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One possibly relevant factoid for those who want to eliminate world poverty. Since Mao’s death, the real per capita income of China has gone up about twenty fold. That’s a reduction in world poverty that dwarfs anything likely to be done via income redistribution. A reduction achieved by (among other things) abandoning an ideology that preached the virtue of income equality.

Hint hint: you either apply the same standards of correlation vs. causation to China’s trends in LIFE EXPECTANCY (and immediately print out a small poster of Mao to hang on your wall, presumably)… or you downgrade your confidence!

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Our children were raised without television—but with lots of books and unlimited computer access. It wasn’t a problem, neither of them resented it, and they turned out just fine.

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Redistributing income to make all incomes equal, assuming it could be done costlessly, would by that standard make poverty universal, since the average world income is less than $10,000.

And that’s ignoring the fact that, in order to get the money into the hands of the really poor, much of it would have to flow through the hands of the kleptocrats currently ruling them, and would mostly stick.

One possibly relevant factoid for those who want to eliminate world poverty. Since Mao’s death, the real per capita income of China has gone up about twenty fold. That’s a reduction in world poverty that dwarfs anything likely to be done via income redistribution. A reduction achieved by (among other things) abandoning an ideology that preached the virtue of income equality.

The one thing that the developed countries of the world could do that would significantly reduce world poverty would be to open their borders to immigrants from the third world. Dropping trade restrictions—for instance the European barriers to the import of agricultural crops (and the U.S. to the import of sugar) would help too.

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I don’t see any suggestion in Chesterton’s writing that he proposed going back to medieval technology, only to something more like medieval social institutions. That would certainly be consistent with growing potatoes and maize, neither of which was available in England in 1410, and probably with doing most of the other things that allowed England to feed considerably more people in 1910 than in 1410.

Further, if Chesterton didn’t appreciate the increase in standard of living from the fifteenth to the twentieth century, he was not alone in that error. Take a look at Engels’ description of the idyllic life of the English peasantry at some intermediate point.

“They did not need to overwork; they did no more than they chose to do, and yet earned what they needed. They had leisure for healthful work in garden or field, work which, in itself, was recreation for them . . . they were ‘respectable’ people, good husbands and fathers, led moral lives because they had no temptation to be immoral, there being no groggeries or low houses in their vicinity, and because the host, at whose inn they now and then quenched their thirst, was also a respectable man, usually a large tenant farmer who took pride in his good order, good beer, and early hours. They had their children the whole day at home and brought them up in obedience and the fear of God. . . . The young people grew up in idyllic simplicity and intimacy with their playmates until they married.”

There was quite a widespread belief that standards of living had gone down during the 19th century, when pretty clearly they had gone up.

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“But Weary Willie may say that he hates work, and is quite willing to take less, and be poor and dirty and ragged or even naked for the sake of getting off with less work. But that, as we have seen, cannot be allowed: voluntary poverty is just as mischievous socially as involuntary poverty: decent nations must insist on their citizens leading decent lives, doing their full share of the nation’s work, and taking their full share of its income. . . . Poverty and social irresponsibility will be forbidden luxuries.”

“Compulsory social service is so unanswerably right that the very first duty of a government is to see that everybody works enough to pay her way and leave something over for the profit of the country and the improvement of the world”

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Yes, but …

It was also Cass Sunstein who wrote an article raising the possibility that online people with bad ideas could be dealt with by employing people to join their conversations and subvert their idea structure—with no implication that those people would necessarily announce that that was what they were being employed to do. So perhaps not so much a core of humility as a switch to what he viewed as cleverer forms of manipulation.

In the real world, it’s hard to imagine “libertarian paternalism” remaining libertarian. It’s just too easy to make the choice you don’t want people to make gradually harder and harder—real world example available for the curious.

http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2009/01/rationality-nudges-and-slippery-slopes.html

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I would seriously recommend considering the possibility that your negative experiences were unique to you, and not a symptom of a larger sickness in the system.

I’ve met a lot of people who went to public school and wish they hadn’t, and a lot more people who went to public school and hated it. I’ve never met anyone who was homeschooled and regretted it. One of my cousins (or maybe a son of a family friend; this was a long time ago) was homeschooled and wanted to go to public school, but was went back to homeschooling after a year.

A lot of my teachers were incompetent, in one case to the point of being actively malicious to people who knew the material better than she did. I only had four teachers in eleven years who I liked, and one of them could barely teach because his (honors) class was full of human trash.

This, incidentally, is another good reason to have children partially raised by the state. It limits the parents’ ability to control their children’s access to the wider culture. Children get exposed to viewpoints their parents don’t want them to.

Yeah, like the viewpoint that their race is evil and uncool, or the viewpoint that rebelling against their family is just what children do.

I obviously can’t pin the sex-and-drugs stuff on children’s TV or whatever — that problem lies elsewhere in the culture — but one thing I can fault the media for is providing a view of social scripts that doesn’t match up at all with reality. If you grew up in the ’90s, you remember all that shit about jocks and nerds and cool kids and uncool kids and uncool kids pining hopelessly after some random girl because that’s just What Is Done and crazy goths with fucked-up home lives and whatever, and none of that shit had anything to do with reality.

(Once I become king of the galaxy, I’m at least banning romance movies. Speaking of unrealistic scripts.)

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