Two phrases that Daniel Patrick Moynihan put into America's political lexicon two decades ago are increasingly pertinent. They explain the insufficient dismay about recent economic numbers.
Moynihan said that when deviant behaviors — such as violent crime, or births to unmarried women — reach a certain level, society soothes itself by "defining deviancy down."
It de-stigmatizes the behaviors by declaring them normal. And sometimes, Moynihan said, social problems are the result of "iatrogenic government." In medicine, an iatrogenic ailment is inadvertently induced by a physician or medicine; in social policy, iatrogenic problems are caused by government.
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