Mediaboss Marketing

When I try to explain why suburban sprawl is not the result of the free market, arguments often start like this:

Other person: You can complain all you want about sprawl, but it's what people want.

Me: Sprawl isnt the result of the free market, its the result of government policy. Your tax dollars paid for the highways that opened up suburbia to development, zoning codes and minimum parking requirements made suburbia car-dependent, and the failure of school desegregation ensured that cities had stigmatized schools and suburbs had prestigious ones. (I explain these policies in more detail here).

Other person: But we live in a democracy! If the government did it, it's what the people want!

Whats wrong with the other persons conclusion? The most obvious flaw is that what government does is not always what the people want. This is so for three reasons. First, the government doesnt always know what (if anything) the people want. On some issues, public opinion polling is so common that what most Americans want is fairly obvious: for example, there are many polls on abortion, and it seems pretty clear that most Americans think abortion should be legal some of the time but not all of the time.

But issues like transportation and land use are not heavily polled, so politicians dont necessarily know much about public opinion. For example, pollingreport.com, a website that compiles the results of national polls, includes over a dozen 2022 polls on abortion. By contrast, the websites most recent national poll focusing on transportation was in 2018. Thus, even a politician who really wants to know what the average citizen thinks might have some difficulty figuring this out.

Instead of relying on the opinions of the public as a whole, politicians understandably listen to the people who lobby them and give them money. So, if the loudest voices they hear want highways, the politicians fund highways. Government gives money to road-builders to build highways, and they use that money to lobby politicians and make campaign contributions. That lobbying causes politicians to support even more highway spending, ad infinitum. By contrast, public transit agencies cant give campaign contributions, which limits their appeal to politicians.

Similarly, in the land use context, zoning laws might reflect the views of a few dozen people who speak at public hearings rather than the views of the average person. If there are no loudmouths to shift the dialogue, zoning laws might reflect the views of unelected planners, or the views of one or two council members who have stronger opinions on zoning than the rest of the council.

Second, even if politicians knew what the average citizen thought, they might not give much weight to that hypothetical citizens views because the average citizen might just vote on party lines or based on other issues. National polls suggest that issues such as transportation and zoning are rarely voting issues. For example, Gallup regularly asks Americans what the most important problem facing the country is; typically only 3 or 4 percent pick environmental issues, and infrastructure is even less important.

Third, sprawl doesnt reflect todays electorate as much as it reflects the electorate of the 1920s (when zoning was created), the 1950s and 1960s (when a highway-building boom caused cities to lose population to suburbs), and the 1970s (when zoning began becoming much more restrictive in coastal states). In those days, public polling was far less frequent than it is today, so even if todays state legislator can guess what the average person thinks about public transit or housing policy, that might not have been true when the United States was set on its current car-dependent path.

Fourth, not all policies affecting urban development were even created by elected legislators. For example, minimum parking requirements are often created by planners who look at what other cities are doing, and school desegregation policies (which made urban schools in affluent neighborhoods unattractive to whites by requiring those schools to diversity while suburban schools were allowed to stay all-white) was rammed down Americans throats by the Supreme Court.

But lets assume for the sake of argument that every anti-urban 20th-century policy would have been endorsed by the average citizen. (In fairness, I do think some, if not all, of these policies were probably popular). Does that mean that these policies reflect popular will more than the free market would?

Not necessarily. If public policy reflects the will of the majority, the minority gets shut out. By contrast, the free market creates unanimity without conformity; the majority gets what it wants, but the minority gets what it wants.

For example, suppose that 60 percent of people in a town want a big house, and 40 percent want a small house or an apartment. The 60 percent could use zoning laws to impose their preferences, ensuring that the entire town is zoned for big houses. The 40 percent would either have to move or pay for more house than they want. By contrast, in a city without land use regulation, 100 percent of people get what they want: the big house people get big houses, the small house people get small houses. (I realize that empirical reality is somewhere in between these extremes; nevertheless, the collapse of apartment construction over the past several decades suggests that the first scenario matches reality more than the second). Thus, even the most democratic government only reflects the preferences of a majority.

View post:
Sprawl and Democracy - Planetizen

Afghanistan is one of nine countries that have become outright dictatorships in the last two years, according to researchers at the University of Gothenburg. (Photo: Omer Abrar / AFP / NTB)

The global levelof democracy is back to where it was in 1986. This means that 35 years ofdemocratic progress have been reset over the past decade.

Nine countries have become pure dictatorships in the last two years:

Afghanistan, Chad, Guinea, Haiti, Iran, Mali, Myanmar, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.

Another term for these is closed autocracies, see fact box.

These trends have been documented by the Varieties of Democracy project at the University of Gothenburg, also called V-DEM. They have measured the level of democracy in the world by examining how many of the world's inhabitants live with democratic rights.

The V-Dem reportdistinguishes among four forms of government: closed autocracies, electoralautocracies, electoral democracies and liberal democracies. Autocracy is thesame as a dictatorship.

In closedautocracies, either no elections are held, or elections are held, but the headof state is not exposed to any real competition in the elections.

In electoralautocracies, elections are held between different parties, but the electoralprocess does not meet democratic standards.

In electoraldemocracies, free and fair elections are held. In addition, the population hasa number of institutional democratic rights, such as freedom of expression andthe right to organise.

In liberaldemocracies, the legislature and the judiciary also supervise the executive,and the rule of law and individual freedom of citizens are protected.

Source: Politicsand Governance

yvind sterud, a professor at the Department of Political Science at the University of Oslo(UiO), has contributed to V-DEM's latest report as a country expert.

He points out thatsome of the most authoritarian countries in the world such as China and nowIndia are extremely populous. This has an impact on the measurements. But themore-or-less authoritarian states are also in the majority when the number ofstates is used as the unit of measurement.

sterud believesthat the decline in democratic governance is often due to economic setbacks.

There will likelybe more dissatisfaction, more polarization. The authorities tend to tighten upa bit because there is more unrest, so economic crises are an important part ofthe explanation for the decline in democratic governance, he said.

Some countrieswith authoritarian rule, such as China, have also been very successfuleconomically.

This means thatan authoritarian form of government has become a development model for othercountries, because democratic regimes have been very poor at delivering welfareand growth, he said. Many democratic states have stagnated and experiencedrising unemployment.

The democraticdecline is particularly evident in the Pacific region, in Eastern Europe and inCentral Asia. There has also been a decline in Latin America and the Caribbean.

There arenevertheless examples of countries that have moved in the opposite direction,from authoritarian rule to democratic rule. Bolivia, Bulgaria, the CzechRepublic, the Dominican Republic, Malawi, Moldova and Zambia have all seen anevolution from authoritarian rule to democracy over the past three years.

sterud believesthis may be due to the fact that they have managed to pursue an economic growthpolicy, which in turn means that they deliver more to the population.

These countries aretrying to implement redistribution policies, which means that the difference betweenpoor and rich becomes somewhat smaller. The southern and south-eastern Europeancountries are also characterized by membership of the EU, which has enabledthem to reduce unemployment by exporting labour to richer parts of Europe, hesaid.

This means thatthe living conditions for many improve, and then the conditions for democraticgovernance are more favourable, he said.

yvind sterud is a professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Oslo. (Photo: UiO)

Are there anycountries that are currently governed in an authoritarian manner that couldmove in a more democratic direction in the coming years?

sterud is not certain.

It is verydifficult to predict that, because it depends very much on the development inthe country, whether they manage to reverse the trend in the direction ofsmaller tensions between ethnic groups, and dampen internal tensions, he said.

He neverthelesssees Ukraine as an opportunity in the longer term.

It is possible tothink that at one point or another, when the war is over, Ukraine will becomedependent on Western support for reconstruction. As of today, Ukraine is a kindof hybrid regime, as it is called, with strong authoritarian features andenormous corruption, and it is reasonable to believe that things will improvewhen the war is over. With dependence on Western support and a strongerorientation towards the West, there will be pressure in the direction of tryingto overcome some of the corruption and to get a government that is responsiveto the population, he said.

Translated by Nancy Bazilchuk

Reference:

Evie Papada et.al.: Defiance in the Face of Autocratization. V-Dem Institute Democracy report, 2023.

Read the Norwegian version of this article at forskning.no

Link:
There are now more dictatorships than democracies in the world - Sciencenorway

Why has so little been done about social and economic inequality? There are multiple hypotheses. The commitment to freedom, after all, means that within the capacious boundaries of the law, no one should prevent anyone else from thinking, saying, or doing whatever they like. That sensibility helps explain not only skyrocketing salaries and lower taxes but also how a mendacious serial swindler could become president of the United States, incite a mob to sack the nations Capitol, and (at least so far) pay no price for it. If freedom now trumps every other value, then solidarity and social obligation are for suckers. If only a lucky few can feast in our less regulated economic environment today, so much the better for them. If others are starving, say neoliberals, they should become entrepreneurs and get rich.

The problem, of course, is that the ideology of self-help is no more tied to reality now than it was during the first Gilded Age. Millions of Americans work more than one minimum-wage job or try to stay afloat as independent contractors in the gig economy, while others cruise ahead. False as its promise has proved for most Americans, neoliberal ideology has seeped into every part of our culture. The top 1 percent, those at the pinnacle of our economic pyramid, attract so much attention and criticism from progressives that less has been said about the top 10 percent, the segment of professionals and denizens of the new knowledge economy whose household income is more than $212,110 a year. Such upper-class Americans (who often consider themselves merely upper-middle-class) once voted Republican. Recently they have become, along with nonwhite voters, the backbone of the Democratic Party. Since the New Deal coalition fractured during the 1970s, the party now depends on a different set of voters.

This is a global phenomenon. Thomas Piketty, Amory Gethin, and Clara Martnez-Toledano at the World Inequality Lab (WIL) in Paris have studied voting across fifty democracies since 1948. The evidence in Political Cleavages and Social Inequalities (Harvard, $39.95, 656 pp.) shows that, whereas less well-educated voters in blue-collar and low-skilled service jobs voted consistently for social-democratic parties in the postwar period, they have now gravitated to conservative parties. Parties on the Left now rely on a core of highly educated voters who work in the knowledge economy. The standard explanation for that phenomenon in the United States has stressed cultural backlash against racial unrest, the counterculture, and feminism. But the shift of less-educated voters toward conservative parties in Europe predates by decades the mass immigration of non-Europeans often cited as its cause. The class-based party cleavages of the twentieth century, in short, have been replaced by multi-elite party systems. Conservative parties represent high-income and low-educated voters; liberal parties have become the parties of higher-educated voters.

In the spring of 1787, Madison argued in Vices of the Political System of the United States that democracies can fracture along multiple lines, of which class is only one. Among other factors, Madison also identified religion, region, occupation, culture, and the irrational attachment of some voters to individual leaders. The WIL groups evidence confirms Madisons analysis. Class is now one among other divisions, including collective beliefs concerning tradition, cosmopolitanism, authoritarianism, and the adequacy of neoliberal reliance on market mechanisms. In a recent working paper, Brahmin Left versus Merchant Right, Piketty argues that left parties have abandoned redistributionist programs thanks to near unanimity on the adequacy of capitalism. Moderate left parties acceptance of neoliberal ideas has made cultural conflicts more prominent, especially the resentment felt by the less educated toward the more educated.

By adopting the cosmopolitan worldview that, thanks to our education, seems to us self-evidently correct, we members of the college-educated elite have distanced ourselves from the cultures of those who lack not only tertiary education but also the privileges such education brings. Forgetting the advantages that the well-educated usually enjoy growing up, including intact families that prioritize schooling and instill self-discipline, we have consciously or unconsciously embraced the idea of meritocracy. Our preferred politicians, from schoolteacher McGovern and engineer Carter to technocrats Michael Dukakis, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, and Obama, hold not only bachelors but also graduate degrees from the nations most selective universities. Culturally, these people inhabit a different world from the rough-and-ready cowboys Ronald Reagan and George W. Busheven if they were only fake cowboysand the celebrity wheeler-dealer Donald Trump, even though he was only a bankrupt con man. Political scientist Walter Dean Burnham noted evidence of increasingly polarized cultural conflict in the United States as early as 1970. The battle lines have since become much more deeply entrenched. As Carlos Lozada showed in his exhaustive study of the books published during Trumps presidency, What Were We Thinking (Simon & Schuster, $17, 272 pp.), four years of listening to the presidents unhinged harangues only intensified progressives bewilderment over his election. Four years of listening to Trumps critics belittle his voters as ignorant dupes or racists only intensified their resentment.

Democratic presidents, while in office if not before or after, have shown no greater interest in the economic condition of struggling Americans than have Republicans. Millions, especially but not exclusively in the heartland, have watched their middle-class livesand those they envisioned for their familiesvanish along with the well-paying jobs that, between the Depression and the oil crisis, secured that status. Republicans tell voters that cultural elites are to blame for their situation; Democrats give them little reason to disagree. If an unstoppable force of nature reshaped our economy, as neoliberals have claimed for half a century, and if one party loudly endorses American traditions of patriotism, self-reliance, Evangelical Christianity, and white male supremacy while the other party makes fun of all that, then the choice for many voters will be clear.

Calhoun, Gaonkar, and Taylor borrow terminology from David Goodhart, who contrasts somewheres, whose lives are rooted in particularand often decayingplaces, with anywheres, whose cosmopolitan experiences and preferences shape their very different sensibilities. Joan C. Williams has been pointing out for decades, most recently in White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America (Harvard Business Review Press, $22.99, 192 pp.), that those who provide service work and care work for the young, the old, the sick, and wealthy midlife professionals are understandably tired of elites condescension. Unctuous expressions of gratitude do not make up for long hours and lousy pay. Preserving your self-respect is hard when the entire culture undervalues your work while overvaluing those who, as John Adams put it, do nothing but push money around.

Wealthy Americans once voted Republican because they preferred low taxes and an unregulated economy. Evidently, despite their redistributionist rhetoric, so do most Democrats, whose tepid reforms offer somewheres little of economic value while supplying them with a steady stream of scorn. For that reason, Alan Abramowitz has argued, promises of economic redistribution might not persuade less skilled manual workers and service workers to return to the Democratic Party. We wont know unless the party at last delivers FDRs Second Bill of Rights or Rustins Freedom Budget. Even before Trump was elected, Larry M. Bartels and Christopher H. Achen provided evidence in Democracy for Realists (Princeton, $29.95, 408 pp.) that most people vote not on issues but on their personal situations, which have not improved for decades, and on their social identities, defined for millions of Americans by educational elites disdain.

Few Americans at the lowest rungs of the economic ladder even bother to vote, as Jan-Werner Mller points out in Democracy Rules (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $27, 256 pp.). We are witnessing what Mller terms a double secession of the rich, who have escaped the world of public services for private enclaves, and the poor, who understandably feel excluded and ignored. The failure of Democrats and Republicans to take seriously the problem of intergenerational poverty helps explain why. Perhaps the answer, as E. J. Dionne Jr. and Miles Rapoport argue in 100% Democracy: The Case for Universal Voting (The New Press, $23.24, 224 pp.), is to follow the two dozen nations where citizens are required to vote, or to follow states such as Oregon, which have instituted citizen-led initiatives to foster participation. Sadly, neither party seems interested in reforms to address the disengagement that plagues U.S. politics.

Beyond neoliberals upward channeling of profits from labor to capital and the role of tertiary education in distancing a new elite of cosmopolitans from other Americans, two more factors help explain our current condition.

The media landscape has been transformed by technology, by the blurring of reality through disinformation, and by the paradoxical consolidation of the sources providing information. Everyone understands how the internet has created echo chambers in which Americans find their own perspectives confirmed, amplified by passion, and intensified by endless repetition. When the primary criterion of truth is what those on my side believe, Calhoun, Gaonkar, and Taylor write, partisanship becomes almost epistemological. Trumps lies were central to his presidency, delighting his loyalists while outraging everyone else. The 24/7 news cycle of our political entertainment complex requires ever more sensational stories, or at least ever-renewed outrage at the other sides perfidy. Before the 1949 Fairness Doctrine was killed by Reagan in 1987 and the libertarians at WIRED magazine succeeded in making the digital world a new Wild West, nearly every community had its own local newspaper focused on local concerns. Most mid-century big-city newspapers either aspired to objective news coverage or had a competing newspaper to balance their perspective. Because most local papers have shrunk or vanished, many Americans now know less about community issues that really matter to their lives. Filling that vacuum, Mller argues, are obsessions with the largely symbolic, highly charged issues of the culture wars.

See more here:
Is American Democracy Coming Apart? - Commonweal

');});jQuery('.entry-content p.watermarked > div.watermarked_image > img').each( function() {if ( jQuery(this).hasClass('alignnone') ) {jQuery(this).parent().addClass( 'alignnone' );}if ( jQuery(this).hasClass('alignleft') ) {jQuery(this).parent().addClass( 'alignleft' );}if ( jQuery(this).hasClass('alignright') ) {jQuery(this).parent().addClass( 'alignright' );}if ( jQuery(this).hasClass('size-medium') ) {jQuery(this).parent().addClass( 'has-size-medium' );}if ( jQuery(this).hasClass('aligncenter') ) {jQuery(this).parent().addClass( 'aligncenter' );jQuery(this).parent().children().wrapAll('');}});}});});

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken will participate in the second Summit for Democracy on March 28-30,2023in Washington, D.C. The Summit will be co-hosted by the United States, Costa Rica, the Netherlands, Republic of Korea, and Republic of Zambia. Below is a list of events Secretary Blinken will participate in as well as the corresponding press coverage. The Department of State will provide preset and final access times on the Department of State daily public schedule.More information on the Summit can be foundhere.

Tuesday, March 28, at the Department of State

9:00 a.m.Secretary Blinken chairs a virtual panelsessiononA Just and LastingPeace in UkrainefeaturingPresident of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy.(VIRTUAL OPEN PRESS COVERAGE)

1:00 p.m.Secretary Blinken delivers remarksatThe Status of Women is the Status of Democracyeventin the Dean Acheson Auditorium, at the Department of State.(OPEN PRESS COVERAGE)

Wednesday, March 29

Summit for Democracys five co-hosts the United States, Costa Rica, Netherlands, Republic of Korea, and Zambia will officially kick off the Summit, with each co-host leader hosting a live, fully virtual, thematic, Leader-level plenary session. The Secretary will participate in virtual plenary sessions.

Thursday, March 30, at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center

12:30 p.m.Secretary Blinken delivers opening remarks and moderates the first session focusing on Advancing Democracy and Internet Freedom in a Digital Age,at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center.(OPEN PRESS COVERAGE FOR CREDENTIALED MEDIA)

5:45 p.m.Secretary Blinken delivers Summit for Democracy closing remarks,at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center.(OPEN PRESS COVERAGE FOR CREDENTIALED MEDIA)

All Summit for Democracy events listed above will be livestreamed onhttps://www.state.gov/summit-for-democracy-2023/. Additional high-resolution downloadable footage of the livestream will be provided after the conclusion of the sessions.

For more information on the second Summit for Democracy please email the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor atDRL-Press@state.gov. For information on credentialing please contact summitmedia@state.gov

Link:
Secretary Blinken's Participation in the Second Summit for ... - Department of State

BEIJING, March 27, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Hosted by the State Council Information Office of China, organized by Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, China Media Group and China International Communications Group, the Second International Forum on "Democracy: The Shared Human Values" was held in Beijing from March 22nd to 23rd. Hundreds of Chinese and foreign distinguished guests from more than 100 countries, regions and international organizations adopted a combination of offline and online communication to discuss topics such as "democracy and sustainable development", "democracy and innovation", "democracy and global governance", "democracy and the diversity of human civilization", "democracy and the road to modernization" and so on.

Opening Ceremony of the Second International Forum Democracy: The Shared Human Values

The participants believed that democracy is the common value of all mankind, and there are many forms of realizing democracy. The coexistence and symbiosis of different civilizations is the way to the healthy development of human civilization. All countries should respect the diversity of world civilizations, respect the democratic development path of other countries, strengthen exchanges and mutual learning, and promote the construction of a community of shared future for mankind. The Communist Party of China proposes and develops people's democracy in the whole process, and continuously transforms the value concept of the people as the masters of the country into scientific and effective institutional arrangements as well as concrete and realistic democratic practices. The people enjoy a wide range of democratic rights, and the people's democratic participation continues to expand, which has condensed consensus and strength for the modernization in Chinese style.

At the meeting, the foreign guests discussed the topics of the forum. Former Prime Minister of Thailand, Abhisit Vejjajiva pointed out that the international community needs to play a constructive role and firmly practice multilateralism, which is an effective way to promote the multipolarization of the world and the democratization of international relations. Jos Lus Centella, chairman of the Communist Party of Spain, pointed out that China insists on taking the people as the center to promote the modernization process and improve the people's living standards in an all-round way. It is to strengthen the international cooperation in poverty alleviation, food security, and green development, and work together to solve the most direct and realistic interests of the people. Mushahid Said, chairman of the National Defense Committee of the Senate of Pakistan, pointed out that China's Initiative "Belt and Road" has brought more than 100 countries and international organizations together. The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor is one of the flagship projects under the construction of "Belt and Road". It represents the concept of a community of shared future for mankind with win-win cooperation. Xu Qingqi, chairman of the Centre for New Inclusive Asia of Malaysia, pointed out that the problems in the world now are different from those in the past. We are all one family upon the globalization, the progress of science and technology, China proposing a community of shared future for mankind. Therefore, we must look at global governance beyond the range of a specific country.

Story continues

Contact: Liu QuanpingTel.: 0086-13911163556Email: liuquanping@cass.org.cn

CASS Logo

Cision

View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/apac/news-releases/the-second-international-forum-on-democracy-the-shared-human-values-kicked-off-in-beijing-301782059.html

SOURCE Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

Read more here:
The Second International Forum on "Democracy: The Shared Human Values" kicked off in Beijing - Yahoo Finance