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Politics and Economics
In its original Founding-Father sense, happiness was akin to felicity, a kind of well-being that comes from living a purposeful and productive life. Today we would call that sense of well-being flourishing. …So what does a government need to do to create conditions conducive to flourishing? Put differently, what does a government need to do to increase the sense of control and self-efficacy of its citizens, allowing them to pursue purposeful and productive lives?
Basically, “cost-burdened” means paying more than 30% of household income on housing expenses. What the above chart tells us is that the cost of housing is a burden for most households with incomes under $30,000 a year. About a quarter of US households earn less than $30,000 a year.
“How on earth could young people, whose wages are flat…dare question the larger economic forces in their lives?!” - Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. …So, what’s happening with wages? I have a source for that: the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, which tracks wage trends in the US. Here’s a recent Atlanta Fed chart on wage growth by income quartile over the past 20 years:
“In conclusion, capitalism is a fun and efficient way to consolidate all the world's resources in the control of a tiny group of massively rich individuals at the expense of everyone else.” - Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
My takeaway from these survey results is that how we feel about disparities in income and wealth has a lot to do with how much we think ...people have control over their circumstances...luck figures in life outcomes ...the rules of the game are fair ...people deserve what they get…
Per the above chart, about a third of US asylum-seekers in 2017 were from three small countries: El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. This is especially the case for “defensive” asylum-seekers - that is, those who are defending themselves in immigration court, because they were denied asylum by an immigration official, caught trying to cross the border illegally, or for some other reason.
The net effect of all these asylum applications is system overwhelm. Over a year ago, the USCIS had already declared a huge backlog of asylum cases. To quote a January 31, 2018 USCIS news release:
“The agency currently faces a crisis-level backlog of 311,000 pending asylum cases as of Jan. 21, 2018, making the asylum system increasingly vulnerable to fraud and abuse. This backlog has grown by more than 1750 percent over the last five years, and the rate of new asylum applications has more than tripled.”
Back in 1964, Historian Richard Hofstadter wrote the now-classic “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” for Harper’s Magazine. According to Hofstadter, this style of mind was characterized by “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy”…Hofstadter goes on:
“Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish….”
Not that these survey results are implausible. Plenty of peer-reviewed studies have revealed today’s millionaires to be frugal, hard-working, and mostly from middle-class backgrounds. They buy boring cars. They’re diligent savers. This is not new information - twenty years ago academics Thomas Stanley and William Danko found that 80% of US millionaires were first-generation rich. That is, they did not inherit their wealth.
This year’s Green New Deal (GND) repeats the claim that “global warming at or above 2 degrees Celsius beyond preindustrialized levels will cause…a loss of more than 99 percent of all coral reefs on Earth”. The GND references an October 2018 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). I reviewed the IPCC report’s references and this is what I found…
For those who want to understand the Other Side better, a few do’s: …Strive to be humble about your own grasp of the relevant facts…
And a few don’ts: Mindread – that is, ignore the other side’s expressed thoughts and motivations in favor of what you consider their “real” thoughts and motivations. …
What’s a technocrat? Admirers would say someone who approaches problems and challenges with the mindset of a scientist or engineer, seeking out information from credible sources, confronting their own ignorance, changing their minds when the evidence calls for it, taking disagreement seriously, and gladly accepting criticism to avoid error, because they devoutly wish to get it right. …What’s an ideologue? …
In the debate, supporters of the Green New Deal came back with:
Other ideas are just cover for capitalist yearnings
Nothing significant is being done to combat climate change
There is no serious alternative to the Green New Deal
The Green New Deal is our only hope to avert catastrophe
What I see [in this list of the ten most unequal states] is southern states, rich states, and New Jersey. Compared to other US states, all but Florida have high unemployment and all but New Jersey and Connecticut have high poverty rates and low median household income.
It appears that states with the lowest level of inequality also have low unemployment rates (except for that huge outlier, Alaska*). They also tend to be rural, vote Republican, and do somewhat better than other states on median household income, poverty rates, and the composite measure of well-being. Of course, we don’t know cause-and-effect here.
So what happened - especially between 1970 and the early 2000s when the savings rate bottomed out? It wasn’t because Americans increasingly couldn’t afford to save; it was because they increasingly choose not to. Consider…
Most chief executives make less than the average physician. Yes, there are super-star executives who make an obscene amount of money - but they are the exception, not the rule….the top 1% are mostly owners of partnerships and small (‘S’) corporations. These “pass-through” business owners earn more, on average, than major shareholders of the big ‘C’ corporations.
The capacity to imagine future danger and take constructive steps to avert it is called “adaptive anticipation”. Adaptive adaptation starts with sensitivity to threat. It ends with effective problem solving.
According to this trope, the Fearful Conservative is afraid of change and uncertainty, clinging to the safe harbor of habit and tradition, overly controlled, troubled by bad dreams and distressed by disorder. In so many words: fear makes conservatives stupid. The authors usually bolster their case with a few studies and quotes from “experts”, which can be hard to refute if you don’t know what they’re leaving out - namely, evidence to the contrary.
One thing the articles and opinion pieces don’t mention is the decades of research on personality and political attitudes, covering tens of thousands of participants. And that research is, well, unequivocal: conservatism is not associated with anxiety or fear - it’s most strongly associated with Conscientiousness.