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knudsenlu

The neuroscience of inequality: does poverty show up in children's brains? | Inequality... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ty-show-up-in-childrens-brains

neuroscience poverty children education

shared by knudsenlu on 25 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • The Neurocognition, Early Experience and Development Lab is home to cutting-edge research on how poverty affects young brains, and I’ve come here to learn how Noble and her colleagues could soon definitively prove that growing up poor can keep a child’s brain from developing.
  • handful of neuroscientists and pediatricians who’ve seen increasing evidence that poverty itself – and not factors like nutrition, language exposure, family stability, or prenatal issues, as previously thought – may diminish the growth of a child’s brain.
  • poor kids tended to perform worse academically than their better-off peers
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Prior to their study, scientists had never investigated the specific cognitive tasks (face learning, picture learning, vocabulary tests) in which poor children underperformed, let alone mapped out how their brain structure and development might differ.
  • The results, which Noble and Farah reported in a 2005 paper, were the beginning of what they call a “neurocognitive profile” of socioeconomic status and the developing brain. Farah, Noble and other scientists soon began using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans to examine the brains of children across the socioeconomic spectrum.
  • The results were striking. In one study, Farah looked at 283 MRIs and found that kids from poorer, less-educated families tended to have thinner subregions of the prefrontal cortex – a part of the brain strongly associated with executive functioning – than better-off kids. That could explain weaker academic achievement and even lower IQs.
  • What’s more, the data indicated that small increases in family income had a much larger impact on the brains of the poorest children than similar increases among wealthier children. And Noble’s data also suggested that when a family falls below a certain basic level of income, brain growth drops off precipitously. Children from families making less than $25,000 suffered the most, with 6% less brain surface area than peers in families making $150,000 or more.
  • It’s really a shame for this field that Hillary Clinton’s not our president Martha Farah These studies indicate it isn’t one specific factor that’s solely responsible for diminishing brain growth and intellectual potential, but rather the larger environment of poverty.
Javier E

Rich countries that let inequality run rampant make citizens unhappy, study finds | Ine... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-rampant-make-citizens-unhappy

inequality study research psychology satisfaction happiness international longitudinal

shared by Javier E on 17 Apr 22 - No Cached
  • Countries that allow economic inequality to increase as they grow richer make their citizens less happy, a new study shows.
  • Until now, researchers have believed that inequality was largely irrelevant to levels of life satisfaction,
  • his study of 78 countries spanning four decades – the largest longitudinal research of its kind – punctures that myth
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • “When inequality increases, people with high incomes don’t benefit much from their gains – many rich people are focused on those who have even more than they do, and they never feel they have enough,”
  • “But people who earn little really suffer from falling further behind – they feel excluded and frustrated by not being able to keep up even with people who receive average incomes.”
  • examined survey data of life satisfaction levels, where people rate their life satisfaction on a scale of one to 10, and linked it to Gini coefficient numbers – a measure of inequality – from 1981 to 2020.
  • In 1981, as the UK was gripped by a recession, life satisfaction stood at 7.7. But during the economic boom of the 1980s, inequality grew, and the research shows that the happiness figure dropped to 7.4 by 1999.
  • However, as measures to reduce inequality began to take effect, happiness slowly returned so that by 2018, life satisfaction stood at 7.8.
  • Any country that moved from the lowest quarter of countries in terms of inequality to the highest quarter saw a decrease in life satisfaction of about 0.4 on the 10-point scale, he found.
  • India’s life satisfaction declined from 6.7 in 1990 to 5.8 in 2006 as inequality rose. By 2012 it was still lower than in 1990, despite the country’s prolonged economic boom.
  • The US and Australia also both saw pronounced falls in life satisfaction, but those countries where inequality had fallen were generally happier, such as Poland, Peru, Mexico and Ukraine, before the Russian invasion.
  • “In some of the previous research, you see people saying ‘inequality isn’t that big a deal, so all efforts to address inequality are misguided because inequality is beneficial’.
  • “I think that’s misguided – inequality is generally damaging to people’s life satisfaction so we should pay attention to efforts to mitigate it,
peterconnelly

Meet the Wikipedia editor who published the Buffalo shooting entry minutes after it sta... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

CNN.com

shared by peterconnelly on 03 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • After Jason Moore, from Portland, Oregon, saw headlines from national news sources on Google News about the Buffalo shooting at a local supermarket on Saturday afternoon, he did a quick search for the incident on Wikipedia. When no results appeared, he drafted a single sentence: "On May 14, 2022, 10 people were killed in a mass shooting in Buffalo, New York." He hit save and published the entry on Wikipedia in less than a minute.
  • That article, which as of Friday has been viewed more than 900,000 times, has since undergone 1,071 edits by 223 editors who've voluntarily updated the page on the internet's free and largest crowdsourced encyclopedia.
  • He's credited with creating 50,000 entries
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • In the middle of breaking news, when people are searching for information, some platforms can present more questions than answers. Although Wikipedia is not staffed with professional journalists, it is viewed as an authoritative source by much of the public, for better or for worse. Its entries are also used for fact-checking purposes by some of the biggest social platforms, adding to the stakes and reach of the work from Moore and others.
  • "Editing Wikipedia can absolutely take an emotional toll on me, especially when working on difficult topics such as the COVID-19 pandemic, mass shootings, terrorist attacks, and other disasters," he said.
  • "I like the instant gratification of making the internet better," he said.
  • "I want to direct people to something that is going to provide them with much more reliable information at a time when it's very difficult for people to understand what sources they can trust."
  • "It is considered cool if you're the first person who creates an article, especially if you do it well with high-quality contributions," said Rasberry.
  • To help patrol incoming edits and predict misconduct or errors, Wikipedia -- like Twitter -- uses artificial intelligence bots that can escalate suspicious content to human reviewers who monitor content.
  • Rasberry, who also wrote the Wikipedia page on the platform's fact checking processes, said Wikipedia does not employ paid staff to monitor anything unless it involves "strange and unusual serious crimes like terrorism or real world violence, such as using Wikipedia to make threats, plan to commit suicide, or when Wikipedia itself is part of a crime.
  • Rasberry said flaws range from a geographical bias, which is related to challenges with communicating across languages; access to internet in lower and middle income countries; and barriers to freedom of journalism around the world.
  • "I've got many other editors that I'm working with who will back me, so when we encounter vandalism or trolls or misinformation or disinformation, editors are very quick to revert inappropriate edits or remove inappropriate content or poorly sourced content," Moore said.
  • While "edit wars" can happen on pages, Rasberry said this tends to occur more often over social issues rather than news.
  • Wikipedia also publicly displays who edits each version of an article via its history page, along with a "talk" page for each post that allows editors to openly discuss edits.
  • "If no reliable sources can be found on a topic, Wikipedia should not have an article on it," the page said.
  • "If it was a paid advertising site or if it had a different mission, I wouldn't waste my time."
Javier E

Opinion | What Do We Actually Know About the Economy? (Wonkish) - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...about-the-economy-wonkish.html

economics history crisis great recession theory

shared by Javier E on 17 Sep 18 - No Cached
  • Among economists more generally, a lot of the criticism seems to amount to the view that macroeconomics is bunk, and that we should stick to microeconomics, which is the real, solid stuff. As I’ll explain in a moment, that’s all wrong
  • in an important sense the past decade has been a huge validation for textbook macroeconomics; meanwhile, the exaltation of micro as the only “real” economics both gives microeconomics too much credit and is largely responsible for the ways macroeconomic theory has gone wrong.
  • Finally, many outsiders and some insiders have concluded from the crisis that economic theory in general is bunk, that we should take guidance from people immersed in the real world – say, business leaders — and/or concentrate on empirical results and skip the models
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  • And while empirical evidence is important and we need more of it, the data almost never speak for themselves – a point amply illustrated by recent monetary events.
  • chwinger, as I remember the story, was never seen to use a Feynman diagram. But he had a locked room in his house, and the rumor was that that room was where he kept the Feynman diagrams he used in secret.
  • What’s the equivalent of Feynman diagrams? Something like IS-LM, which is the simplest model you can write down of how interest rates and output are jointly determined, and is how most practicing macroeconomists actually think about short-run economic fluctuations. It’s also how they talk about macroeconomics to each other. But it’s not what they put in their papers, because the journals demand that your model have “microfoundations.”
  • The Bernanke Fed massively expanded the monetary base, by a factor of almost five. There were dire warnings that this would cause inflation and “debase the dollar.” But prices went nowhere, and not much happened to broader monetary aggregates (a result that, weirdly, some economists seemed to find deeply puzzling even though it was exactly what should have been expected.)
  • What about fiscal policy? Traditional macro said that at the zero lower bound there would be no crowding out – that deficits wouldn’t drive up interest rates, and that fiscal multipliers would be larger than under normal conditions. The first of these predictions was obviously borne out, as rates stayed low even when deficits were very large. The second prediction is a bit harder to test, for reasons I’ll get into when I talk about the limits of empiricism. But the evidence does indeed suggest large positive multipliers.
  • The overall story, then, is one of overwhelming predictive success. Basic, old-fashioned macroeconomics didn’t fail in the crisis – it worked extremely well
  • In fact, it’s hard to think of any other example of economic models working this well – making predictions that most non-economists (and some economists) refused to believe, indeed found implausible, but which came true. Where, for example, can you find any comparable successes in microeconomics?
  • Meanwhile, the demand that macro become ever more rigorous in the narrow, misguided sense that it look like micro led to useful approaches being locked up in Schwinger’s back room, and in all too many cases forgotten. When the crisis struck, it was amazing how many successful academics turned out not to know things every economist would have known in 1970, and indeed resurrected 1930-vintage fallacies in the belief that they were profound insights.
  • mainly I think it reflected the general unwillingness of human beings (a category that includes many though not necessarily all economists) to believe that so many people can be so wrong about something so big.
  • . To normal human beings the study of international trade and that of international macroeconomics might sound like pretty much the same thing. In reality, however, the two fields used very different models, had very different intellectual cultures, and tended to look down on each other. Trade people tended to consider international macro people semi-charlatans, doing ad hoc stuff devoid of rigor. International macro people considered trade people boring, obsessed with proving theorems and offering little of real-world use.
  • does microeconomics really deserve its reputation of moral and intellectual superiority? No
  • Even before the rise of behavioral economics, any halfway self-aware economist realized that utility maximization – indeed, the very concept of utility — wasn’t a fact about the world; it was more of a thought experiment, whose conclusions should always have been stated in the subjunctive.
  • Kahneman and Tversky and Thaler and so on deserved all the honors they received for helping to document the specific ways in which utility maximization falls short, but even before their work we should never have expected perfect maximization to be a good description of reality.
  • True, a model doesn’t have to be perfect to provide hugely important insights. But here’s my question: where are the examples of microeconomic theory providing strong, counterintuitive, successful predictions on the same order as the success of IS-LM macroeconomics after 2008? Maybe there are some, but I can’t come up with any.
  • The point is not that micro theory is useless and we should stop doing it. But it doesn’t deserve to be seen as superior to macro modeling.
  • And the effort to make macro more and more like micro – to ground everything in rational behavior – has to be seen now as destructive. True, that effort did lead to some strong predictions: e.g., only unanticipated money should affect real output, transitory income changes shouldn’t affect consumer spending, government spending should crowd out private demand, etc. But all of those predictions have turned out to be wrong.
  • But, you say, we didn’t see the Great Recession coming. Well, what do you mean “we,” white man? OK, what’s true is that few economists realized that there was a huge housing bubble
  • But data never speak for themselves, for a couple of reasons. One, which is familiar, is that economists don’t get to do many experiments, and natural experiments are rare
  • The other problem is that even when we do get something like natural experiments, they often took place under economic regimes that aren’t relevant to current problems.
  • Both of these problems were extremely relevant in the years following the 2008 crisis.
  • you might be tempted to conclude that the empirical evidence is that monetary expansion is inflationary, indeed roughly one-for-one.
  • But the question, as the Fed embarked on quantitative easing, was what effect this would have on an economy at the zero lower bound. And while there were many historical examples of big monetary expansion, examples at the ZLB were much rarer – in fact, basically two: the U.S. in the 1930s and Japan in the early 2000
  • These examples told a very different story: that expansion would not, in fact, be inflationary, that it would work out the way it did.
  • The point is that empirical evidence can only do certain things. It can certainly prove that your theory is wrong! And it can also make a theory much more persuasive in those cases where the theory makes surprising predictions, which the data bear out. But the data can never absolve you from the necessity of having theories.
  • Over this past decade, I’ve watched a number of economists try to argue from authority: I am a famous professor, therefore you should believe what I say. This never ends well. I’ve also seen a lot of nihilism: economists don’t know anything, and we should tear the field down and start over.
  • Obviously I differ with both views. Economists haven’t earned the right to be snooty and superior, especially if their reputation comes from the ability to do hard math: hard math has been remarkably little help lately, if ever.
  • On the other hand, economists do turn out to know quite a lot: they do have some extremely useful models, usually pretty simple ones, that have stood up well in the face of evidence and events. And they definitely shouldn’t defer to important and/or rich people on polic
  • : compare Janet Yellen’s macroeconomic track record with that of the multiple billionaires who warned that Bernanke would debase the dollar. Or take my favorite Business Week headline from 2010: “Krugman or [John] Paulson: Who You Gonna Bet On?” Um.The important thing is to be aware of what we do know, and why.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.
Javier E

Your class determines how you look your fellow creatures | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...-class-determines-how-you-look

psychology social class perception

shared by Javier E on 11 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • Each of the 61 volunteers was asked to wear a Google Glass, walk for a block in New York and focus their attention on whatever captured their interest. Their souped-up specs then recorded everything they looked at. Afterwards, they filled out a questionnaire that asked, along with matters of age, sex and ethnicity, about their income, their level of education and the social class they believed they belonged to.
  • they found that the number of gazes at strangers did not vary with social class, but their duration did. Specifically, upper-middle-class and upper-class people gazed at the faces of others for a fifth of a second less than members of lower social classes.
  • Once again, lower-class people looked at faces for more time than those from the upper classes did. Specifically, working-class people spent a tenth of a second longer doing so than did upper-middle class people—a difference that did not apply when the same people looked at inanimate objects.
anonymous

The Costly, Painful, Lonely Burden of Care - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...caregiving-burnout.html

shared by anonymous on 27 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The Costly, Painful, Lonely Burden of Care
  • Health care in the U.S. relies on an “invisible army” of caregivers — mostly women. For many, stunted careers, lost earnings and exhaustion are part of the fallout.
  • “If society wants us to keep caring for others, it’s going to have to show a little more care for us.”
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  • Her husband, Brad Buchanan, was late for family dinner. She found him in the bathroom, coughing up blood — a lot of it.
  • Doctors found that a tumor had ruptured in one of his lungs and he urgently needed chemo. As her husband became critically ill, Ms. Washington, a freelance writer, was thrust into the role of nurse.
  • “My hands were shaking,” she said as she remembered apprehensively pushing in the drugs for the first time and feeling the weight of keeping her husband alive.
  • Mr. Buchanan had a stem cell transplant that left him with graft-versus-host disease
  • they tend to do more personal care tasks like helping patients bathe and use the toilet than their male counterparts, who are more likely to oversee finances and arrangement of care.
  • When she explained that she had two children who also had needs, he said, “Well, usually family steps in, and it works out fine.”
  • Ms. Washington felt the burden of responsibility, but also the sting
  • The U.S. health care system relies on and takes for granted the “invisible army” of people — mostly women — who keep the system functioning by performing home care for the many people who are “too well for the hospital” but “too sick for home,” as well as for those on end-of-life care.
  • In 2017, AARP found that about 41 million family caregivers in America perform roughly $470 billion worth of unpaid labor a year.
  • Depending on the analysis, between 61 and 75 percent of caregivers are women
  • The historical roots are complex, but as Evelyn Glenn puts it in “Forced to Care,”
  • emale caregivers put in more hours — 22 to men’s 17
  • A doctor told Ms. Washington that her husband would need 24-hour care and “could not be left alone for even a moment.”
  • Many people who take on caregiving roles experience negative health impacts, but women are especially at risk of the fallout from caregiver stress.
  • Female caregivers are also 2.5 times more likely to live in poverty as non-caregiver
  • A 2011 study found that women who left their jobs to care for a parent lost an average of $324,000 in wages and benefits over their lifetimes.
  • Ms. Washington was able to dip into savings and a recent inheritance to help pay for supplemental in-home care, but it was still a struggle, causing stress, resentment and lost income.
  • It was hard to have my life put on hold. Everything kind of slipped away.
  • I lost a sense of who I was. I was going to pick up a prescription for myself, the only prescription I had when my husband was sick, and the pharmacist asked for my date of birth, and I gave his date of birth
  • People talk about how it’s the most important job in the world, taking care of our children or taking care of our vulnerable elders, and yet those are some of the worst paid jobs.
  • How much is a quarterback paid versus someone who is doing care for a vulnerable elderly person?
  • How did care work become so undervalued?
  • they are also more likely to stand by their partner through a serious illness
  • Western culture has long framed care work done by women as a moral duty or obligation, rather than an economic activity.
  • If your earnings are lower than they would normally be because you’re busy caring for a family member, and you can’t save and pay into social security, it can lock whole families into a cycle of lower wealth and economic instability.
  • And what should someone not do
  • Don’t tell someone to stay positive. For me, there was no staying about it, because I didn’t feel positive to start with. It brought up this feeling
  • My time isn’t my own, but surely my emotions can be
manhefnawi

Reaganomics Vs. Obamanomics: Fallacies Offered By The Left - 1 views

www.forbes.com/...-fallacies-offered-by-the-left

Economics Politics Reasoning

shared by manhefnawi on 12 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • From watching and participating in debates over the years regarding Reaganomics, patterns of logical fallacies and factual errors repeatedly arise among critics on the Left.  As the troublesome facts demonstrating the failures of Obamanomics accumulate, we find that almost religiously minded supporters of President Barack Obama can't deal with those facts, and exhibit analogous logical fallacies.
  • Some critics falsely argue that Reagan increased payroll taxes which are paid much more by lower and moderate income workers.  The payroll tax rate increases of the 1980s were adopted under President Carter and the Democratic Congress in 1977.  The Greenspan Commission Social Security rescue plan adopted in 1983 only advanced a couple of these already scheduled payroll tax rate increases by a year or two.  But the ultimate plan for payroll taxes is to phase them out entirely in favor of lower cost personal accounts to finance the benefits currently financed by those taxes, as discussed in previous columns in this space.
katieb0305

Are You Successful? If So, You've Already Won the Lottery - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...e-already-won-the-lottery.html

shared by katieb0305 on 26 May 16 - No Cached
  • Chance events play a much larger role in life than many people once imagined.
  • But randomness often plays out in subtle ways, and it’s easy to construct narratives that portray success as having been inevitable.
  • In the years since, the painting has come to represent Western culture itself. Yet had it never been stolen, most of us would know no more about it than we do of the two obscure Leonardo da Vinci canvases from the same period that hang in an adjacent gallery at the Louvre.
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  • Inevitably, some of those initial steps will have been influenced by seemingly trivial random events. So it is reasonable to conclude that virtually all successful careers entail at least a modicum of luck.
  • One’s date of birth can matter enormously, for example. According to a 2008 study, most children born in the summer tend to be among the youngest members of their class at school, which appears to explain why they are significantly less likely to hold leadership positions during high school and thus, another study indicates, less likely to land premium jobs later in life. Similarly, according to research published in the journal Economics Letters in 2012, the number of American chief executives who were born in June and July is almost one-third lower than would be expected on the basis of chance alone.
  • To acknowledge the importance of random events is not to suggest that success is independent of talent and effort. In highly competitive arenas, those who do well are almost always extremely talented and hard-working.
  • Such expertise comes not from luck but from thousands of hours of assiduous effort.
  • Being born in a good environment is one of the few dimensions of luck we can control — that is, at least we can decide how lucky our children will be.
  • The unlucky population is growing, and its luck is getting worse.
  • Evidence from the social sciences demonstrates that beyond a certain income threshold, people’s sense of well-being depends much more on their relative purchasing power than on how much they spend in absolute terms. If top tax rates were a little higher, all homes would be a little smaller, all cars a little less expensive, all diamonds a little more modest and all celebrations a little less costly. The standards that define “special” would adjust accordingly, leaving most successful people quite satisfied.
  • Merely prompting people to reflect on their good fortune tends to make them more willing to contribute to the common good, according to a 2010 study published in the journal Emotion.
proudsa

Hillary Clinton Sets Up A Fight With Bernie Sanders Over Paid Leave - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...leave_568f2e27e4b0a2b6fb6f8d81

shared by proudsa on 08 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton on Thursday offered new details about her plan to make sure all workers can take time off, with pay, in order to care for a newborn or sick relative.
  • During that time, the worker would be eligible to receive replacement wages, up to two-thirds of his or her salary.
  • The proposal, if enacted, would patch a major gap in America’s safety net. Workers in every other developed country are entitled to paid leave, in some cases for more than a year.
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  • Some companies provide paid leave anyway. In the last year, high-profile employers like Facebook and Goldman Sachs introduced or expanded paid leave for their employees.
  • But Clinton’s proposal differs from the bill in one crucial way. In order to finance the replacement wages that workers would get, the Gillibrand-DeLauro bill would impose a small payroll tax, of 0.4 percent, that employers and employees would split evenly.
  • Clinton has criticized that approach repeatedly because it would mean higher taxes on lower- and middle-income workers.
  • Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), the only Republican presidential candidate to address the issue formally, has said he’d offer small tax breaks to companies that offer paid leave -- an approach unlikely to have much impact, except perhaps to help well-off workers.
  • “The benefit of being one of the last countries in the world to adopt paid maternity leave is that we have been able to learn from other countries' experiences and the results are clear,” Betsey Stevenson, a University of Michigan economist and former adviser to President Barack Obama, told the Huffington Post on Thursday.
  • To advocates like Heather Boushey, chief economist and executive director of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, that’s a welcome sign that American politics is finally talking about the challenges of parents who also have jobs.
sissij

The Economics of Obesity: Why Are Poor People Fat? - 0 views

www.institutefornaturalhealing.com/...besity-why-are-poor-people-fat

economics psychology research bias

shared by sissij on 08 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • This is what poverty looked like in the Great Depression…
  • This is what poverty looks like today…
  • For most of recorded history, fat was revered as a sign of health and prosperity. Plumpness was a status symbol. It showed that you did not have to engage in manual labor for your sustenance. And it meant that you could afford plentiful quantities of food.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The constant struggle to hunt and harvest ensured that we stayed active. And for those with little money, the supply of calories was meager. This ensured that most of the working class stayed slim.
  • Rich people were fat. Poor people were thin.
  • What he found is that he could buy well over 1,000 calories of cookies or potato chips. But his dollar would only buy 250 calories of carrots. He could buy almost 900 calories of soda… but only 170 calories of orange juice.
  • The primary reason that lower-income people are more overweight is because the unhealthiest and most fattening foods are the cheapest.
  • Within the current system, the best we can hope for is a situation where public funds are diverted from the corporate Agri-Giants (which is nothing more than welfare for the wealthy) to family farms and fruit and vegetable growers. Currently, almost 70% of farmers receive no subsidies at all, while the biggest and strongest take the bulk of public funds.
  • sissij on 08 Feb 17
     
    This article shows a very interesting stereotyping that rich people ought to be fat and poor people ought to be thin. It reminded me of I video I have just seen, in which a poor but fat woman is trying to explain why now people in poverty is more likely to be fat. She shows us some comments from people when they hear that she is very poor. The vehement reaction and bad language they used showed that this stereotyping is very deep in our society. However, time is very different now. Food is not as expensive as we think, what is expensive is actually healthy food, that's why poor people tends to be fat. My grandpa once told me that when he was young, he was confused why poor people in Honking movie are eating chicken legs. This is the result of the transformation of society.--Sissi (2/8/2017)
Javier E

Our economy is a hellscape for consumers. The United flier is the latest victim. - The ... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ted-flier-is-the-latest-victim

oligopoly market fundamentalism consumers

shared by Javier E on 12 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • We are told that this is the era of the empowered consumer:
  • Better information means more competition, which means lower prices — all features, of course, of an open marketplace ostensibly presided over by a regulatory authority that, while distant, exists to protect our safety.
  • This vision is a lie. Air travel is the most concentrated version of an essentially authoritarian experience that can be found throughout today’s economy. We live, work, shop, and travel under a system of grossly asymmetric power relationships, in which consumers sign away most of their rights just by purchasing a ticket and companies deputize themselves to enforce contracts with hired goons.
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  • It doesn’t help that the Trump administration is rapidly stripping away as many regulations as it can, promising to repeal two for every new one implemented — an ultra-wealthy administration’s attempt to formalize the plutocratic free-for-all that has followed decades of growing corporate power, defined by massive income inequality, regulatory capture, a revolving door between agencies and the industries they oversee, and steadily eroding consumer rights. The empowered consumer is a figment of our imagination.
  • Experiences that used to be standardized are being divided into tiers denoting various rights, access and costs. The result is to both pit consumers against one another — as they compete for a limited pool of guaranteed seats on an airplane, for example — and to extract more money out of better-heeled customers.
  • If we violate any of the strictures of the contract we’ve implicitly signed by buying a ticket, then the airline — backed with the imprimatur of state authority, perhaps even with the help of local police — has every right to remove us from the plane without apology.
  • Survey the economic landscape and you’re likely to find similarly scrambled power relationships. During the foreclosure crisis, banks acted like arms of the state, with local sheriffs becoming the banking industry’s eviction force. Health insurers dictate access to health care for millions while a small coterie of chief executives reaps huge payouts. The telecommunications industry has consolidated into a handful of industry behemoths that maintain regional monopolies
  • The result is a lack of competition and slow, pricey service
  • Increasingly we’re not just paying more for less; we are sacrificing our privacy rights in the process, as personal data has become a huge driver of the digital economy
  • Those are the economic costs of this arrangement. The social and cultural costs are harder to define but no less important. As Sandel explains, common experiences become increasingly fragmented and subjected to the vicissitudes of the market: “At a time of rising inequality, the marketization of everything means that people of affluence and people of modest means lead increasingly separate lives. We live and work and shop and play in different places. Our children go to different schools.”
  • traditionally guaranteed rights become more contingent and benefits accrue to the wealthy.
  • We get what we pay for, which increasingly means whatever a company like United decides.
Javier E

Read this if you want to be happy in 2014 - The Washington Post - 2 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...3-9389-09ef9944065e_story.html

diet exercise happiness health freedom knowledge willpower system goal

shared by Javier E on 03 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • people usually experience the sensation of happiness whenever they have both health and freedom. It’s a simple formula: Happiness = Health + Freedom
  • I’m talking about the everyday freedom of being able to do what you want when you want to do it, at work and elsewhere. For happiness, timing is as important as the thing you’re doing
  • Matching your mood to your activity is a baseline requirement for happiness
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  • The good news is that timing is relatively controllable, especially in the long run.
  • If you’re just starting out in your career, it won’t be easy to find a job that gives you a flexible schedule. The best approach is a strategy of moving toward more flexibility over the course of your life.
  • There isn’t one formula for finding schedule flexibility. Just make sure all of your important decisions are consistent with an end game of a more flexible schedule. Otherwise you are shutting yourself off from the most accessible lever for happiness — timing.
  • if you knew that pasta is far lower on the glycemic index than a white potato, you would make a far healthier choice that requires no willpower at all. All it took was knowledge.
  • The most important thing to know about staying fit is this: If it takes willpower, you’re doing it wrong. Anything that requires willpower is unsustainable in the long run.
  • studies show that using willpower in one area diminishes how much willpower you have in reserve for other areas. You need to get willpower out of the system
  • My observation is that you can usually replace willpower with knowledge.
  • the trick for avoiding unhealthy foods is to make sure you always have access to healthy options that you enjoy eating. Your knowledge of this trick, assuming you use it, makes willpower far less necessary.
  • don’t give up too much income potential just to get a flexible schedule. There’s no point in having a flexible schedule if you can’t afford to do anything.
  • the fittest people have systems, not goals, unless they are training for something specific. A sensible system is to continuously learn more about the science of diet and the methods for making healthy food taste great. With that system, weight management will feel automatic. Goals aren’t needed.
  • Did you know that sleepiness causes you to feel hungry?
  • Did you know that eating peanuts is a great way to suppress appetite?
  • Did you know that eating mostly protein instead of simple carbs for lunch will help you avoid the afternoon energy slump?
  • Cheese adds calories, but the fat content will help suppress your appetite, so you probably come out ahead. If you didn’t already know that, you might end up using willpower to avoid cheese at dinner and willpower again later that night to resist snacking. A little knowledge replaces a lot of willpower.
  • Did you know that exercise has only a small impact on your weight?
  • after I started noticing how drained and useless I felt after eating simple carbs, french fries became easy to resist.
  • I also learned that I can remove problem foods from my diet if I target them for extinction one at a time. It was easy to stop eating three large Snickers every day (which I was doing) when I realized I could eat anything else I wanted whenever I wanted
  • If you’re on a diet, you’re probably trying to avoid certain types of food, but you’re also trying to limit your portions. Instead of waging war on two fronts, try allowing yourself to eat as much as you want of anything that is healthy.
  • healthier food is almost self-regulating in the sense that you don’t have an insatiable desire to keep eating it the way you might with junk food. With healthy food, you tend to stop when you feel full
  • One of the biggest obstacles to healthy eating is the impression that healthy food generally tastes like cardboard. So consider making it a lifelong system to learn how to season and prepare healthy foods
  • Did you know that eating simple carbs can make you hungrier?
  • ’m limiting my portion size. You only need to do that if you are eating the wrong foods. Eating half of your cake still keeps you addicted to cake. And portion control takes a lot of willpower. You’ll find that healthy food satisfies you sooner, so you don’t crave large portions.
  • No one can exercise enough to overcome a bad diet. Diet is the right button to push for losing weight, so long as you are active. People who eat right and stay active usually have no problems with weight.
  • I’m about to share with you the simplest and potentially most effective exercise plan in the world. Here it is: Be active every day.
  • When you’re active, and you don’t overdo it, you’ll find yourself in a good mood afterward. That reward becomes addictive over time.
  • After a few months of being moderately active every day, you’ll discover that it is harder to sit and do nothing than it is to get up and do something. That’s the frame of mind you want. You want exercise to become a habit with a reward so it evolves into a useful addiction
  • the intensity of your workout has a surprisingly small impact on your weight unless you’re running half-marathons every week. If your diet is right, moderate exercise is all you need.
  • When your body is feeling good, and you have some flexibility in your schedule, you’ll find that the petty annoyances that plague your life become nothing but background noise. And that’s a great launch pad for happiness.
  • As you find yourself getting healthier and happier, the people in your life will view you differently too. Healthy-looking people generally earn more money, get more offers and enjoy a better social life. All of that will help your happiness.
  • Keep in mind that happiness is a directional phenomenon. We feel happy when things are moving in the right direction no matter where we are at the moment.
jlessner

How Do We Increase Empathy? - NYTimes.com - 2 views

www.nytimes.com/...ow-do-we-increase-empathy.html

increase empathy Research knowledge psychology brain science

shared by jlessner on 30 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • “Probably the biggest empathy generator is cuteness: paedomorphic features such as large eyes, a large head, and a small lower face,” Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychologist, tells me. “Professional empathy entrepreneurs have long known this, of course, which is why so many charities feature photos of children and why so many conservation organizations feature pandas. Prettier children are more likely to be adopted, and baby-faced defendants get lighter sentences.”
  • Not much we can do about looks — although criminal defense lawyers try, by having scruffy clients shave and dress up before appearing in court.
  • Granted, skepticism is reasonable any time (mostly liberal) academics reach conclusions that portray the wealthy in a poor light. But these experiments also find a measure of backing in the real world. For example, among Democratic politicians, personal wealth is a predictor of supporting legislation that would increase inequality, according to a journal article last year by Michael W. Kraus and Bennett Callaghan.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Likewise, the wealthiest 20 percent of Americans give significantly less to charity as a fraction of income (1.4 percent) than the poorest 20 percent do (3.5 percent), according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
Javier E

Louise Linton's antics are far more revealing than she knows - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...-more-revealing-than-she-knows

rich wealth morality psychology bias

shared by Javier E on 14 Feb 18 - No Cached
  • In a world of record-breaking inequality, Linton is giving those of us who are not wealthy much-needed insight into how wealth impacts personality, which could help us understand how all the wealthy people whom Trump has put in charge of his administration think.
  • In a 2015 paper, “Why Wealthier People Think People Are Wealthier, and Why It Matters,” researchers at Britain’s University of Kent and New Zealand’s University of Auckland discovered that the more money someone possessed, the wealthier they believed their peers to be.
  • Other research shows lower-income people spend more time looking at their surroundings and pick up on emotional cues better than their wealthier peers.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • This, in turn, seems to give the wealthy permission to act in a way that, to put it kindly, forever prioritizes No. One — themselves.
  • the higher the self-described social rank, the more candy the subjects took from a jar of candy designated for children.
  • They also discovered the more prestigious the make of car, the more likely a driver would cut off a pedestrian in a crosswalk or fail to yield to others at a four-way stop
  • It’s not simply that some people have a lot more than others. It’s that the excessive wealth leaves them cut off, and clueless, often incapable of understanding the needs and motivations of others
Javier E

A Voter Revolt Against 'Shareholder Value' - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...t-shareholder-value-1475621860

corporate shareholder value responsbility market fundamentalism

shared by Javier E on 08 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • a Feb. 29 quotation from Leslie Moonves, chairman of CBS, CBS -1.76 % that sums up everything wrong with today’s media culture—and with corporate America.
  • Reflecting on the Trump phenomenon at a media and technology conference, Mr. Moonves said that “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”
  • Mr. Moonves is saying that CBS’s only responsibility is to maximize profits, not only in its entertainment division, but also in its news operation
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • He knows that what his network is doing is against the national interest. He has just enough conscience to be aware that it is “terrible,” but not nearly enough to stop doing it. It might impair shareholder value, after all.
  • Mr. Moonves is suggesting that there is no difference in principle between entertainment and news. Both should be judged by the same standard—ratings. If policy speeches don’t attract large enough audiences, cut to a Trump rally.
  • If the leading purveyors of broadcast journalism make no distinction between news and entertainment, then who can blame viewers for seeing no difference between entertainment and politics?
  • American politicians and parties have used entertainment to draw audiences for the better part of two centuries. But there used to be countervailing forces, including prestigious broadcast news organizations. Not anymore. Once these organizations served as gatekeepers; now they are open-door enablers.
  • They are all in the grip of the same misunderstanding, that their business begins and ends with maximizing shareholder value.
  • They may believe that this is a statutory requirement or a fiduciary duty. If so, they are mistaken
  • It is Milton Friedman’s theory. “There is one and only one social responsibility of business,” he wrote in “Capitalism and Freedom,” “to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits.”
  • corporate law imposes no enforceable legal duty to maximize either profits or share prices.
  • And it is not politically sustainable. This is the clear meaning of the 2016 presidential election.
  • As a policy argument, Friedman’s thesis flunks key empirical tests
  • during the 1970s, inflation, recession, a stagnant stock market and rising competition from abroad created an opening for Friedman’s theory, which soon dominated corporate boardrooms.
  • In the name of maximizing shareholder value, corporations moved plants and jobs around the world, paid the lowest wages they could get away with, and scheduled work assignments to maintain managerial “flexibility,” whatever the consequences for workers’ families. Meanwhile, their lobbyists engineered a myriad of special interest breaks in the corporate tax code.
  • Now we can see what four decades of pursuing shareholder value at the expense of everything else has yielded
  • Public confidence in corporations is at rock-bottom, and public anger is sky-high
  • The revolt against the corporate economic agenda—free trade, a generous immigration policy, lower corporate taxes and the rest—is sweeping the country.
  • As the Republican rank and file has turned against corporations and New Democrats have given ground to left-wing populists, big business has been left politically homeless.
  • It will take corporate America a long time to climb out of this self-created hole.
  • Its first step should be to back long-overdue proposals for improving workers’ lives and incomes. Paid family leave is an idea whose time has come; so is a catch-up increase in the federal minimum wage; so are stable and predictable schedules for part-time workers.
  • Allowing workers to share in profits and productivity increases would be another good step.
  • Above all, corporate leaders should grasp the distinction between immediate gain and self-interest rightly understood. Pushing for the last increment of profit over the next quarter and the one after that comes at the expense of the strategies that can leave firms best positioned for the future.
  • America needs a new generation of corporate statesmen.
caelengrubb

Student loan debt: Here are 7 ways the $1.6 trillion toll affects the U.S. economy - Th... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...-loan-debt-is-doing-us-economy

shared by caelengrubb on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • American families are carrying about $1.6 trillion in student loan debt, a massive burden that amounts to nearly 8 percent of national income. That share has roughly doubled since the mid-2000s.
  • Years of research show that such post-college debt compels people to put off marriage and home ownership. It also stifles entrepreneurship and career paths.
  • Student loan debt is taking a bite out of the housing market
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • A $1,000 increase in student loan debt, researchers found, lowered the odds of marriage by 2 percent a month among female bachelor’s degree recipients in the first four years after graduation. That finding has been bolstered by more recent research showing a similar trend.
  • Student loan debt is hampering the growth of small businesses
  • a significant and economically meaningful negative correlation” between rising student loan debt and falling small-business formation. The mechanism isn’t hard to grasp: If you’re paying off a student loan, you’re less able to pull together the cash needed to start a business.
  • The authors note that small businesses are responsible for “approximately 60 percent of net employment activity in the U.S.”
  • Student loan debt is delaying marriage and family formation
  • This year, the Federal Reserve issued a report showing that student loan debt prevented about 400,000 young families from purchasing homes, accounting for about a quarter of the drop in home-ownership rates in this demographic from 2005 to 2014
  • Student loan debt makes it harder to weather financial crises
  • From 2007 to 2009, households with student loans saw 12.4 percent of their total net worth evaporate, while the net worth of those without such loans fell by 9.3 percent
  • Student loan debt is preventing young people from saving for retirement
  • Student loan debt can cause graduates to give up on their dreams
  • The returns on higher education aren’t what they once were
anonymous

The 'Old American Dream,' a Trap as the Floods Keep Coming - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-hurricane-harvey-houston.html

shared by anonymous on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The ‘Old American Dream,’ a Trap as the Floods Keep Coming
  • Still, she wanted so badly to keep her word.
  • In her kitchen, Juanita Hall routinely found opossums staring back at her from the cage trap she kept under the table
  • ...29 more annotations...
  • And that was all before a winter storm last month left Ms. Hall shivering over a heater and caused pipes to leak
  • Hurricane Harvey. The storm hit Houston in 2017, and for many, the trauma endured as a haunting memory.
  • But for Ms. Hall, almost four years later, the devastation remained a grinding reality.
  • “I think about it every day, all day long,”
  • she walked through the house she had lived in since childhood.
  • No matter what, the house would be there, and it would be theirs.
  • Owning a home has long been part of Houston’s promise for many working-class families, offering security and a foothold for upward mobility. But disasters — flood after flood — have kept coming.
  • A changing climate threatens more
  • Houston’s poorest neighborhoods, the houses are no longer the safety net they were intended to be.
  • A few months before Harvey, Ms. Hall ran into her mother’s bedroom and found her collapsed on the floor. Now, she cannot forget the request her mother made soon before she died: Don’t y’all lose my house.
  • “I’m tired of the unknown,
  • His house was another thread in the skein of complications that consumed his life, all of which were caused or made worse by a lack of money.
  • A storm, as it cuts its path, may not recognize race or class, but the pace of recovery very often does
  • In Houston’s poorest neighborhoods, an unfamiliar winter storm stoked a familiar anguish, one fueled by recurring floods and what residents see as a pattern of neglect.
  • Yet it also plunged them into a familiar agony: no electricity, waterlogged homes
  • certainty that they faced more of a frustration they knew all too well from wrangling with bureaucracies for help that was rarely enough, if it ever came at all.
  • “They’ve lost in a lot of ways,”
  • “These neighborhoods are just having issue after issue, and none of their original issues have been dealt with or resolved. This is layer upon layer of injury.”
  • Tired but still at it
  • “My folks used to say, if it’s easy, baby, question it,”
  • Harvey Forgotten Survivors Caucus, which helped patch up her house
  • And she also learned that hers was, in many ways, a familiar set of circumstances, living in a home that had been handed down through family and amounted to just about the entirety of their wealth.
  • The community was drained of more than just white residents. Businesses left. So too did a sense of opportunity.
  • “The property value went down,” Mr. Moses said. “The human value went down.”
  • There are the neighborhoods that bounce back. And there are the others — with lower incomes and largely nonwhite residents — where every event arrives as another setback on an interminable slog
  • “The only option is to stay where you’re at,” he said. “That’s it.”
  • “You’re more of a mother to these children than the mothers,” he told her. And when he died, he wanted her to oversee his estate.
  • “This is an assignment to me, and I want to get it done,” Ms. Hall said sitting on her front porch, washed in the light of a crisp afternoon filtering through the leaves of the magnolia tree. “If I die the day after, I’m satisfied.”
  • er father’s dream was now the one she held for Bella: No matter what, the house would be there, and it would be hers.
tongoscar

IDEA Public Schools headed for Houston with high acceptance rates - and plenty of skept... - 0 views

www.houstonchronicle.com/...lege-kids-Houston-15074039.php

shared by tongoscar on 22 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • Lopez’s mother and father gave up their jobs as an accountant and civil engineer, respectively, as they moved from Mexico to Texas’ Rio Grande Valley several years ago. Now, she works as an administrative assistant and he labors as a mechanic — the cost of giving their children an American education.
  • “Sacrifices like that mean so much to me that I feel the need to pay it back by getting accepted into college,” said Lopez, now a senior.
  • Now, as the organization aims to double in size over the next three years, IDEA will debut in the Houston area this August. The network plans to open two campuses in the boundaries of Houston and Spring ISDs, with each site eventually housing two schools that serve students from prekindergarten to 12th grade. By 2025, IDEA plans to establish eight more campuses that ultimately will enroll about 15,000 children living near the region’s lowest-rated traditional public schools.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Lopez has reached those goals this school year, earning acceptance letters from Louisiana State University, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley and St. Mary’s University in San Antonio. He is poised to join an IDEA Public Schools senior class that, if history holds, will send nearly all graduates on to college.
  • “They market that every kid gets accepted and goes to college, and in a perfect world, that seems right,”
  • By virtually any measure, IDEA ranks among the best-scoring districts serving predominantly Hispanic and lower-income children.
  • IDEA’s results have coincided with an educational revival in the Rio Grande Valley, once considered one of the state’s lowest-performing regions. All 14 of IDEA’s neighboring districts serving at least 10,000 students earned A or B grades last year under the state’s academic accountability system. Several reported some the state’s highest math and reading test scores among poor children.
tongoscar

'Free' College Would Be an Expensive Disaster. Just Ask Europe. - 0 views

www.dailysignal.com/...lege-heres-how-its-working-out

shared by tongoscar on 20 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Free college sounds great! Who doesn’t like free stuff?
  • To make the idea sound even more appealing, advocates continuously cite Europe as an example of success. Many European countries offer their citizens tuition-free higher education, so why can’t America?
  • Americans already pay a steep price for our higher education system. Taxpayers—including those who never went to college and never intend to—spend more than $150 billion a year on federal student loans, grants, and other government programs.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • One of the few factors putting any downward pressure on higher education costs is the growing criticism that universities receive for leaving so many students burdened with massive amounts of student loan debt. Under a fully financed government system, however, universities would receive no such scrutiny. They’d simply pass the bill to Washington and let lawmakers take the heat from unhappy taxpayers. That cumulative bill would quickly skyrocket. Many European countries that have experimented with “free college” are finding that approach to be simply unaffordable. Germany, for example, saw a 37% increase in the college subsidy cost to taxpayers once public universities removed tuition.
  • Similarly, England had a free-college policy between the 1960s and the 1990s. Enrollment soared, straining government revenues. Ultimately, England had to lower resources by 39% per student. Ultimately, England’s free college policy wound up hurting low-income students the most, as schools were forced to cap the number of students admitted.
  • European countries that offer tuition-free higher education also struggle with the issue of completion. Finland, for example, ranks first among all Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries in terms of subsidies for higher education, with 96% of all higher education funding coming from public sources. However, Finland ranks 25th among OECD countries for degree attainment.
  • The $1.5 trillion in outstanding student loan debt that Americans owe is certainly a crisis. However, the solution to this problem is not to encourage more students to attend who may later drop out and ask Americans who did not go to college to pay for those who do.
tongoscar

Donald Trump is the moderate candidate in the 2020 presidential election - Washington T... - 0 views

www.washingtontimes.com/...moderate-candidate-in-the-2020

shared by tongoscar on 22 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • Washington has a way of capturing presidents more than they conquer its bureaucracy — in current parlance, President Trump has become an alligator more than he has drained the swamp.
  • If one of the terribly serious six lands in the Oval Office, don’t look for that to change. With moderate revisions, Nancy Pelosi endorsed the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement. None of the Democratic aspirants could end the festering confrontation with China without winning fundamental reforms in its socialist market economy, which the Chinese Communist Party simply won’t tolerate, or facing a revolt within their own party in Congress.
  • The economy entered 2020 in reasonably good shape, but thanks to Boeing’s problems and the coronavirus lockdown of China we will be lucky to get 2 GDP percent growth this year. A cooling economy means the improvements in wages and wealth of lower income Americans Mr. Trump bragged about in his State of the Union address will diminish.
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