Listening to Picturing a Meltdown, an interview with two of the authors of a comic-style book explaining what led to our economic crisis, I realized that in addition to marriage as the foundation of society, there is another myth that claims to be oh, so important to our freedom: Home ownership. It has a lot of similarities and it is tied very strongly to marriage and the nuclear family. Just like marriage, home ownership is seen as a status symbol: I own a home, therefore I am an adult. It is the next step in our becoming adults, right after … Continue reading »
Aug 162010
May 192010
I’ve been thinking a lot about ethics lately. No, not the book variety. No, I am not writing a paper on ethics. It’s ethics in real life. You know, something like: Is getting $450 per week worth a little lie or two? And you know what I realized: The temptation is damn, well, tempting! If I say x instead of y – I will get some money! It is as if the system rewards lying. And the only thing stopping me would be ethical qualms
May 012010
Before I disappear again to write two papers in three weeks, I thought I’d share some statistics that have been bothering me ever since I received the fact sheets from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. The first talks about unemployment. Despite cheers to the contrary, our economy is not back on track – at least not for people who are looking for jobs rather than investments. Other than the steady upward trend of unemployment rates across gender lines, what also caught my eye is the heavy hit women who maintain families are taking. Consistently, throughout
Feb 072010
Cognitive dissonance is that feeling that we get when we believe something contradictory. It arises – to use the example from a textbook – when you think you should be on a diet but devour a huge bowl of chocolate mousse. You then start justifying your choice to minimize the dissonance. Recently, I have been thinking about a specific cognitive dissonance: Ethical dissonance. Working at a large financial institution (FI) during the financial “crisis” is creating a lot of ethical dissonance for me. Already the fact that I put the crisis in quotes is a symptom of that: On the … Continue reading »
Jan 192010
Via the Facebook page of the National Sexuality Resource Center, I found a report from the Pew Research Center on marriage and how wives are rising (whatever that’s supposed to mean). Reading the first paragraph, I decided that I needed to change my evening plans and respond to this. The institution of marriage has undergone significant changes in recent decades as women have outpaced men in education and earnings growth. These unequal gains have been accompanied by gender role reversals in both the spousal characteristics and the economic benefits of marriage. The first part of the first sentence is correct: … Continue reading »
Nov 162009
This week’s Too Much includes an in depth look at a new meta-analysis about the impact of a society’s income inequality on that society’s citizen’s health. It’s a puzzle that apparently epidemiologists have been working on for a while but it was fairly recently brought to the forefront again when a comparison between the US and European countries showed that the US fares worse even though we spend a lot more on health care (I’ll see if I can dig up that article again…). Nothing seemed to explain the discrepancy, though, it’s obvious that the reporting ignored consistent findings that … Continue reading »
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