A multifaceted program causes lasting progress for the very poor: Evidence from six countries

Source: www.sciencemag.org

Don’t ever tell me that poverty is a condition that will always be around or is something that laissez-faire economics will take care of.  Quite frankly, it’s lazy thinking and unfeeling to view a challenge such as poverty or extreme poverty as a feature of human society that has a place in such global abundance or that doing nothing will solve the problem.  Furthermore, I am willing to hypothesize that these efforts to relieve poverty, using time, energy, and resources from the production of wealth in our societies will not come at a great expense to that production of wealth and may, in fact, balance out or exceed on its returns for the overall global economy, especially with more consumption, increased savings to protect against shocks, and if it is done in an environmentally sound and sustainable way.  It’s science, but it’s not rocket science.  Enjoy!

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5 facts about the minimum wage: Pew Research

While the idea of raising the minimum wage is broadly popular, efforts to do so at the national level have stalled. We gathered key facts looking at the issue. While the idea of raising the minimum wage is broadly popular, efforts to do so at the national level have stalled repeatedly in Congress, leading advocates to focus more of their efforts on cities and states. A Pew Research Center survey from January 2014 found clear partisan differences in support for raising the minimum wage: Overall, 73% of people favored an increase in the federal minimum to $10.10 an hour, mirroring a Democratic-backed proposal that failed to move ahead in Congress last year. But while large majorities of Democrats (90%) and independents (71%) said they favored such an increase, Republicans were more evenly split (53% in favor and 43% opposed).Here are five facts about the minimum wage and the people who earn it

Source: www.pewresearch.org

It is, quite honestly, criminal that we permit so many people live on so little so that a few people can have so much more than they can ever hope to spend in a lifetime.  These people are people too, and they are entitled, as human beings and American citizens, to live and have the ability to thrive and pursue happiness as well.  What good comes for those who take so much while delivering so little in return for the rest of us by comparison to the labor and potential contributions of these tens of millions of people?

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Steps to Take After the NSA Shootings, 3/30/2015

The American governments at all levels and in all places are going to have to come to terms with a few things.  The first set of things are their own anti-social, repressive, oppressive, and anti-democratic tactics and methods and policies that they have enacted towards the general public.  The American people cannot and will not voluntarily be marched into a neo-feudal serfdom without some form of resistance springing forth.  Worse still, the people who will be behind such a resistance will also be the least qualified, least able, and least willing to establish a functional and effective new order from the ashes of the old.  The second set are the anti-social, anti-progress, moronic, baboon-like group of radical right wing personalities and people whose anti-social, anti-progress, and anti-democratic tactics are what have brought us to the point where one is dead at NSA headquarters.  These are the fat cat millionaires and radical right wingers who are sitting in our Congressional delegations, posing as bankers and businesspeople, making a mockery of the American spirit and the nature of Americans throughout all levels of society.  We can either be cleansed of these people by ignoring them, voting against them, and by defending ourselves with lethal force if necessary.  Or we can continue to sit around and do nothing while they dismantle our entire society and environment in the name of profit, control, and some abstract notion of liberty that they’ve never questioned or seriously examined.

I’ve always suggested that we turn our attention towards ridding our human societies of these conservative elements and the more pragmatic economic elite who fund them.  The shooting at the NSA should be taken as a wake-up call for all Americans to unite against the growing right wing despotism that is threatening to erode our nation’s core integrity and to disband the dysfunctional and ineffective establishment “left” in favor of a new progressive state in America that relies on science, evidence, and the well-being of all people, not just the rich, as the benchmarks for good policy and good policy-making.  Financial wealth for wealth’s sake should not be the end all of a society’s goal, nor should we condone or accept those who can’t get that through their heads.

A government and its members are never self-sustaining entities.  A government and their members rely on the legitimacy, acceptance, and authority that is granted to them.  These are things which can be revoked with disastrous consequences to follow for all people, including for the governments’ members, when and if they are revoked.  Governments can fail; their existence is not guaranteed.  Best to continue working with the general public in a dialogue for the sake of improving the quality of life for people rather than act as if there are no consequences for your actions.  The sooner our governments in the United States and throughout human society get this through their heads, the sooner we’ll all be better off.  We need to eliminate the right wing by allowing them to eliminate themselves, and the world will be that much closer to being reasonably settled, even though it will never truly be settled in the long term or short term.  This will never be a utopian world; some problems will continue, old ones fade away, and new ones will rise.  What we can change is how we live, interact with, and respond to the changes and common reality, first, by acknowledging that there is a common reality where all opinions, hypotheses, and perceptions are not equal and should not be given an equal light if they prove to be unfounded and without evidence to support them.  The second thing we need to do is learn about this universe as thouroughly, deliberately, and accurately, specifically with regards to ourselves and to our own place within it relative to all other things on the individual and collective level.  The third thing is to apply the lessons in our daily lives, policies, laws, programs, and actions, such that we can live healthier, happier, and more sustainable lives as individuals within the context of our environment and our societies.  We can follow these three steps and all the subsequent steps and implications, or we can all collapse as a civilization and ruin ourselves and the world around us in the name of senseless greed and baseless ideology.  These are the options.  What side will you be on?

Think about it.

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A Simple Critique of Neoclassical Economic Theory: Micro and Macro Edition

The economy is much more complicated than the businesses that occupy it.  While it is important to understand how businesses and businesspeople respond to external factors in the economy, based on internal preferences and desires, it is also important to bear in mind the relative value of financial profit relative to environmental, social, and economic concerns.  Since businesses and businesspeople are too preoccupied with monetary gain and profits, it behooves the society, businesses, and businesspeople alike to turn over final authority over the economy, at the very least, to the society under the trust of the government in order to preserve the businesses and business interests non-monetary concerns.  The beauty of an effective and efficient democratic system, free from the constraints of businesses, businesspeople, and general social elites, is that the government is more likely to be corrected by the society and the people living in the society than if it were left to the oligarchic manipulation by the economic and social elites.  Working people benefit from being protected from businesses and businesspeople attempting to take advantage of them and their labor.  Businesses and businesspeople benefit from maintaining a relative environmental and social homeostasis in which they can best operate to make money within the constraints of society, the environment, and technological know-how.  Without this combination of factors, it is impossible to maintain a society in which people can live or make money over and above the financial costs that are required to maintain such a system.

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Strike Me Down, and I Shall Become More Powerful Than (Conservatives) Can Possibly Imagine

What progressives and liberals need to recognize, is that they need to go down with their honor and dignity in tact.  The United States is, and always has been, an essentially progressive nation, where inclusion, equal opportunity, and human rights, the essentials of liberalism, are put on pedestals while monarchy, aristocracy, exclusion, and the corporate pretender wannabes, the essence of conservatism, are shunned and vilified in popular culture and sentiment.  We want leaders who are accountable, responsive, and genuinely concerned with the well-being of ourselves as leaders.  Why would we vote for anyone who doesn’t fulfill these things for us on a practical level?

The progressives in their present form need to pull back, reorganize, go underground if necessary, and cede to the conservatives and Libertarians all the power and influence that they want.  The leadership should be prepared to get out of the country and find safe haven overseas while maintaining lines of communication inside.  We need to prepare for war, make friends overseas, and prepare for combat if necessary against the conservative and Libertarian forces.  Let the people eat the dog shit provided by the wannabe corporate aristocrats, and they’ll more than likely grow weary of it.  They’ll long for a return to what their government was meant to be about.  This is the United States of America, not the play pen of some inbred pseudo-nobles.  I think that, if given enough rope, and provided that the progressives avoid being condemned as a group by the public, the conservatives will hang themselves or be forced to evolve on the terms and lines of the progressives.  Conservatism in government is little more than an abusive, unfeeling, and uncaring relationship with the public.  Only the public can make the ultimate cut with the conservatives.  The progressives, for their part, must get themselves ready to out campaign the conservatives on the grassroots level, and possibly fight a popular guerrilla war against the bankers, the corporate executives, and the establishment union leaders and entrenched interests.  It is time that our leadership should recognize their true interests relative to the public.

I call this the Obi Wan Maneuver.  “Strike me down, and I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.”

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How Capitalism Leads to a Sovietesque System in America

In some respects, the United States is more like the Soviet Union because of the influence of Capitalism and Capitalists than anything else. We have a shadow group of wealthy people and interests calling the shots behind the scenes to both political parties who sit in our government. The Soviets had one political party calling the shots to their government behind the scenes via the Politbureau. Both groups of people and their ultimate philosophies and practices lead their societies to the same results and likely to the same conclusions.  Our Capitalist elites extract wealth and relative power from us, the Soviet elites did the same to their people.  Both of our governmental systems and staff neglected to listen to the signs of their social and environmental ecosystems.  The Soviet Union collapsed politically and fell apart into traditional ethnic territories.  The United States is also likely to fall apart if nothing significant substantially changes, albeit, it’ll likely be into ideological and cultural camps.

By my reckoning, the solution to at least the American problem is a commitment to democratic principles and a social logic for our economy. Workers should be paid according to their profitability and, when there aren’t enough jobs available in the private market, the government should buy up the extra labor and put people to work with living wages and provide job training and education while they otherwise mark time in between jobs and demand cycles. Living conditions could be improved where people live with surpluses produced by productivity, based on demonstrable needs and evidence based practices.  We could probably eliminate Medicare and Medicaid in favor of a universal healthcare and reduce medical costs as well through negotiation with the healthcare providers.  We could maybe even go as far as to nationalize health research (which has already effectively happened), giving profit for health problems that are solved rather than leaving health to the private markets for them to ignore public health in favor of profits. Same could be said for national defense.  Why should anyone be allowed to derive profit from war (which is an anathema to a healthy economy) or to have a substantial portion of our workforce tied up in pointless weapons manufacturing?

All the while, our governments can start to coordinate amongst themselves for the production and delivery of services.  Experiments with organizational practices to improve inter and intra governmental communication, as well as attention towards creating fora for dialogue with the public on local and party levels could also take place, such that our government officials can know what the public actually needs and wants.  The delivery, implementation, and interface of these functions can also be experimented with on the local and party levels in order to create a lasting link between governed and governing that can only be broken at both parties’ expense.

In the end, the United States is exhibiting the same anti-democratic, anti-social, and anti-environmental symptoms under Capitalism that the Soviet system exhibited under their definition of Communism.  Our government officials and political parties don’t seem to truly care to put in an effort to create a two-way dialogue with the public and amongst their own levels and layers.  They also don’t seem to care to have in place the necessary tools, mechanisms, and practices to preserve their own legitimacy and authority or to increase their personal and institutional longevity.  Our legislators, administrators, chief executives, corporate shadow government officials and interests don’t seem to be thinking or feeling beyond the next election or the next quarterly report on profits.  It is myopic, stupid, idiotic, cruel, callous, and predictably destructive for themselves to continue on this present course of action without appropriate, significant, and substantial changes to the way they think, feel, and work with the larger world that is also them.  Meanwhile, you the citizen will pay either for your complacence in doing nothing appropriate to make momentum against these people happen or your ignorance in your tacit or outright support for them and their practices.  We live together or we die together.  Quite frankly, I think there are a lot of people out there, young and old, rich and poor, who are actually opting for death, as far as the impacts of their choices are in common reality.  The United States will rot from the inside out, due to chronic mismanagement by law and policy makers and practitioners.  We, as the whole American society will pay the price for our choices to be either apart of the solution in common reality or to be apart of the problem tacitly or overtly in common reality.  It all of our choices whether we succeed or fail.  I for one though am not seeing many positive signs amongst the citizenry or the elected and appointed officials who can actually do something for us though.  A perfectly preventable and predictable end for those who actually probably deserve it.  Oh well.

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The Four Pillars of Our Present Society

By targeting the executives and leadership cadres of the energy, finance, public, and media sectors at all levels, we can institute real solid changes to our world for better or worse.  These four, I believe, represent the main axiomatic core of our American society’s power structure and, indeed, the world’s power structure.

Specifically, what we need is clean, renewable, inexpensive, and effective energy, socially and environmentally conscious finance and investment, socially oriented and cooperative/collaborative government, and media platforms to shut down the ignorant, delusional, and malevolent.  By making small changes in each of these sectors in terms of logic, perceived interest, and chosen courses of action, we can truly revolutionize the world.

The ultimate battlefield is in the hearts and minds (specifically, the brains) of each individual living person in human society, to go either towards either progressivism, adaptability, and grounding in reality, or conservatism, ideology, and delusion.  Once these four pillars have been converted to what are scientifically ensured methods of survival and well-being, the rest of society can fall into place.  The main challenge will be from those persisting in darkness and confusion but, with these evolutionary changes in these places, they should prove to be just an unpopular nuisance.  If done correctly, these radical right wing and Libertarian elements will self-isolate, alienate the rest of human society, and ultimately consume themselves in a maelstrom of self-destruction, possibly aided and abetted by the new power elements in society.  They’ll make themselves irrelevant and invite people to ask for them to be possibly put to death for their agitation and violence.

We have the game.  The game is either going to be won or end entirely.  No more middling.

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What Would You Suggest?

What good is growth if it does not sustain?

If it leaves the masses huddled in poverty, scrounging for the scraps of the rich people’s table?

What good is growth if it weakens the nation, divides us, and leaves us open for foreign occupation and international humiliation?

We’ve gotten our priorities so screwed up in this world of ours.  Our leaders and future leaders don’t even know what it’s like to live on the edge of survival; have so lost touch with their own humanity and their own sense of direction as living organisms that they literally cannot tell which side of the bread is actually buttered for them as humans.

Confucius said (to paraphrase) that when the roots are neglected, the tree the grows from it cannot ever be healthy.  The governments and the people who sit behind our governments, have created a system where only the topmost branches are prioritized and the roots of the society from which they spring are neglected.  The higher they build in this case, the farther they will fall, and the more we will all pay for their impropriety, poor conduct, and poor choices.

Let me be blunt: there are correct and incorrect choices to make, especially when you’re making choices that are experienced by other people living in the society.  There are choices that serve you well and choices that serve you poorly; you are NEVER free from consequence.  The more the elite and those who are too stupid to realize their real position in society push for height without the base, the more likely they are going to fall and the harder that they will fall in the long term (which becomes, incidentally, the short term all too soon).

I honestly don’t know what I am doing here in this world so poorly constructed and guided.  I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with the insights that I have and I don’t know how to convince other people that we’re working on bought time.  I don’t know what to do to get people to make the small (emphasis on small) changes that need to be made now to prevent the collapse of the very world that I need to make my living in as well.  What would you suggest that I do in addition to what I’ve already done?

Utility Maximization – Where We Go Wrong

Perhaps our real problem as a species, from an economic perspective, is a poor definition and a poor cognizance of our actual utilities, given our biological, sociological, and environmental needs.  Would anyone say that the French or Russian or Chinese or Iranian aristocrats truly maximized their utility when they took so much from their societies that the societies themselves rose up and eliminated them?  I’m not inclined to say so.  I think we’re headed on a similar collision course with history of our corporate and political leaders continue on their same near-sighted, artificial, and narrow definitions of success and utility maximization.

Utility is going to be different for each person and position within a given society.  It is also something that is partially constructed socially and partially experienced endogenously within ourselves.  Just because something amasses you more material or financial wealth doesn’t mean that it is you’re actually “winning” at anything.  Just because several people or society itself may have told you what you wanted doesn’t mean that it’s really good for you as an individual.

A business person’s motivation to maximize financial profits and material wealth is contradictory and, sometimes, mutually exclusive to maximizing their actual organic, sociological, and environmental needs as living beings.  Yet through a combination of genetic, socialization, and psychological factors they choose financial wealth over their own physical, social, and environmental health.  They seem to clearly mistake and misunderstand their own self interests relative to the larger social, economic, and environmental picture of the universe that is around them.

A governing member of society’s motivation can be found in maintaining, preserving, and extending their relative power and influence within the given society.  However, we see here again that these governing members frequently mistake temporary relative power over people to long term longevity and a lasting positive influence on peoples’ lives.  Without this positive influence on peoples’ well-being and quality of life, they then preside over relative hovels of societies or else, get removed from office all together in more proactive societies.  Again, the key to achieving utility maximization is misunderstood, even in the public realm where traditional notions of utility maximization aren’t present.

In short, maximizing relative power and influence, along with pure financial profit are not keys to maximizing human utility on any planet.  They should not be used in determining those things which we need to crave for our health, well-being, and quality of life in this universe within the context of our larger society, economy, and environment.  Those who don’t see it like that are probably suffering from some sort of socially induced hallucination that could be an enabling factor in allowing them to fight, kill, and even die for the sake of things that we don’t really need and shouldn’t really want as human beings.  How does the maximization of utility in these traditional senses lead to true utility maximization if they ruin lives, well-being, and whole economies and societies?

Just a thought.  Hope it helps.

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Bill Mitchell: Demystifying Modern Monetary Theory – YouTube

In a challenge to conventional views on modern monetary and fiscal policy, Professor Bill Mitchell of Newcastle University in Australia has emerged as one of…

Source: www.youtube.com

At the root of true conservative government, there is a malfeasance towards the larger social and environmental world that is toxic to both the collective and to the individual who is experiencing the malfeasance.  There are the ideologues, for sure, who genuinely believe that what they’re doing is actually a positive thing for everyone.  But then there are those who are just so overwhelming wrapped up in their own bs that they either don’t see or won’t see the costs that come from destroying the social or environmental systems.

In short, true conservatives are just plain mean, and ideological conservatives are just plain misguided.  We see it time and time again in the social, environmental, and economic science and we see it time and time again in our governments and politics.  There are fundamental, immutable truths out there that apply to economies, societies, and human well-being within the context of the social and environmental worlds.  We may not know all of the truths or how to use them to our advantages all of the time.  There could be unforeseen consequences that then require tinkering with the system in order to adapt it to the new knowledge and/or the new knowledge that is present.  But you must pay attention to natural law and to the changes that happen within the circumstances and conditions that we find ourselves.  This is precisely what is not being done by many policymakers, academics, administrators, and voters.  We cannot afford to keep on the current system that doesn’t even provide for the small self in absolute or in the long term.  Conservatives and ideologues must be removed from office or they must change their behavior, attitudes, and patterns of perspective.  Otherwise, I think they belong in mental institutions where they can be treated.  It is that simple.  Trust the peanut gallery in society and government to make it more complicated than it already is.

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