Rethinking the Economy

Dr. Doug McKenzie-Mohr, author of Fostering Sustainable Behavior: An Introduction to Community-Based Social Marketing. on why a carbon tax might help, but it ain’t enough: because People Aren’t Calculators
The most that price can really do is enhance motivation to act. If we get the prices right, it does not make it [...]

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I recently saw the documentary Crude, about the almost 2 decades old struggle of Amazon indigenous people to force Chevron to cleanup an oil spill the size of Rhode Island that’s turned their land into a toxic cancers on that’s destroying their communities. I had two reactions to the movie — one I expected, [...]

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Grrrrr. I start taking care of my hands, they get better, then I get sloppy. So, another week I won’t be posting to give them time to rest.

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From Dana Goldstein in the Nation:
Here’s what you see in Waiting for Superman, the new documentary that celebrates the charter school movement while blaming teachers unions for much of what ails American education: working- and middle-class parents desperate to get their charming, healthy, well-behaved children into successful public charter schools.
Here’s what you don’t see: [...]

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After a little too much fun on vacation, a little too many crises when I got back to work, and a little too much time reorganizing my condo, my hands have decided to go on strike. So, to let my hands heal I’m not going to do any big posts this week.

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I’m taking this week off — to rest my hands and my brain, and to get some relief from the soup-like humidity of DC’s dog days of August. See ya next week!

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Seriously freaky:

I bumped into this because I want to see if Emotiv, a company that’s trying to create off the shelf mind-controlled gaming tools, had gotten any further since they blew their much-hyped launch a year or two ago. I’m interested because if I could read rss feeds & surf the web without using [...]

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You probably know the oil industry gets a lot of subsidies. But you may not know that, according to the New York Times,
an examination of the American tax code indicates that oil production is among the most heavily subsidized businesses, with tax breaks available at virtually every stage of the exploration and extraction process.
[...]

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[Part 3 of the Promoting Broad Prosperity review]
The other thing I like about Topos’ Promoting Broad Prosperity framework is that they tested their ideas with opinion research. You’d think by 2009 this wouldn’t be a novel concept. If big corporations spend lots of time testing the best way to convince you to eat [...]

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This is pretty mind-blowing.
In 2008, the American National Election Study asked folks if Uncle Sam spent too much, too little, or about right in 12 areas.
The
results:
the respondents who identified themselves as “conservative” or “extremely conservative” had little appetite for specific spending cuts.
Very few conservatives said they favored reducing (or cutting [...]

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