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The world is not falling apart: The trend lines

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Re: The world is not falling apart: The trend lines

#71

Post by JanezStupar »

austerity wrote: post #63
diafygi wrote: post #13

Great! We're better overall than we were! No reason to rest on our laurels, though. How can we be better than we are now? Here's some areas that aren't doing too well: 1. Climate Change - We're in store for a lot of trouble over the next few decades[1]. How will we manage? 2. Wealth Inequality - The gap is widening[2]. How do we reverse the trend? 3. Gerrymandering/voter suppression - The ones in power are the ones w…

Why should I care about the relative wealth of the rich instead of absolute wealth of the poor?

This is the key question for me too.

Nowadays a blue collar worker (at least here in EU) has better living conditions than the wealthiest and more powerful mere hundred years ago.

Nowadays nobody has to die because of bad teeth and everybody has access to cheap and effective education and through that to other means of production.

Re: The world is not falling apart: The trend lines

#72

Post by happyscrappy »

ps4fanboy wrote: post #30
diafygi wrote: post #13

Great! We're better overall than we were! No reason to rest on our laurels, though. How can we be better than we are now? Here's some areas that aren't doing too well: 1. Climate Change - We're in store for a lot of trouble over the next few decades[1]. How will we manage? 2. Wealth Inequality - The gap is widening[2]. How do we reverse the trend? 3. Gerrymandering/voter suppression - The ones in power are the ones w…

> 1. Climate Change Unless the group think around nuclear power changes climate change doesnt stand a chance in hell. EDIT: I would be interested hearing from peoples points of view for those who are downvoting.

We could easily ditch nuclear altogether if we could find an efficient way to store power.

Re: The world is not falling apart: The trend lines

#74

Post by gjm11 »

RodericDay wrote: post #51

Steven Pinker has built a writing career out of telling people who are doing really well that everything is fine and that they should keep on enjoying.

He has built a writing career out of writing books about cognitive science and language, and then more recently diversified into history and writing style.

Exactly one of his books, so far as I can tell, has anything to do with telling anyone "that everything is fine". But it doesn't claim that everything is fine (only that violence is on a long downward trajectory).

I'm guessing that your real objection is to The Blank Slate, which you see as justifying entrenched discrimination. I'm not at all convinced that it does any such thing, but in any case it's a long way from "Pinker wrote one book that some wealthy right-wingers might find comforting" to "Pinker's writing career is built on comforting wealthy right-wingers".

Re: The world is not falling apart: The trend lines

#75

Post by growupkids »

tim333 wrote: post #64
ps4fanboy wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. Climate Change Unless the group think around nuclear power changes climate change doesnt stand a chance in hell. EDIT: I would be interested hearing from peoples points of view for those who are downvoting.

There are other CO2 free options apart from nuclear. If you believe solar installation is increasing exponentially a la Kurzweil then we'll soon have enough solar http://bigthink.com/think-tank/ray-kurzweil-solar-will-power... You can argue solar / wind is already cheaper and the differential is only going to grow http://cleantechnica.com/2014/04/26/wind-solar-can-generate-... Fair enough at the moment wind/solar don…

Doesnt use of natural gas have an adverse impact on climate change?

Re: The world is not falling apart: The trend lines

#77

Post by ctdonath »

aryehof wrote: post #24

> England, Canada, and most other industrialized countries... England isn't a country. Constantly referring to it as one, was a distraction from the contents for me.

"America" isn't, strictly speaking, "The United States of America" - but when people use the term, we all know of which is spoken. Likewise "England".

Can't resist...

Guildenstern: I don't believe in it anyway.

Rosencrantz: What?

Guildenstern: England.

Rosencrantz: Just a conspiracy of cartographers, then?

Re: The world is not falling apart: The trend lines

#78

Post by david_b »

austerity wrote: post #63
diafygi wrote: post #13

Great! We're better overall than we were! No reason to rest on our laurels, though. How can we be better than we are now? Here's some areas that aren't doing too well: 1. Climate Change - We're in store for a lot of trouble over the next few decades[1]. How will we manage? 2. Wealth Inequality - The gap is widening[2]. How do we reverse the trend? 3. Gerrymandering/voter suppression - The ones in power are the ones w…

Why should I care about the relative wealth of the rich instead of absolute wealth of the poor?

In many countries exerting influence in the democratic process is heavily tied to the monetary resources of the person doing the influencing. Given that mechanism it might be easier to remove the wealth inequality than to dismantle the inequality in the democratic process directly.

Re: The world is not falling apart: The trend lines

#79

Post by parasubvert »

maxerickson wrote: post #55
fixedd wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Pinker uses the phrase as a metaphor for four human motivations that, he writes, can "orient us away from violence and towards cooperation and altruism,"[2] namely: empathy, self-control, the "moral sense," and reason. All of which are contrary to religious fundamentalism... which worries me as a US citizen.

Why? Fundamentalists are noisy, but they aren't a majority. Catholics are the largest group, probably followed by the various types of non practitioners (I'm including atheists and people that "aren't sure" together there, I think it's fair to say that "not sure" is a ways away from fundamentalist). It's harder to sort out the protestants, but the more moderate "mainline" groups certainly have more influence than the…

If you've been watching Pope Francis lately, it's providing a strong contrast against fundamentalism, which he has even decried as a disease in the church that needs to end.

Re: The world is not falling apart: The trend lines

#80

Post by unclebucknasty »

JanezStupar wrote: post #70
eli_gottlieb wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing economically inevitable about spending public subsidy on the rich instead of the poor.

How did you get public subsidy into discussion anyway? I have posted a simple question. What if large asset control inequality is inevitable? Is bringing down the wealthy, so that a new class of wealthy takes over and possibly destroying large means of the assets in process benefit society? Thus far that is the biggest outcome generated by previous attempts at decreasing inequality.

>How did you get public subsidy into discussion

See sd8f9iu's comment below. For instance:

"If congress passes a tax cut for the top 1%, that increases inequality, not because some group has suddenly "found a way to farm more efficiently"

That is, public subsidy is naturally a part of the discussion.

>What if large asset control inequality is inevitable?

There is nothing "inevitable" about asset control because there is nothing "inevitable" about our economic system. It is all a function of the choices that we make, so you are begging the question to some degree.

Some of the choices are related to, say, tax-policy, as noted. But, the system itself is one that we have constructed from the ground up to allocate resources (from property rights to market function to fiat currency). We've created ALL of the rules from whole cloth, so how can we turn around and say, "well, that's inevitable", as if nature has decided?

>Is bringing down the wealthy, so that a new class of wealthy takes over...

This is a strawman similar to monkeypiza's comment above. "Bringing down the wealthy", creating a new class of wealthy that "takes over", etc. are not the stated desire or inevitable result of making the system more equitable. It's not a binary proposition.

When we have, say, tax code that favors capital over labor, while we simultaneously assault unionization, the outcome is clearly skewed in one direction. Surely, you see that these factors are out of balance in disfavor of one group. And, if so (and your interest is in fairness), then you would have to flip your original argument in the other direction.

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