Category Archives: Social policy

Greed, Revolution, and Governance

I’m generally very taken with Ian Welsh’s work, particularly two recent posts, A New Ideology and How to Create a Viable Ideology. He then continued with 44 Explicit Points on Creating a Better World. And I hate to say it, but the last piece was no where near as well thought out as the preceding pieces. What troubled me about his latest piece was its combination of confidence (as opposed to modesty and soliciting reactions and input) in combination with it having internal contractions and a lack of precision of language. But perhaps the biggest shortcoming was trying to finesse the question of governance.

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Ilargi: Winter In America Gets Colder – Why We Choose Poverty

We continue to live with the idea of recovery, which in our minds equals a return to what we had, plus added growth. For some of us that may come true, but for a very rapidly increasing number amongst us, it will not. Because, and it’s high time we acknowledge this, at this point in time, the only way the upper echelons of our societies can achieve some level of growth is to take it away from everyone else. And those upper echelons, mind you, demand exponential growth, which means, in a society that cannot grow, that the numbers of poor people will rise exponentially as well.

In reality, we are of course already seeing a huge redistribution of wealth today, only this one increases inequality instead of decreasing it. Which means all those dreams about equal access for everyone to the best health care and education available are long gone. If we would only redistribute wealth in such a way that it would see us return to the level of inequality that existed when those dreams were relevant, 60-odd years ago, much of our poverty conundrum would be solved. It is really as simple as that.

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Obamacare Rollout: Will Insurers Be Hoist on the Enrollment Petard?

The Wall Street Journal looks to have used an interview by Ezra Klein on Obamacare tech woes as the basis for a reported piece on how insurers were having so much trouble with the Federal marketplaces that they were having to check and in some cases process enrollments manually. That’s clearly unworkable at anything resembling the scale of expected participation. But not only does the Journal article corroborate and add more color to an ugly story, but it also mentions a different type of problem, that of eligibility, in passing. That’s actually a hugely important and presumably separate subroutine in the system, and if that is also broken or buggy, it has serious implications of its own.

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Harvard Business School’s Garbage In, Garbage Out “Gender Equity” Experiment

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Readers may have taken note of a long article by Jodi Kantor in the Sunday New York Times magazine celebrating an experiment on the Harvard Business School graduating class of 2013.

The project was deemed a winner. More women students than ever graduated with academic honors. Student satisfaction levels also rose. Unfortunately, if you dig deeper, this “experiment” looks like a “garbage in, garbage out” exercise.

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Why Didn’t OWS Transform Into a Political Movement?

Yves here. I’ve not weighed in on the second anniversary of the start of the Occupy Wall Street anniversary because, truth be told, the movement has gone so local and has so many different faces that I’m not certain it’s possible to make good generalizations without doing a lot of investigation.

This short interview seeks to address one of the expectations for OWS, that it become a political force, and why it was never met

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Third World Watch: Deadly Brain Amoeba Found in US Tap Water

For six years, we’ve discussed off and on how income inequality hurt the health of citizens, even in the top income strata. The US now ranks 27th in life expectancy among 34 advanced economies, down from 20 in 1990.

But in addition to the considerable health dangers of stress and weak social bonds, more obvious public health risks may be coming to the fore.

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Internalization of the Death of the American Dream: A Maine Microcosm

It’s odd to be going about one’s vacation and, like stepping on a rake and having it whack you in the face, stumble into a vignette that apostrophizes how much young people have internalized the fallen state of the American worker.

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Why Progressives Are Lame

Yesterday, we ran a post by Bill McKibben on leadership in social change movements. McKibben argued for a “small l” leader model versus a “big L” leader, which readers debated. Some argued that the Leader model was really code for “Great Man” that was a less viable approach than it once was due to assassinations. Others were struck by the emphasis on distributed leadership, which is an obvious analogy to modern computer and communications networks, and how political commentators to frame their ideas of social order in terms of the technology of the day. Some pointed out that the idea of minimal oversight and control of communities was a long-stading Utopian line of thought, often espoused by people who wound up implementing the exact opposite.

However, I was particularly struck by Dan Kervick’s remark, which came late in the thread:

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Barbara Garson: How to Become a Part-Time Worker Without Really Trying

Yves here. This post by Barbara Garson, which originally appeared at TomDispatch, describes how big companies squeeze down even more on workers by turning what were once full-time jobs into part-time positions to avoid providing benefits and to push pay even lower (workers who are desperate to get more hours will also accept reduced wages, working off the clock, and abusive work conditions).

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