Over the past 12 months, America has had front row seats for a real-life experiment with across-the-board wage hikes.
In January of last year, a grinning Doug McMillon appeared in a video message posted to Wal-Mart’s website to announce that the world’s biggest retailer was set to implement one of the “largest single-day, private-sector pay increases ever.”
Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt breaks down an important 2014 study indicating that the Social Justice Warrior phenomenon on campus is not a trend, but instead marks a deep cultural shift. The paper is not by Haidt, but it’s long, so he summarizes it for his readers. Excerpts (all boldface in Haidt’s original):
Submitted by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,
Leon Hadar does a good job making some sense out of Trump’s recent rambling interviews on foreign policy with The New York Times and Washington Post:
We should reassess the American role in NATO and the rationale for continuing to maintain it. But Trump needs to explain to us why we need to do that, not like a technocrat going through the books but as a political leader with coherent vision of the role the U.S. should play in the world. We do foreign policy not to make a profit but in order to protect the country and advance its interests.
We have come to associate the term “technocrats” with the kind of unelected and non-political experts that serve in European governments, particularly those responding to the recent financial crisis that has devastated several economies there. For example, economists like Mario Monti who served as Italy’s prime minister from 2011 to 2013, leading a government of technocrats in the wake of the Italian debt crisis. Their task wasn’t to transform the economic status quo in Italy, but to use their knowledge and expertise to fix that country’s economy.