...you insist on seeing things as binaries rather than continua. Either this or that, e.g., save the environment or help business; serve the rich or help the poor.
Viewing entries in
Politics and Economics
Wealth is not the same as money. For the wealthy, it's mostly equity in businesses and financial assets, e.g., value of equipment, shares, stocks, and retirement accounts. These are assets that do work: build businesses, provide funds for capital investments, grow the economy, etc.
Specific classes are where you spend part of your life. Class is a range on a distribution, not a static group, except for some people. The trajectory is usually up with age, then plateau in one's 50s, then decline. But reaching the middle class is important, because if it lasts more than a few years, that means you can buy a house, accumulate equity, and have more options later on.
Moderates are often considered weak versions of the Real Thing - people who lack strong convictions, who don't want to rock the boat.
The opposite was supposed to happen. Since more people would be insured under Obamacare, fewer would delay timely medical care. More would get regular check-ups. Medical conditions would be caught and treated before they got out of hand, necessitating a visit to the ER. That was the theory anyway.
That just about all personality traits show significant and substantial genetic influence is the stuff of college textbooks, e,g, Behavioral Genetics, now in its 7th edition.
...all this contributes to segregation along class lines, as families, friends, co-workers, and neighbors form increasingly homogeneous clusters of people with similar education, income, and norms. For many individuals, less class mixing means less first-hand exposure to success stories, which in turn undermines the confidence, motivation, and perseverance needed to get ahead in the world.
On the OOH website, there were some middle-class jobs that did not require even a high school diploma, but I don't want to encourage anyone to drop out of high school. Also, through sheer talent, hard work or luck, some people have successful careers in occupations that typically require more education than they have. But planning to be the exception to a rule is usually not a good move.
Assortative mating is thought to contribute to income inequality when the better educated marry mostly each other and create a privileged class that hoards the best genes, parenting, education, and neighborhoods while the rest of society gets stuck in a socioeconomic rut. That's the theory anyway. What's actually happening on the ground?
The argument in brief: an increase in assortative mating, in which highly educated women are more likely to exercise the near-universal preference of women to marry men of higher education, income, or status (“hypergamy”) has lead to increasing inequality....
A select group of Americans really did see their incomes rise spectacularly and not just on paper. These were executives, managers, financial professionals, and technology professionals - occupations that often come with wealth-based income streams, such as stock options.
Is that it? Is rising inequality mostly an illusion, a matter of how income is being categorized and counted? A shift in accounting practices? No. There's more to the story.
If you don't count the income of the top .1 percent, then the income share of the top 1 percent in the US has actually gone down over the past 30+ years.
... a lot of people want to grow their wealth, especially for retirement. That's where risky assets come in. Risky assets are where the big bucks are made and lost. Risky assets include volatile investments, real estate other than one's own home, or a business. Households heavily invested in risky assets tend to experience big swings in wealth.
...the rich often own businesses or are self-employed professionals, and many grow their money in the stock market - either directly invested or through mutual funds, annuities, trusts, and pension funds...
...something to the effect, “wealth matters much more than income anyway”. And then they point out the super-rich own the lion’s share of wealth in the US and the world...The implication being if we just redistributed a bunch of that wealth, the war on poverty would be over! Is that so?
Tell subjects they scored in the bottom 20% on some performance measure and they'll feel rotten. Expose women to a 15-minute video of gorgeous models and their self-esteem will take a beating. So, sure, you can make experimental subjects feel bad by exposing them to certain conditions in a lab, but do those conditions prevail in everyday life?
What stands out in this map is that Red States are less densely populated than Blue States. They're more rural with plenty of room for people to spread out. Since rural homes are bigger and traveling distances farther, it should come as no surprise that Red States consume more energy per capita than Blue States. This is a function of landscape and livelihood, not politics. If you're a farmer, you don't tootle around in a Prius - you've got a pick-up.
According to the Conference of State Legislatures, net metering policies "have facilitated the expansion of renewable energy through on-site, also known as distributed, generation." Common distributed generation sources include solar panels, natural gas, micro-turbines, methane digesters, and small wind power generators.
The hypothesis: many Republicans would like to see a reduction in Green House Gas (GHG) emissions, whether or not they believe in anthropogenic climate change. Please see Part I of this series for how I arrived at this hypothesis. ... Now, let's test the hypothesis.