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It is altruism, not selfishness, cooperation, not competition, that will ultimately enable human beings to flourish. And Charles Darwin always knew it.
CHARLES DARWIN-Photo:philosophytalk.org
‘In two seminal works, (British economist and logician) William Stanley Jevons (1871) and (Austrian economist) Carl Menger (1871) placed individual self-interest at the foundation of economics. Three years later, (French mathematical economist) Léon Walras (1874) built neoclassical general equilibrium analysis upon a similar assumption of self -interest. For the next 100 years or more, self-interested “economic man” was the centerpiece of mainstream economic theory. But in the same pivotal year, Darwin (1871) published a contrasting and evolutionary explanation of cooperative solidarity and morality, which took over one hundred years to be confirmed broadly by theoretical and empirical research. This fact has been largely neglected by evolutionary economists that have strangely hitherto made little use of (or even reference to) Darwinism. ‘- Geoffrey M. Hodgson, Via the Journal of Evolutionary Economics*
Forget cut-throat competition: to survive, try a little selflessness+
‘Darwin thought that sympathetic and cooperative tribes and groups would flourish in comparison with communities made up of more selfish individuals, and that natural selection would thus favour cooperation.’
‘A new study has claimed that, contrary to received wisdom, it is in fact altruism, not cut-throat competition, that confers real evolutionary advantage.
Research that attempts to link human morality with biological evolution (of yeast, in this case) has always had broad appeal. For decades we have lived with the idea that Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection can explain everything in terms of competition – and that therefore evolution favours selfishness. What place is there for a bleeding-heart altruist in a world where only the fittest survive?
The popularity of this idea can be traced back to the massive success of Richard Dawkins’s book The Selfish Gene (1976). “Let us try to teach generosity and altruism,” Dawkins wrote, “because we are born selfish.” Against this backdrop, studies showing how cooperation evolved in nature seem surprising. In a world where we are taught that nature is selfish and selfishness natural, the discovery of natural altruism can even seem shocking.
In fact, Darwin would not have been at all surprised. The conclusion that cooperative groups will flourish at the expense of more selfish ones, and that as a result moral instincts will gradually evolve, was at the heart of his evolutionary writings. In The Descent of Man (1871) Darwin wrote about loving and cooperative behaviours in dogs, elephants, baboons, pelicans, and other species. He thought that sympathetic and cooperative tribes and groups would flourish in comparison with communities made up of more selfish individuals, and that natural selection would thus favour cooperation.
Another tendency that Darwin shares with more recent scientists is his willingness to leap from the world of natural selection to the language of morality. Writing of the evolution of human cooperation, Darwin predicted that “looking to future generations, there is no cause to fear that the social instincts will grow weaker, and we may expect that virtuous habits will grow stronger, becoming perhaps fixed by inheritance. In this case the struggle between our higher and lower impulses will be less severe, and virtue will be triumphant.”
But there is a danger in making the leap from the single-celled to the saintly, and again it is one that has been evident since the 19th century. Darwin’s fellow evolutionist Herbert Spencer defined altruism in physical terms – generally as any action that benefited another organism at some cost to the self – but even including mere physical division and loss of matter in very simple organisms. Friedrich Nietzsche retorted that in that case, even urination should be counted as an altruistic virtue.
The final reason we care about studies like these is that they seem to have the potential to shed light on politics and society. The Dawkinsian picture of selfish humans driven by an evolved individualism chimed with the social and political ethos of the Margaret Thatcher era. Loadsamoney had selfish genes. But there have always been those on hand to make the opposite political case, too – such as the Russian anarchist and socialist Peter Kropotkin, author of Mutual Aid (1902), who argued that the multiple examples of cooperation among animals proved that mother nature was a communist not a capitalist.
Both these political arguments are guilty of the same fallacy. Selfishness and cooperation, like love and hate, war and peace, rape and murder, are all “natural” and “evolved” in one sense. But human beings, unlike yeast cells, have morals and minds, with which we make choices and form emotional attachments. We also form ourselves into social groups which determine our values. It is through these moral and social means that we decide whether, and in what respects, to follow or to resist nature.’- + Forget cut-throat competition: to survive, try a little selflessness- Thomas Dixon
The Enduring Relevance of Darwin's Theory of Morality
Geoffrey M. Hodgson, Via BioScience
‘Darwin is rightly acknowledged as the founder of modern evolutionary biology and one of the greatest scientists of all time. We know that he got some things wrong—particularly, because he had no knowledge of the genetic mechanisms of inheritance. Of course, Darwin also got many things right, but some of his good ideas have been ignored or belittled by biologists or social scientists. Perhaps the most important—at least for social scientists—is Darwin's conception and evolutionary theory of morality, which appears in his Descent of Man (1871). I wish to outline this theory and discuss why it has been overlooked and why it should be rehabilitated.
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Morality is complex and controversial. In Darwin's (1871) account, morality results from a combination of emotional impulses and thoughtful deliberation. He argues that although primitive moral feelings have evolved for millions of years among “the progenitors of man” (p. 162), humans alone have a developed sense of morality:
A moral being is one who is capable of comparing his past and future actions or motives and of approving or disapproving of them. We have no reason to suppose that any of the lower animals have this capacity.… Man… alone can, with certainty, be ranked as a moral being.
For Darwin, morality emerged in humans from a long-evolved foundation of instinct and impulse. Among these feelings are sympathy for others and obeisance of authority. He explained the evolution of primitive moral feelings in terms of the survival advantages of groups that achieve coherence and solidarity through shared norms and social rules. But to modern readers, this evolutionary explanation requires elaboration, and the role of genetic factors such as inclusive fitness and the role of culture must be taken into account. Recent scholarship suggests that a more complete and robust evolutionary explanation is in sight). It seems that Darwin was broadly right, although he missed out on crucial details.
Moral motivation depends on conscious deliberations (which are apparently unique to humans) and on inherited impulses, but biologists have a much broader agenda than Homo sapiens. Biologists often simplify by assuming, given the environment, that there is a close correspondence between genes and behavior. The influence of culture and any conscious deliberation is generally downplayed, because it is negligible with most species. Therefore, human morality gets sidelined.
Moral motivation is also neglected in the social sciences but for different reasons. Intellectual changes during the First World War led to the rise of behaviorism, as well as the rejection of instinct psychology and the exclusion of evolutionary reasoning from sociology and anthropology. In the 1930s, economics redefined itself as the science of choice, in which choices are made on the basis of a given preference function. Moral motivation was ignored or assumed to be incorporated in this function.
In the last decade or so, there has been within several disciplines—including biology, psychology, economics, and anthropology—an explosion of interest on the problem of explaining human cooperation and altruistic behavior, but much of the work by economists in this area conflates issues of morality with altruism or cooperation under the description of “social” or “other-regarding” preferences. The assumption of “other-regarding” preferences contrasts with the previously prominent idea that economic man was entirely selfish, but someone with “other-regarding” preferences is still maximizing his or her own utility and may also be regarded as selfish.
As economics Nobel Laureate Amartya has argued (1987), what is missing in a preference function is a distinctive dimension of morality. The philosopher Richard Joyce (2006) proposed that morality has most or all of the following characteristics: (a) Moral judgments express attitudes (such as approval or contempt) and beliefs. (b) The emotion of guilt is an important mechanism for regulating moral conduct. (c) Moral judgments transcend the interests or intentions of those concerned. (d) Moral judgments imply notions of desert and justice. (e) Moral judgments are inescapable. (f) Moral judgments transcend human conventions. (g) Moral judgments govern interpersonal relationships and counter self-regarding individualism.
These characteristics do not establish a valid morality; they, instead, help us identify what is a moral judgment, whether that is acceptable or otherwise. We are concerned with descriptive rather than normative ethics: There is no attempt here to identify the “right” morality but, instead, to identify the basic nature of a moral claim. Most religions uphold moral claims, but that does not make them all right or just.
As Darwin did, Joyce (2006) emphasized the role of both emotions and deliberation. His first point establishes that a moral judgment must involve both beliefs and sentiments, that it is not reducible to either alone. If an action is impelled purely by emotion, as Darwin understood, it cannot amount to moral motivation. Deliberations and beliefs are also vital but are, themselves, insufficient, because they must be backed by sentiments or emotions: Acting morally is more than calculated conformity to moral rules.
Joyce's (2006) last four points reveal the limitations of typical utilitarian or preference-based approaches. Moral judgments are not simply expressions of an individual's interests, preferences, sentiments, or beliefs. They are also claims to universality in their context, which would apply irrespective of the interests, preferences, sentiments, or beliefs of those to whom they are supposed to apply. People make clear that they expect moral behavior from others as well as from themselves, which may influence others' behavior.
Morality surpasses questions of preference. It is a matter of right or wrong or of duty, of doing the right thing, irrespective of whether we like it. This is part of what makes us human: We are capable of considering moral rules and of understanding that their observance is more than a matter of personal whim or satisfaction.
From an evolutionary perspective, studies show a significant number of common features of moralities across cultures, notwithstanding important cultural variations. All cultures regard many acts of harm against others as immoral and invest many acts of reciprocity and fairness with moral virtue. Moral codes restraining individual selfishness are also commonplace. As well as sustaining enormous cultural diversity, genetic and cultural coevolution has ensured that some specific types of prosocial moral rules have endured.
In summary, a moral judgment involves attitudes, beliefs, and emotions but is also subject to deliberation of its fairness or justice. In contrast to standard utilitarian approaches, a moral judgment is more than mere convention. The person judging holds that the judgment is inescapable and transcends individual preferences or interests.
Why does all this matter? Simple heuristic, agent-based models show that once we take moral motivation into account, we can have more robust explanations of the evolution of altruism. In these models, there is no longer a one-to-one mapping between genes and behavior. To different degrees, individual decisions are also influenced by the level of moral culture in the group. In turn, the group moral culture can shift up and down incrementally as behavior becomes more or less moral. Positive feedback loops can therefore help sustain group morality. This enhanced understanding of human motivation, inspired by Darwin, leads to very different conclusions on policy matters, such as how to increase productivity within a firm, how to design incentives for health service systems, or how to develop policies to combat global warming (Hodgson 2013).
The rapid development of the life sciences in the last half-century has already had a major impact on the social sciences; a number of scholars now argue that our genetically programmed dispositions have to be taken into account. Evolutionary anthropologists have shown that this insight can dovetail with a complementary appreciation of the additional role of culture.
That is not the end of the story. Darwin's insights on the nature of morality also promise to have a major impact on the social sciences. There is work to be done to develop and test a more complete and robust explanation of the evolution of morality, but there is now enough evidence to suggest that Darwin is broadly vindicated.
These exciting advances combine with another closely related research agenda. Darwin himself conjectured that his core evolutionary principles—of variation, selection, and inheritance—would also apply to systems of replication above the biological level. After much toying with vague and unsatisfactory words such as meme, we are now closer to a rigorous account of what these generalized Darwinian principles would mean when they are applied to evolutionary processes at the social level (Hodgson and Knudsen 2010).
Interaction between the social sciences and biology has a long history. Darwin was inspired by economists Thomas Robert Malthus and Adam Smith. It is now possible for social scientists to share in some of the excitement that biologists have been enjoying in recent decades, and we can all learn more from Darwin.’-The Enduring Relevance of Darwin's Theory of Morality
* The Evolution of Morality and the End of Economic Man
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Imaging a Better World: Moving forward with the real Adam Smith
(There is no doubt that today capitalism is under fire. It is besieged and under attack. To my mind this is the best time to revisit Adam Smith and to try to see if we can locate the true and real Smith. As what has been mainly known about Adam Smith and ascribed to him, are far from the truth. The right-wingers and the market-fundamentalists for too long have abused Smith in order to promote their obnoxious agenda and to legitimise exploitation of people and resources for the benefit of the 1%.
In the interest of accountability to truth and to Smith himself, this must be challenged and attempts must be made to discover the real Adam Smith and his true values.
However, before I try to introduce you to the real Adam Smith, allow me to introduce you to the real modern economists whom have turned the beautiful and elegant economics of Adam Smith into a dismal science of irrelevance and pomposity.)...
Adam Smith and the Pursuit of Happiness
(At the core of his work, Smith was driven by a desire to discover the best ways to make individuals and nations happier. His Wealth of Nations was really an extension of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and is still recognised today as the first and most important book written on political economy.
Ultimately, Smith sought to guide himself and others in the pursuit of true satisfaction. While we might think that material gain and status is what leads to a fulfilled life, he disagreed.
Fulfilment comes when we are able to perform good work in the world and know that we are admired and respected because of our actions. In Smith’s own words: “Man naturally desires not only to be loved, but to be lovely [worthy of being loved].”
Being good is not some empty ideal that holds us back from doing well and succeeding in life.
On the contrary, qualities such as giving, and other wholesome behaviours, are the very things that increase our chances of success, happiness and contentment.)...
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As noted in an article in the AlterNet, more than half of all people in the US don’t believe that the American dream is real. Fifty-nine percent of those polled in June agreed that “the American dream has become impossible for most people to achieve.” More and more Americans believe there is “not much opportunity” to get ahead.
The people in America have reached this conclusion for a very simple reason: It’s true. The key elements of the American dream—a living wage, retirement security, the opportunity for one’s children to get ahead in life—are now unreachable for all but the wealthiest. And it’s getting worse. As inequality increases, the fundamental elements of the American dream are becoming increasingly unaffordable for the ‘99%’.
Here are seven ways the American dream is dead on its track.
- Most people can’t get ahead financially.
If the American dream means a reasonable rate of income growth for working people, most people can’t expect to achieve it.
As Ben Casselman observes at fivethirtyeight.com, the middle class hasn’t seen its wage rise in 15 years. In fact, the percentage of middle-class households in this nation is actually falling. Median household income has fallen since the financial crisis of 2008, while income for the wealthiest of Americans has actually risen.
Thomas Edsall wrote in the New York Times that “Not only has the wealth of the very rich doubled since 2000, but corporate revenues are at record levels.” Edsall also observed that, “In 2013, according to Goldman Sachs, corporate profits rose five times faster than wages.”
- The stay-at-home parent is a thing of the past.
There was a time when middle-class families could lead a comfortable lifestyle on one person’s earnings. One parent could work while the other stayed home with the kids.
Those days are gone. As Elizabeth Warren and co-author Amelia Warren Tyagi documented in their 2003 book, The Two-Income Trap, the increasing number of two-earner families was matched by rising costs in a number of areas such as education, home costs and transportation.
These cost increases, combined with wage stagnation, mean that families are struggling to make ends meet—and that neither parent has the luxury of staying home any longer. In fact, parenthood has become a financial risk. Warren and Tyagi write that “Having a child is now the single best predictor that a woman will end up in financial collapse.” This book was written over a decade ago; things are even worse today.
- The rich are more debt-free. Others have no choice.
Most Americans are falling behind anyway, as their salary fails to keep up with their expenses. No wonder debt is on the rise. As Joshua Freedman and Sherle R. Schwenninger observe in a paper for the New America Foundation, “American households… have become dependent on debt to maintain their standard of living in the face of stagnant wages.”
This “debt-dependent economy,” as Freedman and Schwenninger call it, has negative implications for the nation as a whole. But individual families are suffering too.
Rani Molla of the Wall Street Journal notes that “Over the past 20 years the average increase in spending on some items has exceeded the growth of incomes. The gap is especially poignant for those under 25 years old.”
There are increasingly two classes of Americans: Those who are taking on additional debt, and the rich.
- Student debt is crushing a generation of non-wealthy Americans.
Education for every American who wants to get ahead? Forget about it. Nowadays you have to be rich to get a college education; that is, unless you want to begin your career with a mountain of debt. Once you get out of college, you’ll quickly discover that the gap between spending and income is greatest for people under 25 years of age.
Education, as Forbes columnist Steve Odland put it in 2012, is “the great equalizer… the facilitator of the American dream.” But at that point college costs had risen 500 percent since 1985, while the overall consumer price index rose by 115 percent. As of 2013, tuition at a private university was projected to cost nearly $130,000 on average over four years, and that’s not counting food, lodging, books, or other expenses.
Public colleges and universities have long been viewed as the get-ahead option for all Americans, including the poorest among us. Not anymore. The University of California was once considered a national model for free, high-quality public education, but today tuition at UC Berkeley is $12,972 per year. (It was tuition-free until Ronald Reagan became governor.) Room and board is $14,414. The total cost of on-campus attendance at Berkeley, including books and other items, is estimated to be $32,168.
The California story has been repeated across the country, as state cutbacks in the wake of the financial crisis caused the cost of public higher education to soar by 15 percent in a two-year period. With a median national household income of $51,000, even public colleges are quickly becoming unaffordable.
Sure, there are still some scholarships and grants available. But even as college costs rise, the availability of those programs is falling, leaving middle-class and lower-income students further in debt as out-of-pocket costs rise.
- Vacations aren’t for the likes of you anymore.
Think you’d like to have a nice vacation? Think again. According to a 2012 American Express survey, Americans who were planning vacations expected to spend an average of $1,180 per person. That’s $4,720 for a family of four. But then, why worry about paying for that vacation? If you’re unemployed, you can’t afford it. And even if you have a job, there’s a good chance you won’t get the time off anyway.
As the Center for Economic and Policy Research found in 2013, the United States is the only advanced economy in the world that does not require employers to offer paid vacation to their workers. The number of paid holidays and vacation days received by the average worker in this country (16) would not meet the statutory minimum requirements in 19 other developed countries, according to the CEPR. Thirty-one percent of workers in smaller businesses had no paid vacation days at all.
The CEPR also found that 14 percent of employees at larger corporations also received no paid vacation days. Overall, roughly one in four working Americans gets no vacation time at all.
Rep. Alan Grayson, who has introduced the Paid Vacation Act, correctly notes that the average working American now spends 176 hours more per year on the job than was the case in 1976.
Between the pressure to work more hours and the cost of vacation, even people who do get vacation time—at least on paper—are hard-pressed to take any time off. That’s why 175 million vacation days go unclaimed each year.
- Even with health insurance, medical care is increasingly unaffordable for most people.
Medical care when you need it? That’s for the wealthy.
The Affordable Care Act was designed to increase the number of Americans who are covered by health insurance. But health coverage in this country is the worst of any highly developed nation—and that’s for people who have health insurance.
Every year the Milliman actuarial firm analyzes the average costs of medical care, including the household’s share of insurance premiums and out-of-pocket costs, for a family of four with the kind of insurance that is considered higher quality coverage in this country: a PPO plan which allows them to use a wider range of healthcare providers.
Even as overall wealth in this country has shifted upward, away from middle-class families, the cost of medical care is increasingly being borne by the families themselves. As the Milliman study shows, the employer-funded portion of healthcare costs has risen 52 percent since 2007, the first year of the recession. But household costs have risen by a staggering 73 percent, or 8 percent per year, and now average $9,144. In the same time period, Census Bureau figures show that median household income has fallen 8 percent.
That means that household healthcare costs are skyrocketing even as income falls dramatically.
The recent claims of “lowered healthcare costs” are misleading. While the rate of increase is slowing down, healthcare costs are continuing to increase. And the actual cost to working Americans is increasing even faster, as corporations continue to maximize their record profits by shifting healthcare costs onto consumers. This shift is expected to accelerate as the result of a misguided provision in the Affordable Care Act which will tax higher-cost plans.
According to an OECD survey, the number of Americans who report going without needed healthcare in the past year because of cost was higher than in 10 comparable countries. This was true for both lower-income and higher-income Americans, suggesting that insured Americans are also feeling the pinch when it comes to getting medical treatment.
As inequality worsens, wages continue to stagnate, and more healthcare costs are placed on the backs of working families, more and more Americans will find medical care unaffordable.
- Americans can no longer look forward to a secure retirement.
Want to retire when you get older, as earlier generations did, and enjoy a secure life after a lifetime of hard work? You’ll get to… if you’re rich.
There was a time when most middle-class Americans could work until they were 65 and then look forward to a financially secure retirement. Corporate pensions guaranteed a minimum income for the remainder of their life. Those pensions, coupled with Social Security income and a lifetime’s savings, assured that these ordinary Americans could spend their senior years in modest comfort.
No longer. As we have already seen, rising expenses means most Americans are buried in debt rather than able to accumulate modest savings. That’s the main reason why 20 percent of Americans who are nearing retirement age haven’t saved for their post-working years.
Meanwhile, corporations are gutting these pension plans in favor of far less general programs. The financial crisis of 2008, driven by the greed of Wall Street one percenters, robbed most American household of their primary assets. And right-wing “centrists” of both parties, not satisfied with the rising retirement age which has already cut the program’s benefits, continue to press for even deeper cuts to the program.
One group, Natixis Global Asset Management, ranks the United States 19th among developed countries when it comes to retirement security. The principal reasons the US ranks so poorly are 1) the weakness of our pension programs; and 2) the stinginess of our healthcare system, which even with Medicare for the elderly, is far weaker than that of nations such as Austria.
Economists used to speak of retirement security as a three-legged stool. Pensions were one leg of the stool, savings were another and Social Security was the third. Today two legs of the stool have been shattered, and anti-Social Security advocates are sawing away at the third.
Conclusion
Vacations; an education; staying home to raise your kids; a life without crushing debt; seeing the doctor when you don’t feel well; a chance to retire: one by one, these mainstays of middle-class life are disappearing for most Americans. Until we demand political leadership that will do something about it, they’re not coming back.
Can the American dream be restored? Yes, but it will take concerted effort to address two underlying problems. First, we must end the domination of our electoral process by wealthy and powerful elites. At the same time, we must begin to address the problem of growing economic inequality. Without a national movement to call for change, change simply isn’t going to happen.-AlterNet
...And now the six ways to bring the American Dream back from the dead
‘Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed -
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above'.- Langston Hughes
‘It is time to admit that the “American Dream” is dead. Its underlying conditions – strong, consistent economic growth and a meritocracy structured to keep the rich from gaming the system – no longer hold true.
Nonetheless, an American Dream 2.0 is still possible, and it will be up to those now contending for the White House to offer a blueprint for making it a reality. For starters, America’s leaders need to explain the problem clearly. The Declaration of Independence proclaimed the “pursuit of happiness” a central feature of American life. Since 1776, each generation has sought upward social mobility; and for a long time, many – though not all – met with prosperity.
For over a century after the American civil war, breakthroughs in energy, medicine, telecommunications, and transportation reshaped America (and the world). Economic productivity grew dramatically, as did the average lifespan. And for most of this period, a rising tide really did lift most boats. Politicians from both parties embraced the national ethos that anyone could get ahead through hard work and gradually, if imperfectly, made it accessible to immigrants, non-whites, women, the disabled, and others who had historically been excluded from the promise of American life.
But when economic growth began to slow in the 1970s, voters grew frustrated, while oil shocks, Watergate, and the ignominious end of the Vietnam war compounded the public’s sense of what President Jimmy Carter called America’s “malaise”. It was against this dismal backdrop that Ronald Reagan campaigned in 1980 on a promise to deliver “Morning in America”. With the US Federal Reserve having signalled its willingness to do what was necessary to rein in inflation, taxes were cut, and America was fundamentally transformed from a country of savers into one of borrowers.
In the ensuing decades, financial leverage drove growth onward, but the American Dream was living on borrowed time. Americans were going into debt to buy foreign goods, and the producers of those goods were buying US government debt, thereby keeping interest rates low. Though Americans felt prosperous, the real economy was growing at only half its previous rate, and median wages were plateauing.
Meanwhile, the Fed busied itself trying to put out periodic fires in the financial markets. Yet it inadvertently made the problem of rising inequality even worse. By 2007, its policies had artificially expanded financial markets, where assets are held largely by the wealthy, to three times the size of the real economy.
The American Dream works only when growth is broadly shared and structural impediments to advancement are scarce. Neither is true today. According to the Congressional Budget Office, annual growth rates of 4% are not coming back – at least not anytime soon; 2% growth is the most that should be expected. Moreover, the innovations that drove growth in manufacturing employment and upward mobility in the past have been superseded by digital technologies. For all their convenience, the Amazons and Ubers of the digital economy are destroying working-class jobs and driving down wages.
Making matters worse, the US tax code has increasingly come to favour capital over labour, which helps to explain why labour’s share of national income has been declining. All told, there is too much debt for the young, too little retirement savings for the post-1945 baby boom generation, and a lack of job flexibility and security for the displaced and unemployed. Trying to get ahead has become a Sisyphean task.
Six Steps to a Better Dream
Fortunately, a better narrative is possible. We already know what we need to do to help rebalance the playing field and restore deficit-neutral growth and dynamism. For starters, we should be reducing student debt in exchange for national service in fields such as teaching, emergency services, and rural medical care. Not only is this the right thing to do, but it would also galvanise a new generation of public servants in socially important areas currently suffering from labor shortages.
My Guest Blogger Steve Szeghi: Student Loan Debt in the United States, Time to Forgive
Second, we must eliminate tax breaks – namely, the stepped-up basis loophole for estate taxes and the carried-interest rate – that widen and entrench the wealth divide. In doing so, we could unlock hundreds of billions of dollars in new tax revenue.
Third, that newfound tax revenue should be used for three key purposes. First, America needs to provide tuition-free community college to retrain its workers, many of whom have been – or eventually will be – displaced by automation and other new technologies. Second, we need a national infrastructure programme – a modern version of President Franklin D Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration – which could employ many of those who have lost manufacturing jobs. And third, it is time to establish a national trust fund for student loans, which should then be repayable from a predetermined proportion of the student’s subsequent income for a specified number of years. Students who end up with low future incomes would pay less than they borrowed, but this would be offset by higher earners.
Values-less Education and the Death of Dreams
The Journey to Sophia: Education for Wisdom
Fourth, the federal minimum wage must not only be raised, but also be indexed to the rate of inflation. This would both help people keep up with the rising cost of living and, as the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago has shown, increase aggregate economic activity.
Fifth, we must make access to basic childcare a universal good, or women’s participation in the labour force will continue to fall short of its potential.
And finally, we need to give everyone access to the same retirement-savings benefits as the rich; namely, through an expansion of the Thrift Savings Plan, which acts like a 401k but provides critical tax benefits that most workers currently lack.
What might an Economy for the Common Good look like?
And finally, we need to give everyone access to the same retirement-savings benefits as the rich; namely, through an expansion of the Thrift Savings Plan, which acts like a 401k but provides critical tax benefits that most workers currently lack.
Empires rise and fall – and sometimes they rise again. America’s current trajectory does not bode well. But if we act now, we can still fashion a new American Dream for the world’s largest economy.’-Alexander Friedman, The Guardian, Fri 16 Aug 2019
Mr Trump, we are not what we earn!
‘I Have a Dream’: Yearning for Dr. King’s Interconnected World
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A Message from Kamran Mofid to mark International Youth Day
‘On 17 December 1999, in its resolution 54/120, the United Nations General Assembly endorsed the recommendation made by the World Conference of Ministers Responsible for Youth (Lisbon, 8-12 August 1998) that 12 August be declared International Youth Day.’
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What is the unfolding story of the next decades?
The rise of today’s youth, leading the world, with hope, inspiration, commitment, imagination and wisdom in the interest of the common good, to change our troubled world for the better
The commitment and the passion of young people is a force for change that cannot be matched or bettered. Today, the youth of the world have risen against injustice, inhumanity, greed, wars and conflicts, environmental degradation and abuse, values-less education, and more. By their actions, they are empowering and enabling us all to imagine and construct a better world in the interest of the common good.
- Dr. Larch Maxey, We Owe it to Our Humanity to hear you, to emulate you
- World in Chaos and Despair: The Healing Power of Slow Food
- Anthea Lawson, We Owe it to Our Humanity to hear you, to emulate you
- Do you have an eye for justice and sense of duty? Then, these questions are for you.
- Come and meet the Team Human, My Favorite Team