Sorry for the clickbait-y post title. To be honest, I toyed with the idea of having a 15-20 word headline and then decided against it. Of course, there are lots of important factors that go into making good decisions and there’s been plenty of that written about online (including here on this very website). There …
Category Archives: Politics
Electing Officials to Represent the “Future”
I was catching up on some podcasts this weekend and I heard a particularly interesting one — Ezra Klein interviewing Astra Taylor. The conversation is wide-ranging, but there were a few bits that stuck out to me. Astra talked about the differences between democracies, aristocracies, and lotteries, and discussed the idea of every citizen serving …
Continue reading “Electing Officials to Represent the “Future””
Quick Thoughts: Planning Fallacy, Sci-Fi, Gendered Language, and Scarcity/Excess
As I look to breathe some life back into writing, I thought I’d take a quick peek at some of the “drafts” I had saved from when I used to write regularly. Fortunately, there aren’t too many there. In the interest of trying to start fresh, I thought I’d do a quick post addressing some …
Continue reading “Quick Thoughts: Planning Fallacy, Sci-Fi, Gendered Language, and Scarcity/Excess”
The Partisan Gap Amongst Female Politicians is Likely to Get Worse
If I’m being honest, when I first read the title of this journal article “A partisan gap in the supply of female potential candidates in the United States,” I didn’t think twice. Pew often publishes surveys/research that seemed to indicate that the gap between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, with regard to women candidates, was …
Continue reading “The Partisan Gap Amongst Female Politicians is Likely to Get Worse”
Quick Thoughts on “Obama’s Stealth Startup”
A couple of weeks ago, there was a great article in Fast Company about President Obama’s initiative to bring the the technology used in the US bureaucracy into the 21st century. After reading it, there were a few things that came to mind, so I thought I’d write a post with some “Quick Thoughts” as …
Continue reading “Quick Thoughts on “Obama’s Stealth Startup””
Big Government NOT Linked to Greater Corruption
You hear it all the time: “Big government is the problem.” “We need to reduce the size of the government if we want to eliminate corruption.” As it turns out, just because the government grows in size doesn’t mean that corruption will grow along with it. From a journal article published last year [Emphasis added]: This study’s …
Continue reading “Big Government NOT Linked to Greater Corruption”
Do Public Sector Employees Volunteer More Than Private Sector Employees?
I have a confession to make right off the bat — I wrote the headline for this post specifically to counter Betteridge’s law of headlines. If you’re familiar with it, then you’ve already realized that the answer to the question posed is yes. From the research: The models showed that government employees volunteered more in general, and participated in a …
Continue reading “Do Public Sector Employees Volunteer More Than Private Sector Employees?”
When Will the United States Next Have a Transformational President on Domestic Policy?
I was catching up on some of the journal articles I’ve accumulated to read over the last year and I one caught my eye: “Transformational and transactional presidents,” by Joseph Nye, Jr. In the article, Nye makes the case that presidents didn’t matter (as much) to the US developing into a great power as we may …
What if We Treated Prisoners Like Humans?
There was an excellent article in last week’s New York Times Magazine about a maximum-security prison in Norway. Though, when you read about this prison, it sounds nothing like any prison you’ve probably heard about in the US or Canada: Norway’s newest prison was marked by a modest sign that read, simply, HALDEN FENGSEL. There were …
Continue reading “What if We Treated Prisoners Like Humans?”
Solving False Equivalence in Politics?
Last week, John Oliver had a great segment that poked fun at how most (all?) television outlets cover climate change. Take a look: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjuGCJJUGsg Upon watching it, I didn’t think that Oliver was going to “even out” the representation in a physical manner. Instead, I thought that he was going to solve the issue of the “talking heads” appearing equal. Let me …
Jeremiah Stanghini 