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Politics and Economics
What’s a technocrat? Admirers would say someone who approaches problems and challenges with the mindset of a scientist or engineer, seeking out information from credible sources, confronting their own ignorance, changing their minds when the evidence calls for it, taking disagreement seriously, and gladly accepting criticism to avoid error, because they devoutly wish to get it right. …What’s an ideologue? …
In the debate, supporters of the Green New Deal came back with:
Other ideas are just cover for capitalist yearnings
Nothing significant is being done to combat climate change
There is no serious alternative to the Green New Deal
The Green New Deal is our only hope to avert catastrophe
What I see [in this list of the ten most unequal states] is southern states, rich states, and New Jersey. Compared to other US states, all but Florida have high unemployment and all but New Jersey and Connecticut have high poverty rates and low median household income.
It appears that states with the lowest level of inequality also have low unemployment rates (except for that huge outlier, Alaska*). They also tend to be rural, vote Republican, and do somewhat better than other states on median household income, poverty rates, and the composite measure of well-being. Of course, we don’t know cause-and-effect here.
So what happened - especially between 1970 and the early 2000s when the savings rate bottomed out? It wasn’t because Americans increasingly couldn’t afford to save; it was because they increasingly choose not to. Consider…
Most chief executives make less than the average physician. Yes, there are super-star executives who make an obscene amount of money - but they are the exception, not the rule….the top 1% are mostly owners of partnerships and small (‘S’) corporations. These “pass-through” business owners earn more, on average, than major shareholders of the big ‘C’ corporations.
The capacity to imagine future danger and take constructive steps to avert it is called “adaptive anticipation”. Adaptive adaptation starts with sensitivity to threat. It ends with effective problem solving.
According to this trope, the Fearful Conservative is afraid of change and uncertainty, clinging to the safe harbor of habit and tradition, overly controlled, troubled by bad dreams and distressed by disorder. In so many words: fear makes conservatives stupid. The authors usually bolster their case with a few studies and quotes from “experts”, which can be hard to refute if you don’t know what they’re leaving out - namely, evidence to the contrary.
One thing the articles and opinion pieces don’t mention is the decades of research on personality and political attitudes, covering tens of thousands of participants. And that research is, well, unequivocal: conservatism is not associated with anxiety or fear - it’s most strongly associated with Conscientiousness.
Azarian wrote a Psychology Today piece titled, “Fear and Anxiety Drive Conservatives' Political Attitudes” …he supported his claims with evidence from four studies. Luckily I was able to locate most of the original studies to see if his conclusions were reasonable. Here’s what I found…
“…industry, self-reliance, frugality, self restraint or control, modesty, temperance, fortitude, cheerfulness, civility, compassion, and respect for the property of other persons.” Jean M. Yarbrough, author of American Virtues: Thomas Jefferson on the Character of a Free People.
What would be the opposite of these virtues?
The preliminary report doesn’t discuss why over two-thirds of those contacted did not complete interviews. Nor does it address potential differences between individuals who did complete interviews and those who did not.
Why would Amazon refuse to remain neutral if employees tried to unionize? I’m thinking it wasn’t so much about wages. After all, Amazon employees at the NYC headquarters were expected to earn an average of $150,000 a year...
So the question, “was the Amazon deal worth it?” is partly answered by “What was the alternative”? Were there other businesses in the wings that wanted the same location and could provide greater benefit at less cost?
When people say that political differences boil down to differences in values, they’re often implying an unbridgeable gulf between their side and the other side. And so we have the increasing polarization and breakdown of communication between Democrats and Republicans. After all, if you don’t care about the same things, what’s the point in talking to each other?
…the point of income and wealth is what you can get with them. Besides status and influence, that would be stuff you can buy, now or later: housing, food, healthcare, transportation, entertainment, education, clothing, security, experiences, etc. One would think that inequality in buying power would translate to a similar level of inequality in the value of the stuff bought. One would be wrong.
The idea of a federal jobs guarantee is that anyone who wants a job gets a job and the job pays enough to support a family. Per Bernie Sanders, that would be a full-time public-sector job paying at least $15 an hour with healthcare and other benefits.
For instance, in one Pew research survey, just 53% of those under 30 who initially identified as Republicans or leaned Republican consistently remained with the party over four subsequent surveys.
I’ll start with political spending by “business interests”, a convenient category that includes rich people, corporations, non-corporate businesses, business associations, and industry groups. If spending by business interests influenced US elections and legislation in a major way, one would expect the US to do well in the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business rankings. And it does okay - but not as well as Denmark and Norway.
We typically talk about inequality in terms of income and wealth. But what are income and wealth good for? They’re good for their exchange value, i.e., what you can get with them. Another way of saying this is that income and wealth are proxies for current or future spending. So let’s look at how Americans have been spending…