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Why Is Bob Herbert Boring? - T. A. Frank
Proposes and disposes of some theses on why liberal columnist Bob Herbert doesn't get more attention.
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ince I've examined two theories of blame—it's Bob's fault; it's Washington's fault—and found both to be partly wanting, that leaves another possibility: it's the world's fault. Or, at least, it's the fault of human nature. Sadly, history and science make a compelling case that most of us are, indeed, hard-pressed to give a damn. -
In 2005, the psychologists Deborah A. Small, George Loewenstein, and Paul Slovic found the limits of human compassion to be even more irrational and constrained. In their study, students at a university in Pennsylvania were paid five dollars to complete questionnaires on technology. Enclosed with the questionnaire was a seemingly unrelated letter soliciting donations to a hunger relief organization in Africa.
The study's first conclusion was what the researchers had expected: people are more compassionate when they are told about a specific victim. When respondents were asked to donate money to help feed a seven-year-old African girl named Rokia, they contributed more than twice what they did when just confronted with general statistics on hunger.
But then things got surprising. When Rokia was presented with the statistics, the donations fell by nearly half. Worse still, when the authors asked one set of subjects to perform mathematical calculations and the other set of subjects to describe their feelings when they heard the word "baby," the subjects who'd done math gave only about half as much to Rokia as the ones who'd thought about babies. Apparently, just thinking analytically makes us stingier. The authors of the study concluded that "calculative thought lessens the appeal of an identifiable victim."
Remote Microscopy: Mobile Imaging for Disease Diagnosis | Blum Center for Developing Economies, UC Berkeley
The CellScope project focuses on the development of a modular, high-magnification microscope attachment for cell phones. Due to its portability, affordability and functionality, the CellScope will enable health workers in remote areas to take high-resolution images of a patient's blood cells using the mobile phone's camera, and then transmit the photos to experts at medical centers.
Joe Bageant: America's White Underclass
Sister, most of us live anecdotal lives in an anecdotal world. We survive by our wits and observations, some casual, others vital to our sustenance. That plus daily experience, be it good bad or ugly as the ass end of a razorback hog. And what we see happening to us and others around us is what we know as life, the on-the-ground stuff we must deal with or be dealt out of the game. There's no time for rigorous scientific analysis. Nor need.
The Role Of Abundance In Innovation | Techdirt
Gopnik points to evidence challenging the idea that "necessity is the mother of invention," by noting that more innovation seems to occur in times of abundance, rather than times of hardship. The idea is that in times of hardship you're just focused on getting through the day. You don't have time to experiment and try to improve things -- you make do with what you have. It's in times of plenty that people finally have time to mess around and experiment, invent and then innovate.
Stumbling and Mumbling: The "evil poor" problem
In not raising this question, he’s perpetuating one of the great hypocrisies of the right. On the one hand, they exaggerate the extent to which people respond to incentives - hence the claim that the 50p tax rate will do huge damage. But on the other hand, when the poor respond to incentives by turning to crime, they demand not that incentives be changed - except, of course, to cut welfare benefits - but moralise about “evil.”
Open Left:: No, Versailles, "Welfare Reform" Didn't Work, Either
So much for yet another Versailles myth. The only thing that "welfare reform" managed to do was kick more women and children off of welfare. It did not move them out of poverty, which is what the rest of the civilized world recognizes as the actual purpose of social welfare programs for the poor.
The Role of Religious and Social Organizations in the Lives of Disadvantaged Youth
This paper examines whether participation in religious or other social organizations can help offset the negative effects of growing up in a disadvantaged environment.
Neuroscience and social deprivation | I am just a poor boy though my story's seldom told | The Economist
How poverty passes from generation to generation is now becoming clearer. The answer lies in the effect of stress on two particular parts of the brain
The Totalitarian Temptation and all that — Crooked Timber
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As you’ve probably noticed, conservatives tend to argue against liberalism/progressivism by asserting (plausibly) that Robespierre, or Stalin, or Hitler did bad things; then asserting (considerably less plausibly) that liberalism/progressivism somehow equals, or naturally tends to slide into, bad authoritarianism of a distinctively modern sort. Ever since Burke wrote his book about the French Revolution, some such slippery slope argument is the Ur-argument of conservatism as political philosophy.
Suppose we sketch out that thing that it is feared liberalism/progressivism will slipperily slide into. See if you don’t agree that the one thing every conservative swears up and down that he hates in all its many works and deeds, is anything resembling the following:
Intellectuals cook up some abstract, scientistic, rationalistic System. Blinded by the light of Enlightenment hubris, they conclude that a very great transformation of society can be happily effected in relatively short order. A political revolution shall ascend atop some alleged social science breakthrough which, we are assured, is a sold extension of more fundamental advances in the natural sciences. Mostly, the engine of change is the force of changed minds themselves. First, some activist elite manages to get their heads on straight. Then the people will eventually be dragged (if necessary) into the light. It’s Politics of Meaning as the Rule of Reason. The job of government is to understand what the right values are, and make sure those values permeate the lives of the (potentially false-consciousness afflicted) masses. For their own good.
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quite apart from his tendency to prescribe misery, what is notable about Murray is the degree to which he fits the science-turned-social-engineering-hubris bill. He claims that some people know what the true values are in life – the transcendent ones. What this enlightened elite should do is use the government (i.e. by forcibly shrinking it) to induce those who are deluded by false values to accept the true ones.
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slacktivist: The workers in the vineyard
"I changed a word or two in there, but that word "envious" in the final question is holy writ. The perverse irony, of course, is that you're most likely to hear that word tossed about nowadays by exactly the sort of greedy, grumbling sorts described in the parable above. These are warped, stunted, soulless creatures who lie awake at night worrying that somehow, somewhere, some poor person might be catching a break that they didn't 100-percent deserve. Some poor family might be getting extra food stamps. Some poor mother might be using WIC to get the good cheese. Some family might not get kicked out of their home and onto the street when really they should have been responsible enough not to trust the professional realtors and bankers who assured them they could afford that house."
TPMCafe | Talking Points Memo | A Political System Utterly Unresponsive to the Poor
The eminent political scientist Robert Dahl once suggested that "a key characteristic of a democracy is the continued responsiveness of the government to the preferences of its citizens, considered as political equals." By that standard, contemporary America hardly seems to qualify. While cynics will not be surprised to hear that poor people are less than equal in our political system, even they should be shocked and disturbed by the strength of the empirical evidence suggesting that the views of millions of poor Americans are utterly ignored by their elected representatives.
Why Do Americans Still Hate Welfare? - Economix Blog - NYTimes.com
In his book “America’s Struggle Against Poverty in the Twentieth Century,” James Patterson, a professor of history emeritus at Brown University, writes that “the image of the poor person in the 1930s was the agrarian farmer, down on his luck, but not complaining.” Think of Tom Joad, the protagonist of John Steinbeck’s novel “The Grapes of Wrath.”
Starting in the mid-1960s, however, that image began to change: poverty –- especially welfare — became seen by many as largely an African-American phenomenon. It was also during this decade that the word “welfare,” which previously did not have a negative connotation, became “a political epithet,” according to Sanford Schram, a professor of social policy at Bryn Mawr College
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