“…Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes understood that great revelations create great enemies. He once warned: “You never need think you can overturn any old falsehood without a terrible squirming and scattering of the horrid little population that dwells under it.”
“When inequality loses its association with hope and instead becomes interpreted as a signal of a rigged society, higher inequality relates to lower well-being” (Buttrick, N. R., S. J. Heintzelman, et al., 2017).
More land for agriculture means less land for grasslands, wetlands, and forests. Looking at the Big Picture, "sparing" the wild things is better than "sharing" with them. Of course, there will always be exceptions, but that's the general rule.
There are things I care about… I want the biosphere to survive, relatively intact. I want every human to have a home… The list goes on. There's no way to justify the list. No first principles that can withstand scrutiny.
... Averaged across the above groups, 24% of Republicans surveyed by Pew considered economic inequality to be a "very big" problem, compared to 62% of the Democrats surveyed.
...ideologues tend to exaggerate societal problems, the better to justify their Big Solution. Big Solutions need to be justified when they require painful sacrifice (the darkness before the dawn), as they often do. That pain had better be worth it. Hence: Big Solutions need Big Problems.
Point is, no one has an emotional reaction to inequality without a sense of what it speaks to. Inequality is a concept for God's sake. It's not at the same level of concreteness as, say, a snake slithering in the grass.
The above game is an example of what I call an "Act of God" study design, in which researchers (playing God) randomly dole out good and bad fortune to study participants, typically in the form of monetary payments.
Here’s the thing: yeah, what with pesticides, fertilizer run-off, and habitat encroachment, farmers haven't done birds any favors - but that's not the whole story of declining bird populations. Nature will not simply revert back to some pristine state if we give back what we took: sorry - the habitat is yours now - multiply and prosper!
If 80% of wild plants depend on insects for pollination, the decline of insects spells trouble for just about all birds, not just the insect-eating ones. So what can we do?
For the most part, these are longstanding Republican complaints against the Democratic Party. What's changed over the years is the intensity of feeling that accompanies the complaints...
Prone to anxiety? The machinery will tilt towards the threat potential in its representations, systematically reviewing the possibilities. Confident and optimistic? The machinery will tilt towards images of success and triumph, but not dwell on them because no preparation is required for what may come. We already know we can handle whatever is thrown our way, and it will be good.
This is the exploration process: questions are paths, you keep going down them until you reach a clearing - some light! Then you look around and find another path/question. Repeat. Hope for partial illumination (a clearing!). Yeah, some people think they can achieve total illumination: out of the woods at last! I'm skeptical about the 'total' part, yet ever hopeful another clearing is just down the road. All the while aware that some problems require decisive and timely action, even though the light could be better.
"...estimates a seasonal decline of 76%, and mid-summer decline of 82% in flying insect biomass over the 27 years of study."
Even when we think we're doing the right thing as an "end-in-itself", there is an implicit assumption that the world will turn out better (at least in the "long term") if we simply focused on the action itself, consequences be damned. Basically, it's a heuristic that resolves a lot of ethical dilemmas. We need heuristics because life is complicated; we can't think through everything.
Is it any wonder that a lot of Republicans soured on the environmental movement or came to doubt the "consensus" on climate change? Sure, as members of a pro-business/limited government party, it's not surprising that Republicans would be a bit less gung-ho about environmental regulation than Democrats. But that doesn't explain the change in Republican opinion over the last decade or so.
Some government programs have already been shown to reduce chronic and transient poverty. One multi-year study found that the following government benefits combined reduced the chronic US poverty rate from 10.8% to 2.1%...What more can be done? Lots! Just a few ideas...
At the debate, UBI advocates dismissed these predictions as overly speculative, maintaining that possible risks could be managed. Their main argument was that a generous UBI was called for because Americans are suffering and their situation will keep getting worse without a major overhaul of the social contract. More specifically: poverty, income volatility, job instability and stalled social mobility are a plague upon the country and the only cure is a universal basic income. ...So let's look at these Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse:
According to every recent survey I've read, Trump supporters are well aware of the President's character defects and many don't agree with all his policies, yet they continue to support this vile man because they trust his overall policy instincts, don't mind or even enjoy the show he puts on, and/or really, really hate the Democrats.
But wait! Won’t robots and AI free us from the need for labor? So can't we just ignore all the evidence re work disincentives and labor market participation?