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the debate over morality in America has less to do with moral outcomes and more to do with a vision of how society should look based on idealistic remembrances of how things were. So people like Mr Munro and the Republican candidates believe America is in a moral slump. The odd thing is, people on the left might actually agree, though for very different reasons. They are upset by the perceived greed of the 1%, and the broad acceptance of torture and war as foreign-policy tools. In the end, the debate over morality more closely resembles two distinct monologues.
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over the past several decades the crime rate has fallen dramatically, despite what you may think. The homicide rate has been cut in half since 1991; violent crime and property crime are also way down. Even those pesky kids are committing less crime. There are some caveats to these statistics, as my colleague points out, but I think we can conclude that crime is not the cause of America's moral decline.
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Abortion has returned as a hot-button issue, perhaps it is eating away at our moral fiber. Hmm, the abortion rate declined by 8% between 2000 and 2008. Increases in divorce and infidelity could be considered indicators of our moral decay. There's just one problem: according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the divorce rate is the lowest it has been since the early 1970s. This is in part due to the recession, but infidelity is down too.
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when we expect redistributive effects to even out in the long run, so that everyone eventually comes out ahead, we are more likely to overlook reshufflings of income. That is a key reason why we believe that technological progress should run its course, despite its short-run destructive effects on some. When, on the other hand, the forces of trade repeatedly hit the same people – less educated, blue-collar workers – we may feel less sanguine about globalization
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Highly skilled and better-educated respondents tend to be considerably more pro-free trade than blue-collar workers are.
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While globalization occasionally raises difficult questions about the legitimacy of its redistributive effects, we should not respond automatically by restricting trade. There are many difficult trade-offs to consider, including the consequences for others around the world who may be made significantly poorer than those hurt at home.
"I take no responsibility for my behavior! I'm an innocent pawn! It's society's fault!"
The government safety net was created to keep Americans from abject poverty, but the poorest households no longer receive a majority of government benefits. A secondary mission has gradually become primary: maintaining the middle class from childhood through retirement. The share of benefits flowing to the least affluent households, the bottom fifth, has declined from 54 percent in 1979 to 36 percent in 2007, according to a Congressional Budget Office analysis published last year.
And as more middle-class families like the Gulbransons land in the safety net in Chisago and similar communities, anger at the government has increased alongside. Many people say they are angry because the government is wasting money and giving money to people who do not deserve it. But more than that, they say they want to reduce the role of government in their own lives. They are frustrated that they need help, feel guilty for taking it and resent the government for providing it. They say they want less help for themselves; less help in caring for relatives; less assistance when they reach old age.
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Politicians have expanded the safety net without a commensurate increase in revenues, a primary reason for the government’s annual deficits and mushrooming debt. In 2000, federal and state governments spent about 37 cents on the safety net from every dollar they collected in revenue, according to a New York Times analysis. A decade later, after one Medicare expansion, two recessions and three rounds of tax cuts, spending on the safety net consumed nearly 66 cents of every dollar of revenue.
The recent recession increased dependence on government, and stronger economic growth would reduce demand for programs like unemployment benefits. But the long-term trend is clear. Over the next 25 years, as the population ages and medical costs climb, the budget office projects that benefits programs will grow faster than any other part of government, driving the federal debt to dangerous heights.
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the reality of life here is that Mr. Gulbranson and many of his neighbors continue to take as much help from the government as they can get. When pressed to choose between paying more and taking less, many people interviewed here hemmed and hawed and said they could not decide. Some were reduced to tears. It is much easier to promise future restraint than to deny present needs.
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what we have today in the world of moral and ethical thought is not a dictatorship of relativism, but, from a bird’s eye view, moral ambiguity and pluralism.
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The day before his papacy began, Joseph Ratzinger delivered a homily in which he made the oft-quoted observation: “We are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one’s own ego and desires.” I disagree. At least, I disagree if we’re speaking of serious contemporary moral thought. With the claim that modern mass society is marked by egoism and intemperance, I’ve no quarrel, but I’d call this moral laziness or the absence of moral consideration, not a dictatorship of relativism.
“I think what (role) Confucianism can play, or any kind communitarian traditional order value system can do, is sort of (be) a mitigating factor in whatever excesses individualism in society might create.”
Political debates that involve science will be far more productive-- for both policy and the health of the scientific enterprise -- if the focus of debates is on policy options rather than what people happen to think about this or that.
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As Walter Lippmann once said, democracy is about getting people who think differently to act alike, not to get them to think alike.
Innovation means change, and change is not always welcomed amongst the public and their represenative. But the perversity of the innovation economy is such that resisting innovation does not mean that things will stay the same. Innovation has consequences and so too does aversion to innovation.
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BASF, the German chemical giant, is to pull out of genetically modified plant development in Europe and relocate it to the US, where political and consumer resistance to GM crops is not so entrenched.
The headquarters of BASF Plant Science will move from Limburgerhof in south-west Germany to Raleigh, North Carolina, and two smaller sites in Germany and Sweden will close. The company will transfer some GM crop development to the US but stop work on crops targeted at the European market – four varieties of potato and one of wheat.
The decision, which involves the net loss of 140 highly skilled jobs in Europe, also signals the end of GM crop development for European farmers. Bayer, BASF’s German competitor, is working on GM cotton and rice in Ghent, Belgium – but not for European markets. -
The move, according to BASF, is the consequence of aversion to genetically modified crops in Europe. Setting aside whether such aversion is appropriate or justified, it exists and has consequences, just as the aversion to stem cell research by the administration of George W. Bush during the last decade prompted relocation of researchers in that field.
Korea is rich, so it can no longer grow fast by copying others. It cannot remain dynamic with an ageing, shrinking workforce. It cannot become creative with a school system that stresses rote learning above thinking. And its people cannot realise their full potential in a society where they get only one shot at doing well in life, and it comes when they are still teenagers. To remain what one writer called “The Land of Miracles”, Korea will have to loosen up, and allow many routes to success.
The less people know about important complex issues such as the economy, energy consumption and the environment, the more they want to avoid becoming well-informed, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association.
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And the more urgent the issue, the more people want to remain unaware
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participants who felt most affected by the economic recession avoided information challenging the government's ability to manage the economy. However, they did not avoid positive information
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countries with a more diverse religious landscape did not, in fact have a higher homicide rate. However those with ethnic and linguistic divisions did.
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Chon's analysis suggests that ethnic and language barriers can increase murder rates, but religious differences do not. However, there are a few caveats.
The first is that we're looking at individual homicides here, not full-on wars or inter-communal violence. What's more, it could be argued that religious divisions exacerbate tensions mainly when they're aligned with ethnic and linguistic fault lines - they crystallise and fortify existing divisions. - 1 more annotation(s)...
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. The Fiscal Times recently talked with Martin Ford, author of The Lights In the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future, about how advances in robotics will affect future job markets.
Ford’s prediction?
Machines and computers are getting better at an accelerated rate, and I think within maybe 5 to 10 years things are going to get to the level where machines begin to surpass the ability of most people to do routine work. I base this partly on my belief that most of the work out there in the economy is routine in nature. There aren’t that many people that are paid to think creative thoughts
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while we certainly like to think that the jobs we do are important and that we are good at them, the reality of the situation is that most jobs could feasibly be done by machines (journalism included).
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in the middle of this golden age of behavioral research, there is a bill working through Congress that would eliminate the National Science Foundation’s Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences. This is exactly how budgets should not be balanced — by cutting cheap things that produce enormous future benefits.
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Eldar Shafir of Princeton and Sendhil Mullainathan of Harvard have recently, with federal help, been exploring a third theory, that scarcity produces its own cognitive traits.
A quick question: What is the starting taxi fare in your city? If you are like most upper-middle-class people, you don’t know. If you are like many struggling people, you do know. Poorer people have to think hard about a million things that affluent people don’t. They have to make complicated trade-offs when buying a carton of milk: If I buy milk, I can’t afford orange juice. They have to decide which utility not to pay.
These questions impose enormous cognitive demands. The brain has limited capacities. If you increase demands on one sort of question, it performs less well on other sorts of questions.
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Shafir and Mullainathan gave batteries of tests to Indian sugar farmers. After they sell their harvest, they live in relative prosperity. During this season, the farmers do well on the I.Q. and other tests. But before the harvest, they live amid scarcity and have to think hard about a thousand daily decisions. During these seasons, these same farmers do much worse on the tests. They appear to have lower I.Q.’s. They have more trouble controlling their attention. They are more shortsighted. Scarcity creates its own psychology.
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A team lead by psychologist Michele Gelfand (University of Maryland) surveyed people from 30 countries to assess how tight each country was. They were asked to rate statements like:
“There are many social norms that people are supposed to abide by in this country”
“In this country, if someone acts in an inappropriate way, others will strongly disapprove,”
“People in this country almost always comply with social norms.”
What they found supported their theory that tight societies develop in response to external threats (broadly defined and including both environmental and man-made threats).
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Tighter societies had higher population density, fewer natural resources, lower food supply, more pollution, more natural disasters, more disease, and more threatening neighbours.
They had more autocratic governments and less press freedom, fewer political rights and civil liberties, more police and less crime (at least, less reported crime).
They also (you won't be surprised to hear if you read this blog regularly), are more religious, with more people attending religious services and (to a lesser extent) more people rating god as being important in their lives. -
that's what they found using religion survey data from 1995. I repeated it but using data from 2005 - and as you can see from the figure there's no correlation at all. Now, part of that might be because I only had data for half the countries. But it may indicate that the relationship is unstable.
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the relationship between religion and happiness might vary from society to society. Now a new analysis, by Jan Eichhorn at the University of Edinburgh, finds that this indeed might be the case. He looked at 43 countries, mostly from Europe but also including the USA, Australia and New Zealand.
Same as everyone else Eichhorn found that, on average and after taking other factors into account, religious people (whether measured by belief or attendance) tend to be happier. However, countries with more religious people weren't happier on average.
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Having strong religious beliefs isn't linked to happiness in countries where few others have strong beliefs, or where few people go to Church. Eichhorn explains:
People who place a higher importance in god, however, are happier when they live in a country
where others do as well. Furthermore, when many people in the country attend religious services regularly, their happiness also is found to be higher.
As the reverse is not the case—people who attend services more often are not happier when the average personal level of importance of god is higher—it appears to be that happiness through religiosity can mainly be derived through conforming to the standard in their country—in particular the visible standard. -
people are happiest when they are in a group of people who are similar to them. Since religious people are a large majority in most countries, it seems that this is a major reason why religious people tend to be happier.
In common with other surveys, there was no relationship between religious/spiritual beliefs and happiness. Stronger god-belief did not equate to more happiness.
There was, however, a small, statistically significant link between attending Church (or Mosque, or Synagogue) and happiness. That's what I've shown in the graph.
That's pretty similar to what other surveys have shown. But what's interesting is that Cooper broke down the results by age. She found that the 'happiness effect' of going to Church only appeared in the over 80s.
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Cooper broke down the results by age. She found that the 'happiness effect' of going to Church only appeared in the over 80s.
The very old tend to be more religious than younger people, but actually less likely to go to church than those aged 60-80 (probably because of ill health). Perhaps, as a result, they have fewer alternative social support networks. Or perhaps it's simply that those who are well enough to get out to Church are happier just because they are healthier!
Whatever the reason, these data show that for English people under 80 years old, there is no link at all between religion and happiness.
Americans have been watching protests against oppressive regimes that concentrate massive wealth in the hands of an elite few. Yet in our own democracy, 1 percent of the people take nearly a quarter of the nation’s income—an inequality even the wealthy will come to regret.
I’d like to ask everyone, especially those characterized as ‘Malays’, to list their family histories. And see how many of us can really go back further than three generations born in this land. I know I can’t (Marina Mahathir)
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there is also an older pre-nationalist tradition there of understanding Malaya as an immigrant society, and a tendency as in other immigrant societies for the relatively recent migrants in all communities to provide much of the innovative energy and leadership – witness Hussein Onn, Tun Razak and Dr Mahathir in Malay politics...
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[Mahathir] argued that every country has a ‘definitive people’ who were the first immigrants to set up states in the territory in question. Since the aborigines in both Malaysia and Australia were stateless peoples who did not do this, it was the Malays in Malaya, like the English-speaking Christians in Australia, who defined the core culture and set the conditions by which subsequent migrants were admitted. [He interpreted] Australia somewhat idiosyncratically to suit his argument for permanent Malay supremacy in Malaysia"
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