Tuesday, January 2nd, 2018
Sara Miller Llana, Staff Writer - The Christian Science Monitor
Stephan: Iceland, like the other Nordic cultures is wellbeing oriented; the culture understands that the fostering of wellbeing is what makes a society, happy, healthful, and successful. As you read this, ask yourself: "Why can't we seem to figure out this sort of thing in our culture? What is blocking us from becoming a functional society?
Iceland youth
Credit: Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
REYKJAVIK, ICELAND —In the late 1980s, when Björgvin Ívar Guðbrandsson was a teenager, alcohol and school dances went hand-in-hand. While he was later to drinking than his peers – more interested in playing soccer and guitar – when he did start around age 16, he would smuggle alcohol in his guitar case into school events.
“I think the adults just turned a blind eye,” says Mr. Guðbrandsson. “The culture was, I think, ‘they’re just kids. As long as they aren’t fighting, it’s okay.’”
Today, as a teacher at Langholt school in Reykjavik where he once studied, he says that if a student were to show up drunk to a dance, it would be such a scandal that the school principal would likely call child protective services.
In reality, that rarely happens because substance abuse on a wide scale has essentially become a “non-issue,” says Guðbrandsson. Alcohol and school dances, in other words, don’t go together in Iceland today.
This school is hardly alone. Teen drinking – as well as teen smoking, […]
No Comments
Monday, January 1st, 2018
Stephan A. Schwartz, Editor - Schwartzreport
Stephan: I wish to all my readers the very best for 2018. May it be for each of you, and those you love, a year of good health, prosperity, and productivity. Make a difference, foster wellbeing in every choice you make.
-- Stephan
2 Comments
Monday, January 1st, 2018
Preeti Varathan, - Quartz
Stephan: I don't believe in omni-scientist, the idea that an expert in one area is automatically an expert in other areas. I do consciousness research, and almost everything I see from materialists, even though they may have great stature in some other field, I know to be mediocre crap.
Yet I am constantly being reminded of my own ignorance so I tend to pay attention to people speaking in their own fields, and this is particularly true in economics. Like consciousness research economics is a discipline about which all kinds of nonsense is put forward. Consider Ayn Rand. That's why I find Nobel Laureate economists, people like Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, and Angus Deaton so important. I don't always agree with them, but the fact that their peers who know much more than I do, find their thinking so notable, I take seriously.
Here is Deaton's thinking on wealth inequity; it is very thought provoking and original.
Angus Deaton, an economics professor at Princeton, and the recipient of the 2015 Nobel Prize in economic
Dominick Reuter/Reuters
America is trying to come to terms with its economic inequality. Does inequality spur growth or kill it? Is it a necessary evil—or necessarily bad? Angus Deaton, an economics professor at Princeton, and the recipient of the 2015 Nobel Prize in economics, is asked questions like these all the time—and he doesn’t see the point.
“These are questions I am often asked,” Deaton writes in a column(paywall) for Project Syndicate. “But, truth be told, none of them is particularly helpful, answerable, or even well posed.”
Deaton believes the biggest misconception about inequality is that it causes certain economic, political, and social processes. But that’s backward. Economic inequality is a symptom of processes—some good, some bad—that drive the global economy. It’s the residue of a post-industrialized age.
Two types of inequality
What we should actually investigate is which types of inequality are fair, and which are not. “Inequality is not the same thing as unfairness; and, to my mind, […]
1 Comment
Monday, January 1st, 2018
David Smith, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: As we close out 2018 I think it is appropriate to consider what has happened to us. This is the Guardian's view on this.
No Comments
Monday, January 1st, 2018
David Smith , - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: As we close out 2018 I think it is appropriate to consider what has happened to us. This is the Guardian's view on this.
American carnage’: Donald Trump began his presidency with apocalyptic rhetoric. How has the reality been? Credit: Pool/Getty
It’s nearly half-time and we’re still here. On 20 January it will be two years since the businessman and reality TV celebrity Donald Trump took the oath as president, spoke of “American carnage” and boasted about his crowd size, leaving millions to wonder if the US, and the world, could survive him.
It will also be two years until the next inauguration in Washington. Has the 45th president kept his campaign promises and made America great again? Or has he proven an existential threat to the republic, stoking internal divisions, destroying its reputation abroad and assailing norms and values, the rule of law and reality itself?
For sure, Trump is testing his infamous January 2016 claim – “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters” – to destruction.
True, there has been no new war, no major terrorist […]
No Comments
