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Running Against Their Own Ideas « The Dish - 0 views

dish.andrewsullivan.com/...unning-against-their-own-ideas politics republicans health care policies obamacare
shared by Javier E on 15 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Republicans “turn from denouncing the health-care law for its lack of high-deductible insurance to denouncing the health-care law for its high-deductible insurance”:
  • The real difference between left and right now is the “other stuff” Obamacare does to the insurance market. And what’s that other stuff? It’s “guaranteed issue” and “community rating”—the requirements that insurers sell to anybody, regardless of pre-existing condition, with varying rates or benefits. It’s the creation of a minimum standard for coverage, so that all plans must cover at least 60 percent of the typical person’s medical bills and include a set of “essential health benefits” from hospitalization to mental health to rehabilitative services to maternity care. It’s the availability of generous tax credits, available to people with incomes as high as four times the poverty line and worth thousands of dollars a year in some cases. And it’s the individual mandate—the requirement that people pay a fine if they decline to get coverage when it is both available and affordable.
  • One option was for Republicans to build as many of their ideas into the Affordable Care Act and force Democrats to take partial responsibility for these hideously unpopular, but fairly reasonable, ideas. They didn’t do that. Then Democrats picked some of the ideas up anyway. So Republicans again had a chance to focus their fire on the parts of the law they hated — like the Medicaid expansion — in the hopes of moving the health-care system in the direction they prefer. Instead, they’re aiming at the least popular policies in the law — which just so happen to also be the exactly policies that they support.
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Understanding Syria: From Pre-Civil War to Post-Assad - William R. Polk - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...281989 syria war history
shared by Javier E on 15 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Syria is a small, poor, and crowded country. On the map, it appears about the size of Washington state or Spain, but only about a quarter of its 185,000 square kilometers is arable land. That is, “economic Syria” is about as large as a combination of Maryland and Connecticut or Switzerland.
  • Except for a narrow belt along the Mediterranean, the whole country is subject to extreme temperatures that cause frequent dust storms and periodic droughts. Four years of devastating drought from 2006 to 2011 turned Syria into a land like the American “dust bowl” of the 1930s.
  • The most important physical aspect of these storms, as was the experience in America in the 1930s, was the removal of the topsoil. Politically, they triggered the civil war.
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  • Even the relatively favored areas had rainfall of just 20 to 40 centimeters (8 to 15 inches)—where 20 centimeters (8 inches) is regarded as the absolute minimum to sustain agriculture—and the national average was less than 10 centimeters (4 inches)
  • Considering only “agricultural Syria,” the population is about five times as dense as Ohio or Belgium, but it does not have Ohio’s or Belgium’s other means of generating income.
  • Syria is not just a piece of land; it is densely populated. When I first visited Syria in 1946, the total population was less than 3 million. In 2010, it reached nearly 24 million.
  • The bottom line is that the population/resource ratio is out of balance. While there has been a marginal increase of agricultural land and more efficient cropping with better seed, neither has kept up with population growth.
  • During Ottoman rule the population was organized in two overlapping ways. First, there was no “Syria” in the sense of a nation-state, but rather provinces (Turkish: pashaliqs) that were centered on the ancient cities. The most important of these were Damascus, which may be the oldest permanently settled city in the world today, and Aleppo.
  • throughout its centuries of rule, the Ottoman Empire generally was content to have its subjects live by their own codes of behavior. It did not have the means or the incentive to intrude into their daily lives. Muslims, whether Turk or Arab or Kurd, shared with the imperial government Islamic mores and law. Other ethnic/religious “nations” (Turkish: millet) were self-governing except in military and foreign affairs.
  • the same groups also moved into mainly Muslim cities and towns, where they tended to live in more or less segregated neighborhoods that resembled medieval European urban ghettos or modern American “Little Italys” or “Chinatowns.”
  • Since this system was spelled out in the Quran and the Traditions (Hadiths) of the Prophet, respecting it was legally obligatory for Muslims. Consequently, when the Syrian state took shape, it inherited a rich, diverse, and tolerant social tradition.
  • the French created a “Greater” Lebanon from the former autonomous adjunct provinces (Turkish: sanjaqs) of Mount Lebanon and Beirut. To make it their anchor in an otherwise hostile Levant, they aimed both to make it Christian-dominated and big enough to exist as a state. But these aims were incompatible: the populations they added, taken from the pashaliq of Damascus, were mainly Muslim, so the French doomed Lebanon to be a precariously unbalanced society.
  • the French reversed course. They united the country as defined in the mandate but attempted to change its social and cultural orientation. Their new policy aimed to supplant the common language, Arabic, with French, to make French customs and law the exemplar, to promote Catholicism as a means to undercut Islam, and to favor the minorities as a means to control the Muslim majority. It was inevitable that the native reaction to these intrusions would be first the rise of xenophobia and then the spread of what gradually became a European style of nationalism.
  • When French policies did not work and nationalism began to offer an alternate vision of political life, the French colonial administration fell back on violence. Indeed throughout the French period—in contrast to the relatively laissez-faire rule of the Ottoman Empire—violence was never far below the outward face of French rule.
  • the “peace” the French achieved was little more than a sullen and frustrated quiescence; while they did not create dissension among the religious and ethnic communities, the French certainly magnified it and while they did not create hostility to foreigners, they gave the native population a target that fostered the growth of nationalism. These developments have lingered throughout the last 70 years and remain powerful forces today.
  • in the years after the French were forced out, coup leader after military dictator spoke in nationalist rhetoric but failed to lead his followers toward “the good life.”
  • for three and a half years, Syria became a part of the United Arab Republic.
  • Union did not work, so in 1961 Syrians were thrown back on their own resources. A fundamental problem they faced was what it meant to be a Syrian.
  • The more conservative, affluent, and Westernized nationalists believed that nationhood had to be built not on a religious but on a territorial base. That is, single-state nationalism (Arabic: wataniyah) was the focus of Syria’s statehood.
  • Their program, however, did not lead to success; its failure opened the way for a redefinition of nationalism as pan-Arab or folk nationalism (Arabic: qawmiyah). As it was codified by the Baath Party, it required that Syria be considered not a separate nation-state but a part of the whole Arab world and be domestically organized as a unified, secular, and at least partly Westernized state. This was a particularly difficult task because the dominant Muslim community, initially as a result of French rule and later as a result of domestic turbulence and foreign interference, regarded the members of the minority communities, particularly the Jewish community, as actual or potential turncoats.
  • as Syrians struggled for a sense of identity and came to suspect social difference and to fear the cooperation of minorities with foreigners, being an Alawi or a Christian or a Jew put people under a cloud. So, for Hafez al-Assad, the secular, nationalist Baath Party was a natural choice
  • Their answer was to try to bridge the gaps between rich and poor through a modified version of socialism, and between Muslims and minorities through a modified concept of Islam. Islam, in their view, needed to be considered politically not as a religion but as a manifestation of the Arab nation. Thus, the society they wished to create, they proclaimed, should be modern (with, among other things, equality for women), secular (with faith relegated to personal affairs), and defined by a culture of “Arabism” overriding the traditional concepts of ethnicity.
  • The “Resurrection” (Arabic: Baath) Party had its origins, like the nationalist-communist Vietnamese movement, in France. Two young Syrians, one a Christian and the other a Sunni Muslim, who were then studying in Paris were both attracted to the grandeur of France and appalled by the weakness of Syria. Like Ho Chi Minh, they wanted to both become like France and get the French out of their nation. Both believed that the future lay in unity and socialism. For Michel Aflaq and Salah Bitar, the forces to be defeated were “French oppression, Syrian backwardness, a political class unable to measure up to the challenge of the times,”
  • After Assad’s assault in 1982, the Syrian city of Hama looked like the Iraqi city of Fallujah after the American assault in 2004. Acres of the city were submerged under piles of rubble. But then, like Stalingrad after the German attack or Berlin after the Russian siege, reconstruction began. In a remarkable series of moves, Hafez al-Assad ordered the rubble cleared away, built new highways, constructed new schools and hospitals, opened new parks, and even, in a wholly unexpected conciliatory gesture, erected two huge new mosques. He thus made evident what had been his philosophy of government since he first took power: help the Syrian people to live better provided only that they not challenge his rule. In his thought and actions, his stern and often-brutal monopoly of power, he may be compared to the ruling men, families, parties, and establishments of Chinese, Iranian, Russian, Saudi Arabian, Vietnamese, and numerous other regimes.
  • Hafez al-Assad did not need to wait for leaks of documents: his intelligence services and international journalists turned up dozens of attempts by conservative, oil-rich Arab countries, the United States, and Israel to subvert his government. Most engaged in “dirty tricks,” propaganda, or infusions of money, but it was noteworthy that in the 1982 Hama uprising, more than 15,000 foreign-supplied machine guns were captured, along with prisoners including Jordanian- and CIA-trained paramilitary forces (much like the jihadists who appear so much in media accounts of 2013 Syria). And what he saw in Syria was confirmed by what he learned about Western regime-changing elsewhere.
  • As Iraq “imploded” in coups beginning in 1958 and morphed into Saddam Husain’s regime, the Syrians came to regard it as an enemy second only to Israel.
  • During the rule of the two Assads, Syria made considerable progress. By the eve of the civil war, Syrians enjoyed an income (GDP) of about $5,000 per capita. That was nearly the same as Jordan’s, roughly double the income per capita of Pakistan and Yemen, and five times the income of Afghanistan, but it is only a third that of Lebanon, Turkey, or Iran
  • In 2010, savaged by the great drought, GDP per capita had fallen to about $2,900, according to UN data. Before the civil war—and except in 2008 at the bottom of the drought, when it was zero—Syria’s growth rate hovered around 2 percent,
  • In social affairs, nearly 90 percent of Syrian children attended primary or secondary schools and between eight and nine in 10 Syrians had achieved literacy. On these measures, Syria was comparable to Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Libya despite having far fewer resources to employ.
  • Like his father, Bashar sought to legitimize his regime through elections, but apparently he never intended, and certainly did not find, a way satisfactory (to the public) and acceptable (to his regime) of enlarged political participation.
  • The lack of political participation, fear of public demands, and severe police measures made the regime appear to be a tyranny
  • This and its hostility to Israel led to large-scale, if covert, attempts at regime change by outside powers including the United States. These acts of subversion became particularly pronounced during the second Bush administration.
  • between 2 and 3 million of Syria’s 10 million rural inhabitants were reduced to “extreme poverty.”  
  • Four years of devastating drought beginning in 2006 caused at least 800,000 farmers to lose their entire livelihood and about 200,000 simply abandoned their lands, according to the Center for Climate & Security. In some areas, all agriculture ceased. In others, crop failures reached 75 percent. And generally as much as 85 percent of livestock died of thirst or hunger. Hundreds of thousands of Syria’s farmers gave up, abandoned their farms, and fled to the cities and towns
  • Syria was already a refuge for a quarter of a million Palestinians and about 100,000 Iraqis who had fled the war and occupation. Formerly prosperous farmers were lucky to get jobs as hawkers or street sweepers. And in the desperation of the times, hostilities erupted among groups that were competing just to survive.
  • And so tens of thousands of frightened, angry, hungry, and impoverished former farmers were jammed into Syria’s towns and cities, where they constituted tinder ready to catch fire.
  • Instead of meeting with the protesters and at least hearing their complaints, the government saw them as subversives. The lesson of Hama must have been at the front of the mind of every member of the Assad regime. Failure to act decisively, Hama had shown, inevitably led to insurrection. Compromise could come only after order was assured. So Bashar followed the lead of his father. He ordered a crackdown. And the army, long frustrated by inaction and humiliated by its successive defeats in confrontation with Israel, responded violently. Its action backfired. Riots broke out all over the country. As they did, the government attempted to quell them with military force. It failed. So, during the next two years, what had begun as a food and water issue gradually turned into a political and religious cause.
  • we don’t know much about the rebels. Hundreds of groups and factions—called “brigades” even when they are just a dozen or so people—have been identified. Some observes believe that there are actually over 1,000 brigades. A reasonable guess is that, including both part-time and full-time insurgents, they number about 100,000 fighters.
  • In Syria, quite different causes of splits among the brigades are evident. To understand the insurgency there, we must look carefully at the causes. The basis is religion
  • During the course of the Assad regime, the interpretation of Islam was undergoing a profound change. This was true not only of Syria but also of understanding, practice, and action in many other areas of the world.
  • tens of thousands of young foreigners flocked to Syria to fight for what they see as a religious obligation (Arabic: fi sabili’llah).
  • in Syria, while many Muslims found the Assad regime acceptable and many even joined its senior ranks, others saw its Alawi and Christian affiliations, and even its secularism and openness to Muslim participation, insupportable.
  • The foreign jihadists, like the more recent nationalists, put their emphasis on a larger-than-Syria range. For them, it is a folk nationalism not only to the Arab world but also to the wider world of Islam, affecting a billion people across the globe. What they seek is a restored Islamic world, a Dar ul-Islam, or a new caliphate.
  • the aims of the two broad groups—the Syrians and the foreigners—have grown apart in a way similar to the split that occurred in Arab nationalism. The Syrians focus on Syria and seek the overthrow of the Assad regime much as their fathers and grandfathers focused on the task of getting the French out of their country—their watan. Their nationalism is single-country oriented
  • all the rebels regard the conflict in Syria as fundamentally a religious issue. Particularly for the native rebels, as I have pointed out, the religious issue is overlaid by ethnic complexities.
  • It would be a mistake to regard the Syrian war, as some outside observers have done, as a fight between the forces of freedom and tyranny. If the opponents of the regime are fighting for some form of democracy, they have yet to make their voices heard.
  • as in Afghanistan, they have fought one another over territory, access to arms, leadership, and division of spoils as bitterly as they have fought their proclaimed enemy. This fracturing has made them impossible to defeat—as the Russians experienced in Afghanistan—but also, so far at least, incapable of governing on a national scale. But they are moving in that direction.
  • All observers agree that the foreign-controlled and foreign-constituted insurgent groups are the most coherent, organized, and effective. This is little short of astonishing as they share no common language and come from a wide variety of cultures.
  • Paradoxically, governments that would have imprisoned the same activists in their own countries have poured money, arms, and other forms of aid into their coffers. The list is long and surprising in its makeup: it includes Turkey; the conservative Arab states, particularly Qatar and Saudi Arabia; the EU member states; and the U.S.
  • The United States has a long history of covertly aiding insurgents in Syria, and has engaged in propaganda, espionage, and various sorts of dirty tricks. The rebels, naturally, have regarded the aid they’ve received as insufficient, while the government has regarded it as a virtual act of war. Both are right: it has not been on a scale that has enabled the rebels to win, but it is a form of action that, had another country engaged in it, seeking to overthrow the government, any American or European administration would have regarded as an act of war under international law.
  • Such covert intervention, and indeed overt intervention, is being justified on two grounds, the first being that the Syrian government is a tyranny. By Western standards, it is undoubtedly an authoritarian regime
  • However, the standards Western nations proclaim have been applied in a highly selective way. The EU and the U.S. enjoy cordial and mutually beneficial relations with dozens of tyrannical governments including most of the countries now attempting to regime-change Syria.              
  • Senior rebels have publicly threatened to carry out a genocide of the country’s main ethnic/religious minority, the Alawis. Scenes being enacted in Syria today recall the massacres and tortures of the wars of religion in 16th- and 17th-century Europe.
  • Most urgent in the minds of the EU and the U.S. is the second justification for intervention: the Syrian government is charged with using illegal chemical weapons. This is a very serious charge. However, doubts remain about who actually used the weapons. And, more importantly, even though the weapons are indeed horrible and are now generally considered illegal, several other states (the U.S., Israel, Egypt, and Iraq) have used them. Terrible as they are, they are only a small part of the Syrian problem—more than 99 percent of the casualties and all of the property damage in the war have been the result of conventional weapons. Getting rid of chemical weapons will neither in and of itself stop the war nor create conditions favorable to a settlement.
  • the cost of the war has been immense. And, of course, it is not over. We have only guesses on the total so far. One estimate is that the war has cost Syria upwards of $150 billion. Whole cities now resemble Stalingrad or Berlin in World War II. More than 2 million people have fled abroad while more than 4 million are internal refugees, remaining in Syria.
  • Lebanon. Even though there is little fighting there, the conflict in Syria is estimated to have cost that little country about $7.5 billion and doubled unemployment to 20 percent. About 1 million Lebanese were already judged by the World Bank as “poor,” and an additional 170,000 are now thought to have been pushed into poverty. The Syrian refugee population in the country has reached at least 1 million, making Syrians now almost a third of the total Lebanese population.
  • In Jordan, the story is similar. Half a million refugees are camped out there. One refugee encampment in the country houses over 100,000 people and has become Jordan’s fifth-largest city
  • However reprehensible the Syrian government may be in terms of democracy, it has not only given refugees and minorities protection but also maintained the part of Syria that it controls as a secular and religiously ecumenical state.
  • Tragic as these numbers are—the worst for nearly a century—factored into them is that Syria has lost the most precious assets of poor countries: most of the doctors and other professionals who had been painstakingly and expensively educated during the last century
  • Even more “costly” are the psychological traumas: a whole generation of Syrians have been subjected to either or both the loss of their homes and their trust in fellow human beings. Others will eventually suffer from the memory of what they, themselves, have done during the fighting. Comparisons are trivial and probably meaningless, but what has been enacted—is being enacted—in Syria resembles the horror of the Japanese butchery of Nanjing in World War II and the massacres in the 1994 Hutu-Tutsi conflict in Rwanda.
  • How the victims and the perpetrators can be returned to a “normal life” will be the lingering but urgent question of coming generations in Syria and elsewhere.
  • one in four or five people in the world today are Muslim: roughly 1.4 billion men, women, and children. That whole portion of the world’s population has its eyes on Syria. What happens there is likely to have a ripple effect across Asia and Africa. Thus, even though it is a small and poor country, Syria is in a sense a focal point of world affairs.
  • Unlike the Iraq and Afghan wars, the Syrian conflict will also have a “blowback” effect on the countries from which the Muslim fundamentalist insurgents come. It is in recognition of this fact that Russian President Vladimir Putin decided to intervene in the Syrian war.
  • Even if fighting dies down, “lasting and bitter war,” like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—regardless of what American and European politicians say or even hope—will necessarily involve “boots on the ground.” That is, it will be fought with guerrilla and terrorist tactics on the rebel side against the now-typical counterinsurgency methods on the other side.
  • Javier E on 15 Dec 13
     
    "How drought, foreign meddling, and long-festering religious tensions created the tragically splintered Syria we know today. "
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BBC News - Record number of women MPs as German parliament meets - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...world-europe-24626276 german parliament politics
shared by grayton downing on 22 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Germany's parliament has reconvened for the first time since September's election which saw a surge of support for Chancellor Angela Merkel.
  • She is trying to forge a deal between her Christian Democrat bloc and the centre-left Social Democrats.
  • Women make up 36% of the new MPs, where one-third of members are new to the Bundestag.
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  • Nearly one in five of Germany's 82 million residents are either immigrants themselves, or children of immigrants who have arrived since 1950, according to Germany's federal statistics office.
  • Their talks with the Social Democrats, which may continue for weeks, are expected to focus on the introduction of a nationwide minimum wage, taxation and control of key government ministries.
  • virtually meaningless, since a successful "grand coalition" would give Mrs Merkel control over nearly 80% of the house's seats.
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BBC News - Cave paintings change ideas about the origin of art - 1 views

www.bbc.com/...science-environment-29415716 education history culture art origin paintings
shared by qkirkpatrick on 10 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • Scientists have identified some of the earliest cave paintings produced by humans.
  • Early artists made them by carefully blowing paint around hands that were pressed tightly against the cave walls and ceilings. The oldest is at least 40,000 years old.
  • "The minimum age for (the outline of the hand) is 39,900 years old, which makes it the oldest hand stencil in the world
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  • There are also paintings in the caves that are around 27,000 years old, which means that the inhabitants were painting for at least 13,000 years.
  • "The basis for this art was there 60,000 years ago; it may even have been there in Africa before 60,000 years ago and it spread with modern humans"
  • qkirkpatrick on 10 Oct 14
     
    Originally the oldest cave paintings were thought to be from Spain and France, but new paintings from Indonesia have been found that are possibly older. They are thought to be over 40,000 years old.
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The Center-Right Moment - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-the-center-right-moment.html politics conservatism trends international US UK Germany
shared by Javier E on 13 May 15 - No Cached
  • there are a few broader trends to be observed. The first is that the cutting-edge, progressive economic arguments do not seem to be swaying voters.
  • Over the past few years, left-of-center economic policy has moved from opportunity progressivism to redistributionist progressivism. Opportunity progressivism is associated with Bill Clinton and Tony Blair in the 1990s and Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago today. This tendency actively uses government power to give people access to markets, through support for community colleges, infrastructure and training programs and the like, but it doesn’t interfere that much in the market and hesitates before raising taxes.
  • The conservative victories probably have more to do with the public’s skepticism about the left than with any positive enthusiasm toward the right.
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  • Redistributionist progressivism more aggressively raises taxes to shift money down the income scale, opposes trade treaties and meddles more in the marketplace. This tendency has won elections in Massachusetts (Elizabeth Warren) and New York City (Bill de Blasio) but not in many other places. Ed Balls, the No. 2 figure in the Labour Party in Britain, co-led the group from the Center for American Progress that wrote the most influential statement of modern progressivism, a report on “inclusive prosperity.” Balls could not even retain his own parliamentary seat in the last election.
  • there are a few things center-right parties have done successfully.
  • First, they have loudly (and sometimes offensively) championed national identity
  • Second, they have been basically sensible on fiscal policy
  • Third, these leaders did not overread their mandate. Cameron in Britain promised to cut the size of government, and he did, from 45.7 percent of G.D.P. in 2010 to 40.7 percent today,
  • But he made these cuts without going overboard. Public satisfaction with government services has gone up. And there have been some sensible efforts to boost those at the bottom. As The Economist pointed out, “The richest 10 percent have borne the greatest burden of extra taxes. Full-time workers earning the minimum wage pay a third as much income tax as in 2010. Overall, inequality has not widened — in contrast to America.”
  • Cameron’s win suggests the kind of candidate that would probably do well in a general election in this country. He is liberal on social policy, green on global warming and pragmatically conservative on economic policy. If he’s faulted for anything, it is for not being particularly ideological, though he has let his ministers try some pretty bold institutional reforms to modernize the welfare state.
  • Globally, voters are disillusioned with large public institutions. They seem to want to reassert local control and their own particular nationalism (Scottish or anything else). But they also seem to want a slightly smaller public sector, strong welfare state reform and more open and vibrant labor markets as a path to prosperity.
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Inequality, Unbelievably, Gets Worse - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...y-unbelievably-gets-worse.html inequality analysis taxes redistribution international politics economics
shared by Javier E on 23 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • Before the impact of tax and spending policies is taken into account, income inequality in the United States is no worse than in most developed countries and is even a bit below levels in Britain and, by some measures, Germany.
  • However, once the effect of government programs is included in the calculations, the United States emerges on top of the inequality heap.
  • our taxes, while progressive, are low by international standards and our social welfare programs — ranging from unemployment benefits to disability insurance to retirement payments — are consequently less generous.
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  • Lower taxes means less for government to spend on programs to help those near the bottom. Social Security typically provides a retiree with about half of his working income; European countries often replace two-thirds of earnings.
  • And income taxes for the highest-earning Americans have fallen sharply, contributing meaningfully to the income inequality problem. In 1995, the 400 taxpayers with the biggest incomes paid an average of 30 percent in taxes; by 2009, the tax rate of those Americans had dropped to 20 percent.
  • Conservatives may bemoan the size of our government; in reality, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, total tax revenues in the United States this year will be smaller on a relative basis than those of any other member country.
  • Similarly, we spend less on early childhood education and care. And another big difference, of course, is the presence of national health insurance in most European countries.
  • All told, social spending in the United States is below the average of that of the wealthiest countries. And other governments help their less fortunate citizens to a greater extent than we do in ways that are not captured in the income statistics
  • The United States, which is the only developed country without a national paid parental leave policy, also has no mandated paid holidays or annual vacation; in Europe, workers are guaranteed at least 20 days and as many as 35 days of paid leave.
  • , on the programmatic side, among the many meritorious aspects of the much-maligned Affordable Care Act are its redistributionist elements: higher taxes on investment income and some health care businesses are being used to provide low-cost or free health care to a projected 26 million Americans near the bottom of the income scale.
  • more can and should be done — like raising the minimum wage nationwide and expanding the earned-income tax credit (a step supported by Republicans).
  • Critics from the right argue that doing more to level the income pyramid would hurt growth. In a recent paper, the International Monetary Fund dismissed that concern and suggested that a more equal distribution of income could instead raise the growth rate because of the added access to education, health care and other opportunities.
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When Cops Check Facebook - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...390882 law enforcement Big Data criminal
shared by Javier E on 21 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • The fundamental problem with policing via social-media data is that it misrepresents what social networks actually look like on the ground. Despite what techno-evangelists might wish, not all social relationships can be described using computational logic
  • The problem is structural and epistemological. Like all computer programs, databases are ultimately based on binary logic. If you want shades of meaning, you have to explicitly build that capability into your system. And building nuance is far harder than it seems.
  • On Facebook, there are only two options for a post: either you click the like button, or you don’t click the like button. There’s no field for someone like Jelani Henry to indicate “I clicked the like button on this post so I wouldn’t get harassed on my way to school.” A like is simply a number used as a flag, true (1) or false (0). Humans are the ones who invest likes with context and meaning. The computer only displays the results of its computation.
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  • When you click to show the list of people who “liked” a post, you probably think you’re getting a list of people who expressed positive sentiment toward a particular combination of sentences. But computationally, what you’re getting is slightly different. “Show me a list of the people who liked a Facebook post” is actually a command more like “Display a list of FirstName and LastName for usernames where the flag LikedThisPost = True.” There are a lot of assumptions built in there.
  • There’s the assumption that the username corresponds to a single real person, which is not always true—people have multiple Facebook accounts, and some accounts have multiple people posting to them, and some accounts are fake
  • There’s the assumption that the agent that clicked the like button is the same person referred to by the username—not necessarily true. People often forget to log out of their Facebook accounts on desktops and laptops, or use other people’s phones to browse social media
  • A like button is merely a tool. Humans use tools in breathtakingly creative ways—this is one of the many exciting and inspiring things about social uses of technology. However, the meaning a person imparts to an action on a social-media platform does not always correspond to the actual intent. In real-life social interactions, nuance is everything. On social media, where that nuance is obscured, we ought to be hyper-critical about the ethical ramifications of using social media data for real-world judgments.
  • For the kid listed in a gang database, it can be unclear how to get out of it. In the world of human interaction, we accept change through behavior: the addict can redeem himself by getting clean, or the habitual interrupter can redeem himself by not interrupting. We accept behavior change. But in the database world, unless someone has permission to delete or amend a database record, no such change is possible
  • The National Gang Center, in its list of gang-related legislation, shows only 12 states with policies that specifically address gang databases. Most deny the public access to the information in these databases. Only a few of these twelve mention regular purging of information, and some specifically say that a person cannot even find out if they have a record in the database
  • . “The last time that the gang unit purged its files, however, was in 1993—approximately 4 years before this study was conducted,” he wrote. “One clerk who is responsible for data entry and dissemination estimated, ‘At a minimum, 400 to 500 gang members would be deleted off the gang list today if we went through the files.
  • n predict what book I want to buy next, hasn’t this problem already been solved?” The answer is inevitably no. When computer scientists were building the Internet in the late 1990s, there weren’t any widely adopted or established ethical guidelines because we were building these systems for the first time in human history.
  • We also need to acknowledge that computer systems are not a panacea. “Your program really does stink, and the sooner you get used to the idea, the better,” writes Nathan S. Borenstein in Programming as if People Mattered. “The inadequacies of your software are simply a reflection of your frail, shortsighted, and limited human nature. Every program ever built is doomed to eventual obsolescence.” We need to put people before programs, and if programs don’t reflect our human values, we need to change the code. And if programmers can’t write code that is fair and just, we should consider relying on people instead of programs.
  • If American law enforcement is going to go deeper into the brave new world of data-driven policing, we need to create systems that have human values embedded in them. If our technological systems are entrapping innocent citizens or tampering with the presumption of innocence, should they be used?
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What If Everybody Didn't Have to Work to Get Paid? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...393428 income basic income inequality automation welfare economics
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  • Santens, for his part, believes that job growth is no longer keeping pace with automation, and he sees a government-provided income as a viable remedy. “It’s not just a matter of needing basic income in the future; we need it now,” says Santens, who lives in New Orleans. “People don’t see it, but we are already seeing the effects all around us, in the jobs and pay we take, the hours we accept, the extremes inequality is reaching, and in the loss of consumer spending power.”
  • People in other countries, especially in safety-net-friendly Europe, seem more open to the idea of a basic income than people in the U.S. The Swiss are considering a basic income proposal. Most of the candidates in Finland’s upcoming parliamentary elections support the idea
  • But in the U.S., the issue is still a political non-starter for mainstream politicians, due to lingering suspicions about the fairness and practicality of a basic income, as well as a rejection of the premise that automation is actually erasing white-collar jobs.
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  • the stories told by the winners are inspiring. For example, one recipient is using his newfound freedom to write his dissertation. Another winner quit his job at a call center to study and become a teacher. Perhaps one anonymous commentator summed it up best: “I did not realize how unfree we all are.”
  • “The sad reality is that a lot of the people who will most need a basic income are not likely to generate a lot of sympathy among volunteer donors,” Ford says. “You see this already with charitable giving—people will give for families, children, and pets—but not so much for single homeless men.” Ford cautions against what he calls the “libertarian/techno-optimistic fantasy” of a private market solution. “Government, for all its deficiencies, is going to be the only real tool in the toolbox here.”
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The American People and the Politics of American Identity - 0 views

www.willwilkinson.net/...-politics-of-american-identity American ethnicity creed identity conservatism
shared by Javier E on 03 Sep 10 - Cached
  • There is no American ethnicity; the U.S. is a resolutely multicultural (and multilingual) country. The usual idea is that American identity is creedal, or organized around a distinctively American set of ideas and value.s
  • The trouble is that even when there is widespread agreement on nominally common values, conceptions of those values vary wildly.
  • Take the belief in individual freedom. Some Americans have understood individual freedom as freedom from all non-defensive physical force and fraud. Some Americans have understood individual freedom as implying roughly equal voice in the democratic process, which straightforwardly requires the redistribution of resources and state regulation of spending on political speech. Some Americans have understood individual freedom as a condition of robust autonomy or self-governance that requires universal government-financed education and a minimum of material resources necessary to ensure that individuals are able actually to exercise their liberty and are not caged-in by necessity. And none of these are the conception of individual liberty that prevailed among the Founders. Anyway, there was heated disagreement among the Founders, too. Some them took the ideal of individual freedom to be consistent with chattel slavery while others correctly found human bondage obviously at odds with liberty. Some defended a robust conception of freedom of conscience while others wished to ban the practice of certain religions for freedom’s sake. And so on
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  • its misguided to appeal to the American creed as the basis of the American identity of the American people. There are multiple conceptions of American creed equally consistent with American history. That’s why movements to glorify, elevate, and honor a particular conception of American identity based on a particular conception of the American creed necessarily  marginalize equally or more historically plausible conceptions and therefore tend to suggest that citizens who favor those conceptions are less or even un-American.
  • The conservative conception of American identity is so selective and so specific that it tends to suggest to its adherents that many (maybe even most!) Americans aren’t real Americans, or are Americans who betray real American ideals.
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Europe Stifles Drivers in Favor of Mass Transit and Walking - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...27traffic.html europe car policy urban walking transport
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  • Today 91 percent of the delegates to the Swiss Parliament take the tram to work
  • Mr. Fellmann calculated that a person using a car took up 115 cubic meters (roughly 4,000 cubic feet) of urban space in Zurich while a pedestrian took three. “So it’s not really fair to everyone else if you take the car,”
  • European cities also realized they could not meet increasingly strict World Health Organization guidelines for fine-particulate air pollution if cars continued to reign. Many American cities are likewise in “nonattainment” of their Clean Air Act requirements, but that fact “is just accepted here,”
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  • While many building codes in Europe cap the number of parking spaces in new buildings to discourage car ownership, American codes conversely tend to stipulate a minimum number.
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A Big Safety Net and Strong Job Market Can Coexist. Just Ask Scandinavia. - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-leap-in-employment-rate-.html safety net work subsidies transport children education scandinavia employment economics
shared by Javier E on 18 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • It is a simple idea supported by both economic theory and most people’s intuition: If welfare benefits are generous and taxes high, fewer people will work. Why bother being industrious, after all, if you can get a check from the government for sitting around
  • The idea may be backward.
  • The United States and many other nations with relatively low taxes and a smaller social safety net actually have substantially lower rates of employment.
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  • Some of the highest employment rates in the advanced world are in places with the highest taxes and most generous welfare systems, namely Scandinavian countries.
  • In Scandinavian countries, working parents have the option of heavily subsidized child care. Leave policies make it easy for parents to take off work to care for a sick child. Heavily subsidized public transportation may make it easier for a person in a low-wage job to get to and from work. And free or inexpensive education may make it easier to get the training to move from the unemployment rolls to a job.
  • In short, more people may work when countries offer public services that directly make working easier, such as subsidized care for children and the old; generous sick leave policies; and cheap and accessible transportation. If the goal is to get more people working, what’s important about a social welfare plan may be more about what the money is spent on than how much is spent.
  • , it could mean that more direct aid to the working poor could help coax Americans into the labor force more effectively than the tax credits that have been a mainstay for compromise between Republicans and Democrats for the last generation.
  • In Denmark, someone who enters the labor force at an average salary loses 86 percent of earnings to a combination of taxes and lost eligibility for welfare benefits; that number is only 37 percent in the United States. Yet the percentage of Danes between the ages of 20 and 59 with a job is 10 percentage points higher than in the United States.
  • In the United States, the major policies aimed at helping the working poor are devised around tax subsidies that put more cash in people’s pockets so long as they work, most notably through the Earned-income tax credit and Child Tax Credit.
  • There is a solid correlation, by Mr. Kleven’s calculations, between what countries spend on employment subsidies — like child care, preschool and care for older adults — and what percentage of their working-age population is in the labor force.
  • Collectively, these policies and subsidies create flexibility such that a person on the fence between taking a job versus staying at home to care for children or parents may be more likely to take a job.
  • The employment subsidies Mr. Kleven cites surely help coax more Scandinavians into the work force, Mr. Greenstein agrees, but shouldn’t be viewed in isolation.
  • wages for entry-level work are much higher in the Nordic countries than in the United States, reflecting a higher minimum wage, stronger labor unions and cultural norms that lead to higher pay
  • There are countless differences between Northern European countries and the rest of the world beyond child care policies and the like. The Scandinavian countries may have cultures that encourage more people to work, especially women.
  • Every country has a mix of taxes, welfare benefits and policies to promote work that reflects its politics and culture. In the large, diverse United States, there is deep skepticism of social welfare programs and direct government spending, along with a greater commitment to keeping taxes low.
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Chicago gave hundreds of high-risk kids a summer job. Violent crime arrests plummeted. ... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...iolent-crime-arrests-plummeted chicago prevention crime youth employment jobs at-risk policy
shared by Javier E on 29 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • A couple of years ago, the city of Chicago started a summer jobs program for teenagers attending high schools in some of the city's high-crime, low-income neighborhoods.
  • Students who were randomly assigned to participate in the program had 43 percent fewer violent-crime arrests over 16 months, compared to students in a control group.
  • Researcher Sara Heller conducted a randomized control trial with the program, in partnership with the city. The study included 1,634 teens at 13 high schools. They were, on average, C students, almost all of them eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. Twenty percent of the group had already been arrested, and 20 percent had already been victims of crime.
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  • The teenagers in the control group participated in neither part of the program.
  • There was a big difference, though, in the violent crime arrest data between the teenagers who got jobs and those who did not:
  • Heller, in fact, found that most of the decline came a few months later:
  • A lot of things could be going on here. Teenagers who might have committed crime to get money would no longer need to when they have a job.
  • If their added income allowed parents to work less, they may also have gotten more adult supervision.
  • It's also possible that students who were busy working simply didn't have idle time over the summer to commit crime — but that theory doesn't explain the long-term declines in violent arrests that occurred well after the summer program was over.
  • Some of the students were given part-time jobs through the program, working 25 hours a week at minimum wage ($8.25 in Illinois) with government or non-profit employers
  • That long-term benefit suggests that students who had access to jobs may have then found crime a less attractive alternative to work. Or perhaps their time on the job taught them how the labor market values education. Or maybe the work experience may have given them skills that enabled them to be more successful — and less prone to getting in trouble — back in school.
  • The results echo a common conclusion in education and health research: that public programs might do more with less by shifting from remediation to prevention.
  • The findings make clear that such programs need not be hugely costly to improve outcomes for disadvantaged youth; well-targeted, low-cost employment policies can make a substantial difference, even for a problem as destructive and complex as youth violence.
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Establishment Populism Rising - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...blishment-populism-rising.html economics social science theory populism jobs income inequality
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  • Larry Summers, who withdrew his candidacy for the chairmanship of the Federal Reserve under pressure from the liberal wing of the Democratic Party in 2013, has emerged as the party’s dominant economic policy strategist. The former Treasury secretary’s evolving message has won over many of his former critics.
  • Summers’s ascendance is a reflection of the abandonment by much of the party establishment of neo-liberal thinking, premised on the belief that unregulated markets and global trade would produce growth beneficial to worker and C.E.O. alike.
  • Summers’s analysis of current economic conditions suggests that free market capitalism, as now structured, is producing major distortions. These distortions, in his view, have resulted in gains of $1 trillion annually to those at the top of the pyramid, and losses of $1 trillion every year to those in the bottom 80 percent.
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  • If we had the same income distribution in the United States that we did in 1979, the top 1 percent would have $1 trillion less today [in annual income], and the bottom 80 percent would have $1 trillion more. That works out to about $700,000 [a year for] for a family in the top 1 percent, and works out to about $11,000 a year for a family in the bottom 80 percent.
  • he is “all for” more schooling and job training, but as an answer to the problems of the job marketplace, “it is fundamentally an evasion.”
  • “The core problem,” according to Summers, is thatthere aren’t enough jobs, and if you help some people, you can help them get the jobs, but then someone else won’t get the jobs. And unless you’re doing things that are affecting the demand for jobs, you’re helping people win a race to get a finite number of jobs, and there are only so many of them.
  • To counter the weak employment market, Summers called for major growth in government expenditures to fill needs that the private sector is not addressing:In our society, whether it is taking care of the young or taking care of the old, or repairing a lot that needs to be repaired, there is a huge amount of very valuable work that needs to be done. It’s much less clear, to use a modern phrase, that there’s a viable business model for getting it done. And I guess the reason why I think there is going to need to be a lot of reflection on the role of government going forward is that, if I’m right, that there’s vitally important work to be done for which there is no standard capital business model that will get it done. That suggests important roles for public policy.
  • In other words, any attempt to correct the contemporary pattern in income distribution would require large and controversial changes in tax policy, regulation of the workplace, and intervention in the economy to expand employment and to raise wages.
  • The lion’s share of the income of the top 1 percent is concentrated in the top 0.1 percent and 0.01 percent. The average income of the top 1 percent in 2013, according to data provided by Emmanuel Saez, a Berkeley economist, was $1.2 million, for the top 0.1 percent, $5.3 million, and for the top 0.01 percent, $24.9 million.
  • the report calls for tax and regulatory policies to encourage employee ownership, the strengthening of collective bargaining rights, regulations requiring corporations to provide fringe benefits to employees working for subcontractors, a substantial increase in the minimum wage, sharper overtime pay enforcement, and a huge increase in infrastructure appropriations – for roads, bridges, ports, schools – to spur job creation and tighten the labor market.
  • Summers also calls for significant increases in the progressivity of the United States tax system.
  • He advocates aggressive steps to eliminate “rents” — profits that result from monopoly or other forms of government protection from competition. Summers favors attacking rents in the form of “exclusionary zoning practices” that bid up the price of housing, “excessively long copyright” protections, and financial regulations “providing implicit subsidies to a fortunate minority.”
  • Signaling that he now finds himself on common ground with stalwarts of the Democratic left like Elizabeth Warren and Joe Stiglitz, Summers adds, “Government needs to try to make sure everyone can get access to financial markets on an equal basis.”
  • Summers supports looking past income inequality to the distribution of wealth. During our conversation, he pointed out that “a large fraction of capital gains escapes taxation entirely” through “the stepped up basis at death.”
  • The idea that an economy could suffer from a persistent shortage of demand is an enormous switch for Summers or anyone who had been adhering to the economic orthodoxy in the three decades prior to the crisisin 2008. Baker goes on to argue that Summers “now recognizes that the financial system needs serious regulation.”
  • Many of the policies outlined by Summers — especially on trade, taxation, financial regulation and worker empowerment — are the very policies that divide the Wall-Street-corporate wing from the working-to-middle-class wing of the Democratic Party. Put another way, these policies divide the money wing from the voting wing.
  • Summers has forced out in the open a set of choices that Hillary Clinton has so far avoided, choices that even if she attempts to elide them will amount to a signal of where her loyalties lie.
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Knowledge Isn't Power - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...gman-knowledge-isnt-power.html education power rich inequality
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  • The education-centric story of our problems runs like this: We live in a period of unprecedented technological change, and too many American workers lack the skills to cope with that change. This “skills gap” is holding back growth, because businesses can’t find the workers they need. It also feeds inequality, as wages soar for workers with the right skills but stagnate or decline for the less educated. So what we need is more and better education.
  • It’s repeated so widely that many people probably assume it’s unquestionably true. But it isn’t.
  • the notion that highly skilled workers are generally in demand is just false.
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  • Actually, the inflation-adjusted earnings of highly educated Americans have gone nowhere since the late 1990s.
  • As for wages and salaries, never mind college degrees — all the big gains are going to a tiny group of individuals holding strategic positions in corporate suites or astride the crossroads of finance. Rising inequality isn’t about who has the knowledge; it’s about who has the power.
  • there’s a lot we could do to redress this inequality of power. We could levy higher taxes on corporations and the wealthy, and invest the proceeds in programs that help working families. We could raise the minimum wage and make it easier for workers to organize. It’s not hard to imagine a truly serious effort to make America less unequal.
  • But given the determination of one major party to move policy in exactly the opposite direction, advocating such an effort makes you sound partisan. Hence the desire to see the whole thing as an education problem instead.
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Is There a Silver Lining to Citizens United? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...lining-to-citizens-united.html election financing rich corruption power inequality political politics
shared by Javier E on 28 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • Representative John Sarbanes, Democrat of Maryland and lead sponsor of The Government by the People Act, described the current post-Citizens United reform strategy as “the empowerment approach” as opposed to a “rules based approach.
  • “The thing about money is that it always seems to find a way around the rules,” Sarbanes said. A “power-based reform” seeks to “match power with power” instead
  • The first is a shift away from candidate dependence on PACs and other special interest sources and an increase in the amount of money politicians raise from their own constituents.
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  • The second effect cited by reformers is the increased likelihood of adoption of legislation generally opposed by business interests, including increases in minimum wage and liberalized family leave policies
  • The third positive consequence cited by advocates of public financing is the election of more working class and moderate income men and women to state legislatures and city councils.
  • Since the Sarbanes bill uses taxpayer money and raises the possibility of shifting legislative bodies to the left, it has zero chance of enactment as long as Republicans control either branch of Congress.
  • “It’s gotten to the point where the only people who can run are those who have contact lists rich enough to raise millions.”
  • He warned that Congress has become the equivalent of the House of Lords.
  • In testimony to the New York state Moreland Commission in 2013, Malbin argued that increased small donor participation is a way to counteranother kind of more systemic corruption: the corruption of representation that occurs when candidates spend so much of their time raising campaign money from rich contributors.
  • I have nothing against rich contributors, but the system needs broader participation. Surveys make it clear that those who can afford large contributions do not have the same policy interests or priorities as most citizens. When office holders spend so much time hearing from big donors, they get a slanted view of the public’s priorities.
  • The current system of financing federal campaigns is out of whack. The power of the rich – captured in the Oct. 10 Times story about “the 158 families that have provided nearly half of the early money for efforts to capture the White House” – defies even the very elastic boundaries of American democracy.
  • The Roberts court has deregulated campaign finance on the premise that the only legitimate grounds for restricting money in politics is to prevent explicit corruption. In doing so, however, the court has sanctioned a pervasively corrupt regime.
  • The more central problem of money in politics is something just as troubling but much harder to see: systems in which economic inequalities, inevitable in a free market economy, are transformed into political inequalities that affect both electoral and legislative outcomes. Without any politician taking a single bribe, wealth has an increasingly disproportionate influence on our politics. While we can call that a problem of “corruption,” this pushes the limits of the words too far (certainly far beyond what the Supreme Court is going to entertain as corruption) and obscures the fundamental unfairness of a political system moving toward plutocracy.
  • The long run solution, Hasen argues — with reasoning I find unimpeachable — is a Supreme Court “that will accept political equality as a compelling interest that justifies reasonable campaign regulations.”
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More White People Die From Suicide and Substance Abuse: Why? - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...e-and-substance-abuse-why.html death rate statistics white narcotic
shared by Javier E on 04 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • Why would the death rate for middle-aged non-Hispanic whites be increasing after decades of decline while rates for middle-aged blacks and Hispanics continue to fall? And why didn’t other rich countries have the same mortality rate increase for people in midlife?
  • if the death rate among middle-aged whites had continued to decline at the rate it fell between 1979 and 1998, half a million deaths would have been avoided over the years from 1999 through 2013. That, they note, is about the same number of deaths as those caused by AIDS through 2015.
  • The major causes of the excess deaths are suicides, drug abuse and alcoholism.
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  • In the past, drug abuse deaths were more common in middle-aged blacks than in middle-aged whites. Now they are more common in whites. The same pattern holds for deaths from alcoholic cirrhosis of the liver. The suicide rate for whites was four times that of blacks.
  • Could people be taking drugs and killing themselves as a response to the economic slowdown? Maybe. But, if so, Dr. Deaton and Dr. Case said, then why aren’t people in other countries responding the same way?
  • Recent reports of illness and disability might provide some clues. More middle-aged whites report that their general health is not good; and, more report chronic pain
  • older people are actually doing better — less addiction, disability rates falling.
  • how much of what they are seeing might be attributed to the explosive increase in prescription narcotics.
  • the people who report pain in middle age are the people who report difficulty in socializing, shopping, sitting for three hours, walking for two blocks.
  • Dr. Deaton envisions poorly educated middle-aged white Americans who feel socially isolated are out of work, suffering from chronic pain and turning to narcotics or alcohol for relief, or taking their own lives. Starting in the 1990s, he said, there was a huge emphasis on controlling pain, with pain charts going up in every doctor’s office and a concomitant increase in prescription narcotics.
  • Dr. Deaton noted that blacks and Hispanics may have been protected to an extent. Some pharmacies in neighborhoods where blacks and Hispanics live do not even stock those drugs, and doctors have been less likely to prescribe them for these groups.
  • So we're all the same after all.Under the right conditions - no control over your life, low pay, no job, little in the way of job prospects, no healthcare, little education, families break down when the man can't be the breadwinner, and then along comes poor health, substance abuse, depression, despair - all those ills that were blamed on black people's supposed lack of morals.Now that white kids are dying of heroin we need to change the laws, end the war on drugs, legalize pot, and change how we talk about what were formerly known as 'junkies'.White men are in despair as a result of economic problems, white kids are doing hard drugs in numbers that everyone's starting to notice, and AIDS is plaguing white communities, and now we need to care. So we're all human?
  • Because white people are depressed over their diminution in society by the policies of the Federal Government, the education system, racial animosity and biased media outlets that are rampant through the society. These doctors are clueless liberals that will try to find any reason to blame, other than the truth. It's not the drugs, it's what is causing them to want the drugs. White males have been denigrated for the past 50 years. The effects have to be building up and weighing on them.
  • John is a trusted commenter Boston 6 hours ago No, their diminution in society came from globalized capitalism. A lot of these working class white people were Reagan voters. I'm the same age as them, I saw it happen. They thought they were getting "Morning in America" but instead they got morning for Walmart and sunset for the working class. That's enough to make anybody turn to pills and booze.
  • DougH Lithonia, GA 7 hours ago To some extent, it's of their own making. High school educated whites tend to vote Republican. Over the last 30 years, Republicans have sold them a bill of goods. They abandoned unions, opposed increases in the minimum wage, and opposed regulation, including safety, wage fairness, etc.So now they are paid less. They have no way of changing that (short of high education) and the big beneficiaries of lower taxes have been the businesses and owners that for which they work. Did those owners bless the workers with the fruits of their benefits? Of course not. They kept the reduced expenses as profit, increased CEO wages, and kept cutting benefits before finally shipping their jobs overseas.Perhaps, if they stopped voting against their own interests, they would fair better.
  • dw659 Chicago 8 hours ago Why? Simple. Because to males, a 'loss of control' is an unacceptable change. 200 years of being 'in control' just because you are born white and male is ending. Many men can't face a world where they are of 'lower status' than women, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, etc. They don't want to live in that world.....
  • dale south africa 5 hours ago Its true ! I am a conservative man and i live i johannesburg. I cant imagine what it must be like respecting all things under the suns . From females, gays blacks etc Children of slaves dictating societies . oprah picking presidents. the bully is not allowed to be at his natural best and strongest with this new liberal socialist agenda , everyone equal attitude. im not white but if I was who would want that
  • Linda is a trusted commenter Oklahoma 54 minutes ago I know so many white men in this small town I live in who never had anything to do with their children. They didn't care about anybody through their productive years and now they're surprised that nobody cares about them.
  • AC USA 5 hours ago Could it be because these guys have no close family ties? They are the ages that their parents are probably in nursing homes or already passed away. These blue collar, high school educated guys fathered unwanted children with women to whom they may or may hot have been married and divorced. But now at middle age comes time for them to feel wanted and valued by their progeny (dad, dispense some life wisdom to us, help us with college, getting married, a down payment on a house, take your grand-kids fishing, etc.), but they dumped their kids by not wanting to pay child support, or having a bad attitude and not helping their kids at all past age 18. So they kids moved on without dad's love and "support" (monetary or emotionally). The "all for myself mentality" they have espoused has finally come home to roost. There is no going back in time, they are all alone, have no purpose as jobs are hard to come by at that age - even more-so blue collar ones - so they drink/take pills to dull the pain, then overdo it.
  • suzinne bronx 5 hours ago Think white families more often DO NOT stick together. At middle age and white, have ZERO contact with any family members. By the time I was 16 most had died, moved away or become estranged. Know this amps up my chances for suicide, and that's probably going to pan out too. Flag
  • Paul '52 is a trusted commenter NYC 2 hours ago The is the first cohort to experience the phenomenon that if you do the same job as your parents you won't do as well or better. These are the auto workers, the airport baggage handlers, the truck drivers. They are, in fact, more productive than their fathers, but they're not paid as well and they don't have pensions. And the disappointment is taking its toll.
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Despair, American Style - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...despair-american-style.html despair death rate suicide white
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  • Even more striking are the proximate causes of rising mortality. Basically, white Americans are, in increasing numbers, killing themselves, directly or indirectly. Suicide is way up, and so are deaths from drug poisoning and the chronic liver disease that excessive drinking can caus
  • what’s causing this epidemic of self-destructive behavior?
  • If you believe the usual suspects on the right, it’s all the fault of liberals. Generous social programs, they insist, have created a culture of dependency and despair, while secular humanists have undermined traditional values. But (surprise!) this view is very much at odds with the evidence.
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  • For one thing, rising mortality is a uniquely American phenomenon – yet America has both a much weaker welfare state and a much stronger role for traditional religion and values than any other advanced country. Sweden gives its poor far more aid than we do, and a majority of Swedish children are now born out of wedlock, yet Sweden’s middle-aged mortality rate is only half of white America’s.
  • You see a somewhat similar pattern across regions within the United States. Life expectancy is high and rising in the Northeast and California, where social benefits are highest and traditional values weakest. Meanwhile, low and stagnant or declining life expectancy is concentrated in the Bible Belt.
  • What about a materialist explanation? Is rising mortality a consequence of rising inequality and the hollowing out of the middle class?
  • it’s not that simple. We are, after all, talking about the consequences of behavior, and culture clearly matters a great deal. Most notably, Hispanic Americans are considerably poorer than whites, but have much lower mortality.
  • what is going on? In a recent interview Mr. Deaton suggested that middle-aged whites have “lost the narrative of their lives.” That is, their economic setbacks have hit hard because they expected better. Or to put it a bit differently, we’re looking at people who were raised to believe in the American Dream, and are coping badly with its failure to come true.
  • I’m not the only observer who sees a link between the despair reflected in those mortality numbers and the volatility of right-wing politics. Some people who feel left behind by the American story turn self-destructive; others turn on the elites they feel have betrayed them.
  • At this point you probably expect me to offer a solution. But while universal health care, higher minimum wages, aid to education, and so on would do a lot to help Americans in trouble, I’m not sure whether they’re enough to cure existential despair.
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Why People Are Confused About What Experts Really Think - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...what-experts-really-think.html journalism equivalency false equivalency controversy
shared by Javier E on 20 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Is it possible to give voice to experts on both sides — standard journalistic practice — without distorting the public’s perception of the level of disagreement?
  • critics argue that journalists too often generate “false balance,” creating an impression of disagreement when there is, in fact, a high level of consensus. One solution, adopted by news organizations such as the BBC, is “weight of evidence” reporting, in which the presentation of conflicting views is supplemented by an indication of where the bulk of expert opinion lies.
  • studies suggest that “weight of evidence” reporting is an imperfect remedy. It turns out that hearing from experts on both sides of an issue distorts our perception of consensus — even when we have all the information we need to correct that misperception.
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  • In one study, all the participants were presented with a numerical summary, drawn from a panel of experts convened by the University of Chicago, of the range of expert opinion on certain economic issues
  • One group of participants, however, was presented not only with the numerical summary of expert opinion but also with an excerpted comment from one expert on either side of an issue
  • , being exposed to the conflicting comments made it more difficult for participants to distinguish the issues most experts agreed on (such as carbon tax) from those for which there was substantial disagreement (such as minimum wage).
  • This distorting influence affected not only the participants’ perception of the degree of consensus, but also their judgments of whether there was sufficient consensus to use it to guide public policy.
  • What explains this cognitive glitch? One possibility is that when we are presented with comments from experts on either side of an issue, we produce a mental representation of the disagreement that takes the form of one person on either side, which somehow contaminates our impression of the distribution of opinions in the larger population of experts
  • Another possibility is that we may just have difficulty discounting the weight of a plausible argument, even when we know it comes from an expert whose opinion is held by only a small fraction of his or her peers.
  • It’s also possible that the mere presence of conflict (in the form of contradictory expert comments) triggers a general sense of uncertainty in our minds, which in turn colors our perceptions of the accuracy of current expert understanding of an issue.
  • the implications are worrisome. Government action is guided in part by public opinion. Public opinion is guided in part by perceptions of what experts think. But public opinion may — and often does — deviate from expert opinion, not simply, it seems, because the public refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy of experts, but also because the public may not be able to tell where the majority of expert opinion lies.
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In New Economic Plan, China Bets That Hard Choices Can Be Avoided - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rd-choices-can-be-avoided.html China economy policy
shared by maddieireland334 on 06 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • As economic growth has fallen while debts and excess industrial output have risen, Chinese leaders have faced growing questions about whether they will carry out the painful policy surgery many experts say is needed to cut away the financial dead weight on the economy.
  • hinese leaders’ usual two-sided rhetoric about their options — peril is close at hand, but so is a sure cure — was especially striking in Mr. Li’s latest annual report to the legislature, the National People’s Congress.
  • Mr. Li suggested, would help dull the pain from cuts to wheezing state-supported industries that must shed millions of workers, as part of a program that China’s powerful president, Xi Jinping, has promoted as “supply-side structural reform.”
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  • He did not specify how many workers could lose their jobs as part of the government’s plan to close, merge or restructure mines and factories weighed down by excess capacity.
  • A growth rate of 6.5 percent a year is the minimum needed to achieve President Xi’s often-declared goal of doubling the size of the Chinese economy by 2020, relative to its size in 2010.
  • But such financial easing implies more debt, at a time when many Western economists and policy makers are already worried that total leverage in the Chinese economy has far outstripped economic output.
  • he increased debt may help the government achieve its target of 6.5 percent to 7 percent economic growth this year, but at the price of burdening banks with even more loans to struggling businesses, or even effectively insolvent ones. That policy may also water down leaders’ promises to shut companies that are producing unwanted industrial goods.
  • Mr. Li said the government’s policies could help create more than 10 million jobs in towns and cities this year, and more than 50 million by the end of 2020.
  • The government will set aside $15.3 billion to support laid-off workers and hard-hit areas, he said.
  • To a surprising extent, the economic vision unveiled by Mr. Li echoed policies in the United States, the European Union and Japan, all of which have depended heavily on their central banks to expand money supply and keep growth aloft. The International Monetary Fund and many independent economists have strongly called for the world to shift from this reliance on monetary policy.
  • The government’s plan said the target for this year’s fiscal deficit at the national level would rise to 3 percent, from a target of 2.3 percent last year. But by most estimates, the actual deficit last year was already over 3 percent.
  • China’s central government has a fairly low debt by international standards; what are deeply indebted are the country’s corporate sector and local governments. But the Ministry of Finance has nonetheless been reluctant to allow a large, persistent deficit to form, particularly as China may yet face very heavy costs to help banks with the costs of large loans to nearly insolvent state-owned enterprises.
  • One of the most surprising was a proposal to expand China’s value-added tax to financial services. Banks would face a 6 percent tax on the interest that they collect on loans.
  • Since the global financial crisis, there have been many calls in the West for broadening value-added taxes to encompass financial services,
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Climate Deal Analysis: The Good, the Bad, the Still Unknown - NBC News - 0 views

www.nbcnews.com/...good-bad-still-unknown-n479056 climate deal analysis unknown nbc news history Policy
shared by katyshannon on 14 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • First, the good news: On Saturday afternoon, world leaders ratified a universal pact to slow global warming, ending a decades-long political stalemate and, according to the best possible science, lowering the risk of ecological collapse.
  • The decisive moment arrived inside a high-security airplane hangar on the outskirts of Paris, where delegates from nearly 200 nations fought over the deal line-by-line for two weeks. Finally, the French foreign minister called an all-hands meeting, and asked if there were any objections to the final 31-page agreement.
  • Seeing and hearing none, he banged a tiny green gavel, sealing the deal into international law. The room erupted in a man-on-the-moon-like moment of rapturous applause. The online world followed.
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  • President Barack Obama praised the deal as "the most ambitious climate change agreement in history." "Beautiful," added French president Francois Hollande. "I used to say we must," commented Christiana Figueres, the United Nation's climate chief. "Today, we can say we did!"
  • The agreement commits the world to hold "the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels." That's an ambitious goal here in 2015, which is expected to be the hottest year on record, amid the three hottest decades on record.
  • Finally, the agreement pledges a minimum of $100 billion a year for developing countries to adapt to the ravages of our already overheated climate. That's an acknowledgement of the vast inequities of climate change: The fact that the richest, most powerful countries have done the most to cause climate change, yet suffer the least as a result. advertisement
  • But there's a whole lot of bad news in this agreement as well: It's vague. It's aspirational. And critics say it's several orders of magnitude away from being enough to avert a crisis in the decades ahead.
  • "The Paris Climate Agreement is not a fair, just or science-based deal," said Erich Pica, president of the eco-watchdog group Friends of the Earth. "The result is in an agreement that could see low-lying islands and coastlines swallowed up by the sea, and many African lands ravaged by drought."
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