Why do we leave people behind? Why can't we value what matters? Why don't we demand more?
The questions we're asking this week
“Whoever cannot seek the unforeseen sees nothing, for the known way is an impasse.” Some two-and-a-half millennia ago, Heraclitus challenged us to take the unfamiliar path if we truly wanted to learn and grow, letting our questions guide us rather than remaining content with the pat answers of our predecessors.
In that spirit, we again leave you this weekend with more of the questions that we have been asking the smartest, most thoughtful people we can find — as well as the questions they’ve been challenging us to answer ourselves.
Community organizer Vincent Emanuele asks whether Democratic leaders can learn to listen to their constituents — and earn votes, rather than simply demand them.
When they knock on people's doors and they tell them to punch 10, which in Michigan City means you vote for an all-Democratic ticket, they then talk down to the people who ask them, "Hey, I've been voting Democrat for 40 years, and I'm still getting screwed. What do you think?" And they say, "Well, if you're an idiot, vote Republican; if not, keep voting Democrat."
Journalist Adam Serwer asks why reporters still haven’t been able to break out of the assumptions that made them miss the real story about Trump voters — and whether they can learn from history.
He is manipulating forces that have been part of American politics since the founding, for generations, and that we had sort of naively assumed that we had conquered. I'm using "we," in the sort of collective American sense, because there are obviously plenty of Americans who did not believe that we had conquered those things.
Writer Gal Beckerman asks if we can recapture the radical, communal spirit that launched social media to build a better model for the future.
It was difficult to imagine scaling it up in size and maintaining the intimacy and the many mechanisms that had allowed it to flourish. But getting bigger was necessary to keep it viable in the crazily commodifying web. “The odds are always good that big power and big money will find a way to control access to virtual communities,” Rheingold prophesied in 1993. “What we know and do now is important because it is still possible for people around the world to make sure this new sphere of vital human discourse remains open to the citizens of the planet before the political and economic big boys seize it, censor it, meter it, and sell it back to us.”
Reporter Emma Goldberg asks if doctors can overcome the racism and misogyny baked into the medical profession — and build a more just system.
One thing I found fascinating is that there's a lot of history in the medical profession of how the whiteness and the patriarchal aspect of the field was set up by design. It's not incidental. It was very much an effort to make this a profession that was elite and that was high-paying.
Professor of public policy Megan Tompkins-Stange challenges us to rethink our assumptions about how the economy works — and to ask for more than scraps from the monopolists who rule the market.
Economic theory dictates that removing patent protections will discourage innovation. But what if we challenged this tenet, and gambled on the idea that firms can be motivated by values other than economic benefit?
Human Act Foundation chair Djaffar Shalchi asks why more rich people can’t step up to be class traitors — and to do what’s right simply by paying their fair share.
Social stability, low crime, a well-educated population, and great infrastructure are good for business. As we put it, the right thing to do is also the smart thing to do. We could also put it this way: the mean way to run an economy is also the dumb way to run an economy.
Economist Mariana Mazzucato tells us we need to ask ourselves — and our leaders — why we don’t assign real value to the things that matter.
Well, this is one of the biggest problems with how we measure the economy. We don't even know how to value care. Care is often given for free. It's an act of altruism. And if we confuse price with value, which is what I argue in my book, then we end up only valuing things that have prices.
Journalist Johann Hari asks why we can’t pay attention — and suggests that refocusing might help fix the fractures in our society.
Imagine you are driving a car, but somebody has thrown a big bucket of mud all over the windshield. You’re going to face a lot of problems in that moment — you are at risk of knocking off your rear-view mirror, or getting lost, or arriving at your destination late. But the first thing you need to do — before you worry about any of those problems — is clean your windshield. Until you do that, you don’t even know where you are. We need to deal with our attention problems before we try to achieve any other sustained goal.
Organizer and author Jane McAlevey asks whether American workers can organize to turn horrible jobs into good ones — and build a more democratic country along the way.
We can transform an industry built on destroying the quality of life. I do think that many Americans who did not understand how badly workers are abused in this country did have the veil pulled away by the pandemic. Can we build enough pressure that reveals enough disgusting behavior by the Bezoses and Musks to win over the public?
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