The top 25 hedge fund managers in the United States collectively earned $22 billion last year, and yet they have their own cushy set of tax rules. If they operated under the same rules that apply to other people — police officers, for example, or teachers — the country could cut its national deficit by as much as $44 billion in the next ten years.
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If the Top 25 Hedge Fund Managers Paid Taxes Like You and Me, We’d Cut 44 Billion of the National Deficit
6 JulTendency Toward Egalitarianism May Have Helped Humans Survive – NYTimes.com
5 JulDarwinian-minded analysts argue that Homo sapiens have an innate distaste for hierarchical extremes, the legacy of our long nomadic prehistory as tightly knit bands living by veldt-ready team-building rules: the belief in fairness and reciprocity, a capacity for empathy and impulse control, and a willingness to work cooperatively in ways that even our smartest primate kin cannot match. …. The advent of agriculture and settled life may have thrown a few feudal monkeys and monarchs into the mix, but evolutionary theorists say our basic egalitarian leanings remain.
via Tendency Toward Egalitarianism May Have Helped Humans Survive – NYTimes.com.
Remembrance of cities past: spectacular photos of the way we lived | Grist
1 JulPhotographs from a world before cars.
BeIow is a sampling of the collection maintained by Burton Holmes Historical Collection (BHHC), reprinted with special permission and under copyright of BHHC. Caldwell has archived 1,700 of an assemblage which once numbered 30,000 photos, the rest lost to time. A range of movie footage, from 200 film cans rediscovered in 2003, now resides at George Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y.
via Remembrance of cities past: spectacular photos of the way we lived | Grist.
Why people become chickenhawks – U.S. Military | All about American forces, Afghanistan, Iraq – Salon.com
30 JunChicken-hawkery thrives in a post-universal-draft world where elites and their progeny don’t have to face the prospect of front-line duty.
For years, chickenhawkery’s roots in this culture of unshared sacrifice have been a matter of theory — albeit a logical, well-grounded theory. But now, thanks to a comprehensive new study, we have concrete data underscoring the hypothesis. It suggests that many Americans’ aggressively pro-war ideology may fundamentally rely on their being physically shielded/disconnected from the human cost of war.
To document this connection, Columbia’s Robert Erikson and University of California at Berkeley’s Laura Stoker went back to the Vietnam War — the last time Americans faced wartime conscription. The researchers analyzed data from the Jennings-Niemi Political Socialization Study of college-bound high schoolers and subsequent interviews of those same high-schoolers from 1965 onward. In the process, they discovered that men holding low draft lottery numbers (and therefore more at risk of being drafted into combat) “became more anti-war, more liberal, and more Democratic in their voting compared to those whose high numbers protected them from the draft.” Importantly, for these men “lottery number was a stronger influence on their political outlook than their late-childhood party identification.” …
No doubt, the antiwar voices who have recently argued for the reinstatement of a draft will find fuel in this Berkeley/Columbia report. They argue that viscerally connecting the entire nation to the blood-and-guts consequences of war will make the nation less reflexively supportive of war — and the new data substantively supports that assertion. That’s why in the midst of (at least) three U.S. military occupations, this report is almost sure to be ignored by our chickenhawk-dominated political class — because it too explicitly exposes the selfish, self-centered and abhorrent roots of the chickenhawk ethos that now plays such an integral role in perpetuating a state of Endless War.
A Richer Shade of Green: The Wisdom of Sustainable Investment Funds | The Nation
24 JunThe need to put a premium on sustainability is not widely acknowledged in the investment community and certainly not among our elected officials, policy-makers and advisers. This presents an opportunity for astute companies and investors. In the long term, companies will benefit from aggressive action to dematerialize, substitute renewable energy for fossil fuel–based sources, increase energy efficiency, reduce water use and promote reuse, and tighten up sourcing and distribution channels. Investors with an eye on long-term gains will seek companies that are addressing these issues.
via A Richer Shade of Green: The Wisdom of Sustainable Investment Funds | The Nation.
Women Impact Collective Intelligence
23 JunA recent article in the Harvard Business Review gave highlights from an interview with Professors Woolley and Malone regarding their study. The Professors explained that they gave subjects aged 18-60 standard intelligence tests, then randomly assigned each person to a team. Each of the 192 teams they studied was given a complex problem to solve that required brainstorming, visual puzzles and decision-making. Once finished, each team was given an intelligence score based on the group’s performance.
Results confirmed that the groups having more members with higher IQ’s didn’t get the highest group score, the ones that had more women did.
via Women Impact Collective Intelligence – Technorati Technorati Women.
Diane Ravitch, the Anti-Michelle-Rhee
23 JunThe best way to improve American education, the post-epiphany Ravitch argues, is to fight child poverty with health care, jobs, child care, and affordable housing.
via Diane Ravitch, the Anti-Michelle-Rhee – Washington City Paper.
Joe Penny – Why we all have the right to a share of city space | NEF
20 Jun… many spaces that we could once call our own, where we could linger at our leisure and experience some of the joys of urban life, have been privatised and increasingly securitised. This in turn fragments our access to the city, limiting it to those who can pay for the privilege and those who conform to narrowly defined social norms.
This problem has been most acutely felt in the great cities of America: New York and Los Angeles being prime suspects. Here, as Sharon Zukin and Don Mitchell eloquently point out, the ability to access and enjoy once freely cherished spaces has come under the almost relentless pressure of market-driven forces, often in the guise of Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) which, in a predictable desire to secure their businesses and loyal consumers (and inevitably surrounding spaces), have driven out transgressive deviants – read those less likely to ‘consume’ the city, and whose presence may deter paying customers; the homeless, ‘winos’, skateboarders, and the like.
via Joe Penny – Why we all have the right to a share of city space | the new economics foundation.
Open Source Politics: Safeguarding the Free Flow of Information | The Nation
19 JunCopyright and patent laws are being used not for the public good, as intended by the Constitution, but to try and keep control of information and ideas themselves. Mega-corporations have extensively extended patents into areas such as information coding—including software and bioengineering, the two greatest examples. The past few decades have seen the extension of copyright far beyond the life of any personal creator, in order to ensure what might be deemed the immortal life of the corporate owner.
via Open Source Politics: Safeguarding the Free Flow of Information | The Nation.
Truth and Traditions 