In 1994, young adults were more conservative and less liberal than old people. In 2014, it was just the opposite. What happened?
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Politics and Economics
So what is the relationship between inequality, social mobility, and household income?
When people think about how they are “doing”, what is their reference point? Partly their earlier selves, partly people in their social network, and partly people they simply come in contact with at work and in the neighborhood. If they’re going to compare themselves with their parents, they adjust for age: how the parents were doing at their current age. Given that income and wealth peak later in life, the comparison isn’t really compelling until later in life.
“…a four-year old’s openness to a new toy predicts how open she’ll be as an adult to, say, the US forging new relations with Iran and Cuba.” — Robert Sapolsky (2017) Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
What I see here is that the two conservative groups have done rather well, despite their limited education. It makes sense to me that they believe most people can get ahead if they work hard - because, for the most part, that’s how it worked out for them. Is that “system justification”, or simply believing in the system upon the evidence of their own lives?
Unfortunately, cheaper drugs and administration would not come even close to paying for Sanders’ Medicare-for-all plan. That’s because the high cost of US healthcare is driven by over-testing, over-treatment, overpriced procedures, and overpaid doctors. Check it out:
Why is it is so much easier to commit fraud against Medicare than against private insurance companies? Partly because the Medicare billing system is easy to game (see, for instance, “upcoding” and “inflated risk scores”) and partly because Medicare doesn’t require preauthorization as a condition of payment…
But what about those high administrative costs? According to The Commonwealth Fund, the share of hospital costs devoted to administration is 25% in the US, compared to 20% in The Netherlands, 16% in England, and just 12% in Canada. That sounds pretty damning, but it’s important to remember that administrative costs are often unrelated to insurance matters or are dual-purpose.
We want the pharma wolf to be healthy - not fat and not lean. Robust enough to survive inevitable dips in revenue. So how much could the US cut drug prices without undermining ongoing innovation in the industry?
Most Americans support “Medicare-for-all”, at least when described very broadly as "a publicly financed, privately delivered system with all Americans enrolled and all medically necessary services covered." But would they support Bernie Sander’s Medicare-for-all plan if well-informed of its details? Let’s look at some of those details, starting with what would be covered and how costs would be controlled. This straight from Bernie's online description…
Subprime loans did not become a significant part of the mortgage market until the 1990s. They were just 8% of the market in 2002….However, subprime mortgages did rise to about 20% of new home loans by 2006. How many of these were the result of predatory practices?
Most employers are having trouble filling job openings these days. The economy’s just too hot. But labor shortages have existed in some occupations for years - even during the Great Recession and its immediate aftermath. Consider…
There are Job-Jobs and then there are Career-Jobs. If you’re trying to decide on a Career-Job, chances are you’ve looked into typical wages of various occupations. Problem is, “typical” is a pretty meaningless term. Websites will likely steer you to “median” wages , meaning the midpoint of the wage distribution, i.e., half the job holders earn less, half earn more. But if you’re truly looking for a career - by which I mean an occupation you want to hold at least ten years - then you have to look at the whole pay range.
The FBI released its 2017 Hate Crime Statistics report a couple days ago. The report was covered by a bunch of news outlets, but the stories were mostly a rehash of the FBI’s relatively short press release. Few reporters dived into the detailed data tables that accompanied the report. I found none that compared the 2017 data to the previous year’s numbers. But I did.
To be pragmatic doesn’t mean one is shallow or selfish, lacking compassion or ideals. Pragmatists may be motivated by a strong sense of right and wrong, but they’re likely to keep their emotions in check in the service of whatever moral good they’re trying to achieve. That’s because strong emotion can make us stupid and short-sighted.
And yet in some other countries, for-profit schools and prisons are considered an improvement on their government-run counterparts. For-profit schools are doing wonders for poor children in India and Nigeria and for-profit prisons are widely accepted and praised in Australia.
The rationale for the proposed $450 billion home ownership program is that home equity is an important source of “iterative wealth building”, especially the use of home equity loans to build businesses and put the kids through college. Current disparities in wealth could therefore be reduced if more people owned homes. But does home equity actually play a significant or essential role in financing business or college educations in America?
The basic idea is that home owners are able to leverage their home equity to move up the economic ladder. Thus, the rationale for the Act is to right historical wrongs through a massive home ownership program to promote economic mobility within previously discriminated communities; hence the name, “American Housing and Economic Mobility Act”. Sounds good but would it work?
Then again, Americans love their specialists – nothing soothes the soul so much as expensive displays of conspicuous compassion.
“The Republicans [walked] away from the 1946 midterms with gains of 56 seats in the House and 13 in the Senate—and majorities in both houses…” - Top 10 Historic Midterm Elections by T.A. Frail/Smithsonian October 13, 2010