This from a Tennessee State University document titled Defining Citizenship and Civic Engagement:
“Attempting to define civic responsibility can be a daunting task because of frequently overlapping constructs, values, and interpretations. Indeed, the very mention of the term civic responsibility evokes notions of what it means to live in a democracy, in addition to the complementary ideas of citizenship, social responsibility, civic engagement, and community involvement. [But here goes…] Civic responsibility means active participation in the public life of a community in an informed, committed, and constructive manner, with a focus on the common good.”
Many states, including North Carolina, require offenders to undergo a Risk and Need Assessment (RNA), which helps criminal justice officials target interventions to reduce recidivism. For example, prisons use RNAs to identify programs inmates should attend while incarcerated. Probation and parole agencies use them to develop an offender’s supervision plan and inform responses to violations. RNAs, supplemented by criminal records, are also used to classify an offender’s level of risk and need, from Minimal to Extreme. These classifications turn out to be rather good predictors of recidivism…
Mmmm…82% of the probationers in 2019 had prior arrests and 59% had been placed on probation before. Around a third were previously incarcerated felons. Of probationers with prior arrests, over half had been arrested three or more times. In other words, a lot of repeat offenders are being put on probation in North Carolina - somewhat ironic given the 1994 sentencing reform was supposed to divert more repeat offenders to prison. Don’t get me wrong, though. I’m not against probation for all repeat offenders…
Throughout this series of posts, I’ll be using North Carolina as a case study, partly because the state implemented major sentencing reforms in 1994 and 2011, so enough time has passed to detect possible effects. Just a important, North Carolina has great data.
Mmmm. Why do Iowa and Kansas have such low poverty levels?
Intuitions about right and wrong clash in moral dilemmas. These dilemmas activate a moral trade-off system designed for resolving conflicts among moral values. Examples of moral values include fairness, reciprocity, responsibility, care, entitlement, merit, loyalty, and honesty. When asked to resolve moral dilemmas, many people made compromise judgments, which strike a balance between conflicting moral values by partially satisfying at least some of them. The moral tradeoff system delivers that solution as an intuitive moral judgment. (paraphrasing Guzman et al, 2022)
Why do some people seem more deserving of government assistance than others?
Social scientists have been exploring this question for decades. Much of the research has focused on the criteria people use to judge the “deservingness” of the vulnerable and poor.
“One year ago, a damning investigation uncovered that 888 units of S.F’s permanent supportive housing were sitting empty. Those numbers have gotten worse…A year ago, when the average time between being approved for housing and handed keys was 85 days, the city said it was aiming to cut the time to 30 to 45 days. But last week, when asked what progress they’d made, officials disclosed that wait times had actually gone up. In fact, they’ve more than doubled. It now takes an average of five months, or around 150 days, to move someone experiencing homelessness into a home. That’s a shameful length of time for a program allotted $356 million each year.” San Francisco Chronicle, March 5, 2023
Many individuals have ideological tendencies – that is, they tend to righteous fervor and conviction, especially when it comes to politics. How about groups? Specifically, are some political groups more ideological than others? That is, do members of these groups hold their opinions and values with greater fervor and conviction than members of other groups? And how would you know?
Unfortunately, finding a cheap place to live in San Francisco is a near-impossibility. For example, I found no rental listings under $800/month during a recent Zillow search and just six listing under $1000/month (5 of which were teeny studios)…On the same day as my San Francisco Zillow search, I checked out the rental market in Houston and this is what I found: 504 results for rentals up to $1000/month and 136 results for up to $800/month.
I belong to a local debate club. Members exchange views on various political and cultural topics, mostly online since Covid although we’ll be resuming in-person meetups this year. Below is a recent email exchange among a few of our members…
The Houston Homeless Count found 3,223 persons experiencing homelessness on the day of its 2022 Point-in-Time (PIT) Count, or approximately one out of 1,916 residents… San Francisco’s Homeless Count of 2022 found 7,754 individuals experiencing homelessness. With a population of 815,201 (2021), that would be a homelessness rate of approximately one out of 105 residents.
Something to ponder: is achieving some of the Moral Good now better than achieving more of the Moral Good later? Given that increasingly later is increasingly uncertain, at what point of later/uncertainty should one just say “screw it” and commit to action? (The answer, as always: it depends).
It appears that most of this wealth is wrapped up in bonds, stocks and businesses, where it helps fund the country’s public and private investment and operations. If the federal government were to implement a wealth tax, rich folks would likely have to take money out of their holdings and businesses to pay the tax. Ideally, the holdings and businesses would not lose value as a result.
Wealth is your overall financial picture, including all your assets. Assets can be considered anything of value that can be converted into cash, including things like cash itself, real estate holdings, investments, and personal property. According to the Federal Reserve, as of September 30, 2022, the combined assets of US households and nonprofit organizations were worth about $162.5 trillion - $54.8 trillion in non-financial assets (e.g., housing, land, machinery, vehicles) and $107.7 trillion in financial assets. Here’s the Fed’s breakdown of financial assets…
And I got to thinking…tax rates are a poor indicator of what US households actually pay in taxes. Economists know this…
The biggest threat to biodiversity is loss of habitat. Agriculture is the main driver of habitat loss on the planet and a major source of greenhouse gas emissions. Climate change will reduce agricultural productivity unless crops become more resilient. GM crops require less land and are more resilient than conventional and organic crops.
In other words, if carrots and sticks change the behavior, then the person has at least some control over the behavior, which is another way of saying: if one is able to engage in goal-directed behavior (e.g. approach carrot, avoid stick), one is responsible to some degree for one’s actions and the outcomes of those actions…That’s where “stigma” comes in. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), “stigma in the context of health is the negative association between a person or group of people who share certain characteristics and a specific disease, including mental illness”. And per the voluminous literature on stigma, a common stigmatizing stereotype associated with mental health disorders such as drug addiction is that people are responsible for their condition.
Moral hazard is a situation where individuals have an incentive to increase their exposure to risk because they do not bear the full costs of that risk. I’m guessing a possible moral hazard associated with needle exchange programs is that these programs would lead to greater drug abuse by reducing the perceived risks of needles. And with opioids, more drug abuse would mean a higher likelihood of death by overdose.
President Clinton eventually signed the the Kyoto Protocol to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, but he never submitted it to the Senate for ratification. That’s because the Senate had already made it crystal clear that the vote would not go well: just two years before the Senate has passed a resolution 95-0 telling Mr. Clinton not to sign any treaty that committed the US to cut emissions without also requiring undeveloped countries to do so.