Word: socialism
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Like reading, viewing online TV is more solitary. You don't gather the family around your MacBook to watch the Super Bowl. Yet in some ways it's more social. There's no online-video TV Guide to rely on--though some start-ups, like eGuiders.com are trying to create one--so your social connections become your TV guide. And the same interactivity that enhances regular TV-watching is even more immediate with laptop in hand. When I watch Lost, I rush to write a blog post--not so much to get my thoughts out as to see the comments...
This is made more complicated by our new living patterns, says New York University sociologist Dalton Conley, whose book Elsewhere, U.S.A. examines how our work and domestic realms collide. "Social proximity is more defining now," he says. "It's class- or occupation-based. Doctors marry doctors instead of nurses." Conley points out that in the past 30 years, the social norms for mate selection have completely flipped: there are fewer prohibitions on whom you can marry, most women work outside the home, and the digital dating landscape is a whole new terrain. "The last change of this significance...
Passing Along Social Security...
Michael Kinsley hypothesizes that the typical American family will be handing down Social Security entitlements to their children as an inheritance [Feb. 9]. Using the same Federal Reserve data Kinsley cites, the median net worth of couples ages 65 to 74 in 2004 was $190,000, including housing assets. By definition of the term median, this value is far more representative of the typical American family than the average net worth of $691,000 he quotes--which is skewed higher by the wealthiest 10% of families. That recalculation, combined with the large decline in net worth for most Americans...
Bravo to Michael Kinsley for daring to point out that many recipients of Social Security do not really need it. Indeed, my wife and I inherited some Social Security from our parents, and it is likely that our children will inherit some from us. However, I disagree with Kinsley that fixing it would be a nightmare. Just pay me back what I put into the system over the years. Any more than that is simply welfare, and I should receive it only when I desperately need it. Of course, to make such a radical change, Congress would have to show...