In Defense of Occupy
Economic inequality is something we should all be talking about. Occupy Wall Street is making it nearly unavoidable, and that's a good thing.
Post Tagged with: "Poverty"
A Broken Social Contract?
How London's other half lives and is born to fail: the developed world’s worst social mobility and equality levels reveal a broken social contract.
Why You’ve Never Heard of Community Action: Civic Participation and Poverty
How and why the Community Action Program was transformed from an engine for participation of the poor to just another program for service delivery.
Geek Power
Here’s Bill Gates from a Wired magazine interview about the state of computer hacking: If he were a teenager today, he says, he’d be hacking biology. “Creating artificial life with DNA synthesis. That’s sort of the equivalent of machine-language programming,” says Gates, whose work for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has led him to develop his own expertise in disease [...]
Generational Inadequacy
I just finished watching Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks’ The Pacific, an HBO miniseries following a group of marines in WWII. And it was truly epic. Melodramatic and overwrought maybe, but the war in the Pacific was no jungle romp. As The Pacific vividly shows, it was unimaginably gruesome, traumatic, and relentless. The marines battled the unyielding and suicidal Japanese on malaria-infested, [...]
E.U.: Vacationing a Human Right
In a bold step intended to reduce poverty, the European Union will soon be providing some of the Continent’s poorest citizens with subsidized plane tickets and hotel rooms. The Toronto-based National Post reported on Monday that the European Union has declared traveling for tourism a human right, and is launching a scheme to subsidize vacations with taxpayer money for those [...]
Georgian President Vows “No Wine For Russia” at IOP
Well, not completely. But Mikheil Saakashvili, the President of Georgia, did boast yesterday that the wine produced in Georgia is simply so good (thanks to his free market reforms) that he hopes the Russians continue their embargo, because to sell it on the Russian market would be a waste – the Russians, he explained, will drink just about anything. If [...]
Robin Hood Strikes Again, Part 2
In his April 11 post, “Weighing In: The Great Tax Debate,” Max Novendstern rebuts my most recent argument that it is inappropriate for 73 percent of federal income taxes to be paid by 10 percent of the American population. Since our disagreement is to at least some extent based on our differing conceptions of fairness, I will offer only a [...]
An Enlightened Approach to Illegal Immigration
Why the politics of immigration must be reconciled with reality
Do Harvard Students Try to Pass for Poor?
James McAuley asks today in the Harvard Crimson: “What is it with Harvard students and pretending to be poor?” James is a polite guy, so he doesn’t name names. He cites “the more well-moneyed of our peers,” he cites “many affluent students,” he cites “wealthy individuals” and “wealthy peers” and “wealthy Harvard undergraduates.” And he cites people with specific phony [...]
