Occupy Wall Street

Democracy, Protests, OWS, and the Tea Party

I was reading a recent article by Phil Kerpen entitled ‘Occupy’ Movement Is Not What Democracy Looks Like. In the article Mr. Kerpen makes two major points. One is that democracy means free elections and culminates in representative democracy; the other is that the OWS movement is undemocratic, that it is about …

Reciprocity, Deadbeats, and Banks

Jonathan Haidt devotes a chapter to Reciprocity in his book The Happiness Hypothesis. Reciprocity is the glue which holds large societies, of certain other animals as well as of humans, together; lack of reciprocity, tit-for-tat, is what keeps them apart. Reciprocity, and its absence, seems to be what is driving …

The 77% Karma

I know it’s no longer a new article (October 16, 2010), but I just read and want to comment around Jonathan Haidt’s What the Tea Partiers Really Want, from The Wall Street Journal. Karma is the word he thinks describes how tea partiers and conservatives view the world. “The law …

“We are all millionaires”, or most of us anyway

I read an interesting statistic in a column by David Gergen and Michael Zuckermann at cnn.com. Regarding income brackets, it references a 2000 survey where “no less than 19% considered themselves in the top 1% — and another 20% on top of that expected they would be soon.” It’s hard …