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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.
  • 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
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
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11 mind-blowing facts about the US economy | Markets Insider - 1 views

markets.businessinsider.com/...conomy-facts-2019-4-1028101291
shared by caelengrubb on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • For more than a century, the United States has been the world's economic powerhouse.
  • The US is on the verge of its longest economic expansion on record
  • Last May, the US economy's streak of more than eight years of economic growth became the nation's second longest on record. It's been a slow climb following the Great Recession, but it's growth nonetheless.
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  • But the US also just hit a record 13 straight years without 3% real GDP growth
  • While the US has had a record period of economic expansion, it's not setting the world on fire. It's been a record 13 straight years without reaching 3% real gross domestic product growth. The US has come close, hitting 2.9% growth in 2018, but America hasn't hit a real GDP growth of 3% since 2005, when it grew 3.5%
  • The decade-long expansion has generated 20 million jobs
  • With economic growth stretching the past decade, key figures continue to get better. A 3.4% year-over-year wage growth is the strongest in more than a decade, a good sign as stagnant wages have kept the US middle class at bay
  • Still, the jobless rate fell to 3.8%
  • Sleep deprivation costs the US economy billions of dollars
  • More than a third of the US adult population doesn't get enough sleep, and that costs the US $411 billion through the loss of 1.2 million work days each year.
  • The lack of sleep can come from a variety of factors, whether it's overworking, poor health habits, or even the horrid blue light from electronics
  • About $100,000 separates the middle class from the upper class
  • In 2011, 51% of Americans were considered middle class, and that number grew slightly to 52% in 2016
  • Generation Z might spend as much as $143 billion next year
  • Generation Z, the population born between 1997 and 2012, will make up 40% of US consumers by next year.
  • The average car part crosses into Mexico and Canada eight times in production
  • Mexico is the top trade partner, with the US exporting $21.9 billion worth of products to its southern neighbor and importing $27.7 billion, making up 14.8% of all US trade. Canada, meanwhile, makes up 13.8% of US trade as it imports $22.6 billion worth of American goods and sends in $23.4 billion
  • If California were a country, it would have the fifth highest GDP in the world
  • With a gross domestic product of $2.747 trillion, California would only trail Germany, Japan, China, and the US as a whole.
  • The US spends more on defense than the next seven nations combined
  • That $610 billion is good for 15% of all federal spending
  • The US national debt is at an all-time high
  • In February, US government debt hit an all-time high of $22 trillion
  • The sports industry is worth nearly $75 billion
  • A sports-industry report back in 2015 predicted the market in North America would be worth more than $73.5 billion by this year.
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Scientists are baffled: What's up with the universe? - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...9-8cf0-4cc99f74d127_story.html universe cosmology hubble constant astronomy science origins
shared by Javier E on 01 Nov 19 - No Cached
  • The universe is unimaginably big, and it keeps getting bigger. But astronomers cannot agree on how quickly it is growing — and the more they study the problem, the more they disagree.
  • Some scientists call this a “crisis” in cosmology. A less dramatic term in circulation is “the Hubble Constant tension.”
  • Nine decades ago, the astronomer Edwin Hubble showed that the universe is orders of magnitude vaster than previously imagined — and the whole kit and kaboodle is expanding. The rate of that expansion is a number called the Hubble Constant.
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  • It’s a slippery number, however. Measurements using different techniques have produced different results, and the numbers show no sign of converging even as researchers refine their observations
  • the theorists are intrigued. They hope the Hubble Constant confusion is the harbinger of a potential major discovery — some "new physics."
  • “Any time there’s a discrepancy, some kind of anomaly, we all get very excited,”
  • “Where’s it all going to go? How’s it all going to end? That’s a big question,”
  • One idea floating around is that there could have been something called Early Dark Energy that skewed the appearance of the background radiation
  • “New physics might be that there’s some form of energy that acted in the earliest moments of the evolution of the universe. You’d get an injection of energy that’d then have to disappear,”
  • Leavitt, a then-obscure employee of the Harvard College Observatory, discovered that the intrinsically brighter stars have longer periods. This insight — Leavitt’s law — allows astronomers to know the Cepheid’s absolute luminosity, then gauge the distance to the star based on how bright or faint it appears.
  • just to be clear: The Hubble Constant in question is the rate of expansion in our “local” universe, not the rate of expansion when the background radiation was first emitted billions of years ago. Over time, the Hubble Constant isn’t constant.)
  • At the dawn of the 21st century, this Standard Model seemed to pass every observational test. And any disparities in the measurement of the Hubble Constant would surely be ironed out with further observations, scientists assumed. They had even nailed down the age of the universe precisely: 13.8 billion years.
  • “We felt really good,”
  • He added, jokingly, “We should have stopped taking data.”
  • “We are wired to use our intuition to understand things around us,” Riess said. “Most of the universe is made out of stuff that’s completely different than us. This adherence to intuition is often wildly unsuccessful in the universe.”
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No rides, but lots of rows: 'reactionary' French theme park plots expansion | France | ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...nch-theme-park-plots-expansion historiography france history
shared by Javier E on 22 Sep 23 - No Cached
  • Nicolas de Villiers said the theme park – whose subject matter includes Clovis, king of the Franks, and a new €20m (£17m) show about the birth of modern cinema – was not about politics. He said: “What we want when an audience leaves our shows – which are works of art and were never history lessons – is to feel better and bigger, because the hero has brought some light into their hearts … Puy du Fou is more about legends than a history book.”
  • He said the park’s trademark high-drama historical extravaganzas worked because, at a time of global crisis, people had a hunger to understand their roots and traditions. “The artistic language we invented corresponds to the era we live in. People have a thirst for their roots, a thirst to understand what made them what they are today, which means their civilisation. They want to understand what went before them.” He called it a “profound desire to rediscover who we are”.
  • e added: “People who come here don’t have an ideology, they come here and say it’s beautiful, it’s good, I liked it.”
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  • Guillaume Lancereau, Max Weber fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, was part of a group of historians who published the book Puy du Faux (Puy of Fakes), analysing the park’s take on history. They viewed the park as having a Catholic slant, questionable depictions of nobility and a presentation of rural peasants as unchanged through the ages.
  • Lancereau did not question the park’s entertainment value. But he said: “Professional historians have repeatedly criticised the park for taking liberties with historical events and characters and, more importantly, for distorting the past to serve a nationalistic, religious and conservative political agenda. This raises important questions about the contemporary entanglement between entertainment, collective memory and politically oriented historical production …
  • “At a time when increasing numbers of undergraduates are acquiring their historical knowledge from popular culture and historical reenactments, the Puy du Fou’s considerable expansion calls for further investigation of a phenomenon that appears to be influencing the making of historical memory in contemporary Europe.”
  • Outside the park’s musketeers show, André, 76, had driven 650km (400 miles) from Burgundy with his wife and grandson. “We came because we’re interested in history,” he said. “The shows are technically brilliant and really make you think. You can tell it’s a bit on the right – the focus on war, warriors and anti-revolution – but I don’t think that matters.”
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Matt Ridley on Evolution by Sexual Selection | Mind & Matter - WSJ.com - 0 views

online.wsj.com/...3551004578116903873762428.html sexual selection evolution biology science psychology
shared by Javier E on 18 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • the evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller in his book "The Mating Mind" explored the notion that since human males woo their mates with art, poetry, music and humor, as well as with brawn, much of the expansion of our brain may have been sexually selected.
  • sexual selection explains civilization itself. They mathematically explored the possibility that "as females prefer males who conspicuously consume, an increasing proportion of males engage in innovation, labor and other productive activities in order to engage in conspicuous consumption. These activities contribute to technological progress and economic growth.
  • Michael Shermer, in his book "The Mind of the Market," argues that you can trace anticapitalist egalitarianism to sexual selection. Back in the hunter-gatherer Paleolithic, inequality had reproductive consequences. The successful hunter, providing valuable protein for females, got a lot more mating opportunities than the unsuccessful.
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  • this might explain why it is relative, rather than absolute, inequality that matters so much to people today. In modern Western society, when even relatively poor people have access to transport, refrigeration, entertainment, shoes and plentiful food, you might expect that inequality would be less resented than a century ago—when none of those things might come within the reach of a poor person. What does it matter if there are people who can afford private jets and designer dresses? But clearly that isn't how people think. They resent inequality in luxuries just as much if not more than inequality in necessities. They dislike (and envy) conspicuous consumption, even if it impinges on them not at all. What hurts is not that somebody is rich, but that he is richer.
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A Modest Proposal for More Back-Stabbing in Preschool - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ack-stabbing-in-preschool.html children education values goals US economy inequality
shared by Javier E on 02 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • I am a deluded throwback to carefree days, and in my attempt to raise a conscious, creative and socially and environmentally responsible child while lacking the means to also finance her conscious, creative and environmentally and socially responsible lifestyle forever, I’d accidentally gone and raised a hothouse serf. Oops.
  • Reich’s thesis is that some inequality is inevitable, even necessary, in a free-market system. But what makes an economy stable and prosperous is a strong, vibrant, growing middle class. In the three decades after World War II, a period that Reich calls “the great prosperity,” the G.I. Bill, the expansion of public universities and the rise of labor unions helped create the biggest, best-educated middle class in the world. Reich describes this as an example of a “virtuous circle” in which productivity grows, wages increase, workers buy more, companies hire more, tax revenues increase, government invests more, workers are better educated. On the flip side, when the middle class doesn’t share in the economic gains, it results over time in a downward vicious cycle: Wages stagnate, workers buy less, companies downsize, tax revenues decrease, government cuts programs, workers are less educated, unemployment rises, deficits grow. Since the crash that followed the deregulation of the financial markets, we have struggled to emerge from such a cycle.
  • What if the kid got it in her head that it was a good idea to go into public service, the helping professions, craftsmanship, scholarship or — God help her — the arts? Wouldn’t a greedier, more back-stabby style of early education be more valuable to the children of the shrinking middle class ­ — one suited to the world they are actually living in?
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  • Are we feeding our children a bunch of dangerous illusions about fairness and hard work and level playing fields? Are ideals a luxury only the rich can afford?
  • I’m reminded of the quote by John Adams: “I must study politics and war, that my sons may have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history [and] naval architecture . . . in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, tapestry and porcelain.” For all intents and purposes, I guess I studied porcelain. The funny thing is that my parents came from a country (Peru) with a middle class so small that parents had to study business so that their children could study business. If I didn’t follow suit, it’s at least in part because I spent my childhood in the 1970s absorbing the nurturing message of a progressive pop culture that told me I could be anything I wanted, because this is America.
  • “When we see the contrast between the values we share and the realities we live in, that is the fundamental foundation for social change.”
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Should we even go there? Historians on comparing fascism to Trumpism | US news | The Gu... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...nald-trump-historians-trumpism fascism hitler resistance democracy
shared by Javier E on 03 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • “What are the necessary social and psychological conditions that allow populists of Hitler’s ilk to gain a mass following and attain power?”
  • “There are certain traits you can recognize that Hitler and Trump have in common,” Ullrich says. “I would say the egomania, the total egocentricity of both men, and the inclination to mix lies and truth – that was very characteristic of Hitler.”
  • Like Trump, “Hitler exploited peoples’ feelings of resentment towards the ruling elite.” He also said he would make Germany great again. Ullrich also notes both men’s talent at playing the media, making use of new technology and their propensity for stage effects.
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  • “I think the differences are still greater than the similarities,” he says. “Hitler was not only more intelligent, but craftier. He was not just a powerful orator, but a talented actor who succeeded in winning over various social milieus. So not just the economically threatened lower middle classes which Trump targeted, but also the upper middle classes. Hitler had many supporters in the German aristocracy.”
  • Trump was also democratically elected, while Hitler never had a majority vote. “He was appointed by the president of the German Reich.” Then there’s the fact that Trump does not lead a party “which is unconditionally committed to him”.
  • “A further obvious difference is that Trump doesn’t have a private militia, as Hitler did with the SA, which he used in his first months after coming to power to settle scores with his opponents, like the Communists and Social Democrats. You can’t possibly imagine something similar with Trump – that he’ll be locking Democrats up into concentration camps
  • “Finally, the American constitution is based on a system of checks and balances. It remains to be seen how far Congress will really limit Trump or if, as is feared, he can override it. It was different with Hitler, who, as we know, managed to eliminate all resistance in the shortest space of time and effectively establish himself as an all-powerful dictator. Within a few months, there was effectively no longer any opposition.”
  • “Hitler profited from the fact that his opponents always underestimated him,” Ullrich explains. “His conservative allies in government assumed they could tame or ‘civilise’ him – that once he became chancellor he’d become vernünftig (meaning sensible, reasonable). Very quickly it became clear that was an illusion.”
  • “There were many situations where he could have been stopped. For example in 1923 after the failed Munich putsch – if he’d served his full prison sentence of several years, he wouldn’t have made a political comeback. Instead, he only spent a few months behind bars, [having been released after political pressure] and could rebuild his movement.”
  • The western powers made the same mistake with their appeasement politics, indecision and indulgence. “In the 1930s Hitler strengthened, rather than weakened, his aggressive intentions,” Ullrich says. “So you could learn from this that you have to react faster and much more vigorously than was the case at the time.”
  • llrich also contends that if Hindenburg, the president of the Reich, had allowed Chancellor Brüning, of the Centre party, to remain chancellor to the end of 1934, rather than responding to pressure from conservatives to dismiss him in 1932, “then the peak of the economic crisis would have passed and it would have been very questionable whether Hitler could still have come to power”.
  • At the same time, Hitler’s ascent was no mere fluke. “There were powerful forces in the big industries, but also in the landowning class and the armed forces, which approved of a fascist solution to the crisis.”
  • If fascism “now just means aggressive nationalism, racism, patriarchy and authoritarianism, then maybe it is back on the agenda,” Bosworth continues. But today’s context is fundamentally different
  • Today’s “alt-right” agitators “live in a neoliberal global order where the slogan, ‘all for the market, nothing outside the market, no one against the market’ is far more unquestionably accepted than the old fascist slogan of ‘all for the state, nothing outside the state, no one against the state’”.
  • “What is that if it’s not racially authoritarian?” asks Schama. “If you want to call it fascist, fine. I don’t really care if it’s called that or not. It’s authoritarian, you know, ferociously authoritarian.”
  • Schama also points to deeply worrying messaging, such as “the parallel universe of lies which are habitual, massive, cumulative”; the criminalization of political opponents; the threat to change the libel laws against the press and the demonization of different racial and ethnic groups, going as far as proposing a Muslim registry.
  • Schama is clear: Trump is obviously not Hitler. “But, you know, if you like, he’s an entertainment fascist, which may be less sinister but is actually in the end more dangerous. If you’re not looking for jackboots and swastikas – although swastikas are indeed appearing – there’s a kind of laundry list of things which are truly sinister and authoritarian and not business as usual.”
  • Don’t ignore what people vote fo
  • f you’re of German heritage, it’s hard to understand how so many people could have bought Mein Kampf and gone on to vote for Hitler. Maybe no one really read it, or got beyond the first few pages of bluster, or took antisemitism seriously, you tell yourself. “Or they liked what he said,
  • “I think one of the mistakes this time around would be not to think that the people who voted for Trump were serious. They may have been serious for different reasons, but it would be a big mistake not to try and figure out what their reasons were.
  • Hitler presented himself as a “messiah” offering the public “salvation”, Ullrich points out. With austerity and hostility to the EU and to immigrants riding high, there is fertile ground for European populists next year to seduce with equally simplistic, sweeping “solutions”.
  • The problem, in Mazower’s view, is that establishment politicians currently have no response
  • “The Gestapo was piddling compared with the size and reach of surveillance equipment and operations today,
  • “Very belatedly, everyone is waking up to the fact that there was a general assumption that no government in the west would fall into the wrong hands, that it was safe to acquiesce in this huge expansion of surveillance capabilities, and the debate wasn’t as vigorous as it could have been.”
  • “Now, there is a lot of discussion about allowing this kind of surveillance apparatus in the wrong hands,” he adds. “And we’ve woken up to this a bit late in the day.”
  • Ullrich calls crises, “the elixir of rightwing populists”, and urges that politicians “do everything they can to correct the inequalities and social injustice which have arisen in the course of extreme financial capitalism in western countries”
  • Jane Caplan, a history professor at Oxford University who has written about Trump and fascism, highlights the want of “dissenting voices against marketisation and neoliberalism
  • The failure to resist the incursion of the market as the only criterion for political utility, or economic utility, has been pretty comprehensive.
  • Paranoia, bullying and intimidation are a hallmark of authoritarian regimes. They are also alive and well in our culture today, where online trolls, violent thugs at rallies, threats of expensive libel action and of course terrorist acts are equally effective in getting individuals and the press to self-censor.
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Which Trump Will the World See? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-trump-will-the-world-see.html new york times social media
shared by sissij on 21 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • By advocating an expansive budget through tax cuts and infrastructure spending, Mr. Trump’s plan would most likely lower national savings and propel the United States dollar ever higher, creating the very conditions to widen rather than to narrow the trade deficit.
  • He is doing so in the unrealistic hope that these policies will cause the economy to accelerate from its present 2 percent growth rate to between 3 and 4 percent. And he is counting on such faster economic growth to generate additional tax revenue.
  • A further basic weakness of Mr. Trump’s budget proposal is that it would add stimulus to the economy at the very time that the economy is at or very close to full employment.
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  • If he does go down that path, he will risk inviting trade retaliation by our trade partners, which could lead the global economy down the road to the beggar-thy-neighbor policies of the 1930s.
  • sissij on 21 Dec 16
     
    This article discussed flaws in Trump's economic policy and his relationship with foreign countries. It's surprising for me to see that tax plays a very complicated role in diplomacy. Increasing or decreasing the tax revenue affects how much money the government has. Mr. Trump is definitely a very successful entrepreneur, but earning money for a government is more complicated than eating money for a company because you have to take care of the benefit of your people, not only yourself. --Sissi (12/20/2016)
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How 'Concept Creep' Made Americans So Sensitive to Harm - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...477939 concept creep psychology liberalism harmful trauma torture
shared by Javier E on 19 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • How did American culture arrive at these moments? A new research paper by Nick Haslam, a professor of psychology at the University of Melbourne, Australia, offers as useful a framework for understanding what’s going on as any I’ve seen. In “Concept Creep: Psychology's Expanding Concepts of Harm and Pathology,”
  • concepts like abuse, bullying, trauma, mental disorder, addiction, and prejudice, “now encompass a much broader range of phenomena than before,”expanded meanings that reflect “an ever-increasing sensitivity to harm.”
  • “they also have potentially damaging ramifications for society and psychology that cannot be ignored.”
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  • He calls these expansions of meaning “concept creep.”
  • critics may hold concept creep responsible for damaging cultural trends, he writes, “such as supposed cultures of fear, therapy, and victimhood, the shifts I present have some positive implications.”
  • Concept creep is inevitable and vital if society is to make good use of new information. But why has the direction of concept creep, across so many different concepts, trended toward greater sensitivity to harm as opposed to lesser sensitivity?
  • The concept of abuse expanded too far.
  • Classically, psychological investigations recognized two forms of child abuse, physical and sexual, Haslam writes. In more recent decades, however, the concept of abuse has witnessed “horizontal creep” as new forms of abuse were recognized or studied. For example, “emotional abuse” was added as a new subtype of abuse. Neglect, traditionally a separate category, came to be seen as a type of abuse, too.
  • Meanwhile, the concept of abuse underwent “vertical creep.” That is, the behavior seen as qualifying for a given kind of abuse became steadily less extreme. Some now regard any spanking as physical abuse. Within psychology, “the boundary of neglect is indistinct,” Haslam writes. “As a consequence, the concept of neglect can become over-inclusive, identifying behavior as negligent that is substantially milder or more subtle than other forms of abuse. This is not to deny that some forms of neglect are profoundly damaging, merely to argue that the concept’s boundaries are sufficiently vague and elastic to encompass forms that are not severe.”
  • How did a working-class mom get arrested, lose her fast food job, and temporarily lose custody of her 9-year-old for letting the child play alone at a nearby park?
  • One concerns the field of psychology and its incentives. “It could be argued that just as successful species increase their territory, invading and adapting to new habitats, successful concepts and disciplines also expand their range into new semantic niches,” he theorizes. “Concepts that successfully attract the attention of researchers and practitioners are more likely to be applied in new ways and new contexts than those that do not.”
  • Concept creep can be necessary or needless. It can align concepts more or less closely with underlying realities. It can change society for better or worse. Yet many who push for more sensitivy to harm seem unaware of how oversensitivty can do harm.
  • The other theory posits an ideological explanation. “Psychology has played a role in the liberal agenda of sensitivity to harm and responsiveness to the harmed,” he writes “and its increased focus on negative phenomena—harms such as abuse, addiction, bullying, mental disorder, prejudice, and trauma—has been symptomatic of the success of that social agenda.”
  • Jonathan Haidt, who believes it has gone too far, offers a fourth theory. “If an increasingly left-leaning academy is staffed by people who are increasingly hostile to conservatives, then we can expect that their concepts will shift, via motivated scholarship, in ways that will help them and their allies (e.g., university administrators) to prosecute and condemn conservatives,
  • While Haslam and Haidt appear to have meaningfully different beliefs about why concept creep arose within academic psychology and spread throughout society, they were in sufficient agreement about its dangers to co-author a Guardian op-ed on the subject.
  • It focuses on how greater sensitivity to harm has affected college campuses.
  • “Of course young people need to be protected from some kinds of harm, but overprotection is harmful, too, for it causes fragility and hinders the development of resilience,” they wrote. “As Nasim Taleb pointed out in his book Antifragile, muscles need resistance to develop, bones need stress and shock to strengthen and the growing immune system needs to be exposed to pathogens in order to function. Similarly, he noted, children are by nature anti-fragile – they get stronger when they learn to recover from setbacks, failures and challenges to their cherished ideas.”
  • police officers fearing harm from dogs kill them by the hundreds or perhaps thousands every year in what the DOJ calls an epidemic.
  • After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the Bush Administration and many Americans grew increasingly sensitive to harms, real and imagined, from terrorism
  • Dick Cheney declared, “If there's a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response. It's not about our analysis ... It's about our response.” The invasion of Iraq was predicated, in part, on the idea that 9/11 “changed everything,”
  • Before 9/11, the notion of torturing prisoners was verboten. After the Bush Administration’s torture was made public, popular debate focused on mythical “ticking time bomb” scenarios, in which a whole city would be obliterated but for torture. Now Donald Trump suggests that torture should be used more generally against terrorists. Torture is, as well, an instance in which people within the field of psychology pushed concept creep in the direction of less sensitivity to harm,
  • Haslam endorses two theories
  • there are many reasons to be concerned about excessive sensitivity to harm:
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What's at Stake in a Health Bill That Slashes the Safety Net - The New York Times - 0 views

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shared by dicindioha on 24 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • It is startling to realize just how much the social safety net expanded during Barack Obama’s presidency. In 2016, means-tested entitlements like Medicaid and food stamps absorbed 3.8 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product, almost a full percentage point more than in 2008
  • Public social spending writ large — including health care, pensions, unemployment insurance, poverty alleviation and the like — reached 19.3 percent of G.D.P.
  • Government in the United States still spends less than most of its peers across the industrialized world to support the general welfare of its citizens.
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  • Last week, President Trump’s sketch of a budget underscored how little interest he has in the nation’s social insurance programs — proposing to shift $54 billion next year to the military
  • Republicans in the House plan to vote this week to undo the Affordable Care Act. That law was Mr. Obama’s singular contribution toward an American welfare state, the biggest expansion of the nation’s safety net in half a century.
  • Welfare reform did hurt many poor people by converting antipoverty funds into block grants to the states. But it was accompanied by a big increase in the earned-income tax credit, the nation’s most effective antipoverty tool today.
  • “No other Congress or administration has ever put forward a plan with the intention of having fewer people covered.”
  • Who knows where this retrenchment takes the country? Maybe attaching a work requirement to Medicaid, as conservatives propose, will prod the poor to get a job. Or perhaps it will just cut more people from Medicaid’s rolls. Further up the income ladder, losing a job will become more costly when it means losing health insurance, too.
  • Millions of Americans — poor ones, mainly — will use much less health care. They will make fewer outpatient visits, have fewer mammograms and cholesterol checks.
  • In any event, public health insurance will take a big hit.
  • Under the House Republican plan, 24 million more Americans will lack health insurance by 2026, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
  • Might depression and mental health problems destabilize families, feeding down into the health, education and well-being of the next generation?
  • Yet it is worth remembering that among advanced nations, the United States is a laggard in life expectancy and has one of the highest infant mortality rates.
  • If American history provides any sort of guidance, it is that continuing to shred the social safety net will definitely make things worse.
  • dicindioha on 24 Mar 17
     
    Directing spending away from American people and their access to healthcare is a definite possibility for Trump. It will be interesting to see the effect this has on the healthcare market and the American people. This article says it will probably hurt many poor people and decrease their health.
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The Trouble With Neutrinos That Outpaced Einstein's Theory - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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shared by Javier E on 02 Apr 12 - Cached
  • The British astrophysicist Arthur S. Eddington once wrote, “No experiment should be believed until it has been confirmed by theory.”
  • Adding to the sense of finality was the simple fact — as Eddington might have pointed out — that faster-than-light neutrinos had never been confirmed by theory. Or as John G. Learned, a neutrino physicist at the University of Hawaii, put it in an e-mail, “An interesting result of all this fracas is that no new model I have seen (or heard of from my friends) really is credible to explain the faster-than-light neutrinos.”
  • Eddington’s dictum is not as radical as it might sound. He made it after early measurements of the rate of expansion of the universe made it appear that our planet was older than the cosmos in which it resides — an untenable notion. “It means that science is not just a book of facts, it is understanding as well,”
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  • If a “fact” cannot be understood, fitted into a conceptual framework that we have reason to believe in, or confirmed independently some other way, it risks becoming what journalists like to call a “permanent exclusive” — wrong.
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The Poverty of an Idea - NYTimes.com - 1 views

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shared by Javier E on 03 Mar 12 - Cached
  • THE libertarian writer Charles Murray has probably done more than any other contemporary thinker to keep alive the idea of a “culture of poverty,” the theory that poor people are trapped by distorted norms and aspirations and not merely material deprivation.
  • Harrington had picked up the idea of a “culture of poverty” from the anthropologist Oscar Lewis, whose 1959 study of Mexican slum dwellers identified a “subculture” of lowered aspirations and short-term gratification. Echoing Lewis, Harrington argued that American poverty constituted “a separate culture, another nation, with its own way of life.” It would not be solved merely by economic expansion or moral exhortation, he contended, but by a “comprehensive assault on poverty.”
  • In his view, these problems were not a judgment on the poor as individuals, but on a society indifferent to their plight. His popularization of the phrase “culture of poverty” has unintended consequences. There was nothing  in the “vicious circle” of pathology he sketched that was culturally determined, but in the hands of others, the idea came to signify an ingrained system of norms passed from generation to generation.
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  • Conservatives took the attitudes and behaviors Harrington saw as symptoms of poverty and portrayed them as its direct causes.
  • In his 1984 book, “Losing Ground,” Mr. Murray argued that welfare programs abet rather than ameliorate poverty. The book dismissed Harrington’s prescription for ending poverty, and Harrington returned the favor. In “The New American Poverty,” published the same year, he called Mr. Murray the right-wing equivalent of a “vulgar Marxist,” a social theorist who believed in a “one-to-one relationship between the economic and the political or the psychological.”
  • Harrington’s culture-of-poverty thesis was at best an ambiguous impediment to understanding — in later books, he made no use of the term. But in its moral clarity, “The Other America” was ultimately optimistic; it was less an indictment and more an appeal to Americans to live up to their better instincts.
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Rich People Just Care Less - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...rich-people-just-care-less psychology privilege status high-status power disparity empathy rich attention
shared by Javier E on 07 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Turning a blind eye. Giving someone the cold shoulder. Looking down on people. Seeing right through them. These metaphors for condescending or dismissive behavior are more than just descriptive. They suggest, to a surprisingly accurate extent, the social distance between those with greater power and those with less
  • A growing body of recent research shows that people with the most social power pay scant attention to those with little such power. This tuning out has been observed, for instance, with strangers in a mere five-minute get-acquainted session, where the more powerful person shows fewer signals of paying attention, like nodding or laughing. Higher-status people are also more likely to express disregard, through facial expressions, and are more likely to take over the conversation and interrupt or look past the other speaker.
  • A prerequisite to empathy is simply paying attention to the person in pain. In 2008, social psychologists from the University of Amsterdam and the University of California, Berkeley, studied pairs of strangers telling one another about difficulties they had been through, like a divorce or death of a loved one. The researchers found that the differential expressed itself in the playing down of suffering. The more powerful were less compassionate toward the hardships described by the less powerful.
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  • research finds that the poor, compared with the wealthy, have keenly attuned interpersonal attention in all directions, in general, those with the most power in society seem to pay particularly little attention to those with the least power. To be sure, high-status people do attend to those of equal rank — but not as well as those low of status do.
  • This has profound implications for societal behavior and government policy. Tuning in to the needs and feelings of another person is a prerequisite to empathy, which in turn can lead to understanding, concern and, if the circumstances are right, compassionate action.
  • In politics, readily dismissing inconvenient people can easily extend to dismissing inconvenient truths about them. The insistence by some House Republicans in Congress on cutting financing for food stamps and impeding the implementation of Obamacare, which would allow patients, including those with pre-existing health conditions, to obtain and pay for insurance coverage, may stem in part from the empathy gap.
  • redistricting and gerrymandering have led to the creation of more and more safe districts, in which elected officials don’t even have to encounter many voters from the rival party, much less empathize with them.
  • Social distance makes it all the easier to focus on small differences between groups and to put a negative spin on the ways of others and a positive spin on our own. Freud called this “the narcissism of minor differences,”
  • Since the 1970s, the gap between the rich and everyone else has skyrocketed. Income inequality is at its highest level in a century.
  • Apart from the financial inequities, I fear the expansion of an entirely different gap, caused by the inability to see oneself in a less advantaged person’s shoes.
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Our Cold Civil War Intensifies, Ctd « The Dish - 0 views

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shared by Javier E on 25 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • Taken alone, it would appear both sides share equal blame for the present political paralysis as each shifts to their ideological poles.
  • while both sides may be guilty of running to their respective corners, one is clearly more liable for putting the kibosh on negotiation deal-making.
  • one gets more liberal, the more he or she wants elected officials who compromise.
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  • only the Republicans are carrying out a primary purification to fit their no-compromise dispositions.
  • polarization per se is not the current critical crisis – it’s a refusal to compromise, to reach out from one’s ideological end of the spectrum to meet in the middle (where most of us already are), and demanding that one’s representatives refuse to negotiate to get things done and better the country.
  • A consistently liberal position is fine if you’re prepared to meet the other side halfway – and vice-versa of course. In fact, sometimes a strong position can help facilitate a real deal.
  • it’s the GOP that is the outlier, and long has been.
  • Liberals and conservatives are coming to rely on different worldviews motivated by different interpretations of what “reality” is. The Republican party has clearly decided that the only path open to them is to further embrace the resentment exhibited in rural, displaced white voters – people whose concerns have been unconscionably ignored but who have directed their anger at an entirely inappropriate target. They see Obama as the enemy but they vote for the people who are their real enemies.
  • If you think about it point by point, it becomes even less sensible. The debt? That was a result of Bush’s unfunded wars, irresponsible tax cuts and his corporatist Medicare expansion (which was itself just a subsidy for drug companies). The recession? A logical endpoint of a decades-long abandonment of responsible financial regulation. Immigration? There have been no significant changes to our immigration law since 1986, when Saint Reagan pushed through a bill that provided legal status to many who were undocumented – and the right conveniently proceeded to forget that. Ditto with gun control, since Reagan supported the Brady Bill publicly, and that clearly must be erased from the record.
  • The left, by contrast, did not throw Democrats out of office for supporting the Bush tax cuts. It did not throw Democrats out of office for opposing cap-and-trade legislation, immigration reform, or for stonewalling Obamacare until the very last minute when Scott Brown’s surprise election made inaction untenable. The left complained about these realities but never pretended that the reality was any different than what it was; we had the best we could get and that while Obama has let us down on specific issues, he has been a wholly underappreciated president – and history will very likely vindicate him
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God, Darwin and My College Biology Class - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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shared by Javier E on 29 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • There are a few ways to talk about evolution and religion, I begin. The least controversial is to suggest that they are in fact compatible. Stephen Jay Gould called them “nonoverlapping magisteria,” noma for short, with the former concerned with values and the latter with facts.
  • Noma is the received wisdom in the scientific establishment, including institutions like the National Center for Science Education, which has done much heavy lifting when it comes to promoting public understanding and acceptance of evolution. According to this expansive view, God might well have used evolution by natural selection to produce his creation.
  • This is undeniable. If God exists, then he could have employed anything under the sun — or beyond it — to work his will. Hence, there is nothing in evolutionary biology that necessarily precludes religion, save for most religious fundamentalisms
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  • here’s the turn: These magisteria are not nearly as nonoverlapping as some of them might wish.
  • As evolutionary science has progressed, the available space for religious faith has narrowed: It has demolished two previously potent pillars of religious faith and undermined belief in an omnipotent and omni-benevolent God.
  • The more we know of evolution, the more unavoidable is the conclusion that living things, including human beings, are produced by a natural, totally amoral process, with no indication of a benevolent, controlling creator.
  • I CONCLUDE The Talk by saying that, although they don’t have to discard their religion in order to inform themselves about biology (or even to pass my course), if they insist on retaining and respecting both, they will have to undertake some challenging mental gymnastic routines.
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But What Would the End of Humanity Mean for Me? - James Hamblin - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...361931 future AI forecasting apocalypse technology
shared by Javier E on 12 May 14 - No Cached
  • Tegmark is more worried about much more immediate threats, which he calls existential risks. That’s a term borrowed from physicist Nick Bostrom, director of Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute, a research collective modeling the potential range of human expansion into the cosmos
  • "I am finding it increasingly plausible that existential risk is the biggest moral issue in the world, even if it hasn’t gone mainstream yet,"
  • Existential risks, as Tegmark describes them, are things that are “not just a little bit bad, like a parking ticket, but really bad. Things that could really mess up or wipe out human civilization.”
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  • The single existential risk that Tegmark worries about most is unfriendly artificial intelligence. That is, when computers are able to start improving themselves, there will be a rapid increase in their capacities, and then, Tegmark says, it’s very difficult to predict what will happen.
  • Tegmark told Lex Berko at Motherboard earlier this year, "I would guess there’s about a 60 percent chance that I’m not going to die of old age, but from some kind of human-caused calamity. Which would suggest that I should spend a significant portion of my time actually worrying about this. We should in society, too."
  • "Longer term—and this might mean 10 years, it might mean 50 or 100 years, depending on who you ask—when computers can do everything we can do," Tegmark said, “after that they will probably very rapidly get vastly better than us at everything, and we’ll face this question we talked about in the Huffington Post article: whether there’s really a place for us after that, or not.”
  • "This is very near-term stuff. Anyone who’s thinking about what their kids should study in high school or college should care a lot about this.”
  • Tegmark and his op-ed co-author Frank Wilczek, the Nobel laureate, draw examples of cold-war automated systems that assessed threats and resulted in false alarms and near misses. “In those instances some human intervened at the last moment and saved us from horrible consequences,” Wilczek told me earlier that day. “That might not happen in the future.”
  • there are still enough nuclear weapons in existence to incinerate all of Earth’s dense population centers, but that wouldn't kill everyone immediately. The smoldering cities would send sun-blocking soot into the stratosphere that would trigger a crop-killing climate shift, and that’s what would kill us all
  • “We are very reckless with this planet, with civilization,” Tegmark said. “We basically play Russian roulette.” The key is to think more long term, “not just about the next election cycle or the next Justin Bieber album.”
  • “There are several issues that arise, ranging from climate change to artificial intelligence to biological warfare to asteroids that might collide with the earth,” Wilczek said of the group’s launch. “They are very serious risks that don’t get much attention.
  • a widely perceived issue is when intelligent entities start to take on a life of their own. They revolutionized the way we understand chess, for instance. That’s pretty harmless. But one can imagine if they revolutionized the way we think about warfare or finance, either those entities themselves or the people that control them. It could pose some disquieting perturbations on the rest of our lives.”
  • Wilczek’s particularly concerned about a subset of artificial intelligence: drone warriors. “Not necessarily robots,” Wilczek told me, “although robot warriors could be a big issue, too. It could just be superintelligence that’s in a cloud. It doesn’t have to be embodied in the usual sense.”
  • it’s important not to anthropomorphize artificial intelligence. It's best to think of it as a primordial force of nature—strong and indifferent. In the case of chess, an A.I. models chess moves, predicts outcomes, and moves accordingly. If winning at chess meant destroying humanity, it might do that.
  • Even if programmers tried to program an A.I. to be benevolent, it could destroy us inadvertently. Andersen’s example in Aeon is that an A.I. designed to try and maximize human happiness might think that flooding your bloodstream with heroin is the best way to do that.
  • “It’s not clear how big the storm will be, or how long it’s going to take to get here. I don’t know. It might be 10 years before there’s a real problem. It might be 20, it might be 30. It might be five. But it’s certainly not too early to think about it, because the issues to address are only going to get more complex as the systems get more self-willed.”
  • Even within A.I. research, Tegmark admits, “There is absolutely not a consensus that we should be concerned about this.” But there is a lot of concern, and sense of lack of power. Because, concretely, what can you do? “The thing we should worry about is that we’re not worried.”
  • Tegmark brings it to Earth with a case-example about purchasing a stroller: If you could spend more for a good one or less for one that “sometimes collapses and crushes the baby, but nobody’s been able to prove that it is caused by any design flaw. But it’s 10 percent off! So which one are you going to buy?”
  • “There are seven billion of us on this little spinning ball in space. And we have so much opportunity," Tegmark said. "We have all the resources in this enormous cosmos. At the same time, we have the technology to wipe ourselves out.”
  • Ninety-nine percent of the species that have lived on Earth have gone extinct; why should we not? Seeing the biggest picture of humanity and the planet is the heart of this. It’s not meant to be about inspiring terror or doom. Sometimes that is what it takes to draw us out of the little things, where in the day-to-day we lose sight of enormous potentials.
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Huffington Post in Limbo at Verizon - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-post-in-limbo-at-verizon.html media publishing economics
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  • The Huffington Post sits at the center of a phenomenon that some describe as the birth of a new media establishment: Several digital start-ups, including BuzzFeed and Vice, are trying to upend news presentation the way cable channels encroached on broadcast television in the 1980s. By that measure, some in the industry say, $1 billion is a reasonable valuation for a site with more than 200 million unique visitors a month, and acquiring it is a smart play for Verizon as it follows other communications companies, like Comcast, in owning its own content.
  • Others see, instead, a frothy market that has led to overly high valuations for media companies, based largely on branding and a relentless focus on audience development techniques. Photo
  • According to a document published in 2013 by the website The Smoking Gun, The Huffington Post was expected to generate $60 million in revenue in 2011, when AOL bought it, with $10 million in Ebitda (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization) growing to $165 million in revenue and $58 million in Ebitda by 2013. People with knowledge of its current finances said that its annual revenue is now in the hundreds of millions, and that its profitability depends on how generously its recent investments in a global expansion and video are assessed.
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Scientist helps develop new tools to probe mysteries of the brain - 1 views

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shared by carolinewren on 09 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • A University of Otago researcher is part of an international collaboration that has developed an exciting and expansive new set of tools to probe cell types in the brain
  • involves using techniques that manipulate the genes of a small subset of cells so that the cells glow under fluorescent microscopes. By manipulating unique gene markers for each cell type into fluorescent labels or probes, the structure and function of various types of neurons can be visualized and studied
  • making certain cell types fluorescently glow, is the ability to use light to make the cells actually fire a signal, using a technique called optogenetics
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  • Associate Professor Ruth Empson of Otago's Department of Physiology says these innovations are powerful new techniques that will greatly advance worldwide efforts to understand how different parts of the brain connect and communicate during behaviour
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Naomi Oreskes, a Lightning Rod in a Changing Climate - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rod-in-a-changing-climate.html science scientific method denial climate change conservatism ideology research
shared by Javier E on 16 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Dr. Oreskes is fast becoming one of the biggest names in climate science — not as a climatologist, but as a defender who uses the tools of historical scholarship to counter what she sees as ideologically motivated attacks on the field.
  • Formally, she is a historian of science
  • Dr. Oreskes’s approach has been to dig deeply into the history of climate change denial, documenting its links to other episodes in which critics challenged a developing scientific consensus.
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  • Her core discovery, made with a co-author, Erik M. Conway, was twofold. They reported that dubious tactics had been used over decades to cast doubt on scientific findings relating to subjects like acid rain, the ozone shield, tobacco smoke and climate change. And most surprisingly, in each case, the tactics were employed by the same group of people.
  • The central players were serious scientists who had major career triumphs during the Cold War, but in subsequent years apparently came to equate environmentalism with socialism, and government regulation with tyranny.
  • In a 2010 book, Dr. Oreskes and Dr. Conway called these men “Merchants of Doubt,” and this spring the book became a documentary film, by Robert Kenner. At the heart of both works is a description of methods that were honed by the tobacco industry in the 1960s and have since been employed to cast doubt on just about any science being cited to support new government regulations.
  • Dr. Oreskes, the more visible and vocal of the “Merchants” authors, has been threatened with lawsuits and vilified on conservative websites, and routinely gets hate mail calling her a communist or worse.
  • She established her career as a historian with a book-length study examining the role of dissent in the scientific method. As she put it a few months ago to an audience at Indiana University, she wanted to wrestle with this question: “How do you distinguish a maverick from a crank?”
  • Dr. Oreskes found that Wegener had been treated badly, particularly by American geologists. But he did not abandon his faith in the scientific method. He kept publishing until his death in 1930, trying to convince fellow scientists of his position, and was finally vindicated three decades later by oceanographic research conducted during the Cold War.
  • As she completed that study, Dr. Oreskes sought to understand how science was affected not only by the Cold War but by its end. In particular, she started wondering about climate science. Global warming had seemed to rise as an important issue around the time the Iron Curtain came down. Was this just a way for scientists to scare up research money that would no longer be coming their way through military channels?
  • the widespread public impression was that scientists were still divided over whether humans were primarily responsible for the warming of the planet. But how sharp was the split, she wondered?
  • She decided to do something no climate scientist had thought to do: count the published scientific papers. Pulling 928 of them, she was startled to find that not one dissented from the basic findings that warming was underway and human activity was the main reason.
  • She published that finding in a short paper in the journal Science in 2004, and the reaction was electric. Advocates of climate action seized on it as proof of a level of scientific consensus that most of them had not fully perceived. Just as suddenly, Dr. Oreskes found herself under political attack.
  • Some of the voices criticizing her — scientists like Dr. Singer and groups like the George C. Marshall Institute in Washington — were barely known to her at the time, Dr. Oreskes said in an interview. Just who were they?
  • It did not take them long to document that this group, which included prominent Cold War scientists, had been attacking environmental research for decades, challenging the science of the ozone layer and acid rain, even the finding that breathing secondhand tobacco smoke was harmful. Trying to undermine climate science was simply the latest project.
  • Dr. Oreskes and Dr. Conway came to believe that the attacks were patterned on the strategy employed by the tobacco industry when evidence of health risks first emerged. Documents pried loose by lawyers showed that the industry had paid certain scientists to contrive dubious research, had intimidated reputable scientists, and had cherry-picked evidence to present a misleading pictur
  • The tobacco industry had used these tactics in defense of profits. But Dr. Oreskes and Dr. Conway wrote that the so-called merchants of doubt had adopted them for a deep ideological reason: contempt for government regulation. The insight gave climate scientists a new way of understanding the politics that had engulfed their field.
  • Following Dr. Oreskes’s cue, researchers have in recent years developed a cottage industry of counting scientific papers and polling scientists. The results typically show that about 97 percent of working climate scientists accept that global warming is happening, that humans are largely responsible, and that the situation poses long-term risks, though the severity of those risks is not entirely clear. That wave of evidence has prompted many national news organizations to stop portraying the field as split evenly between scientists who are convinced and unconvinced.
  • Dr. Oreskes’s critics have taken delight in searching out errors in her books and other writings, prompting her to post several corrections. They have generally been minor, though, like describing a pH of six as neutral, when the correct number is seven. Dr. Oreskes described that as a typographical error.
  • In the leaked emails, Dr. Singer told a group of his fellow climate change denialists that he felt that Dr. Oreskes and Dr. Conway had libeled him. But in an interview, when pressed for specific errors in the book that might constitute libel, he listed none. Nor did he provide such a list in response to a follow-up email request.
  • However much she might be hated by climate change denialists, Dr. Oreskes is often welcomed on college campuses these days. She usually outlines the decades of research supporting the idea that human emissions pose serious risks.
  • “One of the things that should always be asked about scientific evidence is, how old is it?” Dr. Oreskes said. “It’s like wine. If the science about climate change were only a few years old, I’d be a skeptic, too.”
  • Dr. Oreskes and Dr. Conway keep looking for ways to reach new audiences. Last year, they published a short work of science fiction, written as a historical essay from the distant future. “The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View From the Future” argues that conservatives, by fighting sensible action to cope with the climate crisis, are essentially guaranteeing the long-term outcome they fear, a huge expansion of government.
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Op-Ed: Why Jewish educators need to teach the Palestinian perspective | Jewish Telegrap... - 1 views

www.jta.org/...ch-the-palestinian-perspective jews education palestine history conflict critical thinking perspective
shared by Javier E on 30 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • I was shocked that no one had ever helped me understand that while the creation of Israel was a magnificent event for the Jewish people, it devastated Palestinian life. I had never considered the impact of war and displacement — as well as occupation and settlement expansion — on Palestinian communities. Learning about Palestinian culture was a transformative experience for me
  • Jews must grapple with Palestinian perspectives because we can’t wish Palestinians away or pretend they don’t exist. We have a moral obligation to listen carefully to their stories and try to comprehend what they have endured as a result of war and displacement. If we want a peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we must engage directly with Palestinians – not by criticizing or attacking them, but by genuinely trying to understand their experiences.
  • Educators should also help their students cultivate understanding, respect and compassion for both Israelis and Palestinians. Often we don’t teach our children about the Palestinians because we don’t see them as central to our people’s stories. Yet Jews and Palestinians are linked together through a complex history, present conflict and unknown future.
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  • Jewish educators often shy away from teaching subjects that they deem too political, arguing that politics do not belong in the classroom. They believe that their role is solely to teach about Israel and to impress upon young Jews that Israel is core to their Jewish identities. Yet educators have a responsibility to teach not only about the vision or dream of Israel but also the reality of Israel — and it’s impossible to do this without political discussions.
  • The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is central to Jewish life. It’s as important to Jewish identity as prayer and the weekly Torah portion. While American Jews can certainly live rich Jewish lives without ever thinking about Israel, it’s the epicenter of Jewish politics. Involving middle- and high-school students in the debates around the conflict allows them to grapple with Jewish history, explore the many variations of Zionism and understand religious and political differences within the Jewish community.
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