Is Our Elites Learning, Atrios, Eschaton, April 18, 2014

The problem with the Lifestyles Of The Not Quite Rich Enough genre is there’s never any hint that anyone involved (reporters, subjects) take the next step and think, “oh, gosh, if I can’t live on $300K what must it be like to live on $50K!!!!”

“You’re leaving? Are you effing kidding?” An anti-gay bigot gets humiliated, Kate Geiselman, Salon, April 16, 2014

When Peter LaBarbera saw that close to a hundred people had assembled at my college to hear his warning about “the gay agenda,” I’m sure he was thrilled. He is the president of a group called Americans for Truth About Homosexuality, which describes its mission as being “dedicated to exposing the homosexual-bisexual-transgender activist agendas.”

When, less than 10 minutes later, he was left with an audience of about a dozen, he was angry. Angry enough to say, as the masses marched out, “You’re leaving? Are you effing kidding?” Angry enough to tweet, later that evening, “Two liberal professors lead their students in a walkout of my talk … rather than allow them to hear an opposing viewpoint.”

Except that’s not exactly what happened. What happened was much bigger than that, but I should back up a bit.

Is growth always good? Mano Singham, Freethought Blogs, April 17, 2014

It seems to be almost axiomatic these days to think of economic growth as an unfettered good. But must it always be so? Johann Hari in the April 2010 of The Progressive magazine wrote in a review of a book about John Maynard Keynes, whose influential work has been used to fuel growth, about what that famous economist thought about when we might know that it might be time to call a halt to growth.

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The key is to try and ensure that everyone has a basic level of comfort and security, and the current rapidly growing inequality works against that.