Join us on Tuesday, January 14th for “FEARS: Where not everyone shares your pain” – get details and reserve your seat HERE.

“In America nearly every man has his dream – his pet scheme – whereby he is to advance himself socially or pecuniarily. It is this all-pervading speculativeness which we tried to illustrate in “The Gilded Age.” It is a characteristic which is both bad and good for both the individual and the nation. Good, because it allows neither to stand still but drives both forever on to some point which is ahead, not behind nor to one side. Bad, because the chosen point is often badly chosen and then the individual is wrecked. The aggregation of such cases affects the nation and thus is bad for the nation. Still, it is a trait which is – of course – better for a people to have and sometimes suffer from than to be without.”

Join us for a discussion of rising economic inequality in our Dinner at the Square season kickoff “American Dream Lost?” Tuesday, October 15th. Get more information HERE.

“In America nearly every man has his dream – his pet scheme – whereby he is to advance himself socially or pecuniarily. It is this all-pervading speculativeness which we tried to illustrate in “The Gilded Age.” It is a characteristic which is both bad and good for both the individual and the nation. Good, because it allows neither to stand still but drives both forever on to some point which is ahead, not behind nor to one side. Bad, because the chosen point is often badly chosen and then the individual is wrecked. The aggregation of such cases affects the nation and thus is bad for the nation. Still, it is a trait which is – of course – better for a people to have and sometimes suffer from than to be without.”

Robert Putnam, in the New York Times:

‘As successive graduating P.C.H.S. classes entered an ever worsening local economy, the social fabric of the 1950s and 1960s was gradually shredded. Juvenile-delinquency rates began to skyrocket in the 1980s and were triple the national average by 2010. Not surprisingly, given falling wages and loosening norms, single-parent households in Ottawa County doubled from 10 percent in 1970 to 20 percent in 2010, while the divorce rate more than quadrupled. In Port Clinton itself, the epicenter of the local economic collapse in the 1980s, the rate of births out of wedlock quadrupled between 1978 and 1990, topping out at about 40 percent, nearly twice the race-adjusted national average (itself rising rapidly).’

‘…The crumbling of the American dream is a purple problem, obscured by solely red or solely blue lenses. Its economic and cultural roots are entangled, a mixture of government, private sector, community and personal failings. But the deepest root is our radically shriveled sense of we. ‘

Read the whole article online HERE.

Check out our upcoming program looking at rising inequality HERE. And you can check out the whole dinner season HERE.

“Nothing struck me more forcefully than the general equality of conditions among her people.”

From Chrystia Freeland’s “Plutocrats:”

‘The master and his apprentice worked side by side. The latter living with the master and therefore subject to the same conditions. When these apprentices rose to be masters there was little or no change in their way of life. There was, substantially, social equality – and even political equality – for those engaged in industrial pursuits had little or no voice in the state. Before the industrial revolution, we were all pretty equal. But that changed with the first gilded age.

‘ “Today,” according to Andrew Carnegie, “we assemble thousands of operatives in the factory and in the mine of whom the employer can know little or nothing, and to whom he is little better than a myth. All intercourse between them is at an end. Rigid castes are formed and as usual mutual ignorance breeds mutual distrust.

‘That shift was particularly profound in America, one reason that even today the national mythology doesn’t entirely accept the existence of those rigid castes of industrial society.’

“I think going forward, we have to deal with our larger structural problems. The biggest one, as far as I’m concerned is we’re no longer socially mobile as a country. You have people that are born poor, there is a higher and higher probability that they’re going to stay poor and people who are born rich, there is a great probability that they’re going to stay rich. It’s so un-American. And yet none of the conversation and the debates are really about this. But upward mobility is a way to solve a lot of the problems because then people don’t default out of fear or exasperation… if they feel like life isn’t fair to them they can’t succeed – it’s only the big interests that can succeed… then they default to something that looks a little more like Europe than historically our republic has been.”

— Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush (this morning on MSNBC’s Morning Joe)

A University of California at Berkley study, published in the Journal of Psychological Science, showed that conservatives were far more motivated on environmental issues – including climate change – when it was explained with particular language.

“When it comes to climate change, deforestation and toxic waste, the assumption has been that conservative views on these topics are intractable. But new research from the University of California, Berkeley, suggests that such viewpoints can be changed after all, when the messages about the need to be better stewards of the land are couched in terms of fending off threats to the “purity” and “sanctity” of Earth and our bodies…”

Read the entire article online here.

The study supports the body of work on moral reasoning that shows conservatives consider purity and sanctity one of the “channels” of morality, where this basis for moral decision-making is simply lacking in liberal moral reasoning. According to the lead author of the study, “when individuals view protecting the environment as a moral issue, they are more likely to recycle and support government legislation to curb carbon emissions.” This is more support for the case made by Jonathan Haidt in The Righteous Mind and the central premise of the Asteroids Club – “fending off threats” is a strong foundation for us to build from.

So if liberals want conservatives to see the climate change “asteroid,” perhaps they might want to shake-up their word choice. Beats angry yelling as a strategy hands down.

This page is where we will assemble the best information about what makes climate change an “asteroid,” and therefore a substantial threat to our future. It will serve as a resource for Asteroid Clubs wishing to present climate change as a part of their event.

We’d like you to participate in crowd-sourcing the best data, the most compelling reads, and the smartest videos by posting a comment under the relevant section (with source links). We’ll mine the comments and continue to build the case with your help.

At the bottom of the page you’ll find “The Telescope” for climate change. It’s where we’ll seek to view the asteroid in more depth, dimension and accuracy – giving good arguments mitigating the threat of the asteroid their due. Telescopes reveal complexity we’re likely to ignore if we’re freaking out about an incoming asteroid.

This page is where we will assemble the best information about what makes rising economic inequality an “asteroid,” and therefore a substantial threat to our future. It will serve as a resource for Asteroid Clubs wishing to present rising inequality as a part of their event.

We’d like you to participate in crowd-sourcing the best data, the most compelling reads, and the smartest videos by posting a comment under the relevant section (with source links). We’ll mine the comments and continue to build the case with your help.

At the bottom of the page you’ll find “The Telescope” for rising inequality. It’s where we’ll seek to view the asteroid in more depth, dimension and accuracy – giving good arguments mitigating the threat of the asteroid their due. Telescopes reveal complexity we’re likely to ignore if we’re freaking out about an incoming asteroid.