Saturday, June 12, 2004
A Fresh Look at Social Policy in the Early 21st Century
One of the best ways to look at the era we live in as far as addressing social issues such as poverty, civil rights and equality of all sorts is to realize that we are living in an age that the market frameworks to balance the variables in and out of these conditions just doesn't exist anymore. This trend does not on the one hand dispute the fact that there must be a distributionist goal towards adjusting certain inequalities or disparities but it also on the other hand does not deny the fact that there are underlying distributionist facets well underway. It is just that the way we measure people social conditions in this day and age unlike thirty or forty years ago will altogether no matter what we do be incomprehensive in today's terms.
At the outset of this century welfare or social progress has gotten its noteriety mainly through the chief efforts of the Brandeis Brief which became believe it or not the chief model in which to understand the dimensions of poverty--that is, you have to rely on statistics and numbers. It served as the basis for many a things including the Brown v. Board of Education and even the Great Society Programs. Yet like many sought after policy they too failed the test of time as the supporters of them weren't able to maintain a hold much less a decisive or I should say convincing reason to sustain these programs any further.
Lots of peope were eventually left out especially with the new waves of social reforms that encompassed one of the fallacy of post-modernism: welfare to work programs, empowerment zones, curtailing affirmative action and school choice vouchers. How at any rate these programs are in themselves a stream of works resulting from a fallible grasp of time is that for starters no matter how much any Republican wants to cut taxes and reduce spending to a minimalist state that such a minimalist state under the circumstances that we live in these days will always become larger(as Congress through the US Attorney General was able to pass the Patriot Act future administrations will have to maintain a certain level of welfare spending, reversing the common ideology found in the conservatives camp).
Secondly, as each age characterized of an economic term evolves(such as from an industrial economy to a post-industrial economy) the worth and value of the information at hand intensifies geometrically(which means that if were are now coming out of an post-industrial economy the inequalities pursuant to it if not being accounted for can increase so many folds); thirdly, as a result of such, no matter which direction societal leaning towards greater or lesser welfare and civil rights protection it is bound to be nothing more than a concoction of what a perfect society or way of life people should live in(such as the Proposition 209 might only reflect racial supremacist projecting their viewpoint in that state state's legislature).
Fourthly, with all this comes a post-instituional effect, that is erosion of physical institutions as we know it being replaced with virtual ones--it can even go down the line to having a virtual state or imaginary armies; finally the concept of individuals and humanity will have to be a post-Soviet one, one in which people are viewed not as having souls but trapped in a world where the evils of slavery and neo-imperialism comes in a different guise as in a post- Soviet era whereas there is more impact on our resources(a good distributionist starting point) in using them to re-assert(or how one looks at re-evaluating people's identity) in which case there is no market framework out there to make such a use of these resources 'morally' worthwhile.
What will connect all this is that unlike before where we looked at poverty as a sign of European exploitation but now it will be seen as a mere occurence that has gone out of control merely due to the constraint of the element of time and energy has placed on us. (To look at it completely from the former approach is simply and extremely naive; it overlooks the organic forces or forces that comes about because there is enough energy and substance to create a following or entity of its kind.)
Poverty as I understand it has been looked at from a dichotomotic debate in which on the one hand you have to meet basic needs and on the other hand that you have to take in consideration non-economic or pre-rational incentives in which people have. Even if it wasn't looked at such a straightforward way, the attitudes and approaches would have to embody elements that were unconventional premodern or local. This does not mean that we can't look at poverty from this perspective but it is useless and pointless to carry out a policy with a type of population we have this today and expect to have tomorrow.
One of the controlling factors of poverty these days is the concept of the digital divide. By this I mean the evolving forces of de novo institutions such as the internet having a tremendous effect on people's lives. As the internet itself grows larger, its existence makes them more uncertain as it evolves into something new and different and yet the impact of it makes us rethink basic discussions on areas of freedom of speech and privacy and that this rethinking is just merely a crowding out of the virtual world on the physical.
Even from a international perspective, the causes of wars will be on the reaction and bluntness of advance technology such as the thought of using bunker busters to flush out Bin Laden in Pakistan and the increased use of caves and tunnels to continue to elude the US making Al Queda ever the larger and its protege. Thus making the causes of war more of who has access to information and how they can cause sort of a hysteria.
There is another factor about the digital divide and that has to do with ongoing technological revolution that will not in the coming years bring forth revolutionary household products but also change the way we approach a lot of things and perhaps how we present them. Take cloning for example how we are able to assign clone individuals the same rights as natural born ones; schooling, how we can have a combination of mass schooling with the internet and allow for private/home schooling at the same time(here I am not advocating one or the other I am just saying how there must be a different approach to things); or entertainment, imagine if pop stars and divas like Britney Spears or Jennifer Lopez is replaced with computer generated singers and models.
Imagine an economy in which the revenues comes from the wealth of nannotechonology that have welfare programs resulting from. Imagine the state taking a less derivative approach to families and marriage and just do away with them, afterall they are just institutions and just 'raise' the children by themselves like the Prime Minister in the "Star Wars: Attack of the Clones."
Of course the big question will be where is the normative approach for all this. You can't expect this to happen overnight without anytype of protest or backlash. That is a pretty difficult question to resolve in which case how this will happened is that the debates that warehouses these issues in one way or another will just get trampled and swept under the carpet as others will unfold or posed so as its guise. I don't remember where I read this but as a thinker once said as mankind labor too much they have a tendency to forget. I think not just the labour policy or the mobility of labor will play a role but the forced way we have to reconcile this as the psychological effect on the masses can create some type of 'default' or in G.L. Shackle a 'subjectivity of expectation.'
Applying these two things would mean for the first test as in the case of civil rights whereas negatively a high incarceration rate type culture and 'antinomianistic'(as well libertarian attitudes towards drugs and sex) we live in will forced either various races to start looking at each other as equals or go to some massive race wars. I think the former will happened. You will probably have better days in civil rights only such that those compromises having been made and understood from a rigid test as not be a sell out on either side and allowing things going from there. I am not saying this is my viewpoint on civil rights but it is a worthwhile that should be taken in consideration.
The other sample will be something you read in a amateur newspaper about the effects of being unfair without proving any type of social inequality being there. That is there will be a shift on the model on what the good life assured of the state at hand (i.e. a nation-state) towards one of a post-post-modern ones. Why look at poverty based on the expectation as though everybody supposed to get married and raise a family, even if you really do or don't. This method of looking at things will be looked as being cheap, fraudulent and frivolous. I think the bases in which how we can judge if somebody living in destitution or poverty will(aside from the fact that basic needs having been met) from a Rifkined approach of 'pay per experience' or 'a transformation of ownership to leasing.'
Either way such changes is the result of a lot of things being built up and have at its doorstep long been overdue or overhaul. Pretty much today we are just regurgitating old and passe ways of seeing the world and alleviating its problems. Such a way of percieving and doing stuff makes likely more scenarios such as the World Trade Center and its aftermath more unpredictable and placing a strain on our resources.
One of the best ways to look at the era we live in as far as addressing social issues such as poverty, civil rights and equality of all sorts is to realize that we are living in an age that the market frameworks to balance the variables in and out of these conditions just doesn't exist anymore. This trend does not on the one hand dispute the fact that there must be a distributionist goal towards adjusting certain inequalities or disparities but it also on the other hand does not deny the fact that there are underlying distributionist facets well underway. It is just that the way we measure people social conditions in this day and age unlike thirty or forty years ago will altogether no matter what we do be incomprehensive in today's terms.
At the outset of this century welfare or social progress has gotten its noteriety mainly through the chief efforts of the Brandeis Brief which became believe it or not the chief model in which to understand the dimensions of poverty--that is, you have to rely on statistics and numbers. It served as the basis for many a things including the Brown v. Board of Education and even the Great Society Programs. Yet like many sought after policy they too failed the test of time as the supporters of them weren't able to maintain a hold much less a decisive or I should say convincing reason to sustain these programs any further.
Lots of peope were eventually left out especially with the new waves of social reforms that encompassed one of the fallacy of post-modernism: welfare to work programs, empowerment zones, curtailing affirmative action and school choice vouchers. How at any rate these programs are in themselves a stream of works resulting from a fallible grasp of time is that for starters no matter how much any Republican wants to cut taxes and reduce spending to a minimalist state that such a minimalist state under the circumstances that we live in these days will always become larger(as Congress through the US Attorney General was able to pass the Patriot Act future administrations will have to maintain a certain level of welfare spending, reversing the common ideology found in the conservatives camp).
Secondly, as each age characterized of an economic term evolves(such as from an industrial economy to a post-industrial economy) the worth and value of the information at hand intensifies geometrically(which means that if were are now coming out of an post-industrial economy the inequalities pursuant to it if not being accounted for can increase so many folds); thirdly, as a result of such, no matter which direction societal leaning towards greater or lesser welfare and civil rights protection it is bound to be nothing more than a concoction of what a perfect society or way of life people should live in(such as the Proposition 209 might only reflect racial supremacist projecting their viewpoint in that state state's legislature).
Fourthly, with all this comes a post-instituional effect, that is erosion of physical institutions as we know it being replaced with virtual ones--it can even go down the line to having a virtual state or imaginary armies; finally the concept of individuals and humanity will have to be a post-Soviet one, one in which people are viewed not as having souls but trapped in a world where the evils of slavery and neo-imperialism comes in a different guise as in a post- Soviet era whereas there is more impact on our resources(a good distributionist starting point) in using them to re-assert(or how one looks at re-evaluating people's identity) in which case there is no market framework out there to make such a use of these resources 'morally' worthwhile.
What will connect all this is that unlike before where we looked at poverty as a sign of European exploitation but now it will be seen as a mere occurence that has gone out of control merely due to the constraint of the element of time and energy has placed on us. (To look at it completely from the former approach is simply and extremely naive; it overlooks the organic forces or forces that comes about because there is enough energy and substance to create a following or entity of its kind.)
Poverty as I understand it has been looked at from a dichotomotic debate in which on the one hand you have to meet basic needs and on the other hand that you have to take in consideration non-economic or pre-rational incentives in which people have. Even if it wasn't looked at such a straightforward way, the attitudes and approaches would have to embody elements that were unconventional premodern or local. This does not mean that we can't look at poverty from this perspective but it is useless and pointless to carry out a policy with a type of population we have this today and expect to have tomorrow.
One of the controlling factors of poverty these days is the concept of the digital divide. By this I mean the evolving forces of de novo institutions such as the internet having a tremendous effect on people's lives. As the internet itself grows larger, its existence makes them more uncertain as it evolves into something new and different and yet the impact of it makes us rethink basic discussions on areas of freedom of speech and privacy and that this rethinking is just merely a crowding out of the virtual world on the physical.
Even from a international perspective, the causes of wars will be on the reaction and bluntness of advance technology such as the thought of using bunker busters to flush out Bin Laden in Pakistan and the increased use of caves and tunnels to continue to elude the US making Al Queda ever the larger and its protege. Thus making the causes of war more of who has access to information and how they can cause sort of a hysteria.
There is another factor about the digital divide and that has to do with ongoing technological revolution that will not in the coming years bring forth revolutionary household products but also change the way we approach a lot of things and perhaps how we present them. Take cloning for example how we are able to assign clone individuals the same rights as natural born ones; schooling, how we can have a combination of mass schooling with the internet and allow for private/home schooling at the same time(here I am not advocating one or the other I am just saying how there must be a different approach to things); or entertainment, imagine if pop stars and divas like Britney Spears or Jennifer Lopez is replaced with computer generated singers and models.
Imagine an economy in which the revenues comes from the wealth of nannotechonology that have welfare programs resulting from. Imagine the state taking a less derivative approach to families and marriage and just do away with them, afterall they are just institutions and just 'raise' the children by themselves like the Prime Minister in the "Star Wars: Attack of the Clones."
Of course the big question will be where is the normative approach for all this. You can't expect this to happen overnight without anytype of protest or backlash. That is a pretty difficult question to resolve in which case how this will happened is that the debates that warehouses these issues in one way or another will just get trampled and swept under the carpet as others will unfold or posed so as its guise. I don't remember where I read this but as a thinker once said as mankind labor too much they have a tendency to forget. I think not just the labour policy or the mobility of labor will play a role but the forced way we have to reconcile this as the psychological effect on the masses can create some type of 'default' or in G.L. Shackle a 'subjectivity of expectation.'
Applying these two things would mean for the first test as in the case of civil rights whereas negatively a high incarceration rate type culture and 'antinomianistic'(as well libertarian attitudes towards drugs and sex) we live in will forced either various races to start looking at each other as equals or go to some massive race wars. I think the former will happened. You will probably have better days in civil rights only such that those compromises having been made and understood from a rigid test as not be a sell out on either side and allowing things going from there. I am not saying this is my viewpoint on civil rights but it is a worthwhile that should be taken in consideration.
The other sample will be something you read in a amateur newspaper about the effects of being unfair without proving any type of social inequality being there. That is there will be a shift on the model on what the good life assured of the state at hand (i.e. a nation-state) towards one of a post-post-modern ones. Why look at poverty based on the expectation as though everybody supposed to get married and raise a family, even if you really do or don't. This method of looking at things will be looked as being cheap, fraudulent and frivolous. I think the bases in which how we can judge if somebody living in destitution or poverty will(aside from the fact that basic needs having been met) from a Rifkined approach of 'pay per experience' or 'a transformation of ownership to leasing.'
Either way such changes is the result of a lot of things being built up and have at its doorstep long been overdue or overhaul. Pretty much today we are just regurgitating old and passe ways of seeing the world and alleviating its problems. Such a way of percieving and doing stuff makes likely more scenarios such as the World Trade Center and its aftermath more unpredictable and placing a strain on our resources.
# posted by Jamie @ 6:05 PM 
