We perceive social justice through a prism of intervening considerations, like how much:
...people have control over their circumstances
...luck figures in life outcomes
...the rules of the game are fair
...people deserve what they get.
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Politics and Economics
…survey evidence showing the number of Americans endorsing anthropogenic climate change fell during the Great Recession, between 2007 and 2009. The authors' basic theory is that when people sense economic threat, they are more likely to value order and stability, which motivates them to justify the existing economic system and downplay evidence suggesting the system itself is a problem.
There's something about psychologizing that's invalidating. As if psychology was the science of human error. But does it have to be so? Humans are pretty good at tracking reality, thanks to biases and heuristics that work well most of the time. Error can be an ally in the search for truth.
In the bad ol' days of bureaucratic communism, psychiatrists contributed their diagnostic services to the state to help rein in trouble-makers. Take "sluggish schizophrenia", a diagnosis characterized by “pessimism, poor social adaptation and conflict with authorities” and frequently used to facilitate the psychiatric incarceration of political dissenters in the USSR and Eastern Bloc countries. Thanks to sluggish schizophrenia, the Soviet Union had three times as many schizophrenic patients as the US.
Most people accept that merit should be rewarded and bad behavior punished, but that doesn't tell us much. The difficult question is: how much? Part of the answer to that is: according to the rules of a legitimate system. And what makes a system legitimate?
Wealth is usually calculated as what the household owns that can be cashed in for future spending. But shouldn't external sources of future spending be counted as household wealth as well? Why not count the value of investments into which other entities pay but the household collects, like government- or employer-funded pensions? For example, the median pension benefit for newly retired teachers in California is $40K a year. That works out to $1 million over 25 years.
For instance, inequality was associated with higher happiness in countries where people felt they or their children were going places. Well-dressed rich people reminded them of their own possibilities, not of something they can never have because the system is rigged. In these countries, exposure to the good fortune of others wasn't depressing or an occasion to rage against the machine. It was inspirational: an occasion to double-down on one's resolutions. Okay, that's simplifying a bit, but you get the point.
…if we're around someone who's "higher" than us on a dimension that matters (e.g., wealth, looks, personality), the degree to which we feel good or bad about it depends (in whole or part!) on whether we feel we have what it takes to get where they are.
…what one considers fair or equitable is partly based on whether a person’s allotment is deserved - that is, earned by virtue of personal qualities or actions. Deservingness isn't just about what a person is or does, though. It's also about the broader social and economic context: the rules of the game that dictate which qualities or actions are rewarded.
Average profit margins for insurance companies have hovered around 3% for years. That's not wasted money, though; in our current healthcare system, insurance companies play a vital role: they rein in providers who are prone to over-treat and over-test.
I care about outcomes, not motivation. Greed is good as long as greed delivers.
“…shorter life spans, limited income and wealth potential…mass incarceration … limited access to educational resources and political participation, state-sanctioned killing by police…”
Even more important is how much the federal government actually collected in taxes during this Golden Age of high taxes on the rich. After all, governments need to collect money to redistribute money. So in the 1950s were federal tax revenues higher than they've been more recently? No.
One way ideologies instill confidence and hope is by romanticizing a time or place where one's ideals were at least partly realized: see, it was done before, so we can do it again, but even better. For some, that romanticized time and place was western Europe and North America during the 1950s*. Exhibit A:…
But the California system uses a rigid, top-down approach that disincentivizes labor-saving innovations in nursing care. That's because California hospitals would still be stuck with the same minimum RN:patient ratios even if ways were found to reduce time spent on some nursing tasks (e.g., documentation).
Who are the one percent? Technically, households with an adjusted gross income of at least $465,626. But who are those people? Many work in occupations that pay so well they have plenty of money available to get richer still through profitable investments. Many work in the following occupations...
It looks like job stress has gone up a bit over the years, while work hours and satisfaction with work load and level of RN staff levels haven't changed much since the implementation of AB 394. Kinda disappointing when you think of the added expense of all those extra RNs and RN hours. This is not at all to say that nurses haven't benefited from the implementation of strict staffing ratios. It just doesn't look like the benefit has been all that great. And then you've got to ask if it's worth it. Because there are costs to these extra costs.
“The basic takeaway from the analysis was that there is variation in quality from hospital to hospital, but that variation it is not correlated with for-profit status.” Maybe For-Profit Hospitals Aren't So Bad, Harvard.edu Blog
US healthcare spending is almost twice that of the other developed countries. Pharmaceuticals and medical goods (e.g., medical supplies and devices) are a relatively small part of that difference. If we knocked off, say, $200 a year in drugs and medical goods, we'd hardly make a dent in overall US healthcare spending – which is approaching a per capita average of $10,000 a year.
First we've got to get a handle on what the US actually spends on healthcare. According to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (National Health Expenditures 2016 Highlights - CMS.gov), US healthcare spending reached $3.3 trillion in 2016, or $10,348 per person. That represents 17.9% of the gross domestic product (GDP). For comparison, the “Comparable Rich Country” average for healthcare spending was $5169 per person in 2016 (10-12% of GDP, depending on the specific country).