors of the economy and regions of the country have been decimated by these economic changes. The descent in all manner of social indexes is most apparent among poorly educated whites. Conservative commentator Charles Murray has documented in his new book the decline in marriage rates and family stability within the white working class. And now, as the New York Times' Sabrina Tavernise has reported, that decline includes longevity as well. While other Americans' life expectancy has advanced, the life expectancy of whites without high school diplomas has declined since 1990 - by three years among men and five years among women. The market is not just redistributing income in the United States, then. It is redistributing life.
James Goodman

Brain-Changing Hammocks - The Sweet Pursuit - Utne Reader - 0 views

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sleep health science hammock Twin Oaks Trager bodywork

shared by James Goodman on 27 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • It’s summertime, and hammock season is here. Time to lay back, sway under a shade tree, let the breeze kiss the soles of your bare feet, and drift off. Certainly a hammock can help you relax, but new research suggests it can also alter brain activity to improve sleep. In a study published in the June 2011 issue of Current Biology, neuroscientists at the University of Geneva claim that gentle rocking makes people fall asleep faster and experience deeper sleep by synchronizing brain waves.
  • The researchers enlisted 12 men to take two afternoon naps in a quiet, dark room on a bed that could simulate the gentle rocking motion of a hammock. (Chances are, they didn't have a hard time rounding up volunteers.) For one nap, the bed rocked; for the other, the bed was stationary. Cynthia Graber of Scientific American reports the findings:
  • All the men fell asleep faster when they swayed. And the scientists monitored the men’s brain activity during all the naps. They found that rocking increased the duration of what’s called N2, a non-REM stage that accounts for about half of a good night’s sleep. Rocking also increased deep-sleep-associated brain activity—so-called slow oscillations as well as bursts of action called sleep spindles. Though the conclusions drawn from this naptime study are encouraging, the jury is still out on whether hammocks can alleviate insomnia at night. But, why wait for proven results? Put down the Ambien and try a hammock.
  • James Goodman on 27 Jun 11
     
    Like the Trager Approach
James Goodman

Need Therapy? A Good Man Is Hard to Find - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...22therapists.html

therapy man male gender woman female psychology

shared by James Goodman on 22 May 11 - No Cached
  • Aggression is another. Many men grow up in a world of hostile body language and real physical violence that is almost entirely invisible to women. A bar fight that sounds traumatic to a female therapist may be no more than a good night out for a man. Likewise, a stare-down in the sandbox that looks vanishingly trivial from a distance may lie like a poisoned well in the stream of the unconscious.
  • In just the past few years, psychologists have identified a number of issues that are, in effect, male versions of the gender-identity issues that so many mothers face in the work force: the self-doubt of being a stay-at-home father, the tension between being a provider and being a father, even male post-partum depression.
James Goodman

HOW, AND WHEN, TO MAKE A DECISION | More Intelligent Life - 0 views

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psychology society science sexuality

shared by James Goodman on 06 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Seemingly trivial things have a huge influence on the way that we make decisions, research shows. Bill Ridgers reports ...
  • The reason, Ackerman believes, is that touch is the first sense that we develop after birth. “People learn how to make decisions about the world by understanding what they’ve already experienced, and that means the physical world.” The ability to think in the abstract, of course, comes much later.
  • If true, Tuk’s findings are interesting because they challenge an established psychological theory called “ego depletion”. This states that we only have a finite well of self-control. Each time we deny ourselves something—whether going to the bathroom or choosing a salad for lunch, rather than the sausage sandwich we really wanted—we use up some of our reserves. The theory of ego depletion was developed by Roy Baumeister, a psychologist at Florida State University. In practical terms, he says, this means that if you have an important decision to make, you shouldn’t draw from your well of self-control beforehand. Reserves, he says, can be depleted in all sorts of ways: “Even things like trying to look interested at a boring meeting, trying to pretend your boss’s jokes are funny or not saying something unkind to your spouse when you are angry.”
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Decision-making ability can be thought of as akin to a muscle, Baumeister says, in that it is liable to be worn out with overuse. For some, this effect can be life-changing.
  • You have a big decision to make. Whether to put in an offer on a house, say, or change jobs. Which of the following will help you make the right choice: being in a state of sexual excitement or having a full bladder? Most likely, it is not something you have pondered. Psychologists, however, have long studied the ways that external factors such as these influence our decision-making. A full bladder, apparently, helps us take more rational, long-term decisions. At least that was the finding of a study carried out by Mirjam Tuk, a professor at the University of Twente in the Netherlands.
  • Another area of interest to the study of decision-making revolves around sleep deprivation. Professor Michael Chee, a neuroscientist at the National University of Singapore, says that most of us already realise that making decisions when we are exhausted is not advisable. Yet the effect that tiredness has on us is counter-intuitive. Chee says that we tend to believe that we become overly cautious in order to compensate. But the truth, he says, is that a lack of sleep makes us much too optimistic in our decision-making.
  • To return to the original question, being sexually aroused, alas, is not an aid to decision-making. Studies have shown that it can make us impetuous, much as you’d expect. But what is striking is that we greatly underestimate its effect. When Dan Ariely, a professor at Duke University in America, and author of “Predictably Irrational”, experimented on his undergraduates, he found that they had no idea of the extent to which they were being led by their libidos. One reason, Ariely believes, is that we have only a limited mix of emotion and cognition to draw upon. Increase one and you automatically detract from the other. So Robin Williams may have been making a valid psychological point when he said: “God gave men both a penis and a brain, but unfortunately not enough blood supply to run both at the same time.”
  • But if all our decisions are so influenced by external factors, that raises an inevitable question: to what extent are we involved in our own decision-making? Professor Ackerman believes the answer is very little: “All of these subtle influences suggest that most of what is causing our behaviour we are really not aware of. People are just very good at post-hoc reasons for their behaviour.”
James Goodman

Café au Lait Publishing proudly presents - 0 views

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quote

shared by James Goodman on 14 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • “I don’t believe in marriage. No I really don’t. Let me be clear about that. I think at worst it’s a hostile political act; a way for small minded men to keep women in the house and out of the way wrapped in the guise of tradition and conservative religious nonsense. At best it’s a happy delusion. It’s two people who truly love each other and have no idea how truly miserable they’re about to make each other. But…but when two people know that and they decide with eyes wide open to face each other and get married anyway then I don’t think its conservative or delusional, I think its radical and courageous and very romantic.” Spoken by Ashley Judd playing the character of Tina Modotti in the film Frida (2002)
James Goodman

8 Things You May Not Know About HPV - Sexual Health Center - Everyday Health - 0 views

www.everydayhealth.com/sexual-health/0303/things-you-may-not-know-about-hpv.aspx?xid=aol_eh-repro_23-2_20110425&icid=maing-grid7|main5|dl12|sec3_lnk1|59254

health hpv sex sexuality prevention std cancer

shared by James Goodman on 29 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • The human papillomavirus (HPV) garnered news headlines recently when researchers from Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Fla., revealed that as many as 50 percent of U.S. men are infected with HPV. Last February, Ohio State University researchers said that HPV causes more than 60 percent of oropharynx cancers (a type of throat cancer), making the virus a bigger risk factor for that kind of throat cancer than tobacco. No wonder HPV is a hotbed of medical research right now: It’s extremely common, partly vaccine-preventable, and plays a significant role in multiple kinds of cancer, including cervical cancer in women. But for all the buzz about HPV in the scientific community, experts worry that many people are still fuzzy on details about the virus — including how it’s transmitted, who’s most at risk, and how to protect yourself from infection. “There’s so much people don’t know or misunderstand about HPV,” says William Robinson, MD, a professor of gynecologic oncology at Tulane University in New Orleans. Everyday Health asked him and other leading experts to shed light on the most common HPV knowledge gaps.
James Goodman

Avoiding HPV Can Prevent Cancer - EverydayHealth.com - 0 views

www.everydayhealth.com/...ways-to-prevent-hpv-0117.aspx

sexuality sex health hpv cancer prev prevention

shared by James Goodman on 29 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • Human papillomavirus (HPV) is a sexually transmitted virus that can affect men and women. It is the most common sexually transmitted disease — currently, more than 20 million Americans are infected with HPV and another 6 million become newly infected each year. Most of the time, HPV is harmless and goes away on its own. But it can cause genital warts and several types of cancer, including cervical and head and neck cancers. That’s why it’s important to protect yourself against HPV transmission with these eight strategies.
James Goodman

Sex, Violence and the Supreme Court - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...sex-and-the-supremes

violence supreme court sex nudity hypocrisy insanity reactionary

shared by James Goodman on 08 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Quite a bit of rough stuff was bandied about in one of the final Supreme Court decisions of the term released last month — dismembering, bondage, decapitation, a bounty of bloodletting in video games that bring the thrill of the kill to new levels. No problem there, in the view of the court: for children who want to simulate brutal homicide, it’s protected free speech.Sex, not so good. Naked women. Naked men. Fornication. Ewww! The black-robed majority made it clear that the United States of America will always make an exception for sex: “historically unprotected speech,” in the words of Justice Antonin Scalia, who wrote the 7-2 video game opinion.
  • The take-away point from Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association was that the court continued to expand freedoms granted by the First Amendment. But in overturning a California attempt to ban underage video game sales, the case revealed a fascinating intra-justice discussion about modern depictions of sex and violence — why one can be censored, and the other cannot.Ultimately, the back-and-forth by the high court reinforced the notion of a nation that will always be a little skittish about sex, while viewing violence as American as apple pie. If this ruling is indeed a triumph for the First Amendment, it continues a strange double standard.
  • In dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer pressed the issue of why it was O.K. to protect children from sexual images but not from the worst kind of human carnage. His zinger points merit a second look before court-watchers settle into their Adirondack chairs for the summer:But what sense does it make to forbid selling to a 13-year-old boy a magazine with an image of a nude woman, while protecting a sale to that 13-year-old of an interactive video game in which he actively but virtually binds and gags the woman, then tortures and kills her?Breyer expanded further, pointing to the absurd implications of the court’s drift. “What kind of First Amendment would permit the government to protect children by restricting sales of that extremely violent video game only if the woman — bound, gagged, tortured and killed — is also topless?”
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Since he asked, the answer seems to be that a First Amendment that bans an exposed breast to a certain age group is a good thing, while a First Amendment that gives that same age group unfettered access to avatars lopping off a breast is benign. It’s a theme that runs through the culture, enough so that Scalia could breezily dismiss parental concerns about the violent digital playpen he’s so afraid of regulating. “Mortal Kombat” and other games of graphic mayhem are part of a long, cherished tradition, this most conservative of justices argued.
James Goodman

Occupy Wall Street's 'Political Disobedience' - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...streets-political-disobedience

wall street politics society economy

shared by James Goodman on 14 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • Our language has not yet caught up with the political phenomenon that is emerging in Zuccotti Park and spreading across the nation, though it is clear that a political paradigm shift is taking place before our very eyes. It’s time to begin to name and in naming, to better understand this moment. So let me propose some words: “political disobedience.”Occupy Wall Street is best understood, I would suggest, as a new form of what could be called “political disobedience,” as opposed to civil disobedience, that fundamentally rejects the political and ideological landscape that we inherited from the Cold War.
  • Civil disobedience accepted the legitimacy of political institutions, but resisted the moral authority of resulting laws. Political disobedience, by contrast, resists the very way in which we are governed: it resists the structure of partisan politics, the demand for policy reforms, the call for party identification, and the very ideologies that dominated the post-War period.
  • Occupy Wall Street, which identifies itself as a “leaderless resistance movement with people of many … political persuasions,” is politically disobedient precisely in refusing to articulate policy demands or to embrace old ideologies. Those who incessantly want to impose demands on the movement may show good will and generosity, but fail to understand that the resistance movement is precisely about disobeying that kind of political maneuver. Similarly, those who want to push an ideology onto these new forms of political disobedience, like Slavoj Zizek or Raymond Lotta, are missing the point of the resistance.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • One way to understand the emerging disobedience is to see it as a refusal to engage these sorts of  worn-out ideologies rooted in the Cold War. The key point here is that the Cold War’s ideological divide — with the Chicago Boys at one end and the Maoists at the other — merely served as a weapon in this country for the financial and political elite: the ploy, in the United States, was to demonize the chimera of a controlled economy (that of the former Soviet Union or China, for example) in order to prop up the illusion of a free market and to legitimize the fantasy of less regulation — of what was euphemistically called “deregulation.” By reinvigorating the myth of free markets, the financial and political architects of our economy over the past three plus decades — both Republicans and Democrats — were able to disguise massive redistribution toward the richest by claiming they were simply “deregulating” when all along they were actually reregulating to the benefit of their largest campaign donors.
  • This ideological fog blinded the American people to the pervasive regulatory mechanisms that are necessary to organize a colossal late-modern economy and that necessarily distribute wealth throughout society — and in this country, that quietly redistributed massive amounts of wealth to the richest 1 percent. Many of the voices at Occupy Wall Street accuse political ideology on both sides, on the side of free markets but also on the side of big government, for serving the few at the expense of the other 99 percent — for paving the way to an entrenched permissive regulatory system that “privatizes gains and socializes losses.”
  • The central point, of course, is that it takes both a big government and the illusion of free markets to achieve such massive redistribution. If you take a look at the tattered posters at Zuccotti Park, you’ll see that many are intensely anti-government and just as many stridently oppose big government.Occupy Wall Street is surely right in holding the old ideologies to account. The truth is, as I’ve argued in a book, “The Illusion of Free Markets,” and recently in Harper’s magazine, there never have been and never will be free markets. All markets are man-made, constructed, regulated and administered by often-complex mechanisms that necessarily distribute wealth — that inevitably distribute wealth — in large and small ways. Tax incentives for domestic oil production and lower capital gains rates are obvious illustrations. But there are all kinds of more minute rules and regulations surrounding our wheat pits, stock markets and economic exchanges that have significant wealth effects: limits on retail buyers flipping shares after an I.P.O., rulings allowing exchanges to cut communication to non-member dealers, fixed prices in extended after-hour trading, even the advent of options markets. The mere existence of a privately chartered organization like the Chicago Board of Trade, which required the state of Illinois to criminalize and forcibly shut down competing bucket shops, has huge redistributional wealth effects on farmers and consumers — and, of course, bankers, brokers and dealers.
  • The semantic games — the talk of deregulation rather than reregulation — would have been entertaining had it not been for their devastating effects. As the sociologist Douglas Massey minutely documents in “Categorically Unequal,” after decades of improvement, the income gap between the richest and poorest in this country has dramatically widened since the 1970s, resulting in what social scientists now refer to as U-curve of increasing inequality. Recent reports from the Census Bureau confirm this, with new evidence last month that “the number of Americans living below the official poverty line, 46.2 million people, was the highest number in the 52 years the bureau has been publishing figures on it.” Today, 27 percent of African-Americans and 26 percent of Hispanics in this country — more than 1 in 4 — live in poverty; and 1 in 9 African-American men between the ages of 20 and 34 are incarcerated.
  • On this account, the fundamental choice is no longer the ideological one we were indoctrinated to believe — between free markets and controlled economies — but rather a continuous choice between kinds of regulation and how they distribute wealth in society. There is, in the end, no “realistic alternative,” nor any “utopian project” that can avoid the pervasive regulatory mechanisms that are necessary to organize a complex late-modern economy — and that’s the point. The vast and distributive regulatory framework will neither disappear with deregulation, nor with the withering of a socialist state. What is required is constant vigilance of all the micro and macro rules that permeate our markets, our contracts, our tax codes, our banking regulations, our property laws — in sum, all the ordinary, often mundane, but frequently invisible forms of laws and regulations that are required to organize and maintain a colossal economy in the 21st-century and that constantly distribute wealth and resources.
  • In the end, if the concept of “political disobedience” accurately captures this new political paradigm, then the resistance movement needs to occupy Zuccotti Park because levels of social inequality and the number of children in poverty are intolerable. Or, to put it another way, the movement needs to resist partisan politics and worn-out ideologies because the outcomes have become simply unacceptable. The Volcker rule, debt relief for working Americans, a tax on the wealthy — those might help, but they represent no more than a few drops in the bucket of regulations that distribute and redistribute wealth and resources in this country every minute of every day. Ultimately, what matters to the politically disobedient is the kind of society we live in, not a handful of policy demands.
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