Thread: Have the wealthy been shooting themselves in the foot?
1/ Many have argued that current institutional arrangements in the US are heavily tilted in favor of the wealthy. In one sense, this is obviously correct.
2/ But in another sense, it is profoundly mistaken. In a brilliant book due out next month, Yale law professor Daniel Markovits offers a more nuanced view.
3/ The same institutional arrangements that ostensibly benefit the wealthy, Markovits argues, have actually made their lives quite miserable. An excerpt appears in the September issue of THE ATLANTIC: theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…
4/ Markovits proposes a variety of institutional reforms, each of which merits serious consideration. But the real low-hanging fruit lies in a few simple changes in our tax system.
5/ In this brief talk, I explain why more steeply progressive taxation would not only demand no painful sacrifices from the wealthy but would actually greatly improve the quality of their lives:
6/ This insight has important policy implications for our two most pressing challenges: the climate crisis and rising economic inequality. Critics of the Green New Deal argue that tackling these problems simultaneously guarantees failure in both domains. But that's wrong.
7/ In my own forthcoming book (now available for preorder), I explain why the best policies for battling both problems are actually deeply synergistic. Success against each becomes much more likely if we tackle both simultaneously. amazon.com/Under-Influenc… @350@sunrisemvmt
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Holiday gatherings, the COVID-19 surge, and the sunk cost fallacy: Why you should cancel your Thanksgiving travel plans even though you’ve already purchased non-refundable air tickets. 1/
Coronavirus cases are surging out of control. In many states, hospital beds are nearly full, and health care workers are overwhelmed. And because of the 12-day lag between infections and hospitalizations, things are about to get dramatically worse. 2/
When that happens, we’ll face heart-wrenching triage decisions like we saw in Italy in March. Some will be left to die unattended, others turned away. Non-COVID medical emergencies will get short shrift. The Federal government seems unwilling to act. 3/
The government says it cannot reunite the 545 children separated from their parents at the border, because it has no record of the parents' identities or whereabouts. But the parents know exactly who they are. That makes this an easy problem to solve.
Step one: Send saliva samples from the children to a respected international organization--Doctors Without Borders, maybe, or The Red Cross--which would then sequence the DNA of each child.
Step two: Issue a public call to parents whose children were taken from them to submit saliva samples of their own.
As psychologists say, “It’s the situation, not the person.” The strongest predictor of what people will do is what others around them do. In this thread, I’ll describe what behavioral contagion theory says about how the campaign is likely to play out during the final two weeks.
First some background: During the pandemic, I’ve been participating in weekly Zoom calls with former Peace Corps Volunteers who served with me in Nepal during the late 1960s. As among so many of my other friends, there is high anxiety in this group about the election.
During our early calls, prediction markets were pegging the presidential race as a near tossup. That struck me as preposterous, and I tried to explain why. As our conversations unfolded, it gradually became my role on the call to reassure others about Biden’s prospects.
As Genevieve Guenther (@DoctorVive) points out, the climate conversation has finally moved past the mindless disputes with denialists that dominated recent discussion. But we now seem stalled in the absence of a consensus about what to do next.
In the face of record wildfires and 100°F Arctic temperatures, most people now accept that we face a deadly serious challenge. Now many ask, is rapid decarbonization even feasible at any cost? And if so, is there any prospect that voters would be willing to bear that cost?
On the first question, if you’re not familiar with the work of the energy engineer Saul Griffith, I urge you to read this short piece that explains how we can decarbonize rapidly: medium.com/otherlab-news/…
Will General Mattis end up being Citizen B, whose willingness to speak out proves explosively contagious?
In a recent thread about behavioral contagion’s role in debate, I described an example involving 10 citizens—A through J—who would oppose an authoritarian regime publicly if they thought it safe to do so. Citizen B was the pivotal figure in this example.
Each has a threshold indicating her/his willingness to speak out as a function of how many others are speaking out. A, for example, is willing to speak out no matter what. B and C are more cautious, each willing to speak out only if at least 20% of others are also speaking out.
Economic Naturalist Question #19. Why are dramatic political shifts so difficult to predict? #EconTwitter
In an earlier thread, I explored why introductory economics courses appear to leave little lasting imprint on the millions of students who take them each year:
Students learn more effectively when they pose interesting questions based on personal experience, and then use basic economic principles to help answer them. This exercise became what I call my “economic naturalist” writing assignment.