Who would have thought when I wrote this that six years later a leading contender for nominee as Republican U.S. presidential candidate would be arguing the same thing in his campaign.
He sums up the problem with U.S. foreign policy nicely: “We don’t mind our own business!”
Fun fact: U.S. military veterans have given more money to Ron Paul’s campaign than all the other campaigns put together.
I chatted with some of my kid’s friends — currently @ university — they paint a picture of their generation as being totally distrustful of government, politicians, the media and the financial system. They view companies as only out to take as much money off them as possible and they see those in power as cynical, self-interested people who don’t have their best interests at heart.
Most don’t read a newspaper and get their news online from a wide range of sources — bloggers, social media etc. Those who are on the escalator to a job and a career are pretty damning about youff culture — the Chav generation — of reality TV, obssessed with celebs and football.
They fully expect the financial system to collapse sooner or later and seem to relish this possibility so that they can fundamentally remould society when it does — more just, less polluting, less violent seems to be the aim.
A new NBER paper finds evidence for an even more intriguing and provocative hypothesis. Its authors note that those near but not at the bottom of the income distribution are often deeply ambivalent about greater redistribution.
Instead of opposing redistribution because people expect to make it to the top of the economic ladder, the authors of the new paper argue that people don’t like to be at the bottom. One paradoxical consequence of this “last-place aversion” is that some poor people may be vociferously opposed to the kinds of policies that would actually raise their own income a bit but that might also push those who are poorer than them into comparable or higher positions. The authors ran a series of experiments where students were randomly allotted sums of money, separated by $1, and informed about the “income distribution” that resulted. They were then given another $2, which they could give either to the person directly above or below them in the distribution.
In keeping with the notion of “last-place aversion”, the people who were a spot away from the bottom were the most likely to give the money to the person above them: rewarding the “rich” but ensuring that someone remained poorer than themselves.
Which might go some way toward explaining why some of the relatively poor in America often oppose raising taxes on the rich.
Jason Burke’s Osama bin Laden obituary for The Guardian perpetuates the myth that the Taliban never offered to hand Bin Laden over:
Faced with an ultimatum, the Taliban again refused to surrender Bin Laden, who initially denied involvement, and an American-led aerial bombing campaign followed.
In fact the Taliban publicly offered in October of 2001 to hand Osama bin Laden over to a third country, provided the U.S. halted the illegal bombing of Afghanistan and produced the necessary evidence about involvement of Bin Laden or any of his associates in the 11 September attacks. Would they have gone through with the offer? We’ll never know because Bush rejected it, putting an end to any possibility of a potentially peaceful, legal resolution to the events of 11 September 2001, and opened up the way for the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, along with the millions who have lost their lives or had them destroyed as a result.
Update: Jason Burke says he’ll correct obituary.
Chris Mooney explains why facts and evidence rarely change the minds of people who have already formed a strong opinion: The Science of Why We Don’t Believe Science.
Fascinating and depressing. It doesn’t bode well for climate change. It seems the only reliable way to make progress is to wait for those standing in the way to die off. Which poses its own question.
If humans eventually eliminate ageing (highly likely) then this aspect of human psychology—motivated reasoning—will turn out to be our Achilles’ heel. If we’re unable to rely on new generations to progress good ideas, drop bad ones and fix problems then what will we rely on?
Clip from the BBC’s Human Planet, Rivers — Friend and Foe.
Mikael Colville-Andersen’s TED talk on why we shouldn’t wear bicycle helmets. Click through for the video.
I’ve long been a fervent critic of the U.S. but it wasn’t always this way. The fervour came about from a realisation that much of what I was led to believe about America as a child was a lie. I don’t have the same fervour when it comes to abusive powers like China and Russia. I wasn’t constantly barraged with the notion that these countries are the greatest nations ever to have graced the planet with their presence. It’s a high expectations, low outcomes kind of a thing.
And so to the latest example of American hypocrisy. While the U.S. preaches to the world about justice and freedom it is renowned for the opposite:
It’s quite notable that the mere threat of ending up in American custody is considered (at least by Assange’s lawyers) to be a viable basis for contesting extradition on human rights grounds. Indeed, this argument is not unusual.
Indeed, almost every person I’ve spoken who has or had anything to do with WikiLeaks expresses one fear above all others: the possibility that they will end up in American custody and subjected to its lawless War on Terror “justice system.” Americans still like to think of themselves as “leaders of the free world,” but in the eyes of many, it’s exactly the “free world” to which American policies are so antithetical and threatening.
You’re a talented architect, one of the best. You’re in a deep dream (“Limbo”) where your mind can make drastic alterations of any kind. The only limitation is your imagination. You’re effectively a god. And you choose to create a stark 20th century inspired skyscraper world to live in?
