We are not going to save each other, ourselves, America, or the world. But we certainly can leave it a little bit better.
I appreciate this sentiment. Sometimes all of the problems in our world feel overwhelming to take action on, but there are certainly small ways to start making things a little bit better.
This is not a matter of demonizing corporations, but an issue of democratic survival.
I like that the author points out this isn't about demonizing corporations. I've heard arguments that we shouldn't have more accountability for corporations because it would be unfair to them or negatively influence the market. It feels like at some point though, we have to accept that we all live in a shared society and that there's more than just profits at stake for our society.
Corporations speak glibly about downsizing—bureaucratic language that simply means you do not have a job even though we have the highest profits we have had since 1948.
One of the sources I looked at for my exploratory reflective essay said that we wouldn't need universal basic income to help provide income for people if automation continued to increase because the corporations would either use their increased profits from laying people off to lower product prices or to invest in research that would ultimately result in more human jobs. It seems that these extra profits actually end up going to top executives instead though.
Fearmongering will only fuel more conspiracy and continue to drive down trust in quality-information sources and institutions of democracy.
This is an interesting point. There are people who believe most of the mainstream news outlets only provide "fake news" but yet also believe all of the posts they see on Facebook are true. Having such widespread distrust in the media has resulted in people putting their trust into sources that are way less quality than the mainstream media.
Slowing down to check whether content is true before sharing it is far less compelling than reinforcing to your “audience” on these platforms that you love or hate a certain policy.
I wonder if it's an issue of not bothering to slow down and also not even knowing how check whether content is true. It's so easy for people to do a quick Google search and find "evidence" that anything they might be sharing is true.
But research has shown that when people are fearful, oversimplified narratives, conspiratorial explanation, and messages that demonize others become far more effective.
It's unsettling to think that when things are more serious and when we would benefit more from critical analysis, we become less willing or less able to evaluate things critically.
"Stop trying to micromanage the poor and dividing up the 'deserving poor' from the 'undeserving poor.'
I think this is where we end up with a lot of extra administrative costs.
Less expensive, still, would be targeting families with children
This would be an interesting way to address child poverty specifically without the huge cost associated with truly universal basic income. It doesn't seem like it would be too costly from an administrative standpoint either since I would think the government already has social security data that would prove children's ages to prove that families are eligible for the benefit.
we could pay every man, woman and child in the United States $1,610 per year, reducing the overall poverty rate from 15% to 10.8%, for about $500 billion. That's what child poverty, alone, costs the United States each year. Bruenig suggests paying more -- $3,000 per year -- to cut the overall poverty rate in half.
How much would the $10,000 per person given in Cherokee Nation cost?
The results of Costello's longitudinal studies, which compare the lives of children who got the "per cap" payments with those of locals who did not, are staggering. The poorest kids who received the payments were one grade year ahead in school, compared with those who didn't, when researchers checked in with them at age 21. Kids who were lifted out of poverty by the payments saw behavioral problems decrease 40%. For the poorest families, the payments reduced by 22% the odds that children would commit minor crimes by their late teenage years.
I want to look more into this study and how these statistics were obtained.
The payouts were modest at first -- about $500 per person per year, Blythe said. Now the annual sums are more like $10,000 per person.
This may be important to know when considering what effects this program has. Later in the article, the author talks about various plans for how much income to give people and how it's affordable, but none of the plans referenced involved giving people $10,000 per year. So I wonder if that amount would be required in order to have the same outcomes as Cherokee Nation and if that amount would be too expensive to implement.
The basic income continues to have a diverse set of supporters
I wonder if it also has a diverse set of opponents considering it hasn't been implemented large-scale in the United States.
Child poverty costs the United States $500 billion per year, according to University of Chicago research. That includes lost earnings as well as health care and the cost of crime.
I'm wondering how they separate out which portion of costs are attributed to childhood poverty and which would have occurred regardless.
The outcomes of their lives, even the chemistry of their brains, literally can be shaped by it.
I would love to see more science behind this.
Children obviously cannot choose their parents' salaries.
I think it's interesting to target UBI as a way to help children instead of just people in poverty in general because I think a lot of times, people try to make the argument that people who are poor are poor just need to work harder. You can't really make the same argument with children.
Not even Silicon Valley -- home to Facebook, Google and Apple, which is building a new campus that looks like a damn spaceship -- is immune. A third of kids there -- in this epicenter of wealth and prosperity -- are at risk for hunger
This is also surprising too. Our nation is not as wealthy as it appears.
second-highest rate of child poverty in the developed world
Childhood poverty is obviously something important for our nation to address large-scale.
census data show one in five American kids is poor
This is surprisingly large.
The difference between the poor and the non-poor, according to basic income supporters (and basic logic), is just money. Give poor people more of it, and they'll be better off.
I feel like this seems logical at first glance, but there must be more to it. It seems too simple to just expect people to better off with more money alone.
The goal, according to proponents of such a policy, is to alleviate, if not eliminate, the scourge of poverty. And, more importantly, to reduce the social ills -- poor health, poor educational attainment, poor job prospects and higher odds of ending up in jail -- associated with kids who grow up poor.
Potential outcomes for UBI
“The literature on training suggests books and classes are fine entertainment but largely ineffectual. But the game has very large effects. It surprised everyone.”
Maybe instead of just learning about cognitive biases, we have to actually practice actively avoiding them. Maybe this practice builds up a pattern of thinking that we're more likely to use in future situations.
analysts tended to discount such information. Rather than weighing the evidence independently, analysts accepted information that fit the prevailing theory and rejected information that contradicted it.”
That's surprising to me. I've heard about confirmation bias before and knew that it affects individuals in their personal lives. I guess I didn't realize it would have such a large effect on people doing important jobs though. You'd like to think that a high-level analyst would be aware of this bias and have some sort of training to try to reduce its impacts.
That’s the effect that leads us to look for evidence confirming what we already think or suspect, to view facts and ideas we encounter as further confirmation, and to discount or ignore any piece of evidence that seems to support an alternate view.
With the social media silos referenced in Kakutani’s article, we don't even have to only seek out evidence that confirms what we already think. Social media filters out opposing information for us and leads us to think even more that our own ideas are the only ones out there.
If those same students expected on-screen reading to be as slow (and as effortful) as paper reading, would their comprehension of digital text improve?
Maybe digital annotation is a solution to this because it does force you to slow down and think about things the way you're more inclined to do when reading on paper.
and they read each item only once before racing on to the next. Contemporary critics were doubtless appalled, but on the other hand, from that flood of printed matter, we got the Enlightenment, Romanticism, the American and French revolutions.
I think there's a trade-off. Reading the same things multiple times can result in a deeper understanding of that piece of literature. But being exposed to a wide variety of different types of literature and different writers can definitely be enlightening too.
the quantity of information available to the wired reader poses a different and more serious problem.
This also seems like a wonderful opportunity though. Quantity brings lots of different options for content. It also could potentially increase quality overall. If there's only one piece of literature out there about a certain topic, it's hard to know how good the quality is. If there's a lot of material out there, then there's more opportunity for us to judge the quality.
insisting that their disenfranchisement would be merely incidental to his epistocratic plan—a completely different matter, he maintains, from the literacy tests of America’s past, which were administered with the intention of disenfranchising blacks and ethnic whites.
It seems that it would be impossible to have a group of "educated" people who have more education, higher income, are middle-aged men, etc. care about making decisions that would benefit the other groups of society. I don't think all humans are naturally selfless or naturally unbiased,so it seems in Brennan's society, these "uneducated" groups would end up suffering.
In fact, one study he cites shows that even people with excellent math skills tend not to draw on them if doing so risks undermining a cherished political belief.
It seems to not be a problem of education or intelligence in general then. It seems to be a problem of people being too attached to political beliefs and unable to look at political issues objectively. I wonder how Brennan would suggest finding the people "who investigate politics with scientific objectivity".
If the odds that your vote will be decisive are minuscule—Brennan writes that “you are more likely to win Powerball a few times in a row”—then learning about politics isn’t worth even a few minutes of your time.
When put that way, it does make sense that a lot of people feel like there's no point learning about the issues or even voting at all. I wonder if there's a way to make an individual's vote feel more meaningful without just taking away the right to vote from all uneducated people.
government by the knowledgeable
I stumbled across an interesting debate recently for whether we should have some type of education test for people running for president or other high positions in government. I think most people agreed they want people in power who are knowledgeable about the world and current affairs, but there was a concern with who would administer the test and ensure that it was fair and how the questions on the test would be decided. There are many different types of intelligence and they don't all necessarily correlate with being a good government leader.
It would be much safer, Plato thought, to entrust power to carefully educated guardians.
I'm curious how he thought the guardians should be selected in the first place.