american gridlock why the right and left are both wrong commonsense 101 solutions to the economic crises

[...]... began to read mathematics on my own One thing led to the next, and by the mid-1970s, I completed my PhD thesis at Princeton applying game theory to foundational issues in political and moral theory My great good fortune was to have chosen as my thesis topic the problem of distributive justice, that is, the issue of who owes how much to whom, and why This topic had been moribund for decades until the. .. developments over the past half-century have contributed to today’s Dialogue of the Deaf These range from the culture wars of the 1960s and 1970s, to the triumph of inductive logic, to significant changes in lifestyle, and to the advent of extensive Congressional gerrymandering It will be helpful to review the role played by each The Culture Wars To a certain extent, the “culture wars” of the late 1960s and 1970s... institute, he explained to me that the identity bestowed by such labeling was “very good for the funding of contract research.” To be sure, there are a number of commentators who do not fall into these categories Nonetheless, the tenor of the times is the crossfire between Fox News and MSNBC The result is that we are all losers The Price Paid: Policy Gridlock Perhaps the most serious price we are paying for... morphed into a shouting match in which there is no recognition that win-win solutions exist But they do exist, and they are exactly what the doctor ordered Such policies are needed to build bipartisan support on issues, and thus to terminate gridlock here in America, and gridlock elsewhere for that matter My third goal is to demonstrate that the win-win solutions I deduce for the five problems analyzed are. .. example, the prospect of a Lost Decade, and ballooning U.S health-care spending I believe these to be novel solutions, and in arriving at them, I have drawn upon new and quite sophisticated theories that are based upon deductive logic These are the levers and pulleys that make it possible to identify new policy solutions This book has three goals The first is to identify five important problems confronting the. .. categories that have ceased to be meaningful does not seem to bother anyone The possibility that a compelling middle ground might exist seems to have evanesced into thin air And once you are tagged as on the Left, then you must remain on the Left, and vice versa Even entire think tanks are now regularly tagged Left of center” or Right of center.” When I made this point to the head of a very prestigious... ubiquitous throughout the Western world today Whether today’s anxiety stems from the inability of politicians in Washington, DC, to fund the U.S welfare state, or from the intractable euro crisis in Europe, there is a rising sense of gloom and helplessness on both sides of the Atlantic I am an optimist, and this book is offered as an antidote to this contagion of gloom It proposes solutions to many... wanting to learn long ago, even if he is reputedly brilliant and possessed a high IQ at age six A new Nobel Prize in Remedial Logic should be awarded to those researchers who unearthed this important new relationship Almost everyone in the establishment media is now assumed to be either on the Left or on the Right, in varying degrees, and their views are highly predictable The fact that Left and Right are. .. This too can be done, and I shall sketch how fpref.indd xx 03/12/11 8:12 AM Preface xxi Summary of Chapters Chapter 1 reviews the issues of deductive and inductive logic, and relates them to today’s Dialogue of the Deaf I stress how there are many different forms of deductive logic relevant to problem solving, and that some of the most useful of these are quite new These include the logic of game theory,... compared to that of Player 2 No information overload here! Analogously in physics, recall two of the most famous formulas in the history of science: Newton’s F ϭ ma and Einstein’s E ϭ mc 2 There are only three variables in each Surprisingly often in the history of science, the deeper the truth, the fewer the number of variables or “factors” that matter and the less the information needed The Good Lord . Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Brock, H. Woody. American gridlock : why the right and left are both wrong commonsense 101 solutions to the economic crises / H. Woody Brock. p. cm. Includes index. . prediction of the crash in 2008. Not surprisingly, in American Gridlock: Why the Left and Right are Both Wrong, Woody, like only he can do, diagnoses the persistent problems in today’s economy then. AM American Gridlock ffirs.indd vffirs.indd v 03/12/11 8:12 AM03/12/11 8:12 AM ffirs.indd viffirs.indd vi 03/12/11 8:12 AM03/12/11 8:12 AM American Gridlock WHY THE RIGHT AND LEFT ARE BOTH WRONG COMMONSENSE