Welcome to the Nexus of Ethics, Psychology, Morality, Philosophy and Health Care

Welcome to the nexus of ethics, psychology, morality, technology, health care, and philosophy
Showing posts with label Policies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Policies. Show all posts

Sunday, January 28, 2024

Americans are lonely and it’s killing them. How the US can combat this new epidemic.

Adrianna Rodriguez
USA Today
Originally posted 24 Dec 23

America has a new epidemic. It can’t be treated using traditional therapies even though it has debilitating and even deadly consequences.

The problem seeping in at the corners of our communities is loneliness and U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy is hoping to generate awareness and offer remedies before it claims more lives.

“Most of us probably think of loneliness as just a bad feeling,” he told USA TODAY. “It turns out that loneliness has far greater implications for our health when we struggle with a sense of social disconnection, being lonely or isolated.”

Loneliness is detrimental to mental and physical health, experts say, leading to an increased risk of heart disease, dementia, stroke and premature death. As researchers track record levels of self-reported loneliness, public health leaders are banding together to develop a public health framework to address the epidemic.

“The world is becoming lonelier and there’s some very, very worrisome consequences,” said Dr. Jeremy Nobel, founder of The Foundation for Art and Healing, a nonprofit that addresses public health concerns through creative expression, which launched an initiative called Project Unlonely.

“It won’t just make you miserable, but loneliness will kill you," he said. "And that’s why it’s a crisis."


Key points:
  • Loneliness Crisis: America faces a growing epidemic of loneliness impacting mental and physical health, leading to increased risks of heart disease, dementia, stroke, and premature death.
  • Diverse and Widespread: Loneliness affects various demographics, from young adults to older populations, and isn't limited by social media interaction.
  • Health Risks: The Surgeon General reports loneliness raises risk of premature death by 26%, equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes daily. Heart disease and stroke risks also increase significantly.
  • Causes: Numerous factors contribute, including societal changes, technology overuse, remote work, and lack of genuine social connection.
  • Solutions: Individual actions like reaching out and mindful interactions help. Additionally, public health strategies like "social prescribing" and community initiatives are crucial.
  • Collective Effort Needed: Overcoming the epidemic requires collaboration across sectors, fostering stronger social connections within communities and digital spaces.

Monday, June 6, 2022

Morals as Luxury Goods and Political Polarization

B. Enke, M. Polborn, and Alex Wu
NBER Working Paper No. 30001
April 2022
JEL No. D03,D72

Abstract

This paper develops a theory of political behavior in which moral values are a luxury good: the relative weight that voters place on moral rather than material considerations increases in income.  This idea both generates new testable implications and ties together a broad set of empirical regularities about political polarization in the U.S. The model predicts (i) the emergence of economically left-wing elites; (ii) that more rich than poor people vote against their material interests; (iii) that within-party heterogeneity is larger among Democrats than Republicans; and (iv) widely-discussed realignment patterns: rich moral liberals who swing Democrat, and poor moral conservatives who swing Republican. Assuming that parties set policies by aggregating their supporters’ preferences, the model also predicts increasing social party polarization over time, such that poor moral conservatives swing Republican even though their relative incomes decreased. We relate these predictions to known stylized facts, and test our new predictions empirically.

Conclusion

This paper has shown that the simple idea of income-dependent utility weights – which is bolstered by a large body of evidence on “modernization” or “postmaterialism” – generates a host of new testable predictions and sheds light on various widely-emphasized stylized facts about the nature of political polarization and realignment patterns in the U.S. In particular, our approach offers a new lens through which the increased salience of moral and cultural dimensions of political conflict can be understood.

One aspect of polarization that we only briefly and informally touched upon is affective polarization: the stylized fact that people’s dislike of supporters of the other party has strongly increased over time (Iyengar, Sood and Lelkes, 2012; Iyengar et al., 2019). In our interpretation, this reflects that the distribution of moral values of Republican and Democrat voters have diverged over time as a result of sorting processes that are triggered by our account of morals as luxury goods. However, while much psychological research suggests that people get angry if others don’t share their basic moral convictions (Haidt, 2012), more research is needed to establish a direct link between increased voter sorting based on moral values and affective polarization.