As you may have heard, sometimes are taxes are unfair. Here’s another example.

It is past time to make all of our “basic needs” — the imperatives for survival and reproduction — a “social right.”

The term “movement” (rather than crusade) is the preferred moniker for various organized efforts to achieve some important, morally-grounded political objective. My personal dream is that the next great political undertaking will be a “fairness movement/crusade” along the lines that I outline in my book, The Fair Society.

Paul Krugman, in a blog item, in The New York Times today (8/2/15), bemoans what he calls the “tribalism” in…

It seems that happiness is busting out all over – like that famous lyric from the classic Broadway musical, Oklahoma. Forget happiness. It’s a middle class conceit that masks what really matters, what’s really at stake.

I suspect that most arguments are not, at heart, about finding the truth but about being proven “right”. All manner of selfish interests may be at stake.

If there is a take-home lesson from the many different cooperative behaviors in the natural world, it is that cooperation is highly contingent and almost always instrumental to meeting basic survival and reproductive needs. It’s not an end in itself.

For better and worse, our Supreme Court is a political institution and not, despite its trappings, a temple of Olympian detachment — as the Roberts court has amply demonstrated. Sometimes the underling principles of justice are trampled upon.

Capitalism provides a classic example of a double edged sword (Will Hutton, in his book Them and Us calls it a “tightrope”). He argues that fairness is a better ideological objective.

Although the debate about human nature has been unabated among social, economic and political theorists for 2,000 years, there is quietly emerging an empirically based science of human nature, And there is good news.