http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/201...r-younger/

Quote:
There were more 24-year-olds in the U.S. than people of any other age in 2015. But for white Americans, 55 was the most common age, according to Census Bureau data.
In the histogram above, which shows the total number of individuals of each age last year, non-Hispanic whites tend to skew toward the older end of the spectrum (more to the right), while minority groups skew younger (more to the left).



http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/201...r-younger/

Day care (to the extent that it has any educational intent), pre-school, K-12 education, vocational schools, and colleges and universities -- whether Harvard or the late and unlamented Corinthian Colleges.

See subject line. From your experience, which of these two generations is more selfish?

I've been voting Libertarian since I was old enough to vote and they always lose.  But this year Gary Johnson is polling higher than any libertarian has in a presidential election.  Trump and Clinton are polling lower than ever.  I predicted that third parties would draw a significant portion of the vote this year, but it was my guess that that Clinton would get the highest percentage of the vote with Trump coming in second, Johnson third and Jill Stein fourth.  Now, after the whole Clinton email scandal, I'm starting to have hope that maybe Johnson could actually pull off a victory, if he actually makes it to the debates.  Yes, I know Clinton got away without being indicted, but the FBI director's statements were so damning that even her supporters are starting to turn against her.  And Trump?  I just don't see him gaining much more support after all the dumb things he's said.  Plus there's still plenty of time for him to put his foot in his mouth several more times.  Maybe I'm getting my hopes up to high, but I think Gary Johnson actually has a shot this year.

http://www.cnn.com/2016/07/03/politics/f...ended_pool

I like #8: 

8. The Powerball presidency.

This one is pretty much the nineteenth-century version of "lol nothing matters." Lawmakers in 1846 argued that the president should be chosen not by the people or Electoral College, but by random lottery: They literally wanted to pick a ball out of a bucket.

I don’t read many books by libertarian economists as a rule they lack original thinking, but I think Schumpeter’s “new class” might be relevant to my current thinking about class dynamics.  If anyone has read it could they give a summer of what Schumpeter and if they think it’s worthwhile?

We live in interesting and changing times.

Culturally, the best art and music is found on the ignored fringes, such as ambient music. It may be that ambient music will be what these years are remembered for. I like Justin Bieber and all, but what does it say about us that the best artists of our time are Justin Bieber, or one of Rags' favorite rock bands like Airborne? Or a girl pop star? PBS gives us "great performances," and there's endowments for the humanities, but that does not provide us with any achievement in these areas.

We don't think we can write great music or paint great paintings today. There is some greatness in architecture though, although it's little known. We mostly think greatness is technological invention and development. But technology alone will only leave a legacy of tools. What do we use them for? Texting while driving? Posting pictures of trips or parties? Tech is valued because of the economic power and wealth it brings. But again, this is only a means to a purpose we seem to have lost. Our advances in science are a value that will last, but as knowledge it only scratches the surface. So we also need to look deeper too toward the advances in our times in depth psychology and esoteric practices, and where they can lead us.

So we need to develop greater respect for and dedication to the creative arts.

We also live in times of paradigm shifts. These have retreated from public consciousness as the 4T has renewed and extended our obsession with economics. But the needs of the time still call us. We need to respect the Earth and its gifts to us. She makes our lives possible here. That means shifting the way we use the Earth to meet our needs; principally our energy technologies. We need to see that we live in a spiritual world as well as a physical one, so that we can revere and respect life, ourselves and all living beings, and not reduce them to objects for our use. We need to recognize our own consciousness and its depths, and further those trends of our time that release human potential and imagination. 

We need to see ourselves not as separate individuals, but as integral parts of the greater whole, and as wholes ourselves. We are interdependent on what we all can do for each other through sharing our wealth and our unique talents. We need to see that each of us has the economic opportunity to unfold our lives in peace and reasonable prosperity, rather than reserving these things for the fortunate few. We need to respect and honor all people, regardless of which group they are in, and to reduce fighting between us, and to do what we can to help depose the tyranny of corrupt, oppressive and murderous rulers, especially if they are our own. We need to support those movements that advance these paradigms, so that our living world is sustainable and fulfilling.

May America, and our times, be truly great. Happy Anniversary to the USA.

As I was watching one of Neils splendid talks, I got very fascinated by what he describes as "The New Nice". When it comes to music, this little tune describes it well, I think.

https://open.spotify.com/track/55FuRfZVFYWC7RmsvayZ3e

Done by GenXer Aphex Twin, he basically turned his back on his own generation and made this soothing little tune it is. It got everything we Millies want in a tune; contemporary subtlety. 

But what else should be included in this "New Nice" doctrine?

https://app.hedgeye.com/insights/52099-a...gears-down

Quote:

Quote:WHAT’S HAPPENING?
Shortly before the Brexit vote, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) warned that a British exit could cut U.K. GDP growth by 0.8 to 3.0% in 2017. In the following year, 2018, it projected that Brexit would cut rest-of-EU GDP by 0.2 to 0.5% and rest-of-world GDP by 0.0 to 0.2%.
 
No news there: Few imagined that Brexit would be a stimulant. What’s less widely known is that the global economy was slowing down well before it entered the Brexit sand trap.
 
According to the IMF, GDP growth shrank from 5.0% in 2010 to 3.1% last year. The World Bank reports that global GDP growth fell from 3.8% in 2010 to 2.4% last year. The brief re-acceleration in 2014 kindled momentary optimism and then disappeared. Emerging markets and developing economies (EMDEs) have fared the worst, with growth sliding almost every year, while advanced economies have been zig-zagging well below 2% growth for years now. (The IMF and World Bank global growth rates don’t match due to the different ways they weight national GDPs...



https://app.hedgeye.com/insights/52099-a...gears-down

Link

Quote:The 2016 election is about class. “For the first time in a generation, the working class is front and center in an election cycle,” one MarketWatch writer proclaimed. Commentators fret that Hillary Clinton has “lost” the working class and that Donald Trump has risen to prominence on the backs of “white trash.” (Never mind that Trump voters are, on average, wealthier than Clinton’s constituency.) Bernie Sanders even calls himself the working class candidate. This demonstrates just how fuzzy this category is — though Sanders advocates for the working class, he has spent his career in politics, not manual or wage labor. There are lots of other misconceptions about class in America, too. Here, we debunk five.

Myth No. 1: The working class is white and male.

Trump is often credited with engaging the working class. He “won with the working class voters the GOP forgot,” blared one Breitbart column. Meanwhile, “Hillary is losing white working Joes,” proclaimed the Toronto Star. Even Sanders argued that Democrats had allowed Republicans “to capture the votes of the majority of working people in this country.”

Of course, that’s true only if you ignore Asians, Latinos and African Americans. “Factor them into the population of ‘working people,’ ” Slate’s Jamelle Bouie writes, “and Democrats win that group, handily.”

This gets at something important: America has never housed some monolithic entity called the “working class.” As early as 1791, Alexander Hamilton argued that those best suited for factory work were women and children, which became the norm in textile mills until child labor laws were passed in the 20th century. Chinese workers built the Transcontinental Railroad; immigrants labored in the Ohio steel industry; whites and blacks toiled side by side in 20th-century Louisiana sawmills.

Today’s working class is even more diverse. A recent study found that more than half of all Hispanics and African Americans identify as working class. Additionally, about 50 percent of women see themselves as working class. Another report predicted that people of color will make up the majority of the American working class by 2032.

Myth No. 2: Most Americans don’t notice class differences.

When surveyed, the vast majority of Americans say they are either middle class or working class. Indeed, political scientist Charles Murray found that Americans have traditionally refused to call themselves rich or poor. This, he wrote in his book “Coming Apart,” “reflected a national conceit that had prevailed from the beginning of the nation: America didn’t have classes, or, to the extent that it did, Americans should act as if we didn’t.” The desire to erase class divisions goes all the way back to Benjamin Franklin, who believed that the North American continent would flatten classes into a “happy mediocrity.”

In truth, though, the United States has always been a stratified country. In Franklin’s time, people were sorted into three classes: “better,” “middling” and “meaner.” The people at the bottom were seen as coarse, vulgar, unfinished — composed of baser materials. Thomas Jefferson described the upper echelon of the Virginia planter class as pure-blood aristocrats; those who married beneath their station produced children who were “half-breeds.”

In the 19th century, Alabama lawyer and author Daniel Hundley defined class in ancestral terms, laying out seven different options. At the top, he placed an inherited aristocracy, descendants of royal Cavalier blood. At the bottom was “white trash,” heirs of the wretched poor dumped in the American colonies.

Today, record inequality divides the rich and the poor. Our country’s wealthy “1 percent” takes home 20 percent of all pretax income, double their 1980 share. For most middle-class and lower-income families, income has either stagnated or fallen. In short, Americans have not escaped class hierarchies, but reinvented them generation by generation.

Myth No. 3: Class mobility is uniquely American.

Since America’s founding, its politicians have promised a society unbound by class. Jefferson once said that America had “no paupers.” Facing down Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow, Vice President Richard Nixon claimed in 1959 that the United States was a “classless society.” Even President Obama described the idea that each generation should be wealthier than the one before as a “founding precept” of the American Dream.

Indeed, Americans are more optimistic about their chances of getting ahead than people in other places. But in reality, it’s harder to rise above your class in the United States than in just about any other developed country; economic mobility is much more possible in places like Japan, Germany and Australia. Socialist author Michael Harrington captured this devastating reality in his 1962 book “The Other America”: The poor were poor, he wrote, because “they made the mistake of being born to the wrong parents.”

Myth No. 4: With talent and hard work, you can rise above your class.

It’s a tale as old as Horatio Alger: Anyone can make it in America, no matter their upbringing. As CNN put the notion , “Through hard work and perseverance, even the poorest people can make it to middle class or above.”

But actually, it’s hard to rise above your income level. In cities such as Atlanta, New York and Washington, a child raised in a poor family has a less than 10 percent chance of becoming wealthy in his or her lifetime. It’s not much better in other parts of the country.

There are lots of reasons for this. Our education-funding system perpetuates inequality. Children in poor families more frequently attend poorer schools and receive fewer enrichment opportunities. As a result, they’re less likely to attend college and earn a degree. Data shows that children from families with incomes of at least $120,000 score much better on the SATs than their peers from households earning $20,000 or less.

Sociologists have also found that parents’ wealth is one of the best predictors of a child’s economic success. Rich families are more likely to own property and to pass wealth on to their offspring. In America, land ownership is one of the best ways to preserve wealth — and share it with the next generation. As the economist Joseph Stiglitz said in his book “The Great Divide”: “America is no longer the land of opportunity that it (and others) like to think it is. . . . To a large extent, the American Dream is a myth.”

Myth No. 5: Class oppression isn’t as significant as racial oppression.

This is a common trope. As Sanders said at a debate this spring: “When you’re white, you don’t know what it’s like to be living in a ghetto. You don’t know what it’s like to be poor.” Other commentators have said that black middle-class families are worse off than poor white ones.

They’re dead wrong. Americans have a long history of making life harder for the poor, no matter their race. Jim Crow’s infamous poll tax divested poor whites as well as poor blacks of the right to vote. During the New Deal, Southern politicians (except Huey Long) refused to extend Social Security to farm laborers, discriminating against blacks and whites alike. Even our current tax policies penalize the poor. In 2009, the top 1 percent of earners paid 5.2 percent of their income in state and local taxes, while the poorest 20 percent paid 10.9 percent.

Class power takes many forms. Its enduring force, its ability to project hatred toward the lower classes, was best summed up by two presidents 175 years apart. In 1790, then-Vice President John Adams argued that Americans not only scrambled to get ahead; they needed someone to disparage. “There must be one, indeed, who is the last and lowest of the human species,” he wrote. Lyndon Johnson came to the same conclusion in explaining the racism of poor whites: “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”