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.
...feminism helped some women advance to positions supervising men, which in the bad ol' days was rarely tolerated, whether at fast food restaurants or accounting firms.
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.
...they’re better at constructing elaborate ideologies around their dumb ideas and more likely to achieve positions of power, allowing them to impose these dumb ideas on others. See, for instance...
Unfortunately, in this era of media fragmentation we see the exact opposite with groups collecting themselves into silos while simultaneously insulting anyone who doesn’t hew to their exact world-view. A Chemist in Langley Posted on April 29, 2017
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.
My initial enthusiasm for writing this blog was to figure out what I found so annoying about the mindfulness movement. Something is wrong here, my emotions said. No, no, no!
To help me figure out if it was just me or if those feelings were on to something, I decided to study the matter further and read a canonical work, Jon Kabat-Zinn's Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness (2013).
...they describe cleaning chemicals as "unnecessary" and propose that microfiber cloths and water are "enough for most purposes". The lead author, Oistein Svanes, summed up the take-home message of the study: "in the long run cleaning chemicals very likely cause rather substantial damage to your lungs".
Of course, we must remain vigilant! But measured optimism is not the enemy.
It's not all that hard or time-consuming to check the actual study behind a headline. If the article doesn't provide a link to the academic paper being cited, judge the publication (shame on them!) and then Google Scholar the paper...
...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.
We should plan to have mini-mastery experiences every day: something a bit challenging but still doable to gets us closer to our goal. Doesn't mean to avoid the hard stuff, but it's nice to sprinkle the hard with the pretty easy to keep us motivated.