a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment by blackbootz
blackbootz  ·  2897 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The New York Times is entirely too blase about these statistics.

It's hard to look at this soberly and not sound melodramatic. The middle and lower classes are unwitting sled dogs, with new and scarier whips designed each day to separate them from their meager incomes. Add to that the most expensive healthcare system in the world providing--depending how you measure it--healthcare at parity with Slovenia or Costa Rica. And god forbid you try to point them towards a political solution that distributes risk and cost, you'll find them sprinting to the polls to elect a gold-plated nitwit.

(Also, anytime it's over 90° outside, I'm reminded that Antarctica is melting.)

Positives. What are the positives? With all this data being made available to the public, we're seeing a huge push in statistical analysis, i.e. Raj Chetty's Equality of Opportunity work or Steven Pinker's Better Angels. That's heartening.