Category: Society & Citizenship

With a concept straight out of a cyberpunk dystopia, China has gamified obedience to the State. China has created a social tool named Sesame Credit which gives people a score for how good a citizen they are. The system measures how obediently citizens follow the party line, pulling data from social networks and online purchase histories.

The system could also become a powerful tool for social conditioning, as users could lose points for having friends with low obedience scores.

Source: China has made obedience to the State a game | The Independent

Places like St. Louis and New York City were once similarly prosperous. Then, 30 years ago, the United States turned its back on the policies that had been encouraging parity.

Until the early 1980s, a long-running feature of American history was the gradual convergence of income across regions. The trend goes back to at least the 1840s, but grew particularly strong during the middle decades of the 20th century.

The rise of the broad American middle class in that era was largely a story of incomes converging across regions to the point that people commonly and appropriately spoke of a single American standard of living. This regional convergence of income was also a major reason why national measures of income inequality dropped sharply during this period.

Yet starting in the early 1980s, the long trend toward regional equality abruptly switched. Since then, geography has come roaring back as a determinant of economic fortune, as a few elite cities have surged ahead of the rest of the country in their wealth and income.

Adding to the anomaly is a historic reversal in the patterns of migration within the United States. Throughout almost all of the nation’s history, Americans tended to move from places where wages were lower to places where wages were higher. … But over the last generation this trend, too, has reversed.

The Emergence of a Single American Standard of Living: Regional Per Capita Income as a Percentage of the National Average

A major factor that has not received sufficient attention is the role of public policy. Throughout most of the country’s history, American government at all levels has pursued policies designed to preserve local control of businesses and to check the tendency of a few dominant cities to monopolize power over the rest of the country. These efforts moved to the federal level beginning in the late 19th century and reached a climax of enforcement in the 1960s and ’70s. Yet starting shortly thereafter, each of these policy levers were flipped, one after the other, in the opposite direction, usually in the guise of “deregulation.” Understanding this history, largely forgotten today, is essential to turning the problem of inequality around.

Beginning in the late 1970s, however, nearly all the policy levers that had been used to push for greater regional income equality suddenly reversed direction.

The Rise in Per Capita Income for Selected Cities Compared to the Rise for the U.S. as a Whole

The Per Capita Income of Various Regions Compared to the New York Metropolitan Area’s

Empirical studies have shown that when a city loses a major corporate headquarters in a merger, the replacement of locally based managers by “absentee” managers usually leads to lower levels of local corporate giving, civic engagement, employment, and investment, often setting in motion further regional decline.

The spectacular rise in the affluence of the D.C. metro area since the 1970s belies the idea that “deregulation” has brought a triumph of open and competitive markets. Instead, it is the result of a boom in what libertarians in other contexts like to call “rent seeking,” or the enrichment of a few through the manipulation of government and the cornering of markets.

Source: Why the Economic Fates of America’s Cities Diverged – The Atlantic

A recent scholarly paper charts the ascendance of a new moral code in American life.

When conflicts occur, sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning observe in an insightful new scholarly paper, aggrieved parties can respond in any number of ways. In honor cultures like the Old West or the street gangs of West Side Story, they might engage in a duel or physical fight. In dignity cultures, like the ones that prevailed in Western countries during the 19th and 20th Centuries, “insults might provoke offense, but they no longer have the same importance as a way of establishing or destroying a reputation for bravery,” they write. “When intolerable conflicts do arise, dignity cultures prescribe direct but non-violent actions.”

The sociologists, Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning, cited the Oberlin incident as one of many examples of a new, increasingly common approach to handling conflict. It isn’t honor culture. … But neither is it dignity culture … It is, they say, “a victimhood culture.”

The culture on display on many college and university campuses, by way of contrast, is “characterized by concern with status and sensitivity to slight combined with a heavy reliance on third parties. People are intolerant of insults, even if unintentional, and react by bringing them to the attention of authorities or to the public at large. Domination is the main form of deviance, and victimization a way of attracting sympathy, so rather than emphasize either their strength or inner worth, the aggrieved emphasize their oppression and social marginalization.”

complaint to third parties has supplanted both toleration and negotiation

Source: Microaggressions and the Rise of Victimhood Culture – The Atlantic

Social change in the U.S. appears to follow a pattern: A few pioneer states get out front before the others, and then a key event—often a court decision or a grassroots campaign reaching maturity—triggers a rush of state activity that ultimately leads to a change in federal law.

Source: This Is How Fast America Changes Its Mind | Bloomberg Business – Business, Financial & Economic News, Stock Quotes