For your reading pleasure.
(1) Ezra Klein answers the questions of "Why Americans are Angry". A representative quotes:
Meanwhile, when creative destruction came at a white-collar industry like journalism, people in the field justified their terror because journalism plays a more important function than simply giving people jobs... Elites are much better at being afraid of job losses in their world, but that hasn't contributed to a broader sympathy or -- dare I say it? -- sense of solidarity. Meanwhile, the game in Washington proved itself rigged in favor of powerful interests when Wall Street cracked and the banks got bailed out. So the economy can batter the working class and it's all part of the natural order of things, but the rich seem to get saved when things don't go their way. Why shouldn't people be angry?"
(2) Over at A Tiny Revolution is the best idea I've heard in a long time:
Starting today, every Friday I'm going to give five dollars to someone who's produced something funny/interesting/worthwhile and is giving it away on the internet(s).
Obviously the internet is the greatest distribution technology ever created for music and writing and video and journalism. But it's also obvious it generally makes it more difficult for people producing such things to earn a living.
Even cooler?
I'm convinced the answer is something like Dean Baker's Artistic Freedom Vouchers. Baker's proposal is that the government give every adult a $100 voucher each year that they could in turn give to anyone producing anything creative.
Of course, there are significant problems with this, but since I'm feeling so darn optimistic about the world, I'll just ignore them for now.
(3) Marc Ambinder over at Atlantic has a terrific piece on obesity. Problematically, there's a bit of straw-manning. To wit:
And the debate on how to deal with obesity remains frozen. On one side are the proponents of individual responsibility, who believe that fat people suffer from a surplus of self-indulgence and a shortage of willpower. On the other are people who believe that Americans are getting fatter because of powerful environmental factors like cheap corn, fast food, and unscrupulous advertising. Each side is held in political check by the other, and both have advocated unrealistic solutions: diets and exercise programs and miracle drugs that don’t work versus massive, and in many cases punitive, government interventions that are politically impossible.
Ezra Klein responds:
Obesity is much more structural than it is personal. That's why it's so depressingly predictable. It afflicts certain communities, with certain socioeconomic characteristics, and it has only really emerged across a certain time period. Those communities contain a lot of different individuals, but their environments and their time and money stresses and their transportation and grocery options and their street safety and exercise opportunities are broadly similar. How we live has changed much more quickly than who we are, and no effort to turn back the tide on obesity will succeed without an accurate understanding of what's made us obese.
(4) Lastly, a friend of Oberliner, Bubblegum Aesthetics's, brother-in-law has a piece up at HuffPo. Send some love: go, read.
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