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Politics and Economics
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) just released its latest report projecting what the federal budget and the economy would look like over the next 10 years if laws governing taxes and spending generally remained unchanged. Per the CBO, relative to the size of the economy, the federal debt swells from 2024 to 2034 as increases in interest costs and mandatory spending outpace decreases in discretionary spending and growth in revenues… Here’s the chart:
I’m going to assume that just about all political allies have been portrayed as perpetrators of wrongdoing and/or victims of injustice, no matter their ideological leanings. This would include LGBTQ+ groups, labor unions, environmentalists, Blacks, Whites, poor people, young people, Hispanics, student activists, old people, business people, farmers, rural folk, pro-life groups, pro-choice groups, evangelicals, mainstream Protestants, Catholics, moderates, Asian Americans, men, women, and plenty of others.
“People use ‘tags,’ ‘markers,’ or ‘identities’ to assort with likeminded individuals, and they alter their appearance to signal commitment to a particular group over alternative groups.” - David Pinsof, David Sears and Martie Haselton, Strange Bedfellows: The Alliance Theory of Political Belief Systems
I belong to a Zoom current events discussion group. Our summer host recently sent an email to group members letting us know that certain points of view would no longer be tolerated during discussions. Here’s an excerpt…
Use of egalitarian rhetoric may reflect allegiance to a particular set of groups, as opposed to an impartial moral preference that cuts across group identities. If this is the case, then many widely used measures of egalitarianism may be confounded with political and social allegiances.
“Moral principles are not so principled. Core values are not so core. Ideological worldviews are not designed to literally view the world but to serve strategic functions like signaling allegiance or mobilizing support.” - Strange Bedfellows: The Alliance Theory of Political Belief Systems by David Pinsof, David Sears and Martie Haselton
…There is currently a housing shortage in Israel. Israel will build at least 15,000 dwelling units a year to house returning Palestinians, funded by private developers. Palestinians would not be obligated to live in these units but must submit documentation of suitable housing elsewhere in Israel before being allowed to emigrate.
The Global RIghts Project (GRIP) is led by an interdisciplinary team of faculty and students from the University of Rhode Island Center for Nonviolence and Peace Studies and the Department of Political Science. GRIP draws upon the “world’s largest quantitative human rights database” to create an annual report on global human rights practices…So did any countries in the Middle East pass the GRIP human rights test?
The Chandler Institute of Governance (CIG) is an international non-profit organisation that works with governments around the world to build effective and accountable governments, institutions and policies. CIG promotes good governance on the principle that good governance “leads to better outcomes and increased public trust”.
Democratic countries are happier and healthier than autocratic countries, even after controlling for economic factors like wealth and poverty (Tov & Diener, 2009; Barnish, Tørnes, et al, 2018). I want a peace plan that maximizes the wellbeing of people on both sides of the conflict and for that to happen, a peace plan should seek to strengthen the democratic institutions and cultures of both Israel and Palestine. Of course, democracy by itself can’t guarantee good governance, public safety or economic prosperity – but it lays the foundation for their possibility and improvement.
Freedom House (FH) is a non-profit organization that was founded in 1941, with Wendell Willkie and Eleanor Roosevelt serving as its first honorary chairpersons. Best known for political advocacy surrounding issues of democracy, political freedom, and human rights, the organization's annual Freedom in the World report assesses the political rights and civil liberties of countries and territories around the world.
In prepping for this series on social justice, I came across a great meta-analysis on the research and theory of "relative deprivation", which the authors define as "the judgment that one is worse off compared to some standard accompanied by feelings of anger and resentment" (Smith, Pettigrew et al, 2011, p 203)
It's no accident that political arguments about social justice tend to focus on the role of hard work versus luck. For instance, in a recent Pew Research Survey, 73 % of Solid Liberals agreed that “hard work and determination are no guarantee of success for most people”, compared to 4% of Core Conservatives. That's a huge difference. No wonder the partisan divide has turned into a chasm. The disagreements are on so many levels: bickering turtles all the way down.
So how does this all connect with the psychology of social justice? Mainly to show that there is no "natural" response to status differences and inequality. Whether we respond with resentment, depression, fear, stress, envy, anger, indignation, admiration, aesthetic pleasure, or even happiness at another's good fortune...all depends.
Hmmm. There is a general drift downward since around the Great Recession, although confidence in small business didn’t fall until the pandemic crash. Confidence in big business took a hit after the 2001 dot-com recession, after which it remained fairly flat until 2018 when it fell further. Confidence in the presidency plunged during the second Bush II term, recovered and then fell again during the Obama years, actually going up during Trump, and falling once again with Biden. Congress hit a high point circa 2003-2004 (I’m guessing before disillusion with US wars set in) and basically hasn’t recovered since. As for confidence in higher education, the trend is obvious and rather alarming.
Mmm…pretty steady in the confidence department until around 2017, then a downward trend, accelerating since 2020. I put the “civil unrest” lines in the chart to see if confidence in police dipped after periods of anti-police civil unrest. No pattern there until 2020, when high confidence responses dipped 5 points over the period of 2020 - 2023.
Since 2012, the US violent crime rate has fluctuated a bit, but it’s still higher than in 1960, when the violent crime rate was 161 crimes per 100,000 population, compared to a rate of 381 per 100,000 in 2022 (the most recent year available).
There actually have been people and movements that were more broadly antiscience than today’s this-or-that skeptics: what we used to call “new age” types, e.g., members of religious cults and believers in the occult. In his oft-cited 1993 book Science and Anti-Science, Gerald Holton mentions “interest in astrology” as indicative of antiscience beliefs, as least as “conventionally” understood (his word).
This all seems so counterintuitive. You don’t die of Covid unless you are infected with Covid, so why wouldn’t there be an association between infection and death rates?