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Medicare Saves Money
Monday, June 13th, 2011
June 12, 2011
Medicare actually saves money — a lot of money — compared with relying on private insurance companies. And this in turn means that pushing people out of Medicare, in addition to depriving many Americans of needed care, would almost surely end up increasing total health care costs… high U.S. private spending on health care, compared with spending in other advanced countries, just about wipes out any benefit we might receive from our relatively low tax burden.
Tags: budget, Health, standard of living
Posted in Health Policy Context | No Comments »
Against Learned Helplessness
Sunday, June 5th, 2011
May 29, 2011
…there are policies we could be pursuing to bring unemployment down. These policies would be unorthodox — but so are the economic problems we face. And those who warn about the risks of action must explain why these risks should worry us more than the certainty of continued mass suffering if we do nothing… As I see it, policy makers are sinking into a condition of learned helplessness on the jobs issue: the more they fail to do anything about the problem, the more they convince themselves that there’s nothing they could do.
Tags: budget, economy, ideology, standard of living
Posted in Policy Context | No Comments »
Nice Guys Finish First
Monday, May 23rd, 2011
May 16, 2011
Different interpretations of evolution produce different ways of analyzing the world. The selfish-competitor model fostered the utility-maximizing model that is so prevalent in the social sciences, particularly economics. The new, more cooperative view will complicate all that… For decades, people tried to devise a rigorous “scientific” system to analyze behavior that would be divorced from morality. But if cooperation permeates our nature, then so does morality, and there is no escaping ethics, emotion and religion in our quest to understand who we are and how we got this way.
Tags: ideology, participation, rights, standard of living
Posted in Inclusion Policy Context | 1 Comment »
The Big Society
Monday, May 23rd, 2011
May 19, 2011
Until Cameron, Britain — like the U.S. — had one party that spoke on behalf of the market (the Conservatives) and one party that spoke on behalf of the state (Labour). But Cameron is initiating a series of policies, under the rubric “Big Society,” that seek to nurture community bonds, civic activism and social capital… Cameron has unveiled a series of measures to decentralize power to local governments, to increase government transparency and to disburse welfare provisions to a variety of delivery mechanisms.
Tags: economy, ideology, participation
Posted in Social Security Policy Context | No Comments »
The Unwisdom of Elites
Sunday, May 15th, 2011
May 8, 2011
The fact is that what we’re experiencing right now is a top-down disaster. The policies that got us into this mess weren’t responses to public demand. They were, with few exceptions, policies championed by small groups of influential people — in many cases, the same people now lecturing the rest of us on the need to get serious. And by trying to shift the blame to the general populace, elites are ducking some much-needed reflection on their own catastrophic mistakes.
Tags: economy, globalization, ideology, standard of living
Posted in Equality Policy Context | No Comments »
The Power of Mockery
Sunday, April 24th, 2011
April 16, 2011
A crucial lesson… is the power of nonviolence: “If somebody is beating you, don’t attack him. Don’t use any violence against them. Just take photos of them and put them on the Internet.”… One of the most exciting trends in the struggle against poverty and social pathologies such as crime is the use of similar youth-owned movements to change cultural norms from the bottom up… Sometimes the most powerful force for social change is a bunch of irreverent and wise-cracking students, working together.
Tags: ideology, participation, rights, standard of living
Posted in Inclusion Debates | No Comments »
The Austerity Delusion
Sunday, April 3rd, 2011
March 24, 2011
Why not slash deficits immediately? Because tax increases and cuts in government spending would depress economies further, worsening unemployment. And cutting spending in a deeply depressed economy is largely self-defeating even in purely fiscal terms: any savings achieved at the front end are partly offset by lower revenue, as the economy shrinks.
Tags: budget, economy, ideology, poverty, standard of living
Posted in Policy Context | No Comments »
The Happynomics of Life
Sunday, March 20th, 2011
March 12, 2011
British research has suggested that money itself does not confer happiness, although wealthier people tend to be happier; that employment is critical to self-esteem; that women tend to be happier than men; and that people need something beyond the material for fulfillment… Open spaces, clear air, security, release from pressure — these are things of growing importance and scarcity. Then the question becomes: How do you promote them while at the same time creating the jobs needed in all Western societies? Growth is of course a large part of the answer, but it can’t be all the answer any longer.
Tags: ideology, mental Health, participation, standard of living
Posted in Policy Context | No Comments »
The New Humanism
Sunday, March 20th, 2011
March 8, 2011
When you synthesize this research, you get different perspectives on everything from business to family to politics. You pay less attention to how people analyze the world but more to how they perceive and organize it in their minds. You pay a bit less attention to individual traits and more to the quality of relationships between people… Their work is scientific, but it directs our attention toward a new humanism. It’s beginning to show how the emotional and the rational are intertwined… It’ll change how we see ourselves.
Tags: ideology, participation, standard of living
Posted in Inclusion Policy Context | 1 Comment »
Obama’s Gun Play
Sunday, January 30th, 2011
January 21, 2011
According to data from the nonpartisan… Center for Responsive Politics, the gun-rights lobby has contributed more than $24 million in election cycles from 1990 to 2010. About 85 percent went to Republicans… According to 2005 data from the U.N… the U.S. is in a league of its own, and not in a good way. We have nearly 9 guns for every 10 people, and about 9 out of every 10 of our homicides are committed with one of those guns. No other country even comes close… 52 percent of Americans asked believed that laws covering the sale of guns should be made more strict.
Tags: crime prevention, ideology
Posted in Child & Family Policy Context | No Comments »
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