Two recent pieces in The New York Times address the subject of rising income inequality in the United States, a subject covered at greater length in Timothy Noah’s book reviewed yesterday. In “Inequality Is Holding Back the Recovery,” Joseph Stiglitz … Continue reading
Almost nobody thinks income and wealth should be distributed with perfect equality. Most of us want to see talent, creativity, and hard work rewarded, both because we think that’s fairer and because we recognize the practical benefits of giving people … Continue reading
A dozen years ago today, on January 17, 2001, the satirical newspaper The Onion published an article “reporting” that then-soon-to-be-inaugurated president George W. Bush had addressed the nation by television to announce that “our long national nightmare of peace and … Continue reading
Paul Krugman’s Sunday column does a clear job of summarizing why the European mania for austerity has been a failure. This obviously doesn’t mean that austerity — cutting government deficits by cutting spending — is always a bad idea. In … Continue reading
The U.S, National Research Council has a quite good website explaining what is actually known about global warming and various approaches to dealing with the problem. The site is intended for the general public and presents the facts in a … Continue reading
You might want to click the “cc” button at the bottom of the video (when it’s playing) to turn on subtitles. Link: http://youtu.be/G0zf7EWZET0 by … Continue reading
I just read an interesting article in the September issue of The Progressive magazine on a subject I’ve been curious about, namely, health insurance in the Netherlands. It’s interesting because the Dutch system is based on private health insurance and … Continue reading
Here’s another surprisingly interesting little micro-documentary from YouTube, this one about the U.S. one-cent coin, or penny: An aside: The coins of most countries clearly show their value in numbers. American coins give the value in English words: one cent, … Continue reading
As André Schiffrin pointed out in a short article in the December 17 issue The Nation magazine, the absorption of Penguin into the Bertelsmann publishing empire will create a single company that will publish about a fourth of all books … Continue reading
Here’s some more evidence the Republican Party has drifted far to the right from its traditional conservative positions in the 1950s. All these positions are found in the Republican Party platform of 1956: We are proud of and shall continue … Continue reading