David Lee's List: Society and Politics

• Forget sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll; immigration is a new generational fault line.
• Boomers were also more likely to say that “no newcomers” should be allowed to enter the country while more young people favored a “welcome all” approach.
• Demographically, younger and older Americans grew up in vastly different worlds. Those born after the civil rights era lived in a country of high rates of legal and illegal immigration.
• baby boomers and older Americans — even those who fought for integration — came of age in one of the most homogenous moments in the country’s history.
• Immigration, which census figures show declined sharply from the Depression through the 1960s, reached a historic low point the year after Woodstock. From 1860 through 1920, 13 percent to 15 percent of the country was foreign born — a rate similar to today’s, when immigrants make up about 12.5 percent of the country.
• But in 1970, only 4.7 percent of the country was foreign born, and most of those immigrants were older Europeans, often unnoticed by the boomer generation
• These older people grew up in largely white suburbs or largely segregated neighborhoods. Young people have grown up in an interracial culture.
• her generation watched “Sesame Street” with Hispanic characters, many of them sat in classrooms that were a virtual United Nations, and now they marry across ethnic lines in record numbers

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• “The main barrier to getting progress has been that statistical agencies around the world are run by economists and statisticians,” Michalos said. “And they are not people who are comfortable with human beings.”
• The State of the USA intends to ultimately post around 300 indicators on issues like crime, energy, infrastructure, housing, health, education, environment and the economy.
• argue that achieving a sustainable economy, and a sustainable society, may prove impossible without new ways to evaluate national progress
• G.D.P. statistics are calculated a dozen times a year on the fifth floor of a modern office building on L Street in Washington
• For them, G.D.P. is what it is and nothing more: a description of total national production that can be helpful when setting economic policy.
• By economic measures, there’s no doubt High-G.D.P. Man is superior to Low-G.D.P. Man.
• What we can’t really say for sure is whether his life is any better.
• Kuznets worried that the nation’s economic activity might be mistaken for its citizens’ well-being
• Most criticisms of G.D.P. since then have tended to fall into two distinct camps.
• The second group of critics, meanwhile, has sought to recast the criticism of G.D.P. from an accounting debate to a philosophical one.
• The H.D.I. is a ranking that incorporates a nation’s G.D.P. and two other modifying factors: its citizens’ education, based on adult literacy and school-enrollment data, and its citizens’ health, based on life-expectancy statistics.
• In his view, Americans would have had a much clearer picture of our progress over the past decade if we had focused on median income rather than G.D.P. per capita, which is distorted by top earners and corporate profits. “When you have increasing inequality, median and average behave differently,” Stiglitz said. Real median household income has actually dipped since 2000. But G.D.P. per capita, he noted, has gone up.
• How many measures beyond G.D.P. — how many dials on a new dashboard — will you need? Stiglitz and his fellow academics ultimately concluded that assessing a population’s quality of life will require metrics from at least seven categories: health, education, environment, employment, material well-being, interpersonal connectedness and political engagement.
• A relatively easy first step, several members of the Stiglitz commission told me, would be to build in a “depletion charge” to G.D.P. for the natural resources — oil, gas, timber and even fisheries — that a country transforms into dollars.
• Geoffrey Heal, a professor at Columbia who worked on the environmental aspects of the commission’s report, told me that including resource depletion in the national accounts — something the U.S. considered in the early 1990s and then abandoned for political reasons — could be implemented within a year if the world’s developed nations agreed to do it.
• “We can put monetary values on mineral stocks, fisheries and even forests, perhaps,” Heal says. “But it’s hard to put a monetary value on alteration of the climate system, loss of species and the consequences that might come from those.”
• the health effects of social isolation are of the same magnitude as people smoking. If we can care about people smoking, because that reduces their life expectancy, then why not think about social isolation too?
• the 10 percent of people who spend the most time suffering, they account for almost half of the total amount of suffering
• income over about $70,000 does nothing to improve how much we enjoy our activities on a typical day
• A lingering question is whether some government officials, perceiving dangers in a new measurement system, might conclude that such an overhaul would wreak political havoc and therefore ought to be avoided.
• The G.D.P. and other indexes, Hoenig said, are “an artifact of a world before the Web.”

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• Giving up the ability to adjust exchange rates, they warned, would invite future crises.
• What the crisis really demonstrates, however, is the dangers of putting yourself in a policy straitjacket.

• If one wanted to explain why the French Revolution spiraled out of control into violence and dictatorship and the American Revolution did not, there is no better answer than the fact that the Americans were used to governing themselves and the French were not.
• “A long continuance in the first executive departments of power or trust is dangerous to liberty,” declared the Maryland Constitution.
• In addition to specifying term limits for its plural executive, the radical Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776 required that after four annual terms even the assemblymen would have to give way to a new set of legislators so they would “return to mix with the mass of the people and feel at their leisure the effects of the laws which they have made.”
• many American leaders had second thoughts about what they had done amid the popular enthusiasm of 1776. Since many of the state legislatures were turning over roughly 50 percent of their membership annually and passing a flood of ill-drafted and unjust legislation, stability and experience seemed to be what was most needed.

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• as visible pollution has diminished, so has public concern over environmental issues
• it’s hard to get the public focused on a form of pollution that’s invisible, and whose effects unfold over decades rather than days
• a narrative in which advocates of strong environmental protection were either extremists — “eco-Nazis,” according to Rush Limbaugh — or effete liberal snobs trying to impose their aesthetic preferences on ordinary Americans
• the anti-environmentalists have been winning the argument, at least as far as public opinion is concerned
• For the most part, anti-environmentalists have been silent about the catastrophe. True, Mr. Limbaugh — arguably the Republican Party’s de facto leader — promptly suggested that environmentalists might have blown up the rig to head off further offshore drilling. But that remark probably reflected desperation: Mr. Limbaugh knows that his narrative has just taken a big hit.

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• the plight of Americans who suffer from pre-existing medical conditions. In other advanced countries, everyone gets essential care whatever their medical history. But in America, a bout of cancer, an inherited genetic disorder, or even, in some states, having been a victim of domestic violence can make you uninsurable, and thus make adequate health care unaffordable.
• What I took away was the arrogance that the success of things like the death-panel smear has obviously engendered in Republican politicians. At this point they obviously believe that they can blandly make utterly misleading assertions, saying things that can be easily refuted, and pay no price. And they may well be right.

• Under current policies, federal debt in the United States — the sum total of annual deficits — would grow from 53 percent of the size of the economy in 2009 to more than 300 percent by 2050, driven mainly by rapidly rising health care costs and, in part, by the aging of the population.
• the country would never have gotten into so deep a hole if President George W. Bush and the Republican-led Congress had not spent years slashing taxes — mainly on the wealthy — and spending with far too little restraint
• The first lesson is that spending without taxing is a recipe for huge deficits, and that running big deficits when the economy is expanding only sets the country up for bigger deficits when the economy contracts.
• a clear lesson from the Depression of the 1930s is that reducing deficits at a time of economic fragility undercuts recovery

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