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income inequality debate

Yeah. He really misses the mark. His points are right but he blames education for not fixing the problem he identifies at the beginning.

“Once upon a time, white male Protestants ruled the roost. You got into a fancy school if your father had gone to the fancy school. You got a job at a white-shoe law firm or climbed the corporate ladder if you golfed at the right club.”

That still happens. That advantage is just laundered through our educational systems.



Gotta love ads. This was funny.

6cd8591e8a3b69a5fb78208d5da679ff.jpg
 
By the way, I don’t think Vietnam and Watergate were caused by intelligent people. Just white male civic leaders. Some were. Some weren’t.
 
Brooks is the dumbest MFer and I can't believe he makes that kind of money to keep writing dogshit pieces.

Once upon a time, white male Protestants ruled the roost. You got into a fancy school if your father had gone to the fancy school. You got a job at a white-shoe law firm or climbed the corporate ladder if you golfed at the right club.

Then we smashed all that. We replaced a system based on birth with a fairer system based on talent. We opened up the universities and the workplace to Jews, women and minorities. University attendance surged, creating the most educated generation in history. We created a new boomer ethos, which was egalitarian (bluejeans everywhere!), socially conscious (recycling!) and deeply committed to ending bigotry.
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We smashed all that? Pretty blatant whitewashing.

Many of the great failures of the last 50 years, from Vietnam to Watergate to the financial crisis, were caused by extremely intelligent people who didn’t care about the civic consequences of their actions.
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Gross oversimplification that pretends our failures were just mistakes by smart people, rather than nefarious acts of American imperialism.

The great achievement of the meritocracy is that it has widened opportunities to those who were formerly oppressed.
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More whitewashing. It wasn't the hard fought battles of the oppressed over their oppressors. It was the achievement of the meritocracy!

Brooks feigns an ignorance about the causes of our current inequality, then prescribes a nebulous solution to just "do better."
 
Those dimwitted, stuck up blue bloods in the old establishment had something we meritocrats lack — a civic consciousness, a sense that we live life embedded in community and nation, that we owe a debt to community and nation and that the essence of the admirable life is community before self.
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When did this civic consciousness exist?
 
Brooks is definitely not very intelligent. I doubt he would even do well on a standard IQ test.
 
MHBDemon said:
When did this civic consciousness exist?
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Not to defend David Brooks, but I definitely think that business leaders were much more civically minded during the postwar era up to about 1980 than they are today. Around 1980 was when Milton Friedman convinced everyone that shareholder profit was the only thing a business leader could/should care about and the era of big mergers and consolidation got going. Before that, even fairly large businesses were much more connected to their local communities and saw the health of the places their businesses were located as an integral part of the health of their business. Now, was this civic engagement also laced with greed, racism, worker exploitation, environmental degradation, and so forth? Yes, of course it was. But that doesn't change the fact that the regional supermarket chains of yesteryear were much more civically engaged, often more responsible employers than the Wal-Marts of today - just to use one example. It's especially obvious in second or third-tier cities like Greensboro and Winston Salem, where the local businesses got eaten by huge national businesses and the civic leadership and charitable giving of those businesses and their executives went away.
 
[h=1]Seniors Are More Conservative Because the Poor Don’t Survive to Become Seniors[/h]
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligence...e=fb&utm_medium=s3&utm_campaign=sharebutton-b

Link to a more detail WaPo article about the study. It may be behind a paywall.
[h=1]Poor people die younger in the U.S. That skews American politics.[/h]
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...nequal-than-elsewhere/?utm_term=.98137f90329b

Here's the original study that's almost definitely behind a paywall. Yes. You have to pay more money or be in academia to learn about the impact of being poor.

[h=1]Health disparities, politics, and the maintenance of the status quo: A new theory of inequality[/h]
[h=2]Highlights[/h]•SES disparities in health perpetuate inequality in democratic systems.
•As the poor die sooner, the non-poor continue participating, shaping policy.
•Age, SES, survivability and socio-political participation are intertwined.
•Health disparities help to explain how societies organize in hierarchies.
•Health improvement of the poor is a sine qua non for a representative democracy.






https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953618300108



Interesting findings that make complete sense.
 
I dont think either party is legitimately interested in franchising poor people. The Republican party actively suppresses their vote with state level disenfranchising legislation, and the national Democratic party passively opposes their participation by not passing national legislation to increase voter participation.

We need:
1. Automatic voter registration at 18
2. Nationwide mail-in voting
3. Nationwide restoral of voting rights for felons
4. Public funded campaign financing reform
5. End of caucases, open primaries in every state
6. Dissolution of Democrat superdelegate process.
7. Statehood for Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico
 
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ImTheCaptain said:
eh, i think voter age should be raised to 21 and cut off at life expectancy
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Why 21? A president that is elected when you're 18 is most likely going to be in office until you're 26, Senators at least till you're 24. In the meantime you're subject to federal law, paying income tax, potentially getting federal student aid, potentially entering the military, serving jury duty, so why wouldnt you be allowed to vote in those 3 years?
 
because teenagers in 2018 are impulsive and rarely lack a perspective that isn't simply what their parents believed.

i'm fine with moving the age for all those civic duties up as well. i wouldnt want an 18 yo on my jury
 
If the state in which you reside seceded from the Union, you shouldn't be allowed to vote. You should be considered a POW and be eligible for POTUS' preferred torture methods for terrorists.
 
then you should definitely cut the age off at like 60 and not worry about the no-show children at the polls
 
myDeaconmyhand said:
I dont think either party is legitimately interested in franchising poor people. The Republican party actively suppresses their vote with state level disenfranchising legislation, and the national Democratic party passively opposes their participation by not passing national legislation to increase voter participation.

We need:
1. Automatic voter registration at 18
2. Nationwide mail-in voting
3. Nationwide restoral of voting rights for felons
4. Public funded campaign financing reform
5. End of caucases, open primaries in every state
6. Dissolution of Democrat superdelegate process.
7. Statehood for Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico
Click to expand...

Take it a step further and restore voting rights to the incarcerated.

Many countries fully recognize the right of incarcerated citizens to vote. Today, 26 European nations at least partially protect their incarcerated citizens’ right to vote, while 18 countries grant prisoners the vote regardless of the offense. In Germany, Norway, and Portugal, only crimes that specifically target the “integrity of the state” or “constitutionally protected democratic order” result in disenfranchisement. The European Court of Human Rights has forcefully defended the voter franchise, going so far as to condemn in 2005 Britain’s blanket ban on voting rights for prisoners, calling it a violation of human rights. In December of last year, after 12 years of resistance to the ECHR’s decision, the UK partially relented by allowing prisoners on temporary release and at home under curfew to cast their ballots.
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http://peoplespolicyproject.org/projects/prisoner-voting/
 
MHBDemon said:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/05/23/opinion/international-world/centrists-democracy.html
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oh right, because i'm a centrist

i've been consistent in my disdain for parts of the American fake system of half representative half democratic system as long as i've been posting.

- too many people qualify to vote and
- the system totally fucks the value of a vote

if the idea of media influence is overplayed, as the Right says, then abolish the states and make everything a direct vote. And if the true voice of the people is squelched, like the Left says, then a direct vote should solve that problem as well.
 
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