The Price of Civilization_ Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity - Jeffrey D. Sachs [127]
Part II: The Path to Prosperity
Chapter 9: The Mindful Society
1. Attributed to Aristotle in Stobaeus, Florilegium, transl. J.E.C. Welldon.
2. For GDP data, see World Bank Data and Statistics, http://siteresources.worldbank.org/DATASTATISTICS/
Resources/GNIPC.pdf. For life expectancy data, see World Health Organization Global Health Observatory Data Repository.
3. Geoffrey Miller, Spent (New York: Penguin, 2009), p. 65.
4. Elizabeth Dunn, Daniel T. Gilbert, and Timothy Wilson, “If Money Doesn’t Make You Happy Then You Probably Aren’t Spending It Right,” Journal of Consumer Psychology 21, no. 2, pp. 115–25.
5. Ibid., p. 123.
6. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Economic News Release: Table A-4—Employment Status of the Civilian Population 25 Years and Over by Educational Attainment.”
The education gradient is stark. Among those twenty-five years and older, the unemployment rate in December 2010 was 15.7 percent for those with less than a high school education, 9.8 percent for those whose highest education attainment was a high school diploma, 7.9 percent for those with some post—high school education, but without a degree; and 4.6 percent for those with a bachelor’s degree or higher.
7. The fact that the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere warms the planet was first accurately elaborated in 1824 by French scientist Joseph Fourier and in numerical detail by Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius in 1896.
8. Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, “Public Praises Science; Scientists Fault Public, Media,” July 2009.
9. Bob Altemeyer, “Why Do Religious Fundamentalists Tend to Be Prejudiced?,” International Journal for the Psychology of Religion 13, no. 1 (2003): 17. Altemeyer concludes that “strong, early emphasis of the family religion may … produce a template for ‘us-them’ discrimination that facilitates acquiring later prejudices.” Similarly, Hall, Matz, and Wood find that religiosity and racism are correlated. They too surmise that “a strong in-group identity was associated with derogation of racial out-groups. Other races might be treated as out-groups because religion is practiced largely within race, because training in a religious in-group identity promotes general ethnocentrism, and because different others appear to be in competition for resources.” (Deborah Hall et al., “Why Don’t We Practice What We Preach? A Meta-Analytic Review of Religious Racism,” Personal Social Psychology Review 14, no. 1 [December 2009], p. 126.)
10. Robert Putnam, “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century: The 2006 Johan Skytte Prize Lecture,” Scandinavian Political Studies 30, no. 2 (June 2007).
11. Senate floor statement by Senator James Inhofe, July 28, 2003.
12. Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for a Technological Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).
13. National Intelligence Council, “Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World,” November 2008.
14. Hans Küng, “Manifesto for a Global Economic Ethic,” Tübingen: Global Ethic Foundation, 2009, p. 5.
15. John F. Kennedy, Address before the Irish Parliament, June 1963, http://ua_tuathal.tripod.com/kennedy.html.
16. John F. Kennedy, Remarks at American University Commencement, June 1963.
Chapter 10: Prosperity Regained
1. U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Educational Statistics, “The Condition of Education 2010,” June 2010, p. 214.
2. In the early years, the government should subsidize the purchases of electric vehicles, to help the industry “move down the learning curve.” Later on, electric vehicles will compete on their own vis-à-vis the traditional alternatives, assuming of course that gasoline use is properly taxed to account for its adverse environmental externalities.
3. U.S. Department of Education, “Mortgaging Our Future: How Financial Barriers to College Undercut America’s Global Competitiveness,” A Report of the Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance,