361–369 of 369 posts
The title/article seems to be a bit of a strawman, AFAICT countries (or their governments / citizens) do not consider the GDP as the one and only measure of national success. Politics are driven by tons of different interest groups (in the broadest sense, ranging from corporate interests, environmental activists, minority representatives, medical or teaching professionals, farmers, retirees living on state pensions,…
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The Gini coefficient is a pure measure of inequality, you can "improve" it while making literally everyone worse off (e.g. destroy all things of value in your country, now everyone has nothing and you have perfect equality).
I mean if you "destroy all things of value in your country" I don't think you're going to be concerned about economic measures whether GDP or Gini, so isn't that kind of a red herring?
Robert Kennedy, on the campaign trail in 1968: "Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product - if we judge the United States of America by that - that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising…
This is a BS political speech and it is very politically motivated. When you can't fix the economy (get GDP up), just claim the GDP doesn't matter. My country's president just claimed we should focus on National Happiness Product. Of course, when all your economical policies fail, economy is just numbers. And no, having an accident doesn't increase GDP. If the passengers dies, that will remove their GDP from society.…
The GDP was expanding at a fantastic rate, at the time. The 1960s were the last decade of strong economic growth, the USA has not seen anything like it in the last 50 years. Only the end of the 1990s seemed to briefly revive the golden years of the post-war boom.
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They aren't. The EU is in the news right now because they cracked down on nuclear and fossil fuels and - after succeeding - ended up in an energy crisis. You can see what countries trying to secure cheap energy do by looking at China and India - lots of coal, lots of oil, bring on as much capacity in nuclear and renewables as they can. They're playing with effectively 4x as many sources of energy as the EU despite th…
> The EU is in the news right now because they cracked down on nuclear and fossil fuels and - after succeeding - ended up in an energy crisis. They allowed the fossil fuel lobby to severely curtail their renewable installations and had a quarter of their nuclear reactors fail. Then had a massive source of gas disappear. The renewables are working exactly as advertised. Seems like a pretty good argument for more of th…
The Europeans have shrinking access to electricity, so they effectively must have negative absolute growth on fossil fuels and I suspect negative or near 0 growth of nuclear (not going to check, so maybe someone is doing the sensible thing and building some nuclear plants and I haven't read about it). They have a long way to go to get towards the sort of success China is managing.
They need a lot of renewables to recover from their serious policy screw ups. They don't seem to have been able to build it that quickly! Hopefully they manage before there is a really bad winter.
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And shortly thereafter, he was assassinated. Another historical "fun fact", is that MLK wasn't assassinated while pushing for civil rights. He was killed once he shifted his focus to financial injustice and wealth inequality. Two might not be a pattern, but it's no accident these historical figures were both challenging the deep pockets status quo and they both died prematurely.
Robert Kennedy was the son of the equivalent of a billionaire and the brother of a President. He was the status quo.
This was back in the day when someone wealthy could run for public office without backing of fellow zillionaires and succeed.
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it might. It might, if we didn't split votes by district, then by county, then by state, and bundle them. It might if our representation weren't purposefully skewed to favor states with let populations. It might if there were runoff voting. It might if there weren't an electoral college, circumventing all that already miserable voting procedure. It might if voting we're a national holiday. It might if we had a choice…
Yes, the things you believe in are ostensibly 1/250000000th the importance of the sum total of what everyone in the U.S. believes in. For example, if the 'political zeitgeist' your referring to is comprised of 50 million eligible voters, and if the other 200 million are fence sitters on believe in another 'zeitgeist', then it's in fact correct for the U.S. as a country to completely ignore the 50 million. i.e. to blo…
I'm talking about how many roadblocks there are between a vote and a policy change, of any stripe.
The fact is, if we all agreed on something, it still wouldn't matter. The process of voting would not see that idea through to any meaningful realization - which sort of defeats the purpose of voting, doesn't it?
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"decent living standards" are a moving target; the definition is always relative to what is currently possible. in mill's time, this might have amounted to having a roof to sleep under and a reliable source of calories. germ theory of disease was just starting to gain acceptance in the latter part of his lifetime. today we seriously consider providing free healthcare to all, and in some countries this is already a re…
In any major city in even the wealthiest of nations it isn't hard to find people who don't have a roof to sleep under and a reliable source of calories. For large portions of the population, things are definitely better than they were 200 years ago. But we are still a long ways away from decent living standards being assured to everyone.
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You must have misunderstood my comment. Only one of my examples might conceivably be delayed. One is explicitly being reversed, and the other is protection of a vulnerable group regardless of majority status. My point isn’t that democracy fails to represent the will of the people. Democracy is more complicated than that, in some ways more flawed and in some ways better.
> One is explicitly being reversed, and the other is protection of a vulnerable group regardless of majority status. The “reversed” case is because people don’t actually care enough to elect representatives that reflect those views. There is a Democratic majority house, senate, and president. Why isn’t abortion protected? > and the other is protection of a vulnerable group regardless of majority status It’s protected…
Because voters aren’t prone to magical thinking, and they don’t elect unicorns. Why don’t we vote for the candidates who don’t exist? The world may never know.