Word: lifeness
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Through much of the 20th century, individuals and groups that were committed to social justice tended to orient their campaigns around the issue of economic redistribution. There was a strong sense that poverty and extreme inequality were detrimental to citizens’ participation in social life. In terms of this dimension of social development, theorists and policy-makers over the last generation have debated the role of state versus market-oriented development...
...contrast to both the state administrators supported by traditional Keynesians and the entrepreneurs favored by economic libertarians, contemporary innovators of redistribution emphasize the role of the public as a third actor in shaping economic life. One example that they often point to is the participatory budgetary process of the city of Porto Alegre in Brazil. The process, which was first implemented in 1989, encouraged all citizens to take part in constructing the city’s budget. Over the past two decades, thousands of citizens have participated annually in formulating the municipality’s economic priorities...
Additionally, the influential Brazilian business journal “Exame” has regularly nominated Porto Alegre as the Brazilian city with the best quality of life based on the following indicators: “literacy, enrollment in elementary and secondary education, quality of higher and postgraduate education, per capita consumption, employment, child mortality, life expectancy, number of hospital beds, housing, sewage, airports, highways, crime rate, restaurants, and climate.” The success of this innovative budget process has made Porto Alegre a model for an alternative form of economic distribution...
...public is given the opportunity to express its ingenuity, experience, and knowledge by tackling the most important questions that society faces. The implicit philosophy is that through the process of public deliberation each individual embodies his or her desire to be an agent, not a spectator in social life; participation in political life expresses the innate desire in every individual to play a role in shaping their society. This new generation of Harvard graduates has the opportunity to expand our democratic imagination by learning from the achievements of Porto Alegre and finding new ways of directly engaging the public...
...recent sunny April afternoon, I was standing by the rhinos outside the Biological Laboratories meeting with visiting prefrosh and answering their questions about research opportunities for undergraduates at Harvard. “How easy is it for undergraduates, especially freshmen, to get involved in research in the life sciences at Harvard?” one of them asked. What they really wanted to know was, “If I am interested in doing research in the life sciences, tell me why I should come to Harvard...