How different would politics be if elected officials had to spend a few months in the military or poverty?

How different would politics be if every representative had to spend a few months in the military followed by a few months in poverty?
In the post-World War II period, most successful politicians served in war. Some came from poverty (Lyndon Johnson and Bill Clinton come to mind, but so did Abraham Lincoln).

There is no evidence that those who had seen war were less inclined to send others to war. As for poverty, those who experienced it were more inclined to promote efforts to help poor people; yet no one produced as vast a set of social programs as the very wealthy Franklin Roosevelt.

In sum, I am not sure that there is a hard an fast cause-and-effect dynamic between experiencing war and poverty and leading in a way that avoids or diminishes either.

However, it seems more honorable for a person commanding others to risk life and limb to have done so, just as it seems more equitable that someone who has struggled with need should weigh efforts to alleviate poverty. For that reason alone, it might be a worthwhile requirement in a democracy.

Are there ways to reduce unemployment as social entrepreneur?

Q. Are there ways to reduce unemployment as social entrepreneur?
What are the possible solutions can a social entrepreneur do to counter unemployment in his or her country? Can social entrepreneurship solve unemployment? Is so then what are the ways and methods to do so?
PS: I’m a trader and investor in Malaysia.

I think your question answers itself. Social entrepreneurship is one way to reduce unemployment, first by hiring people to work temporarily in the enterprise and secondly by making designing those jobs as a kind of training and work experience that can serve in the labor market to obtain longer lasting and sustaining work.

The typical social enterprise in the United States is an operation that is a for-profit subsidiary of a nonprofit.

For example, Homeboy Industries began in 1992 as a ministry by a Jesuit priest to help assist high-risk youth, former gang members and young newly released ex-convicts with mental health counseling, legal services and work-readiness training services. Fr. Greg Boyle, SJ, the founder, whom I met briefly, realized that the best way to get these young people redirected into sustaining jobs was to develop businesses in which they could work and learn to show up on time, not tell off the boss and also acquire a particular marketable skill.

The group started Homeboy Bakery, Homegirl Café & Catering, Homeboy/Girl Merchandise, Homeboy Farmers Markets, The Homeboy Diner, Homeboy Silkscreen & Embroidery, Homeboy Grocery and Homeboy Cafe & Bakery, all for-profit outfits that sell goods and services produced by the people Boyle initially intended to help.

Stories such as these are more prevalent in wealthier economies, in which there is a large consumer market, than in poorer ones. However, innovations such as microfinancing, an entrepreneurial idea that I understand has been fabulously successful in Bangladesh, are examples of what can be achieved.

What psychological factors lead to poverty, and what factors/beliefs lead to wealth?

The idea that poverty or wealth are based on the psychological makeup of a person is a fallacy. It is amply established that the single most significant factor in poverty or wealth is the socioeconomic status of the family into which each person is born.

Studies on social mobility show repeatedly that socioeconomic status is downwardly “sticky.” That is, most people have a stronger likelihood of sliding downward in the socioeconomic ladder that upward.

Studies about the United States show that it takes at least five generations to climb from the bottom 20% of the income distribution to the top 20%; exception: immigrants. In any case, upward mobility happens to a small minority of people. A recent study of Sweden, recently expanded to Scandinavia and Britain found that a large share of those at the top 20% today were descendants of people in the top 20% in the 1700s.

If the question were rephrased to what traits help the rare few who climb up the socioeconomic ladder, that might elicit a different answer. But beware the Horatio Alger mythology. If hard work made people rich, African bush women would all be billionaires.

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This is a repost from my replies to questions posted on Quora, a question-and-answer site where questions are asked, answered, edited and organized by its community of users, at quora.com. The questions and their subtexts are not mine.

Why wasn't I born in a developed country?

Q. Why wasn't I born in a developed country?

A. This is one of those questions that reveals the silliness of patriotism, the pride in supposedly having chosen well one’s birthplace. One might as well take pride in the color of one’ s eyes.

It also begs the question of the term “developed country,” which economists no longer use. When it was, many observed that there are precious few actually developed countries, perhaps the Netherlands or Norway. In reality, the majority of countries fall into the basket of those that are “underdeveloped,” meaning that their systems of political economy fail to deliver basic needs and a degree of transparency to their citizens. A minority of very wealthy nations are actually overdeveloped, with systems that yield pollution, expansionist wars and neocolonial oppression of other countries, plus a measure of internal socioeconomic injustice.

There is no paradise on Earth.

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This is a repost from my replies to questions posted on Quora, a question-and-answer site where questions are asked, answered, edited and organized by its community of users, at quora.com. The questions and their subtexts are not mine.

Would Christians have better luck at converting people if they abolished their dogma of hell?

Q. Would Christians have better luck at converting people if they abolished their dogma of hell?

A. Believing in something because you will get a reward or for fear of punishment is not genuine faith. The teaching about punishment as one of the possibilities at the end of one’ s life or at the end of history (mileage may vary according to the denomination) is about recognizing that God is merciful bust also just.

Incidentally, while churches have recognized many people as saints, not one single solitary human being has been officially consigned to eternal punishment by any major church body of which I am aware.

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This is a repost from my replies to questions posted on Quora, a question-and-answer site where questions are asked, answered, edited and organized by its community of users, at quora.com. The questions and their subtexts are not mine.

Is zero unemployment a good thing?

No and it's not possible. It would mean that no one was seeking to gain or change employment and no one was seeking to hire or fire. In essence, it would mean a static situation without growth or change in the labor market; given that population tends to increase and people tend to shifts in various demographic characteristics (age, marital status, etc.), a static labor market would be necessarily underserving any society.

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This is a repost from my replies to questions posted on Quora, a question-and-answer site where questions are asked, answered, edited and organized by its community of users, at quora.com. The questions and their subtexts are not mine.

What's a good estimate of believing Christians?

[This is the beginning of reposts from my replies to questions posted on Quora, a question-and-answer site where questions are asked, answered, edited and organized by its community of users, at quora.com. The questions and their subtexts are not mine.]

Q: What's a good estimate of believing Christians?
The official number is around 2 billions but for example in my family we are all (6) baptized but only 50% are real Christians, the other 50% are atheist but still nominal Christians.


A: My rule of thumb, about any religion or none, is about 10% really know, understand and assent to the fullness of their nominal faith. Of those, probably none live out such beliefs perfectly. Augustine of Hippo, bishop, scholar and saint, wrestled with this question when he compared the visible ecclesiastical community with the communion of saints, dead and alive, known only to God.

As for Christian statistics in particular, there are many problems. First, different denominations count members in different ways. Many Protestant denominations count only confirmed members. Catholics and Orthodox count baptized people. That already distorts the number.

Sociologists of religion tend to prefer, as a yardstick, behavior indicating adherence. Here again, there is the problem of finding measurable behavior. A common, if imperfect yardstick, is attendance or participation in ritual services or events beyond major holidays. People who go to church one a month throughout the year, for example, are likely to be more seriously committed to a belief (regardless of whether they succeed at meeting the faith’ s ethical demands) than people who go just for Christmas and Easter.

What happened to the high ideals of the Declaration of Independence?

We are all moved by those eloquent words penned by Thomas Jefferson, but not only did the Founding Fathers borrow and misrepresent their intentions in the Declaration of Independence, the United States government has not lived up to the stated original goals.

Take the opening sentence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

The Second Treatise Of Government by John Locke, published in 1690, states that the premise of all political power is “equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another; there being nothing more evident, than that creatures of the same species and rank, promiscuously born to all the same advantages of nature, and the use of the same faculties, should also be equal one amongst another without subordination or subjection.”

Was that really true for the United States?

We know than there was no thought given, implicitly or otherwise, to the equality of women (indeed, Southern lawmakers added “sex” as a protected class under the Civil Rights Act being debated in 1964, partly as a poison pill, partly as a joke). So let’s stick to men.

In what sense were the male African slaves or Indians equal? Or how about white indentured servants? Or was the point that the Creator endowed them with equality and certain rights, but hell if the Founding Fathers were going to follow suit?

This is not to mention the Jeffersonian claim in the Declaration that 

whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Here Jefferson went well beyond the Lockian writ. In effect, Locke had considered the question as follows:

May the commands then of a prince be opposed? may he be resisted as often as any one shall find himself aggrieved, and but imagine he has not right done him? This will unhinge and overturn all polities, and, instead of government and order, leave nothing but anarchy and confusion. To this I answer, that force is to be opposed to nothing, but to unjust and unlawful force; whoever makes any opposition in any other case, draws on himself a just condemnation both from God and man; and so no such danger or confusion will follow.

In fact, Locke’s views are reflected in the work of U.S. lawmakers over time.

In 1798, Congress passed four Alien and Sedition Acts that made it illegal for any person “with intent to oppose any measure … of the government” to “print, utter, or publish … any false, scandalous, and malicious writing” against the government. Citizens or foreigners were barred from opposing the execution of federal laws, preventing a federal officer from performing his or her duties, engaging in aid “any insurrection, riot, Unlawful Assembly, or combination” or make any defamatory statement about the federal government or the president.

The Sedition Act of 1918 added willfully employing “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language”  about the U.S. form of government, the Constitution, the flag, or U.S. military or naval forces.

In 1940 the Alien Registration Act allowed the government to detain any national of a country at war with the United States without trial.

These laws were used against Federalists, southern secessionists and more recent political dissenters including socialists, anarchists, pacifists and labor leaders. Not to mention foreigners.

Arguably, the democratic experiment has some ways to go.

Make War No More

I was going to write a new jeremiad against war today, to protest the Memorial Day militarism and the propaganda schmaltz to help the $800 billion annual orgy of war-profiteering, which has not prevented the United States from losing every war since World War II.

Still, they keep sending Johnny marching off to kill and be killed. It's time to stop.

Here are some of my posts from other occasions on this subject:

A Greatful Nation

Dulce et Decorum Est

War is the fault of all the soldiers who wage it

Let's not forget: Osama had a point

Defying militarism