In the market place, value boils down to the point of overlap between what buyers are willing to pay and what sellers are willing to accept. Value is not a property of the object but of the transaction.
Useful “savoring strategies” included focusing attention on the present moment, engaging in positive rumination, and telling others about positive experiences. The authors conclude: “Hence, our findings contribute to the increasing body of evidence emphasizing the importance of the flexibility of biological and psychological processes for well-being…. our research suggests that practicing as many savoring strategies as possible...
According to Clifford Geertz, religion creates “an aura of utter actuality. It is this sense of the ‘really real’ upon which the religious perspective rests” (Interpretation of Cultures, p. 112; my italics).
Both action and inaction have consequences. To the extent that these consequences matter to us, we have to decide what to do and what not to do – often under conditions of uncertainty and risk. None of this has to do with “free will”.
Bottom line: more police, less prison time. The DOJ piece says prison doesn’t have much deterrence effect – but if it had no deterrence effect, being caught would have no deterrence effect. How much prison or jail time is enough to make one think twice before committing to some criminal act
Once a country achieves a certain standard of living, inhabitants become less focused on doing whatever it takes to survive and start caring more about the world around them. Poorer countries tend to chop down forests, richer countries to plant them.
My beef with cognitive approaches to motivation, emotion, and behavior: cognitivists tend to consider what happens in the head as products of what goes on in the head, with the implicit opposition to what happens "objectively" "in the world". I see what happens in the head as tethered to the world that exists beyond the head.
Scarcity is about a perceived mismatch between what is available (supply) and what is desired (demand). You pay more attention to things associated with scarcity, whether it’s scarcity of guesses, friends, time, or income. Scarcity creates a mindset affecting what we notice, how we decide and how we act.
Larger businesses promote economies of scale, higher wages (known as the big firm wage premium), and de-materialization of production, logistics and transportation (meaning fewer emission per unit produced). Of course, there needs to be a mix of large, moderate and small businesses, and monopolistic power should be avoided.
The definition of ideology I will be using borrows from Robert Jay Lifton and Willard S. Mullins: an ideology is a relatively comprehensive and coherent set of convictions (a “vision”) about how humans and the world works, which is powerful enough to influence one’s thinking, feelings, evaluations, and actions. In this sense, I consider mindfulness as an ideological movement.
A living wage is the hourly rate that an individual must earn to support their family, if they are the sole provider and are working full-time (2080 hours per year). As adopted in the US, living wages are often set so that a full-time worker with a family of four earns more than some measure of poverty (usually the official federal poverty line).
The problem with this “small is beautiful” mentality is that small landholders tend to operate on very small margins and are the least likely to afford sustainable practices like letting a portion of their land fallow every year and to allow some bordering forests to remain intact. In poorer countries, when times are hard, the trees are chopped down to sell the wood....
One of my favorite parts is Litman's list of "methodological potholes" frequently encountered in science writing. These are based mostly on Huron (2000)* and include:
- Discovery fallacy: Criticizing an idea because of its origin (e.g., from a religious text).
- Ipse dixit: Appealing to authority figures(e.g., “Research increasingly shows that...”).
- Confirmation bias: The tendency to see events as confirming a theory while viewing falsifying events as “exceptions”.
- Ad-hoc hypothesis: Proposing a supplementary hypothesis to explain why a favorite theory or interpretation failed a test.
- Data neglect: Tendency to ignore available information when assessing theories or hypotheses.
Some assertions cannot be proven by argument or evidence; that is, they are unfalsifiable. Variations on “I just know” are unfalsifiable. These include: it’s a matter of experience, higher understanding, wisdom, essential truths, deeply felt emotion, being, higher consciousness or faith. There certainly is room for unfalsifiable convictions, but if a conviction is about something that can clearly be evaluated according to the rules of logic or evidence, then “I just know” or any of its variants is not enough.
Approaching the mindfulness movement as a form of discourse reflecting a broad array of influences (cultural, historical, ideological, religious) and employing various rhetorical strategies to boost its appeal is not to say that the insights or wisdom associated with mindfulness are without merit or foundation in reality. A lot of things constrain and influence how we see the world and how we see the world may still reflect, more or less accurately, what is the case.
The BIG would also make it easier to leave dysfunctional relationships. Abused women in particular would have another source of income to help them move out and start over.
BIG would have to be designed in such a way that it would not create a huge disincentive to work. You don’t want to shrink the pool of tax payers, at least not by a lot. Ultimately, it would be the taxpayers who pay for BIG, not to mention all those other things governments do. And you don’t want the tax base too narrowly focused on the affluent, because the income of the rich is more volatile than that of other income classes. A stable BIG needs a stable source of funding, which means a pretty broad tax base. The 1% can’t pay for everything.
The Basic Income Guarantee (BIG) is a form of government benefit in which all citizens or legal residents of a country regularly receive an unconditional sum of money. Some libertarians like the BIG, because it would provide a simple alternative to the morass of means-tested government programs that are associated with dependency, gaming the system, and work avoidance. Liberals like the BIG as a way to combat inequality and eliminate poverty.
There are maps and means and a sense of purpose and direction. Of course, one will take many wrong turns – that goes with the process.
....smaller trucks with less storage space often emit more CO2 per unit transported than those big-ass long-hauls, because the latter transport so much more stuff per haul.