The most important thing, in my opinion, is peaceful parenting. That is, no hitting and no shouting - teach your kids to reason, even if they're being unreasonable.
I would call it respectful parenting. My sister has raised great kids because she and her husband always treated the kids with respect. They talked about things and explained the reasons why they wanted something from the kids. Otherwise they would let the kids do their own thing. Whereas my and my sister's parents never explained anything.
For example we had to be nice to adults and authority figures just because. If somebody had told me that it's in general good to be nice to other people because they will treat you nicely too I think my social development had been much better.
I don't think I ever had a satisfying conversation with my dad.
No, I meant stresses other than parenthood. When you have to work 2 jobs, have to decide whether to use your paycheck to pay overdue bills or buy groceries, and never get enough sleep, it's quite difficult to remain rational while your child is acting irrationally. The stresses of parenthood (never enough sleep, worrying if you are doing the right thing) just exacerbates those. After all, we aren't robots. Emotional state is a tough thing to override.
When your kids destroy your sleep pattern and cry most of the time when they are awake during the day, good luck staying rational and yourself. Everyone has limits and kids are very good at finding them.
Kids don't destroy your sleep pattern unless you abuse them by going against millions of years of co-sleeping and throw them in a crib in a different room (doubling their risk of SIDS). In a year and a half we've had exactly one "troubled night" and that's because she had hand foot and mouth disease.
Children cry because something is wrong. Sometimes that may be "I want to pull the cats tail but she's running away" but more often than not it's something that can be addressed by a parent. Love, attention, and affection has solved every bout of crying so far.
I think you were lucky. My sister's kids were all different. One was extremely easy and the other one was very difficult the first few years. Same parents, same methods, different outcome. People are different,so are kids.
In lala-economic-theory-land yes. But this is not companies competing for the favors of customers. This is nation states competing for the favors of companies and that is a totally different matter.
In the real world you need taxes to operate a country and with big business being able to relocate their capital and their profits at a moments notice corporations have a substantial advantage over nation states (which are by definition somewhat immobile).
So the 'inefficiency' that you seek to eliminate is the oil required to keep the machine running. Note that a company couldn't care less if your country roads fall into disrepair, healthcare sucks and education starts to fall behind. It won't show up in the quarterly reports for a long time and by the time it does they can easily move on to another place.
Having a very low corporate tax is only possible if your country does not require major infrastructure and that's one of the reasons why most tax havens are either nearly un-inhabitable (Cyprus, Panama) or extremely small (Monaco, Lichtenstein, Vaduz, Luxemburg).
Ireland is the exception and it only succeeded there for reasons that the UK will find hard to emulate.
>Having a very low corporate tax is only possible if your country does not require major infrastructure and that's one of the reasons why most tax havens are either nearly un-inhabitable (Cyprus, Panama) or extremely small (Monaco, Lichtenstein, Vaduz, Luxemburg).
>Note that a company couldn't care less if your country roads fall into disrepair, healthcare sucks and education starts to fall behind.
East Asian countries like Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong maintain achieve better healthcare and education outcomes than most western countries in spite of lower government spending. While they may have less welfare spending and greater economic inequality, this certainly isn't an impediment to productivity.
> In lala-economic-theory-land yes. But this is not companies competing for the favors of customers. This is nation states competing for the favors of companies and that is a totally different matter.
Why is it bad when businesses find that conditions for them constantly get better everywhere? Is there something inherently evil or bad about businesses? This is usually a position hardcore Socalists would take.
> In the real world you need taxes to operate a country and with big business being able to relocate their capital and their profits at a moments notice corporations have a substantial advantage over nation states (which are by definition somewhat immobile).
No corporation can move its operations and profits within a moments notice. This takes usually years and the absolute majority of businesses do not even have the option to ever do this.
The problem of most Western societies is that the top 10% basically pay for 75%+ of everything, the middle class pays an acceptable amount and then theres 30% of free loaders with 29,9% being the ones at the bottom and 0,1% on the top.
The top 10% also have more than 75% of the money, so this makes a lot of sense. They have more than 75% of the money, so I imagine it's a good bit higher than you imagine.
How do the freeloaders pay taxes like the rich if they can't afford life circumstances that allow them to get educations similar to the rich?
Healthy countries need taxes to boost their populace up to an optimal level of health and education. Maximize the people that could potentially become high-value.
Countries aren't machines built to serve companies. Whole countries shouldn't be made to become "more efficient" (or poorer) for the sake of companies.
Countries are there to work in the interest of it's population and business owners are a part of any free and democratic society.
If you don't have a mechanism of business owners and private enterprise that are determined by the vote of the population (via spending money privately on products) then you'll need a state controlled market and I doubt you would like the results. (Venezuela, North Korea, Soviet Union)
Just imagine some government committee is deciding on what the national variant of the new iPhone should look like.
Back to OA and my UK perspective. You've seen the reaction to the mild austerity (compared to, say, Greece or even Spain) in the Brexit vote. Go too far down the 'race to the bottom' thing and you'll see a lot more reacting. There are political limits and neo-libralism is only one possible perspective, not a natural law.
I agree. I find groups of people scary. Not in the anxiety manner. I mean that I don't know of a single instance of a person doing massive damage to anyone or any thing, when compared to damage by groups or by people with group backing. All the worst atrocities of the past few centuries were carried out by groups of people. The US constitution is supposed to protect individuals from groups, but that seems to have been (mostly) subverted in the name of preserving our institutions (banking).
But humans mostly want to be part of some group, and that's the problem with the current trend of ultra-individualism: people will be much easier to influence by dangerous groups that fill their need for belonging. If there were a stronger sense of community in the first place, instead of the strong emphasis on the autonomous, self-sufficient and competing individual, one could wonder if radical religious or ultranationist groups would be as significant.
I agree with the hierarchy generally followed by emergency management systems - protect yourself first and your family, then your neighborhood, then if they are all safe help the wider community.
I see it as the perfect storm, trust collapse is causing apathy, not desire to reform.
when they say government is migrating toward a gerontocracy is not just because politician are from the older classes, but also because younger participate less in the democratic debate, whether in the first line or by voting.
Voter turnout among the young was half compared to voter turnout by the elderly, I think, so that would reinforce parent's point.
Here's a FT article with a graph* of voter turnout by age - https://next.ft.com/content/2994afe4-43b0-3763-a80c-92351473... - it seems like, besides one particular anomaly, voter turnout among young people has been steadily declining and Brexit was a continuation of that trend.
no, but are underrepresented because the mistrust trend seems to hit them harder and in a bad way.
also, while I'd argue older people have more world experience, they are also disconnected from society advancements (which is a struggle as old as dirt) and I'd say a healthy society needs not just voting to act as an average between the groups but a dialogue where input from both sides are taken for advancement.
to be honest I'm in the apathy group myself, not because I mistrust politician but because I mistrust a system that promotes a dichotomy between winners and losers on interest groups instead of leveraging both sides needs and wants synergically
Like there was plenty of "political innovation", especially in Europe, after the Great Depression in the 1930s? I'd argue that didn't work out too well. Hopefully this time its different.
I think that was the point of the original article - the mistrust of "authority" following the financial crisis is leading to irrational behaviour such as blind faith in charismatic leaders (who are typically reactionary rather than progressive). Based on historical precedents (e.g. the swing to political extremes following the Great Depression) I don't think this is "positive trend" for a brighter better future, but I hope I'm wrong.
Brexit should have been a decision about policy, but appears not to have been - that is one of the points of the article.
The EU appears to have been too complex a subject for many voters to fully understand, and there was allegedly widespread distrust of the "experts", leading to large numbers basing their decision on emotional responses instead, such as "I don't trust the experts so I'm going to do the opposite of what they recommend" and "I like this bloke who talks about listening to the 'little people' and 'taking back control'".
I know there are some people who voted Leave for well-thought-out reasons, and that I can respect, because it is rational. But most analysis suggests the majority who voted Leave did not do so for rational reasons. In which case it is like cutting off your nose to spite your face. And it is not as though this was a local or a general election - this has made England and Wales look very bad on the world stage, and is something we're all going to have to live with for a very long time.
I can assure you the vast majority of UK voters didn't give a crap about the personalities involved, nor were the decisions taken for "emotive reasons" (sure are lots of people in denial trying to claim that though).
Ignoring reality is the worst possible option. Regarding your assertion, judging an individual by their collective group average is wrong. I'm a big proponent of research in this area - because I want to change it. For e.g. Black Americans have an IQ, on average, 15 points lower than white Americans. I want more research on this area, so it can be improved. Calling people racists (without evidence) shuts down any meaningful conversation, and hurts those who need the most help.
> I want more research on this area, so it can be
> improved
Somehow it sounds more obviously ridiculous when you rephrase it and start looking for "solutions" to improving the intelligence of all white people.
Small differences between very large, heterogenous populations gives you virtually no predictive power about individuals or how to help them, but do facilitate subtle and overt racism, however well-meaning it might be.
> On what evidence can you say that more research
> won't/can't help
On what basis can you say it will? These studies have known drawbacks in that they serve as a rallying point for all sorts of discrimination masquerading as high-minded discourse, and we're yet to see a benefit so far, so the burden of proof here is on you.
At least part of the problem here is given two children / job-applicants / defendants / whatever, who are absolutely identical in every way except for a specific cosmetic phenotype, what possible justification is there for treating them differently based on correlation between that phenotype and some other characteristic over a large population?
You are all over this thread putting words in people's mouths instead of discussing what they are actually saying. You are even painting an entire class of study with a broad brush in a guilt-by-association way. Are you sure that's actually helping your case and the conversation here?
> These studies have known drawbacks in that they serve as a rallying point for all sorts of discrimination masquerading as high-minded discourse, and we're yet to see a benefit so far, so the burden of proof here is on you.
You're arguing for deliberate ignorance because reality is uncomfortable.
> At least part of the problem here is given two children / job-applicants / defendants / whatever, who are absolutely identical in every way except for a specific cosmetic phenotype, what possible justification is there for treating them differently based on correlation between that phenotype and some other characteristic over a large population?
If two people are identical in every observable way, and that single observable way indicates a strong difference between them, why wouldn't one differentiate based on that single observation? They are, after all, indifferentiable in every other way.
Indeed, mathematically speaking if one ignores the single useful datum you posit, then one will make worse decisions: if you have no other data and just flip a coin between greens and blues in your thought experiment a few posts back, then you will choose worse than if you bias your coin towards greens. That's just a fact; whether you choose to ignore it based on the discomfort it causes you is up to you.
