ridemonkey.bikemag.com
Well I’m not gonna deck it. I made my decision and I don’t need to see anymore monkey nipples.America as two countries literally?
Last night while mulling over World Bank and census.gov data, trying to make some sense of our perceived poverty and the growing income inequalities as illustrated so nicely this month in Mother Jones, I had a thought: What if we separate America into Poor America and Rich America with the...
Prior to cities, the "process of securing the energy they needed to feed themselves" tended to take less than four hours a day.I was listening to this podcast and thinking about issues being noted here that drive people’s voting habits. I can’t help but think the divide between urban and rural life is a huge part of the divide and the traditions and culture of the past as each evolved have shaped the mindsets of modern voters (consciously or by exposure). Not unlike the religious splits in the chart I posted previously
Let’s talk about the notion of scarcity a bit, but let’s bring it into at least the 19th and then 20th and 21st centuries. In chapter 12 of your book, which is called — it’s a good title, “Malady of Infinite Aspiration” — you write, “For as long as people have congregated in cities, their ambitions have been molded by a different kind of scarcity from that which shapes those of subsistence farmers, a form of scarcity articulated in the language of aspiration, jealousy, and desire rather than of absolute need. And for the most part,” you write, “this kind of relative scarcity is the spur to work long hours, to climb the social ladder, and to keep up with the Joneses.”
What Do People Do All Day? - Freakonomics
What Do People Do All Day? - Freakonomicsfreakonomics.com
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SUZMAN: I suppose the way to make sense of it is to get a sense of what came before it, or the difference between cities and countryside, first of all. Everybody in rural areas was involved in effectively creating, generating, and acquiring the energy we needed to live, grow, and reproduce. That was what they spent their working lives on. Within cities, by contrast, people spent their energy and time using that energy provided by people in the countryside. The move to cities was this massive act of liberation in a sense. People were suddenly no longer tied to the process of securing the energy they needed to feed themselves, to reproduce. And it resulted in this extraordinary proliferation of jobs. It also transformed the way people constituted value, and saw themselves in relation to other people.
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