Good News! Just last night, while I was singing the glories of these tiny housing units, the Berkeley City Council voted unanimously to move ahead and solicit bids to build them...
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Politics and Economics
Residential hotels used to fill a niche: an alternative to homelessness for the down-and-out. If all else fails, you can get a room, with a shower down the hall. But building residential hotels is a low margin/high hassle business and they just aren't being built like they used to be.
What matters is a sense of control and hope within a lifetime. The feeling that through my actions, I can make progress towards something that matters to me. Self-efficacy! Not that I’m the master of my destiny – more that there are things I can do that will make it better.
Political coalitions are more or less ideological. On the less ideological side, they may be held together by alliances of convenience, whose common cause may be more dislike of the other side than broad agreement on a range of issues.
An ideology is an army of convictions about how the world is and how it ought to be. As befitting a military force, ideologies are fueled by a sense of threat - kept at bay through a fortress-like structure called the ideological square.
It makes sense that states with the most progressive tax systems often get into fiscal trouble. High earners have especially volatile incomes.
A new study for the Mercatus Center at George Mason University ranks each US state’s financial health based on key fiscal obligations.
These considerations wouldn’t matter so much is there were no costs to actions/policies based on worst case scenarios. If all actions and their effects were equal, then go with the worst case! Nothing to lose and everything to gain!
The AMA campaigned against Medicare, FDR’s efforts to include health insurance with Social Security, Harry Truman’s universal-insurance scheme, and Bill Clinton’s healthcare plans.
Some neural networks are associated with attention capture, where the stimulus rules. Other networks are associated with attention deployment, where goals rule.
...attitude is rooted in 19th Century romantic aesthetics, in which emotion, imagination, freedom from rules, and spontaneity are opposed to soulless capitalism and the instrumentalist mindset it engenders.
Of course there are reasons other than I've discussed why healthcare spending is so much higher in the US than other developed countries. Drug costs play a role, as do high administrative costs and patient characteristics (e.g., demanding, non-compliant and obese).
...specialists get paid more in The Netherlands and Australia, but the healthcare systems in those countries use GPs as gatekeepers, meaning to see a specialist, your GP has to refer you to one. Gatekeeping is an important cost-containment measure... Gatekeeping is not nearly as widespread in the US.
...a hospital stay in the US is over $18,000 on average. The countries that come closest to spending as much — Canada, the Netherlands, Japan — spend between $4,000 and $6,000 less per stay.
The imminent dismantling of Obamacare is a shame and an opportunity to do it better next time. Two main challenges: reining in cost and achieving universal coverage. This series will address the cost issue.
Education, healthcare, healthy food, safety, and housing: those are the basic goods governments should strive to provide for all citizens. Plus some type of safety net...
Patriotism is devotion and loyalty to one’s country. Some say patriotism is the author of all sorts of ills. It easily morphs into its ugly cousin Nationalism, that bully with a superiority complex. By favoring one’s own country over others, patriotism encourages the denigration, hatred or distrust of others, making violations of human rights more acceptable.
There are two ways we dehumanize others: focus on their machine-like qualities or stress their animal nature. Mechanistic dehumanization characterizes people as unemotional, cold, and rule-bound, like robots or automatons. Animalistic dehumanization portrays people as overly emotional, impulsive, and childlike.
Helping people in the short term may lead them to make decisions that harm them in the long run. No, this isn’t some cranky diatribe against the welfare state or an argument for tough love. It’s more a plea for activists and politicians to look beyond the intended impact of do-good laws and to seriously consider trade-offs and potential unintended consequences.
Trump supporters are often portrayed as economically stressed victims of globalization and the decline of US manufacturing, worried about job security and stagnating incomes. But as the last post documented, they do not appear to be plagued by trouble finding work. By and large, Trump Country has low unemployment rates.