Archive for September 2025

Vienna has long been among the many international examples that provide valuable lessons for systematic social betterment — particularly for the housing crisis, which has become catastrophic in the U.S. Conversely, in the Austrian capital, a thriving, popular state-led social housing model leads the globe in providing high-quality affordable developments (known locally as the Gemeindebau) to a large segment of the population. With a pragmatic yet forward-thinking design, particularly in green energy future-proofing, the Vienna model offers a knowledge base, born of decades of experience, that in a just world would be tapped to help enact comparable proposals in the United States — like the currently stagnant hopes of a Green New Deal for Housing.

America has never been richer. But the gains are so lopsided that the top 10% controls 69% of all wealth in the country, while the bottom half controls just 3%. Meanwhile, surging corporate profits have mostly benefited investors, not the broader public. This divide is expected to widen after the sweeping new spending bill drastically cuts Medicaid and food aid, programs that stabilize the economy and subsidize low-wage employers. Moreover, the tax cuts at the heart of the bill will deliver tens of billions of dollars in benefits to the wealthiest households while disproportionately burdening low-income households, according to analyses by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office and Joint Committee on Taxation.

For decades, Roxane Cohen Silver has examined the consequences of consuming media about crises, from 9/11 and the Covid-19 pandemic to climate-related disasters and mass shootings. “With greater exposure, we see greater distress in people’s reports of their mental health. Greater anxiety, greater depression, greater post traumatic stress symptoms, acute stress symptoms,” said Silver, professor of psychology, medicine and public health at the University of California, Irvine.

The finding from the Social Care Institute for Excellence (SCIE) came as it sounded the alarm over longstanding delays to the implementation of reforms to the Mental Capacity Act 2005 and the implications of this for the human rights and the care of disabled and older people. SCIE referenced successive governments’ failure to implement the planned replacement for DoLS – the Liberty Protections Safeguards (LPS) – and update the MCA code of practice, which is now almost 20 years old. It also warned that the impending overhaul of the Mental Health Act 1983 (MHA) and likely legalisation of assisted dying risked foundering because they were built on the “crumbling” foundation of the MCA.

Speaking at a social welfare services conference, the Ministry’s Permanent Secretary, Dr John Jingu, emphasized that these services are provided in accordance with government policies, laws, regulations, and guidelines, including the 2008 Child Development Policy, the Children’s Act Cap 13, the 2012 Regulations for Day Care Centres, and the 2024 Children’s Homes Regulations.

Two problems explain the repeated failure. First, the targets were set unscientifically. Authorities set numerical goals without careful analysis of causes, realities and shifting contexts, reducing strategy to wishful thinking. Second, implementation was weak. Budgets, personnel, infrastructure and data sharing were insufficient. Governments limited themselves to campaigns and counseling programs while neglecting structural risk factors that drive suicide. Unrealistic goals and feeble execution became the pattern. Above: An SOS Life Line phone box is seen at Mapo Bridge in Seoul