Browsing PBH By Articles

No, You’re Not “Entitled” To Your Opinion

Posted on June 1, 2013 in Articles

Opinion Entitlement

The Article: No, you’re not entitled to your opinion by Patrick Stokes in The Conversation.

The Text: Every year, I try to do at least two things with my students at least once. First, I make a point of addressing them as “philosophers” – a bit cheesy, but hopefully it encourages active learning.

Secondly, I say something like this: “I’m sure you’ve heard the expression ‘everyone is entitled to their opinion.’ Perhaps you’ve even said it yourself, maybe to head off an argument or bring one to a close. Well, as soon as you walk into this room, it’s no longer true. You are not entitled to your opinion. You are only entitled to what you can argue for.”

A bit harsh? Perhaps, but philosophy teachers owe it to our students to teach them how to construct and defend an argument – and to recognize when a belief has become indefensible.

Don’t Get Cancer: Even With Insurance, You’ll Probably Go Bankrupt

Posted on May 31, 2013 in Articles

Healthcare Costs

The Article: Americans Who Battle Cancer Are Twice As Likely To Go Bankrupt, Even If They Have Health Insurance by Tara Culp-Ressler in ThinkProgress.

The Text: Cancer patients are much more likely to go bankrupt than Americans who aren’t faced with a cancer diagnosis, a new study finds. Even the Americans who have access to health insurance aren’t necessarily safe from bankruptcy, since the high cost of treating cancer can still put an untenable strain their finances.

A team of researchers in Washington state collected data from nearly 400,000 adults, evenly split between those who had been treated for cancer and those who were cancer-free. After checking to see which of those adults had filed for bankruptcy between 1995 and 2009, the researchers found that cancer patients were 2.5 times as likely to go bankrupt in that period.

Although the study didn’t specifically look at insurance coverage, previous research has demonstrated that the Americans who cite major health issues as the reason they filed for bankruptcy are actually often insured. One 2006 study found that more than 60 percent of bankruptcies in the United States are due to high medical bills, and in those cases, three-quarters of those Americans had insurance when they got sick. NBC News interviewed one cancer patient who found herself in this situation, even though she was employed and insured when she first got her diagnosis:

Ten Reasons Austerity Is A Crock

Posted on May 30, 2013 in Articles

Austerity

The Article: 10 Reasons Austerity Is a Crock by Stephanie Kelton in AlterNet.

The Text: Steve Kraske of The Kansas City Star recently interviewed me for a piece about austerity. The story ran in today’s paper. It doesn’t provide much depth (unlike bloggers, journalists have strict space constraints!), so I followed up with a few comments on the Star’s website. I thought I’d share them here, since I’m always trying to improve the way I communicate these ideas with non-economists. So here’s my best effort to make the anti-austerity case in simple terms.

1. When we allow our economy to operate below full employment (as now), we are sacrificing trillions of dollars in lost output and income each year. We can never go back and recover it. It is gone forever. You’ve seen the debt clock? Here’s the lost output clock.

2. Capitalism runs on sales. In survey after survey, we find that the Number One reason businesses are slow to hire and invest in new plant & equipment is a lack of demand for the things they produce. Businesses hire and invest when they’re swamped with customers. See this story in The Wall Street Journal.

Thinking Utopian About Income

Posted on May 29, 2013 in Articles

Income Utopian

The Article: Thinking Utopian: How about a universal basic income? by Mike Konczal in The New York Times.

The Text: In light of the recent Oregon Medicaid study, several people have discussed the idea of taking parts of the social insurance system and replacing them with cash benefits. This naturally brings up the debate about whether it should be a policy goal for the United States to adopt a universal basic income (UBI). These poverty-level targeted incomes are universal and unconditional, so everyone would get them regardless of their income, status or work participation. Wonkblog’s Dylan Matthews wrote an overview of universal basic incomes and some proposals for such a system last year.

Though establishing a basic income was once at the forefront of politics, it has since become more of a Utopian, abstract project. But sometimes it is helpful to step back from the day-to-day wonk work and think Utopian.

First, what are some advantages of providing a universal basic income? To those on the left, a UBI would create greater equality by ending poverty and providing a minimum living standard. It would also increase bargaining power for workers, who could demand better working conditions with a safety cushion. As Erik Olin Wright argues in Envisioning Real Utopias, such bargaining power “will generate an incentive structure for employers to seek technical and organizational innovations that eliminate unpleasant work,” which would “have not just a labor-saving bias, but a labor-humanizing bias.”

Student Debt And The Crushing Of The American Dream

Posted on May 28, 2013 in Articles

Student Debt

The Article: Student Debt and the Crushing of the American Dream by Joseph Stiglitz in The New York Times.

The Text: A CERTAIN drama has become familiar in the United States (and some other advanced industrialized countries): Bankers encourage people to borrow beyond their means, preying especially on those who are financially unsophisticated. They use their political influence to get favorable treatment of one form or another. Debts mount. Journalists record the human toll. Then comes bewilderment: How could we let this happen again? Officials promise to fix things. Something is done about the most egregious abuses. People move on, reassured that the crisis has abated, but suspecting that it will recur soon.

The crisis that is about to break out involves student debt and how we finance higher education. Like the housing crisis that preceded it, this crisis is intimately connected to America’s soaring inequality, and how, as Americans on the bottom rungs of the ladder strive to climb up, they are inevitably pulled down — some to a point even lower than where they began.

This new crisis is emerging even before the last one has been resolved, and the two are becoming intertwined. In the decades after World War II, homeownership and higher education became signs of success in America.