Take a look at : Nurse Education

Glenn Loury, a Brown University economist, says that an Obama victory would weaken arguments for affirmative action. Black voters, he said, “are voting for the end of affirmative action and they don’t even know it.

“They’re voting for the end of race and they don’t even know it,” said Mr. Loury, who is black.”
http://chronicle.com/blogs/election/2317/obama-presents-dilemma-for-scholars-of-race

“Then what will we do as race scholars?” wondered University of Virginia political scientist Lynn Sanders.

“But in March, as he watched Obama’s race speech in Philadelphia, Steinberg, who is white, e-mailed his surprise at what he was hearing: “His candidacy hinged on putting a happy face on racism, and here he reveals, to his credit, knowledge and compassion about racism and its tentacles into the present. He was running away from history, and this has forced him to talk about the past, which blows away his transcendental cover.”"

“”I think it will be hugely positive if (Obama) wins, because there will be this possibility of a more genuine conversation between scholars of different orientations,” said Sanders, who with Donald Kinder authored “Divided by Color.”

“I think it will mess up the congestion in a way that will be very healthy. I can’t wait for that part of it.”"
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/08/for_americas_scholars_of_race.html

I guess for academics it’s a study. It could turn into a mess and fuel racist hate groups and violence against minorities. It could be a new “affirmative action” with poor whites feeling threatened. It could be very unhealthy and the academics will take no credit for that. People don’t even know what they are voting for. They are voting for big money.

It’s time for game change! to start paving the way to change the prevailing paradigms into a borttom-up Icentered paradigm. (www.icentered.org) where, we, individuals are at the center, with the wheel in our hands and collaboratively define a new pact of relations with the entities we interact with (providers, organizations, social sphere).

It’s easiest to start with the 3rd estate of the internet and make it truly a web of life – as it is OUR web and increasingly our virtual habitat. Once the internet is turned on its head to enable a true vantage points of individuals as micro universes of one with distinct needs and wishes, communities will arise to enable it in a groundswell process and next generations leaders and orders will emerge and infiltrate into the brick and mortat world as well because the borders are increasingly blurring.

More on Being Icentered and collaboratively defining the blueprint for an Icentered paradigm in http://www.icentered.org

No, it’s not, Jeff. You’re dead wrong about that.

You are confusing the rot that necessarily sets in when government presumes to intercede in affairs of that sort. The “lie” comes from Washington. You ought to get this straight.

You’re wrong.

Mean is average. Perhaps the author meant median. (Bill Gates coming to town changes the mean wealth a lot but barely changes the median.)

Ignoring mathematical issues (which is a stretch, given the technical tone of the above), an example of the phenomena described would have been a good thing.

Yes, there are places where the rich get rich and the poor are deprived, but they’re not “unregulated economies” – they’re govt-run economies. Some use formal oppression systems while others don’t bother, but they’re not unregulated in any meaningful sense.

As to the US (which isn’t unregulated, but let’s assume for the sake of argument that it is), our inequality leads to poor folks with multiple TVs, cell phones, obesity, and the like. Food riots? Yeah right.

On the other hand, we seem to have a populace that thinks Sarah Palin represents us because she’s “Joe Six-Pack.” The entire concept of the President as a world leader has given way over the past ten years (roughly from Clinton’s blow job thru Dubya) to distrust of anyone who knows anything about issues in favor of someone you’d like to have a beer with.

Scoble’s been having an internal debate with himself about whether crowdsourcing will work or not, and I’m right there with him in my ambivalent position. The good thing is we voted down the bailout. The bad thing is we may have voted it down for the wrong reasons: we (Main Street) didn’t think the current financial crisis affects “us.” We thought we were only bailing out “them.”

Until people recognize that the internet, for better or worse, has made us all interconnected in ways we might not have been previously, we will not be able to seize the reins of our government in a responsible way.

Pray fr us.

And even Economics doesn’t fit that particular description very well anymore, as it has been (over the last few decades) turning away from the view that markets can be adequately described as collections of rational actors acting in their clear self-interest. Economics has also been turning away from the view that unregulated markets inevitably act to maximize overall well-being.

In a strictly limited sense, unregulated markets may maximize average well-being in the short term, but do much more poorly for mean well-being, and over the long term, accelerating inequalities can lead to additional costs even at the top of the food-chain (extreme examples are food-riots and epidemics) and more violent boom-and-bust cycles.

No, it isn’t. Capitalism takes the view that each of us gets to decide what is important to us and act on that in concert with like-minded people.

The failure was a govt “encouraged” edict that banks should loan money to people who had little chance of paying it back. Dems pushed this and Repubs were insufficiently vigorous in opposing it.

Of course, if you’re wont to believe the usual “it’s all about money”, note that Wall Street’s campaign contributions almost all go to Dems.

I’m reminded of the Doonesbury cartoon in which an associate of Uncle Duke’s, a brilliant Indian surgeon, is attempting to transplant the heart of a liberal into an ailing conservative. He tells Duke that what he’s hoping for is someone ‘who’ll act out of a sense of enlightened self-interest’…to which Duke retorts “Yeah – but what happens if you just get a BIGOT who likes BRIE?” The surgeon nonchalently replies “I’ll pull the PLUG…I take pride in my work…”

I was having just this sort of discussion you point up with the conservatives in our advertising department at the paper, and explaining to one enquiring mind the ‘why’ of the nation’s current financial crisis – namely the wholesale deregulation of industry begun under the Reagan administration. My own salesman, an ‘enlightened’ conservative, accused me of giving this questioner ‘the NPR version’ of events, at which point I rounded on him and hit him with hard science (my last and typically most effective resort.) “Look,” I said, “this is NOT a condition exclusive to HUMANS: most of your higher carbon-based lifeforms will HOARD WEALTH as a hedge to ensure survival: SQUIRRELS do it, though they don’t always remember where they BURY the NUTS, CHIPMUNKS do it, HAMSTERS do it…” (okay, admittedly, I was favoring rodents here…I really meant to draw no comparisons) “…so it’s it’s an entirely natural principle of PHYSICS.”

Essentially, two factors were responsible for the current crisis: the decline of the moral/ethical fabric of *REAL* religion in this country that provided the social glue to hold society and family together, and the rise of materialistic worship as a substitute. There is no one set event one can point to where either of these processes commenced – both have been ongoing gestalts for an indefinite amount of time. Let me add that my mention of religion is NOT intended to include the fundamentalism of the current ‘religious right’ in this country – I am referring rather to the moral/ethical compass that was once a mainstay of MOST Christian churches, which filtered its way into our society via the practices of the individuals who attended these churches. As people have given up support of these religious institutions and focuses instead on their worship of the almighty dollar, it has become ‘ethically conscionable’ to ’screw thy neighbor’ in the name of greed.

Capitalism, bereft of any social conscience, simply does not work. Period. What happens is shown in our own country: we have gone from being a Democracy to our current status as a Plutocratic Oligarchy: rule by the wealthy few. This wealthy few care about we, the people, only insofar as our consumption continues to fill their coffers. It’s the ‘Haves’ vs. the ‘Have-Nots,’ as it has always been….from time immemorial…

“Only when the last tree has withered, the last fish has been caught, and the last river has been poisoned, will you realize you cannot eat money.”
—Unknown Cree Native American, addressing the white man

With the crisis happening now, the words from Muhammad Yunus “capitalism is a half-developed structure” come back to mind.
And what he develops in the first chapter of his book “Creating a world without poverty – social business and the future of capitalism” resonate even more deeply:
“Capitalism takes a narrow view of human nature, assuming that people are one-dimensional beings concerned only with the pursuit of maximum profit. The concept of the free market, as generally understood, is based on this one-dimensional human being. Mainstream free-market theory postulates that you are contributing to the society and the world in the best possible manner if you just concentrate on getting the most for yourself.”

If we are going to fix this system, I would like to follow Muhammad Yunus train of thoughts:
“The presence of our multi-dimensional personalities means that not every business should be bound to serve the single objective of profit maximization”
This is also what Bo Burlingham puts forward when he presents “Small Giants – companies that choose to be great instead of big”.

For a “what now” I am thinking social business, bringing the human back into the equation…

Some call it Freedom. Sort of like the type that was abroad when we won independence from England in the late 1700’s.

I think you have the big picture right, though. Power is in the process of shifting from top-down structures to bottom-up ones; and many people will notice the former and not the latter, and conclude that we are sliding into anarchy. (The David Brooks essay you link is a neat example of that.)

Its a vicious circle, you reap what you sow, and the carefree laissez faire attitude prevalent on the Internet has started to result in some ugly consequences.