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Politics and Economics
When the current darkness lifts and partisan animosity is softened by the spirit of collective problem-solving, we could do worse than return to the ancient texts for understanding and advice. One such text is What is Driving U.S. Health Care Spending: America's Unsustainable Health Care Cost Growth by the Bipartisan Policy Center
...by the time you hit the median income in the US, chances are (like 91%) you are very happy or fairly happy.
Keep in mind the above chart is about tax revenue, not tax rates. The average OECD tax revenue is 34.2% of a country's GDP. The US revenue take is 25.9%. Denmark's is the highest, at 49.6% of GDP. Take home: the USA doesn't tax its citizens all that much, compared to its OECD brethren.
This mission is not all that different from that of a parent: provide a secure base while encouraging the child to leave its safety to explore the world. And thereby suffer and thrive.
Individuals who favor "avoidance goals" tend to feel less in control, less satisfied with their progress, and less competent than individuals with lots of "approach goals". In other words, their happiness feeder streams have become mere trickles.
Personal initiative is a proactive and goal-oriented mindset, characterized by long-term focus and persistence in the face of obstacles and setbacks. Such a mindset is action-oriented, planful, and anticipatory: quickly turning goals into actions - with back-up plans ready just in case.
...the wisdom of deficit spending depends on the economic cycle. If stuck in a recession, deficit spending can be helpful to give the economy a boost. But...
2.6%: the median profit margin at an independently owned fast-food restaurant, about a percentage point more at a corporately-owned location
Americans are still a fairly socially mobile people, but part of the population is stuck. What can the US government do to help these folk? Some ideas...
If I'm a roofer living in a working class neighborhood, I'm not measuring my status against super-rich CEOs or Hollywood superstars, I'm looking at how my relatives, neighbors, friends, associates, and fellow roofers are doing.
Ideally, governments seek to create conditions conducive to the pursuit of happiness. These would be conditions that foster the individual's sense of control and purpose, especially in the quest for social connection and status.
...happiness as felicity contains multitudes: a sweet and humble sense of well-being that comes from productive labor in harmony with one's nature and the world, mixed with gratitude for one's good fortune and satisfaction at being able to share the fruits of one's labor.
When Thomas Jefferson penned the Mighty Declaration, happiness was more than "being in the zone" or an internal state that accompanies smiling and laughing. Happiness was frickin' virtuous! Happiness was akin to felicity, a sense of wellbeing that comes from fruitful labor in harmony with the world.
The idea of relative poverty recognizes that basic needs extend beyond the merely material and include markers of status and belonging within a particular society. But "society" is an abstract concept. Society doesn't act on the individual directly but through intermediaries: family, intimates, friends, acquaintances, neighbors, teachers, co-workers, peers, public figures, the media - to name a few.
Rational Choice Theory (RCT) is not a theory about human nature. It's an idealized model that helps economists and political scientists make hypotheses and predictions..."Rational" doesn't mean uninfluenced by "desires, novelty, status" or what have you. It means choosing actions that somehow help achieve goals
The other side of income is spending. Income by itself is a meaningless concept. What matters is what that income can buy. If income goes up 100% but prices for necessary stuff goes up 200%, well you're a whole lot poorer than you used to be.
Of course details matter. A super modest UBI might take the edge off of poverty without disincentivizing work and have little effect on tax rates or revenues. But what constitutes "super modest"?
To keep the Republican party in check, Trump has to keep his troops motivated. He has to tweet. He has to balance presidential displays with divisive rabble-rousing. A reasonable and humble Trump would lose his base and therefore the power to punish those who cross him.
"Technical manuals for 47 interest inventories were used, yielding 503,188 respondents. Results showed that men prefer working with things and women prefer working with people, producing a large effect size (d _ 0.93) on the Things–People dimension."
- Su, Rounds and Armstrong (2009) Men and things, women and people: A meta-analysis of sex differences in interests.
Are male engineers simply more sexist and less welcoming of female students and coworkers than, say, male doctors and lawyers? Why would that be? If we were only talking about the perniciousness of men, we would expect similar gender patterns in a broad range of traditionally male-dominated occupations. But we don't. There's something special about engineering.