Three Great Articles On Poverty, And Why I Disagree With All Of Them

QZ: The universal basic income is an idea whose time will never come. Okay, maybe this one isn’t so great. It argues that work is ennobling (or whatever), that robots probably aren’t stealing our jobs, that even if we’re going through a period of economic disruption we’ll probably adapt, and that “if the goal is eliminating poverty, it is better to direct public funds to [failing schools and substandard public services]” then to try a guaranteed income scheme. It ends by saying that “I can’t understand why we’d consider creating and then calcifying a perpetually under-employed underclass by promoting the stagnation of their skills and severing their links to broader communities.”

(imagine a world where we had created and calcified a perpetually under-employed stagnant underclass. It sounds awful.)

More Crows Than Eagles: Unnecessariat. This one is great. A blogger from the Rust Belt reports on the increasing economic despair and frustration all around her, in the context of the recent spikes in heroin overdoses and suicides. There’s an important caveat here, in that at least national-level economic data paint a rosy picture: the unemployment rate is very low, consumer confidence is high, and the studies of technological unemployment suggest it’s not happening yet. Still, a lot of people on the ground – the anonymous blogger, the pathologists she worked with, and me from my position as a psychiatrist in the Midwest – feel like there’s a lot more misery and despair than the statistics suggest. MCTE replaces the old idea of the “precariat” – people who just barely have jobs and are worried about losing them – with her own coinage “unnecessariat” – people who don’t have jobs, are useless to the economy, and nobody cares what happens to them. It reminds me of the old argument of sweatshop-supporting economists – sure, we’re exploiting you, but you’d miss us if we left. She hates Silicon Valley for building its glittering megaplexes while ignoring everyone else, but she hates even more the people saying “Learn to code! Become part of the bright new exciting knowledge economy!” because realistically there’s no way an opioid-depended 55-year-old ex-trucker from Kentucky is going to learn to code. The only thing such people have left is a howl of impotent rage, and it has a silly hairstyle and is named Donald J. Trump.

Freddie deBoer: Our Nightmare. Also pretty great. The same things deBoer has been warning about for years, but expressed unusually clearly. By taking on the superficial mantle of center-leftism, elites sublimate the revolutionary impulse into a competition for social virtue points which ends up reinforcing and legitimizing existing power structures. Constant tally-keeping over what percent of obscenely rich exploitative Wall Street executives are people of color replaces the question of whether there should be obscenely rich exploitative Wall Street executives at all. As such tendencies completely capture the Democratic Party and the country’s mainstream left, genuine economic anger becomes more likely to be funneled into the right wing, where the elites can dismiss it as probably-racist (often with justification) and ignore it. “I cannot stress enough to you how vulnerable the case for economic justice is in this country right now. Elites agitate against it constantly…this is a movement, coordinated from above, and its intent is to solidify the already-vast control of economic elites over our political system…[Liberalism] is an attempt to ameliorate the inequality and immiseration of capitalism, when inequality and immiseration are the very purpose of capitalism.”

These articles all look at poverty in different ways, and I think that I look at poverty in a different way still. In the spirit of all the crazy political compasses out there, maybe we can learn something by categorizing them:


Including only people who think society should be in the business of collectively helping the poor at all (ie no extreme libertarians or social Darwinists) and people who are interested in something beyond deBoer’s nightmare scenario (ie not just making sure every identity group has an equal shot at the Wall Street positions).

People seem to split into a competitive versus a cooperative view of poverty. To massively oversimplify: competitives agree with deBoer that “inequality and immiseration are the very purpose of capitalism” and conceive of ending poverty in terms of stopping exploitation and giving the poor their “just due” that the rich have taken away from them. The cooperatives argue that everyone is working together to create a nice economy that enriches everybody who participates in it, but some people haven’t figured out exactly how to plug into the magic wealth-generating machine, and we should give them a helping hand (“here’s government-subsidized tuition to a school where you can learn to code!”). Probably nobody’s 100% competitive or 100% cooperative, but I think a lot of people have a tendency to view the problem more one way than the other.

So the northwest corner of the grid is people who think the problem is primarily one of exploitation, but it’s at least somewhat tractable to reform. No surprises here – these are the types who think that the big corporations are exploiting people, but if average citizens try hard enough they can make the Man pay a $15 minimum wage and give them free college tuition, and then with enough small victories like these they can level the balance enough to give everybody a chance.

(These are all going to be straw men, but hopefully useful straw men)

The southwest corner is people who think the problem is primarily one of exploitation, but nothing within the system will possibly help. I put “full communism” in the little box, but I guess this could also be anarcho-syndicalism, or anarcho-capitalism, or theocracy, or Trumpism, or [insert your preferred poorly-planned form of government which inevitably fails here].

The northeast corner is people who think we’re all in this together and there are lots of opportunities to help. This is the QZ writer who said we should be focusing on “education and public services”. The economy is a benevolent force that wants to help everybody, but some people through bad luck – poor educational opportunities, not enough childcare, racial prejudice – haven’t gotten the opportunity they need yet, so we should lend them a helping hand so they can get back on their feet and one day learn to code. I named this quadrant “Free School Lunches” after all those studies that show that giving poor kids free school lunches improves their grades by X percent, which changes their chances of getting into a good college by Y percent, which increases their future income by Z percent, so all we have to do is have lots of social programs like free school lunches and then poverty is solved. But aside from the lunch people people, this category must also include libertarians who think that all we need to do is remove regulations that prevent the poor from succeeding, Reaganites who think that a rising tide will lift all boats, and conservatives who think the poor just need to be taught Traditional Hard-Working Values. Actually, probably 90% of the Overton Window is in this corner.

The southeast corner is people who think that we’re all in this together, but that helping the poor is really hard. They agree with the free school lunch crowd that capitalism is more the solution than the problem, and that we should think of this in terms of complicated impersonal social and educational factors preventing poor people from fitting into the economy. But the southeasterners worry school lunches won’t be enough. Maybe even hiring great teachers, giving everybody free health care, ending racism, and giving generous vocational training to people in need wouldn’t be enough. If we held a communist revolution, it wouldn’t do a thing: you can’t hold a revolution against skill mismatch. This is a very gloomy quadrant, and I don’t blame people for not wanting to be in it. But it’s where I spend most of my time.

The exploitation narrative seems fundamentally wrong to me – I’m not saying exploitation doesn’t happen, nor even that it isn’t common, just that isn’t not the major factor causing poverty and social decay. The unnecessariat article, for all its rage against Silicon Valley hogging the wealth, half-admits this – the people profiled have become unnecessary to the functioning of the economy, no longer having a function even as exploited proletarians. Silicon Valley isn’t exploiting these people, just ignoring them. Fears of technological unemployment are also relevant here: they’re just the doomsday scenario where all of us are relegated to the unnecessariat, the economy having passed us by.

But I also can’t be optimistic about programs to end poverty. Whether it’s finding out that schools and teachers have relatively little effect on student achievement, that good parenting has even less, or that differences in income are up to fifty-eight percent heritable and a lot of what isn’t outright genetic is weird biology or noise, most of the research I read is very doubtful of easy (or even hard) solutions. Even the most extensive early interventions have underwhelming effects. We can spend the collective energy of our society beating our head against a problem for decades and make no headway. While there may still be low-hanging fruit – maybe an scaled-up Perry Preschool Project, lots of prenatal vitamins, or some scientist discovering a new version of the unleaded-gasoline movement – we don’t seem very good at finding it, and I worry it would be at most a drop in the bucket. Right now I think that a lot of variation in class and income is due to genetics and really deep cultural factors that nobody knows how to change en masse.

I can’t even really believe that a rising tide will lift all boats anymore. Not only has GDP uncoupled from median wages over the past forty years, but there seems to be a Red Queen’s Race where every time the GDP goes up the cost of living goes up the same amount. US real GDP has dectupled since 1900, yet a lot of people have no savings and are one paycheck away from the street. In theory, a 1900s poor person who suddenly got 10x his normal salary should be able to save 90% of it, build up a fund for rainy days, and end up in a much better position. In practice, even if the minimum wage in 2100 is $200 2016 dollar an hour, I expect the average 2100 poor person will be one paycheck away from the street. I can’t explain this, I just accept it at this point. And I think that aside from our superior technology, I would rather be a poor farmer in 1900 than a poor kid in the projects today. More southeast corner gloom.

The only public figure I can think of in the southeast quadrant with me is Charles Murray. Neither he nor I would dare reduce all class differences to heredity, and he in particular has some very sophisticated theories about class and culture. But he shares my skepticism that the 55 year old Kentucky trucker can be taught to code, and I don’t think he’s too sanguine about the trucker’s kids either. His solution is a basic income guarantee, and I guess that’s mine too. Not because I have great answers to all of the QZ article’s problems. But just because I don’t have any better ideas1,2.

The QZ article warns that it might create a calcified “perpetually under-employed stagnant underclass”. But of course we already have such an underclass, and it’s terrible. I can neither imagine them all learning to code, nor a sudden revival of the non-coding jobs they used to enjoy. Throwing money at them is a pretty subpar solution, but it’s better than leaving everything the way it is and not throwing money at them.

This is why I can’t entirely sympathize with any of the essays I read on poverty, eloquent though they are.

Footnotes

1. And then there’s the rest of the world. Given the success of export capitalism in Korea, Taiwan, China, Vietnam, et cetera, and the pattern where multinationals move to some undeveloped country with cheap labor, boost the local economy until the country is developed and labor there isn’t so cheap anymore, and then move on to the next beneficiary – solving international poverty seems a lot easier than solving local poverty. All we have to do is keep wanting shoes and plastic toys. And part of me wonders – if setting up a social safety net would slow domestic economic growth – or even divert money that would otherwise go to foreign aid – does that make it a net negative? Maybe we should be optimizing for maximum economic growth until we’ve maxed out the good we can do by industrializing Third World countries? My guess is that enough of the basic income debate is about how to use existing welfare payments that this wouldn’t be too big a factor. And I would hope (for complicated reasons), that basic income would be more likely to help than hurt the economy3.

2. Obviously invent genetic engineering and create a post-scarcity society, but until then we have to deal with this stuff.

3. And then there’s the whole open borders idea, which probably isn’t very compatible with basic income at all. Right now I think – I’ll explain at more length later – fully open borders is a bad idea, because the risk of it destabilizing the country and ruining the economic motor that lifts Third World countries out of poverty is too high.

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1,723 Responses to Three Great Articles On Poverty, And Why I Disagree With All Of Them

  1. Mammon says:

    s/studies of technical employment/studies of technical unemployment/

    • Scott Alexander says:

      s/studies of technical employment/studies of technical unemployment//studies of technological employment/studies of technological unemployment/

      (but thanks, fixed)

  2. Thecommexokid says:

    After all the times you’ve talked about basic income before, finally you mention the connection between a basic income policy and immigration policy….and it’s relegated to a footnote of a footnote.

    • Still Anonymous says:

      Any time you want to mention something controversial, always put it in a footnote. Nobody reads footnotes.

    • anon says:

      Well, he did say he was going to expand on it later.

      It’s definitely a topic worthy of a full post.

    • Walter says:

      The general wisdom is “entitlements/open borders pick one” right? I’m not sure that there’s much to say about that.

      • Ghatanathoah says:

        There’s a third option that’s easy in theory. Just make new immigrants much, much less eligible for entitlements, at least until they have spent a good number of years paying taxes.

        I can’t think of any disadvantages to this idea that aren’t caused by people being stupid. There are lots of people who oppose this idea because it would create an underclass, but the potential immigrants are already an underclass, all that this would change is that they’re now a slightly poor underclass in this country instead of a super poor underclass in a different one. It’s Copenhagen ethics, where people view us as having a giant moral obligation to people who move here, and no moral obligation to people who don’t.

        • Edward Scizorhands says:

          I can’t think of any disadvantages to this idea that aren’t caused by people being stupid.

          Well, there you go: real word disadvantages.

        • Aapje says:

          t’s Copenhagen ethics, where people view us as having a giant moral obligation to people who move here, and no moral obligation to people who don’t.

          And this also leads to a Motte-and-Bailey that you frequently see in debates:

          A. You don’t want to see people get murdered/tortured, right?
          B. No
          A. Great, then you agree that we need to let these people in and give them the exact same economic opportunities and benefits that citizens get.
          B. Wait, what?

        • Ryan says:

          There is an on point Supreme Court decision saying waiting periods before immigrants can receive benefits violates the 14th Amendment:

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_v._Richardson

          • Steven says:

            As far as I can tell, Graham v. Richardson has been interpreted to apply to only a fairly narrow range of benefits (e.g., TANF).
            In particular, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid all have waiting periods for lawful immigrants.

            https://www.ssa.gov/ssi/spotlights/spot-non-citizens.htm
            https://www.medicareresources.org/faqs/can-recent-immigrants-to-the-united-states-get-health-coverage-if-theyre-over-65/

          • Cadie says:

            Would having a waiting period for everyone, immigrant or not, be a solution? Like, to have benefits paid to you in your own name, one of the criteria for eligibility would be living in the USA and/or being a citizen of the USA for 5 years or longer. This would have no or negligible effect on people born as citizens, as they don’t receive benefits at age 5 anyway; their parents/guardians receive the payments. (School lunch programs may need some tweaking to be paid to the child’s guardian(s), at least on paper, but should still work.) Immigrants without prior citizenship status here would need to be residents for five years after moving before they can receive most forms of financial assistance. Since the restriction is technically on everyone – a four-year-old citizen would be ineligible for their own benefit payments on account of not being in the USA long enough, even though in practice they’d be ineligible for other reasons too so it doesn’t matter – it seems more likely to pass a Constitutionality check.

            I don’t like the idea of making immigrants’ lives harder, but it seems like having the option of being a documented immigrant with full worker protections/rights and other rights, and simply not being allowed to vote or collect financial assistance from the government for five (or four, or seven, or whatever) years, is an improvement over the current situation. Which is either don’t move to the USA or be undocumented and lacking most protections. The waiting period gives them a third option which, while not as good as being born here, is a lot better than the other two. Perfection shouldn’t be the enemy of improvement.

        • RCF says:

          Have you considered the possibility that much of so-called cognitive biases, Copenhagen Ethics included, are the result of System 1 determinations that can be communicated to System 2 only in simplified form?

          Consider a Least Convenient World in which the lives of black people as slaves in the South were better than the lives of black people in Africa. Would that make slavery moral?

          Why shouldn’t we have more responsibility towards those who are part of our society than to those who aren’t?

      • The issue is that idealists won’t allow solutions like restricting entitlements to immigrants.

  3. Andrew Hunter says:

    What do you think of this perspective on technological unemployment and basic incomes?

    It does strike me as interesting that the clearing wage for cleaning a house in Seattle is $30/hour (and even then you’re not getting particularly good applicants.) It’s hard to reconcile this with a narrative of people being unemployed unwillingly and desperate for any work.

    I also agree with the author that incentives matter, and basic income doesn’t provide great ones.

    • E. Harding says:

      I suspect the problem in Seattle is construction restrictions. Are there any $30 hour housecleaners in Dallas or Atlanta?

      • eccdogg says:

        Datapoint. I pay my house cleaners $100 for two workers for about 2 hours of work in Raleigh.

        Now that does not translate into a 40 hour/week job since there is downtime etc.

        • ConnGator says:

          Hmm, I pay $140 for 6 (wo)man hours of house cleaning in Raleigh, so that is consistent in the $23-$25 /hour wage.

        • JayT says:

          I assume they are providing the cleaning supplies though, and if you are going through a service that would be another way the income would be divided.

          • eccdogg says:

            Some but not all supplies. Not a service, owner plus one other lady most days. Sometimes owner’s daughter and one other lady. Not sure how they split the money up.

            But you are correct it is not the same as making $25/hr wage.

          • sconn says:

            I cleaned houses in Seattle a few years back, with a company. No idea what the company got paid, but I got $15/hour (and constant nagging if I spent too many hours cleaning).

    • Andrew Hunter says:

      I think it’s interesting to compare what the author of this piece would say about basic income, for instance.

      • Jesse says:

        The bloomberg archives are hard to search, but she is working on a series on the broader topic, so we will probably find out soon…

    • Scott Alexander says:

      This is a really interesting post.

      But first of all, it doesn’t prove that technology isn’t involved. If there’s some floor of job people are willing to do, it’s possible that machines have taken a lot of the jobs above that floor.

      Second of all, I am really far from convinced that the safety net graphic is right. A lot of my patients with really bad financial problems don’t seem to be getting any government assistance at all. In fact, most of the things on there are subsidized health insurance programs, which don’t exactly translate to cash in hand. A lot of them are living on friends’ sofas or on the street. They’re not thinking “I won’t take a job because it might decrease my health insurance coverage”.

      The part about regulations costing jobs seems 100% true to me, although I’m not sure how much those people would make.

      • Andrew Hunter says:

        The graph (and others the author of that post is fond of citing) do seem to disagree with a lot of poverty narratives, and I surely believe you have closer contact with the poor than I do in this country.

        But that said, however they’re getting the effective money to spend–government, charity, friends–it seems that the vast majority of people in this country really do have better living conditions than quite nicely employed people in India. Chris is very happy to point out that those people on friends’ sofas almost certainly have more room, technology, food, plumbing (!), access to appointments with prolix psychiatrists :), and the like than any of the people in his Indian story. Does this mean that they’re bums who should get jobs? I don’t know. But it’s unclear to me that if we haven’t made them unemployable and poor compared to the vast majority of the world that we have a unique duty to compensate this with free money, and incentives to do something useful seem, well, good.

        Several commenters have tried to tie this question into cost of housing in the bay area or other rich areas, and I see where they’re coming from [1], but I don’t think that’s the primary problem here, given that I know *plenty* of employed poor people in the Bay who travel quite some distance to find work–and yet the market for “things rich people need done” is still not close to clearing.

        A side note: other than SF rent control and tenant rights’, which only applies to one city, I start to wonder what’s stopping more people from taking jobs as live in domestic help. In a lot of these cases it’d be cheaper to provide an employee with housing than it would be to pay them enough to come up with it on their own. (Personal example: I live alone in a ~2000 square foot house. On the margin it would cost me about zero dollars, some insurance-y risk premium for untrustworthy houseguests, and moderate annoyance about not being able to wander the house naked to let someone live in the house with me for free, whereas it’d cost me a bare minimum of, what, $1600 or so ($10/hour for a fulltime employee just for that!) to let them pay for an apartment. I don’t need a full time maid, I don’t have kids to nanny, and I like to cook, so I might not use this option if it were available, but I’m still confused why it isn’t a thing other than for au pairs.)

        “Servant’s quarters” used to be quite a thing. Is it just distaste for the idea of servants that mean we don’t have them anymore?

        [1] Typically those commenters come from San Francisco, I can’t imagine why.

        • Steve Sailer says:

          You don’t want to live with Americans who can’t get better jobs than personal servant. And Americans don’t want to pay for you to import better behaved personal servants.

          Peter Schaeffer has pointed out that if you divide the total health care costs of American residents per year by the number of hours worked, it comes out to $12 per hour. So unless you can dump your personal servants back to Bangladesh after they are worn out and sickly from serving you for decades, which usually turns out to be unlikely, it’s not a good deal for taxpayers who can’t afford personal servants.

        • I’m not sure how easily you could legally fire someone if you were providing them housing as part of their compensation. Normally landlords have to jump through a number of hoops to throw someone out on the street and combining that with employment law sounds really complicated and painful.

          • Eric Rall says:

            In California at least, “lodgers” (people renting a bedroom in an owner-occupied dwelling unit) are regulated differently from “tenants” (people renting an entire dwelling unit, either separately or with co-tenants), especially if there’s only one lodger in the house. Specifically, a single lodger is not entitled to eviction procedures — if the landlord gives the legally-required notice and the lodger fails to move out, the lodger is automatically a trespasser and the landlord can call the cops to have them removed or use reasonable force to remove themselves.

            [Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, just a random blog commenter paraphrasing my understanding of part of the California Tenant Guide].

          • Loquat says:

            The California case of the live-in nanny who wouldn’t leave seems to refute that – she had 1 bedroom in their house, though technically she was trading work for room and board rather than renting, but after the family decided she had to go, the cops refused to help and said she did indeed have the right to eviction proceedings because she’d “established residency”.

      • Lesser Bull says:

        The safety net is slow. It doesn’t work well for people who live unstable lives which is, you know, most of the people who need it.

        • Anonymous says:

          There’s not much of a general safety net in the US. Food stamps are universal, housing assistance technically is but has an infinite wait list in a lot of places, and medicaid is in some states. There’s only cash programs for the old, disabled, and parents. Because people that don’t fit into those categories are the unworthy poor and we hate them.

          • MichaelT says:

            There is Medicaid in all 50 states. The only difference is some states agreed to go along with the ACA in increasing the income limit for Medicaid.

          • Anonymous says:

            No that’s incorrect. Medicaid exists in all 50 states, but prior to the expansion states were not required to cover everyone below a given poverty threshold. Some non-expansion states don’t cover childless, non-disabled, non-elderly adults regardless of income.

      • The point being made isn’t that technology isn’t involved in economic and societal change – that would be a silly point to make. The point being made is that jobs exist but people refuse to do them (sometimes for good reasons – e.g. avoiding the police, sometimes for bad reasons, e.g. disability fraud allows the enjoyment of TV time).

        As for that graph, I think it’s solid. Here’s the original post where John Cochrane produced it: http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/taxes-and-cliffs.html

        It’s based on CBO numbers: https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments/11-15-2012-MarginalTaxRates.pdf

        Somewhat before that graph was published, I also produced a similar graph based on consumption data from BLS some years ago: https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2011/why_the_poor_dont_work.html

        They all paint the same picture – in the US, consumption rarely drops below $15k.

        These numbers are of course averages – it could be the case that smart poor people are consuming $30k, whereas the ones who need your psychological help are far poorer and unable to game the system in this way.

        In any case, I rather doubt that the servants in my India office have consumption anywhere near this.

        • Chris says:

          Alternatively, in many cases it’s not that jobs exist yet people refuse to do them, but that employees exist yet companies refuse to hire them. The bid-ask gap between capital and labor never gets bridged, since if you’re an employer you’d often rather let a position go unfilled for a while than lower your standards and hire whoever is available at a lower price. A few dozen retrained “programmers” (i.e. 55-year-old opioid-dependent ex-truckers) with a few month’s coding experience, even at very fractional wages, aren’t going to add up to the value you can get for holding out for one Jeff Dean or Linus Torvalds. Effects from credentialism just exacerbate the problem, since they eliminate a further portion of even genuinely qualified applicants.

          • No one ever said the truck drivers could become economically productive programmers. But why can’t they become taco walas, lawn care guys, house painters, waiters, or some similar thing?

            Again – see India. You’ll find lots of 55 year old guys with minimal skillset who are productively employed.

          • Aapje says:

            @Chris S

            Would you hire a guy with a swastika on his forehead for lawn care, painting, to be a waiter, etc, etc?

          • suntzuanime says:

            Would you hire a guy with a swastika on his forehead for lawn care

            “It’s going to be a maze.”

          • Anonymous says:

            >Would you hire a guy with a swastika on his forehead for lawn care

            Maybe in India! (Or Japan.)

          • lvlln says:

            Would you hire a guy with a swastika on his forehead for lawn care

            “It’s going to be a maze.”

            I’d probably be very careful to make sure he wasn’t enabling any unauthorized trampoline use on my grounds, but sure, I’d hire him.

          • Corey says:

            @Chris Stucchio: lack of aggregate demand. Because of that it’s possible to not have enough work to go around. The models that say there will always be another job for everyone to move into have a full-employment assumption buried in them, I think. (Or an assumption of useful macroeconomic stabilization policy, which is kind of the same thing).

        • K says:

          Being a full-time servant in a private home is not very economically productive work, since your salary will never be more than a fraction of your employer’s salary.

          In any case, I rather doubt that the servants in my India office have consumption anywhere near this.

          In a poor country such as India, middle-class families can have servants because there are plenty of people willing to work for wages that only provide a third-world standard of living. In a first-world country, not many people want a job that only provides a third-world standard of living.

          • Being a full time servant is more economically productive than watching TV all day, which is what the majority of poor adults do. http://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2015/demo/p60-252.pdf – see table 3.

            Western society simply wastes this productive output.

            Now if you want to argue that wasting it is good because you can’t possibly imagine any wealth redistribution scheme that doesn’t have work disincentives (clearly EITC or CCC/NRA are unimaginable), go ahead.

          • suntzuanime says:

            I saw table 3 and can’t figure out what the hell you’re talking about.

          • Suntzuanime, scroll down to “Work Experience” in table 3. Then calculate “Did not work at least 1 week” / “Total, aged 18-64” for people in poverty.

          • suntzuanime says:

            Oh, so by “watching TV all day” you meant “doing literally anything other than being employed”? You can see how I might have been confused. Say what you mean, please.

          • RCF says:

            “Being a full-time servant in a private home is not very economically productive work, since your salary will never be more than a fraction of your employer’s salary.”

            The first claim includes the weasel term “very”, and isn’t really supported by the second claim. If being a servant allows your employer to be more productive, then being a servant is a productive activity.

      • Eli says:

        I want to publicly notice my confusion about technological unemployment, so here goes.

        I want another way to measure it. I think the existing ones suck. Instead of measuring technological unemployment directly, let’s at least bother with asking about how technology affects consumption. How much physical capital (ie: technology and natural resources) goes into each $UNIT worth of consumer goods that I actually buy, including the supply chains? If technological unemployment is a thing, we should see that measure anticorrelate with something like median wages or some other measure of the labor market.

        My confusion is that not only do numerous studies claim technological unemployment isn’t happening yet (some claim it won’t happen ever), but they also say that so-called technological improvements aren’t showing up in productivity numbers. I could blame neoliberalism for that and say that sufficiently cheap labor is substituting for technological R&D in capitalists’ spending, but then we’d expect to see lots and lots of jobs.

        Meanwhile, still other economic studies claim that we’re not really “losing jobs” to trade policies which systematically place the USA and EU in perpetual trade deficits as the world’s consumers, with Asia building up the world’s industrial base, but we’re instead losing them to industrial automation at home. These are the ones claiming that USAian and EUian manufacturing output are higher than ever and have grown over the decades, donchaknow, but have grown more capital-intensive rather than remaining labor-intensive.

        So: where are the jobs and/or robots that, logically, ought to lurk behind the seeming abundance of manufactured goods available for me to purchase? Does it really and actually come down to trade policy dividing the world into a pathological codependency of perpetually indebted consumer-countries and perpetually exploited worker-countries? Or, if we trace the supply chains behind actually-existing goods available for sale, can we eventually find some kind of technology that hasn’t been counted properly somewhere?

        Or has financialization converted industrial capitalism into a form of neo-feudal rentierism, as some other people claim, and most of the “economic value” created is never realized as physical goods?

        • Michael Vassar says:

          The latter.

          • Eli says:

            Given that you belong to the clique which gave us the Graeber-Thiel debate, I certainly find it plausible you should say that. I would certainly agree with the clique that we’ve under-invested in actually getting scientific advancement to happen, even though I largely agree more with Graeber as to the reasons.

            And of course, the constant real-estate bubbles are good support for your view.

            Weirdly enough, this morning I found an Economist story taking the almost Keynesian line: firms are refraining from making technological upgrades by glutting themselves on cut-price labor.

    • meyerkev248 says:

      Housing restrictions.

      Sure, you can get paid $30/hour/kid to be a nanny in the hills above the Peninsula, but then you have to live in the Peninsula, where the rent on a marginal 1 BR apartment is running about $2300. And marginal is not a place you want to be, so you’d really like to be paying $3,000 at some point.

      Whereas in Cleveland, my step-brother pays $500/month for a nicer place than I could get for $3,000. So he’s making $12, but after rent, taxes, and “The guy stocking shelves at the grocery store is spending at LEAST $1500 on rent, what does that do the price of milk”, I’m not sure he’s better off.

      /Even if you head out to the East Bay or down to the South Bay, it’s nearly as expensive and then you have commuting costs
      //Heck, once the one-time vests go away, I’m not sure he’s not better off than me.

    • qwints says:

      I pay about $25/hour for ‘high-end’ house cleaning in Dallas.

      • E. Harding says:

        If so, the problem of there being few people employed in house cleaning may be difficulty of connecting buyers and sellers.

        • qwints says:

          I should clarify that I’m a homeowner paying independent contractors who provide their own equipment and supplies, so it’s not really a wage and I don’t know what they net

        • Deiseach says:

          Okay, out of interest, looked up wages for contract cleaners in USA:

          Median pay for Cleaners in the United States lies in the neighborhood of $10.34 per hour. Compensation ranges between $8.15 per hour and $20.00. Geographic location and career duration each impact pay for this group, with the former having the largest influence.

          A high school diploma or GED is required for a cleaner’s position, and experience working as a cleaner is preferred. Cleaners must be diligent, have attention to detail, and be friendly to other employees in the company.

          I imagine the lower rates depend, as said, on geographic location and after that, people not working for companies get lower rates while contract employers charge higher rates and the business takes its bite out of that before paying the employees’ hourly rates.

          • soru says:

            > the business takes its bite out of that before paying the employees’ hourly rates.

            The numbers here provide a useful counterpoint to Scott’s idea that exploitation is not that significant. It seems like when in comes to wages, the three most important factors are exploitation, exploitation and exploitation.

            But maybe exploitation is an over-dramatic word, too loaded? What it comes down to is negotiating position. If you are poor, you need a job. If you are middle class, you don’t need to set up a cleaning company.

            So you will only do so if it is worth you while to do so, if the returns on capital are greater than that you get from leaving your money in the bank and working for someone else.

            So it’s a positive sum negotiation where one side can walk away and the other can’t. The side with the veto power is going to get 70 to 99% of that positive sum. So cleaning company owners end up as millionaires and cleaners get minimum wage.

            Relevant background:
            https://www.quora.com/Can-I-become-a-millionaire-through-a-Cleaning-Business-and-how

          • The Saddest Marmot says:

            I think the category of cleaners includes a lot of hotel maids and the like, who probably make less than high end home cleaners.

            Fwiw in nyc the independent cleaners people I know have hired charge $15-20/hr while contracting companies are closer to $25-30/hr.

            Worth noting that the $15/hr cleaners generally live within walking distance (and are probably rent controlled / stabilized).

            Although if you’re one of the people paying someone $50k to watch your kids, you probably have more expensive cleaners than a bunch of relatively price conscious 20 something white collar office grunts.

          • Cliff says:

            Soru,

            Why isn’t it supply and demand? Many people can clean houses, few people can run a cleaning business. After all we see high wages in various high-cost places as we would expect and presumably the cleaners there are still poor and “desperate.” Unemployment is low, and most poor people work very little. After tax transfers, only 5% of the U.S. population is under the poverty line. Are poor people really forced to accept the first job offered to them at any price or do many choose to sit at home and collect benefits anyway?

    • Atol says:

      Maids have a large travel cost that is not compensated for. 2-3hrs at a place, with 30m-60m of travel in between places means the real wage is $24-22.5/hr + costs of transportation and supplies vs. $30/hr. I wouldn’t be surprised that 1/3rd of the cost is business cost alone.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        Shouldn’t they be able to coordinate cleaning several homes in one area each day?

        I’m not entirely rhetorical here.

        • ConnGator says:

          Yes, my maid cleans four other houses in my neighborhood. I think she has several clusters of houses due to referrals.

    • Deiseach says:

      Is that $30 an hour going directly to a charwoman, or is it going to the sub-contracted cleaning company which very probably is not paying its cleaners $30 an hour? The company is interested in getting the most work out of the least employees, because the basic rule is that labour is a cost. Reducing your costs is necessary to keep a business lean and productive and profitable, and since nowadays we seem to have swapped “pay out profits in dividends and reinvest them as capital” for “bump up the stock market price by showing quarterly growth in profits” to be the metric of success for “what is a good business to invest in? how do we measure a successful business?”, then slashing your costs is the way to go to make yourself attractive to the stock market (and labour is often quoted as being a very large cost not alone with the wages you pay but the associated taxes, benefits and the likes you have to provide for your employees) by doing things like “voluntary redundancies”, “downsizing” and outsourcing, as well as setting up new factories in overseas countries that offer you preferential tax rates and investment carrots (we here in Ireland duelled and lost with Israel over a new pharma plant), and that is what you are going to be doing.

      That, I think, is why there is a lot of anger that Trump can tap into; being told you should be delighted when poor Chinese get the jobs that were major employers in your area isn’t going to help you get a new job, when all the new jobs are in the shiny new citadels of the glittering technological future that are happy to think of you and yours as yesterday’s economy and have no place for you. Outsourcing jobs to countries that do it for less than American wages, then being told “you are too greedy, you deservedly lost your job because you made too many demands, expected too much money” (when the companies doing the outsourcing are not scraping by paying their CEOs less than the going market rate for the job) is adding insult to injury.

      And what happens when local conditions in those overseas countries that got industrialised due to overseas investment by multinationals mean that the poor Chinese now expect better wages and conditions? As with Ireland – where we are heavily dependent on such jobs still – when the big company pulls out to go to countries that are cheaper (like Poland, for one instance) and there is no domestic replacement, you have not “solved international poverty”.

      The unskilled/semi-skilled manual labour jobs such as working on assembly lines aren’t there anymore; they’ve been replaced by automation where they haven’t been outsourced to cheaper labour nations, and the Bright New Future is one where you get work writing code for the robots doing those jobs. As Scott points out, not everyone can code – and we certainly can’t run an economy where every single school child is being told “become a programmer!”

      Right now, those are desirable jobs due to scarcity. But as with the inflation in college degrees (if you want a good job, go to college instead of going down the mine or becoming a trucker like your old man), when every reasonably bright or capable kid has been steered into becoming a coder, the excess of labour will drive down wages and conditions – the same way that “become a lawyer” resulted in a decline in that labour market.

      There isn’t an easy solution. I think I’m somewhere near the vicinity of that south-west corner as well, Scott.

      As for “free school lunches” and that co-operative “let’s lift all the boats” mindset, let me remind you all about Thatcher the Milk Snatcher. To pay for the promises made to the better-off and the wanting to be better-off, the aspirant middle class, the poor always end up taking the hit. Pay for promised tax cuts by cutting school lunches – that’s how it goes.

      • Julie K says:

        The company obviously isn’t paying the cleaners $30/hour since the money they get from clients has to cover transporting the cleaners to the client’s house, supplies, advertising, office workers, etc.
        Nickel and Dimed describes one company in which the hourly wage paid to cleaners is only 1/4 of what the client pays.

      • Maware says:

        You’re generally looking at $10 or less for any kind of maid/service position. Even if it’s $15, in NYC that’s probably an effective wage of $10 or less due to price differentials. This is assuming the business is on the up and up, and not using illegals.

        Service wages across the board are generally horrid, and it’s compounded by service workers almost never being full time due to the cost of benefits.

        • Andrew Hunter says:

          For the record, yes: that was $30/hour paid directly to a (independent contracting) cleaner (who did a thoroughly mediocre job, by the way), plus a small fee to the Uber-like marketplace.

    • Psmith says:

      Good link. In addition to what everyone else has said about housing/commuting and Steve’s point about live-in servants, I think it’s at least reasonable to worry that something like the fictional California scenario will be a reality within 20 years or so.

    • Hollyluja says:

      Great link. I noticed it when traveling in Turkey – every desk at every customer service station was staffed. They thew bodies at every service position and it felt like Heaven to this American. Every checkpoint, check-in, taxi, food purchase, etc was crazy fast even with big crowds.

      I don’t remember where I read it, but the theory was that around the early 1900s many middle class English and US families suddenly felt poorer even though objectively richer, due to household staff becoming too expensive to employ.

      ETA that I could get my (smallish) PNW house cleaned for $40 under the table or $75 from a service. I consider that difference the “benefit cliff” tax.

      • suntzuanime says:

        It sounds like maybe they weren’t objectively richer, and the basket of goods used to measure inflation didn’t include enough household servants.

        • Aapje says:

          One of the problems with inflation measurements is that it doesn’t measure being priced out of buying goods, where there are no replacement goods that provide the same value at reasonable cost. People may have had more money to spend on other goods once they could no longer afford servants, but none of those goods may have had anywhere near the same value to. So they could justifiably feel poorer in terms of the value/happiness that their incomes buys.

          • “One of the problems with inflation measurements is that it doesn’t measure being priced out of buying goods”

            There are two standard definitions of the inflation rate, one of which is based on what it costs in year two to buy the goods being bought in year one. That measure does include goods that some or all people are no longer buying in year two because of the higher price.

          • Aapje says:

            @David,

            The problem with that is that household servants gradually became more expensive and they were gradually abandoned. So such a yearly view would show some inflation, but every following year would ‘weigh’ the impact of that servant cost inflation less, as less and less money was spend on servants in total.

            If you would do a single inflation measurement with a huge gap, year 1800-2000, you would find a much bigger inflation rate caused by servants than if you add up all the rates of the separate years. The 1800-2000 measurement ‘locks’ the level of servant use at the level of the year 1800, while the rates for the separate years readjust every year.

          • @Aapje:

            Have you thought about which definition of inflation is correct–accurately measures how much money you need in year N+1 to be as well off as you were with a given income in year N? There is a reason why the year to year method, not the century to century method, is used.

          • Aapje says:

            Neither choice is ‘correct’ per se. The entire method is a simplistic model which highlight some parts of the truth and obscure other parts.

            The fact that an arbitrary choice, like the period over which one calculates, can drastically change the results, simply illustrates the limitations (in this case, the consequence of re-setting the baseline).

        • Corey says:

          Supposedly Emily Dickinson once said that she never thought she’d be rich enough to have a car, nor poor enough to not have servants.

          • Deiseach says:

            Bravo for this perfect example of “any old crap can be attributed to someone whose name is slapped onto the end and people reading it on the Internet will believe it”. (The following is not meant to be a personal criticism of Corey or a reflection on their character, intellect or taste, merely an annoyed observation of this old person).

            Emily Dickinson died in 1886. First patent for automobile granted to Karl Benz in Germany in 1886. (For comparison, Henry Ford didn’t start up his first automobile production company until 1901). Technically possible, I suppose, that in the last months of her life she may have said something about a car, but this simply demonstrates Chesterton’s point about the impossible versus the improbable: it’s not impossible for Dickinson to have said this, but it’s sure as hell highly improbable and so I’m calling it bollocks.

            I really am seriously becoming concerned over this phenomena; I see quotes every day attributed to people which sound completely unlike what that person would say based on their published work and opinions/beliefs, but merely stick a Vaguely Famous Name on the end and most people seem to swallow it uncritically as really truly said by that person and share it around online, without even “hey hold on: is that chronologically possible? did X live when Y was invented?”

            “Never believe unquestioningly everything you read on the Internet – Nero, Emperor of Rome”

            EDIT: The remark may indeed have been said by someone, I’m not denying that, but it very likely was not said by Emily Dickinson. Googling it I see it attributed to Agatha Christie, which is much more plausible, but unless I see a source document I’ll put it down to that most prolific of wordsmiths, “Anonymous”.

      • Julie K says:

        Servants became less necessary thanks to modern conveniences like washing machines.

    • Nicholas says:

      I think this has to do with the fact that a two bedroom apartment in the cheapest neighborhood in Seattle is still $2000 a month. The minimum cost of living is extremely high there, and there’s little point in taking a job, no matter how desperate you are, if your checks are still going to bounce because you can’t get an apartment that costs less than $500 dollars per person living in it, while also having to pay transportation costs, grocery bills and utilities.

    • TrivialGravitas says:

      Is that for an independent maid, or is it for a cleaning company that’s going to charge 30 but pay 15?

      Though it might be the same either way, charge 30 yourself, only get 2 or 3 hours a day, work for a service, get paid 15, but get 6-8 hours a day.

  4. c0rw1n says:

    Biology is mutable. And I’m a little confident that a lot of Culture would follow.

    • anonymous poster says:

      Unfortunately at our current technology level, the only biological solution to large numbers of perpetually unemployable people is sterilization.

      • Deiseach says:

        Why stop there, anonymous? 40 and 50 year olds that have been laid off, have no realistic chance of getting an equivalent job or perhaps any job at all, and that have another twenty to thirty years of life left in them leeching off the state’s welfare programmes – why not introduce humane voluntary euthanasia/”if you rationally decide to commit suicide, we will accommodate your wishes by making it easy and providing painless methods” to deal with the masses of useless and non-productive non-labour?

        • Anonymous says:

          We should offer them to have their brains frozen.

          Such act of benevolence might be so great as to justify coercion. Think about it, we would be saving their lives.

        • anonymous poster says:

          Way to muddy the waters by suggesting something I do actually agree with.

        • Anon says:

          You could incentivize this with a lottery. Take all the money you would spend on 100 such people, and offer 10% of it to the one person given a dud injection. Make it a quantum random number generator and everyone wins. Though this would select against Everttians.

      • c0rw1n says:

        Sterilization wouldn’t help much. Gene edition, on the other hand, would, and edits are heritable.

        • anonymous poster says:

          I said at our current technology level.

          • Anonymous says:

            Actually the technology is there. Well, the actual editing bit is. Effective systemic delivery in an appropriate size organism and subsequent safety refinements yet to be worked out (so, like, most of it I guess).

            MCR (http://science.sciencemag.org/content/348/6233/442) and a Cas9-deaminase based technique (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v533/n7603/full/nature17946.html) are your first steps (the Liu group paper actually scooped some of my work, super annoying but they are better at science so oh well).

            Of course, when we’re talking about neurological-associated edits, you start to run into the issue that you can’t really get the Brain to go through the whole mass growth, wiring and pruning process that it does from birth to ~age 20-23. So a lot of stuff you might want to do is out of reach if it involves anything on the gross morphological side.

            None of this invalidates your point in any way but hey, I think we’re closer than a lot realise.

    • Dahlen says:

      Biology is mutable.

      That’s… a more optimistic (and still literally true) viewpoint than I’ve seen from most people (mostly the kind of edgelords who take pride in having very pessimistic and morally appalling worldviews). Doubly so when I found out you didn’t mean eugenics, like half of the comments on this post.

      • Anonymous says:

        We have the barest experimental ability to change our biology, and no practical way, as yet, to do it at any kind of scale – unless one means eugenics, of course. Those we can, did, and do use all the time.

  5. Anonymous says:

    During a recent unprogrammed worship, an attendee testified twice.

    They first testified that “there is that of us in G*d”. Then quite a while later, they shared their joy that this day was their [NN]->th birthday — marking their first adult birthday in which more than half of their life had been spent out of prison.

    And this was no young attendee.

    For various reasons, the number of communities welcoming sharings like this, has diminished sharply in recent decades. It’s no accident — is it? … because there are no accidents! — that David Foster Wallace (among others) attended Mennonite services, perhaps with a view to personally helping to reverse this trend.

    And perhaps David attended, too, because he himself needed to be heard, in a setting more mutually empathic, and therefore less controlled, than his writings permitted, and his social standing encouraged?

    • Steve Sailer says:

      I’m no expert on DFW, but I pick up a lot of Closet Conservative vibes.

    • Michael Watts says:

      Then quite a while later, they shared their joy that this day was their [NN]->th birthday — marking their first adult birthday in which more than half of their life had been spent out of prison.

      I find it kind of hard to believe that, at 20 years old, they had already spent over ten years in prison?

      • Anonymous says:

        Probably means adult life.

      • Nicholas says:

        This is a possibility, because it seems probable to me that if you had been prison for ten years by age 20, you would probably be quite old before more than half of your life was out of prison.
        I had assumed he meant his first adult birthday since he got out of prison, and that he had been in prison when he turned 18.

      • Corey says:

        To be fair, I haven’t read the link, but if it’s a conversion story, those always exaggerate how “bad” the person was before seeing the light.

        Remember Ben Carson having to defend against accusations he didn’t stab a guy? That’s related. The stabbing/belt-buckle story was part of his conversion “testimony”, and the secular media called bullshit, without realizing that was equivalent to saying “the Grand Canyon was not actually dug by Paul Bunyan lassoing a tornado”.

        • “without realizing that was equivalent to saying “the Grand Canyon was not actually dug by Paul Bunyan lassoing a tornado”.”

          Of course it wasn’t.

          It was the result of someone attaching Babe the blue ox to a plow.

    • Anonymous says:

      The above empathy-free/snark-heavy/ultra-rational responses contrast sharply with the moral tenets and social practices of anabaptism/Spinozism and their modern descendants.

      It makes a person wonder whether rationalists too are included among the “unnecessariat”?

      Embracing and extending Anne Amnesia’s essay “Unnecessariat” (of the original post) yields: “Nobody has an economic plan for us [rationalists]. There is no economic plan for us, ever. We keep driving trucks around [writing blog-comments] and keep the margins above gas money and maybe take an odd [freelance coding] job here or there, but essentially, we [rationalists] are history and nobody seems to mind saying so.”

      So what are the appropriate rationalist expressions of unnecessarian grief and rage?

      Do movements like the Sad/Rabid Puppies reflecting the growing Trumpian rage of a rationalist unnecessariat?

      Is “unnecessarian rationalist grief and rage” becoming a thing?

      • So what are the appropriate rationalist expressions of unnecessarian grief and rage?

        Wring out those last few drops of economic vitality, strip your lifestyle to the bone, move to someplace cheap (in terms of both low total costs, high benefits from social services, friends, and community), and shepherd those few drops into careful investments.

        Buy boots, in the Vimesian sense. Ruthlessly strip out of your life things which will bring cost-spirals. Grow your skills, so that when changing economic winds spill a brief shower of economic vitality, you can capture as much of it as possible.

        Eventually reach the point where the point where you can pay for your own abbreviated lifestyle on the strength of your investments alone.

        Retire.

        • Anonymous says:

          Robert Liguori, that is a very nice comment.

          Yet a Ferengi might skeptically ask, whence does the hoped-for/planned-for “strength of investments” originate?

          After all, human history provides no shortage of sobering examples in which putatively “strong” investments of various forms — moral, social, monetary, and capitalist — proved sadly insufficient to support hoped-for/planned-for peaceful, rationalistic, disengaged retirements.

          For which reason, perhaps social and empathic disengagement is (in the long run) not a viably rational option?

          And this is true in Discworld too! 🙂

          • Investments are manyfold. Strong community ties are investments. Education is an investment. An emergency fund of portable wealth is an investment.

            It Probably Won’t Happen Here, But It Might; part of preparing for the future when you’re someone that the people around you don’t find nice or useful to have around is preparing to not be around.

            But you don’t want to overprepare; here in 21st-century America, putting the vast bulk of your investment efforts into low-cost index funds seems to work pretty well.

            (I am not an investment professional, a historian, or a sociologist.)

        • Hollyluja says:

          Robert Liguori – I have nothing substantive to add, but yours is a great comment and a frequent daydream of mine.

          • Anonymous says:

            For me, Robert’s fine comment sounded similar notes to Peter Beagle’s celebrated preface to Lord of the Rings

            Lovers of Middle Earth want to go there.
            I would myself, like a shot.

            This was written in 1973, before LOTR even became an acronym. 🙂

            Nowadays we can only pity the hobbit community’s irrational disdain for efficient market economics, and the Shire’s concomitant poverty-level GHP (gross Hobbit product).

            The contrast between the somnolent Shire and the vigorously innovative, technology-driven, rationally incentivized economies of Isengard and Mordor is striking, to say the least. There are no “unnecessarians” in Isengard or Morder (living ones, anyway).

          • Anonymous says:

            Psmith, the link you provide to The Last Ringbearer is fascinating.

            In a similar vein, perhaps some (many?) SSC readers will enjoy the in-depth analysis provided by “Audio commentary by Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky, recorded summer 2002 for The Fellowship Of The Ring.”

            The Zinn/Chomsky review has two parts; both are worth hearing.

          • Thanks!

            As people may have inferred, financial improvement is a passion of mine. I strongly encourage everyone reading to go set up an account on Mint or another financial tracker, fire up Excel, and take a good look at how they are spending their money; I firmly believe that for most people, it doesn’t have to be just a daydream.

      • Anonymous says:

        There is no appropriate rationalist response to unecessarian grief and rage because it is un-rationalist to be uncessarian.

        This sort of “watch out you’re vulnerable too” stuff has a lot of surface appeal, but it isn’t terribly accurate. Freelance coding is quite lucrative and there doesn’t seem to be any end in sight. There’s no need to become pre-depressed, if the automation apocalypse actually happens then we can worry about it.

        • Psmith says:

          There’s no need to become pre-depressed, if the automation apocalypse actually happens then we can worry about it.

          Is this also what you think about UFAI, or…?

      • Walter says:

        *Blink*

        I don’t associate rationalists with “broke”. We’d be crummy rationalists if we couldn’t make money, which anybody can do even without overcoming their biases. We are mostly wealthy, yeah?

        • Anonymous says:

          You are poor? Then self-evidently, sir or madam, you are no true rationalist!

          • Walter says:

            Well…yeah? Like, if we are all bragging about being great chess players and I suck you should point out, at some point, that maybe I should change my self designation.

            Eliezar Yudkowski had a post about this somewhere on Lesswrong, where he was like “Rationalists should win”. And he posited a sort of respect threshold, where you can’t really be more awesome for being a rationalist than you are for successfully using your rationality. It’s like skinny cooks or broke investment gurus, barbers with rubbish hair, etc.

            “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” is a fair cap.

          • suntzuanime says:

            Yudkowsky is wrong about a lot of stuff. One of the biggest problems with his work is his conflation of epistemic rationality with instrumental rationality. Epistemic rationalists should make correct predictions; it’s only instrumental rationalists who should win, and nobody likes them.

            It’s also a mistake to conflate “rationality skills” with “smart” and to conflate “being interested in learning chess” with “bragging about being a great chess player”.

          • Psmith says:

            If your criterion for rationalism excludes a substantial minority of the people in the community and includes people who have never heard of it and wouldn’t much like it if they had, it’s probably a bad criterion. Are Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope “rationalists”?
            (In any case, you can call yourself a golfer or say that you play golf even if you’re pretty bad at it. For instance.).

          • Walter says:

            @suntzuanime

            But making correct conclusions, and still being broke, is weird to me. Like, you’d kind of have to be trying. Predict what will make you the most cash. Do that. Now you’ve got money.

            I mean, one of the main obsessions of the rationalist community is what kind of charity is best. If we don’t have any money, why are we bothering with that? People on fire don’t become fire fighters.

            Maybe I’m just confused about the epistolic/instrumental rationalists. Aren’t we all instrumental? Like, why bother getting smarter if we don’t put it to use?

            This may actually explain a thing I’ve never grokked. There was a post on LW that was like “buy bitcoin”. So I researched it, made sense to me posted “ok”, and did so. I made a killing, and later on posted “thanks”.

            The thing that shocked me was the total silence on the thread. I figured maybe there was an norm against acknowledging that stuff. But maybe people just aren’t instrumental rationalists, and they saw the post, agreed that buying bitcoin made sense, and didn’t do it?

            @PSmith:

            There are definitely posers, but that’s all communities, yeah? Like, if we were a jazz musicians club you’d sort of know who couldn’t actually play. They could still call themselves jazz musicians, but their appearance is just the consequence of getting a bunch of jazz players together. I mean, no one’s gonna call you out, but if you attend a LW meetup and someone is underwater on debt you know he isn’t practicing what he’s preaching, yeah?

            Honest question here: Real rationalists win, right? So if you are a loser, you aren’t a real rationalist. Isn’t that a thing that we believe? Am I out of step with the community on this? That would be super mortifying.

          • suntzuanime says:

            Why bother with anything? Eventually you have to decide what you want, and what I want is not to believe stupid bullshit.

            IIRC the median annual donation of an EA type is $0. Yeah, it seems weird to me too. Anyway I think there’s a worthwhile distinction to be made between the rationalist community and the EA community. Rationalism may correlate with EA, polyamory, and far-right antidemocratic politics, but it shouldn’t be conflated with any of them.

            IIRC Yudkowsky’s posts on how losers should not get to call themselves rationalists were not well-received by the community at the time; I think you may be out of step with the community. We are, after all, not a cult, and most of us disagree with Yudkowsky in at least some places.

          • Jiro says:

            There was a post on LW that was like “buy bitcoin”. So I researched it, made sense to me posted “ok”, and did so. I made a killing, and later on posted “thanks”.

            Epistemic learned helplessness.

            It is entirely sensible for people to say “sounds like a good idea, I can’t see any flaw in it” and then not follow the idea. Especially where money or other significant expenses are involved.

          • youzicha says:

            @suntzuanime Mandatory Secret Identities didn’t say that losers can’t call themselves rationalists, it says they can’t call themselves rationalism instructors. That sounds like a pretty sound precaution to me, although you’re right that most people in the comments disagreed.

          • Acedia says:

            “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” is a fair cap.

            Sometimes the answer is because they don’t value riches. I’m not one of these but they really exist, I’ve met them.

          • Mmm. I don’t know too many people who don’t value anything in the set of things you can easily get with money and can’t easily get without it.

            Having 20 times your minimum necessary income in the bank (or, to be more precise, invested in a diversified index fund) is such an incredible quality-of-life improvement that I can’t imagine not wanting it.

            It puts you in the position mentioned earlier of being able to support your community rather than work for a wage.

            It lets you pursue hobbies, travel, see the world.

            It insulates you against a catastrophe like a car crash or a lesser medical expense.

            It lets you not have to stress or worry about day-to-day purchases.

            And, if you have children, it gives you the option of joining the great Signaling Olympics to level up their socioeconomic class.

            It’s not a panacea, and there are definitely some people with needs and reasons to have more, but I have trouble genuinely imagining people who want less.

          • Anonymous says:

            Its not about not wanting it, its about having different priorities. Some people just want to start living as early as possible and take advantage of youth instead of doing the hard work to get money.

          • eh says:

            The sequences are pretty thorough regarding akrasia. I don’t think Eliezer is completely rational, nor anyone else, as demonstrated by the struggle to become less biased, more rational, and to win more.

            Consider the case of a meth addict who decided to become a rationalist: there’s a lot of distance between “not smoking meth will make me more productive” and actually following through. For the addict, winning might be as simple as gradually increasing the time between use after careful study of medical literature on successful quitters, and even if the addict is dirt poor we can still say that they acted rationally. Similarly, if you go to a casino, repeatedly put your life saving on red despite a negative expected return, and come out a millionaire, then despite now being rich you haven’t acted rationally.

          • Samuel Skinner says:

            “But making correct conclusions, and still being broke, is weird to me. ”

            Well, there is this thing called autism…

          • Aapje says:

            @Robert Liguori

            I don’t know too many people who don’t value anything in the set of things you can easily get with money and can’t easily get without it.

            That is the wrong question. The question is: do you value the things you can easily get with money over the effort to acquire it? Most predictions actually still require quite a bit of effort to turn into money. For example, let’s say that I predict that in the next few years, technology will allow for useful robot companions for lonely people and that this will take off. There still needs to be someone to actually build these robots. If I’m the only one who believes this with enough conviction, I can only make money by making them myself or paying someone to make them (both are risky and a huge effort). Even if companies exist that do this and I invest in one of them, that company can fail at the same time that another company succeeds. So then I would be proven right and still lose my money.

            Even if everything works out, there would still be a period where I’m smart and yet not yet rich, as these things take time.

            Having 20 times your minimum necessary income in the bank (or, to be more precise, invested in a diversified index fund) is such an incredible quality-of-life improvement that I can’t imagine not wanting it.

            20 times is not sufficient for me to safely cover the period to my death, especially given my prediction that retirement funds will collapse due to mismanagement and demographic factors (and retiring early will mean that my retirement fund will be insufficient anyway). If I quit my job with such a small buffer, I run a great risk of running out of money at the exact moment that employers no longer want me.

            It lets you pursue hobbies, travel, see the world.

            I can already afford the hobbies that I have and have no particular desire for more expensive ones. I don’t really like to travel (and traveling a lot generally results in a huge carbon footprint, which harms others and is thus morally wrong in my eyes).

            It insulates you against a catastrophe like a car crash or a lesser medical expense.

            You don’t have to be rich for that, just not poor (and well insured).

            It lets you not have to stress or worry about day-to-day purchases.

            Again, nothing do to with being rich, just with being not poor.

            And, if you have children, it gives you the option of joining the great Signaling Olympics to level up their socioeconomic class.

            If I had them, I would want them to experience some deprivation (as in: not getting everything they want), as I believe that spoiled children become less happy later in life.

            It’s not a panacea, and there are definitely some people with needs and reasons to have more, but I have trouble genuinely imagining people who want less.

            It’s not about wanting less, but not wanting more or willing to accept less in return for some other benefit.

            Imagine a person who is at the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. At a certain point, no amount of money will make a person more happy. In fact, I would expect a truly smart person to understand that money can’t buy happiness and thus that once the basic needs are fulfilled, finding happiness is primarily a mental exercise, not a matter of buying more things.

          • Psmith says:

            once the basic needs are fulfilled, finding happiness is primarily a mental exercise

            Security is a basic need, for some of us. Liquori is talking about saving and investing, not buying a boat.

          • Aapje says:

            @Psmith

            But there can never be perfect security. If you have 1 million, you may face a situation where that is not enough. If you have 1 billion, it may still not be enough. If you have all the wealth in the world, you may still be unable to get security (huge asteroid is going to hit the earth, no time to create a viable colony with the resources that earth has).

            So at one point you simply have to accept a certain level of security.

            IMO, most people who are unhappy with the security provided by having 100k in the bank won’t feel happy with 1M in the bank, or 1 billion, or 100 billion. They are just chronically insecure. In contrast, the people who are happy with the security of having 100k in the bank won’t feel any happier for having 1M, or 1 billion.

            Basically, I just fundamentally disagree that happiness is an ever increasing function, where if having a certain amount of X makes a person happy at level Y, more X will automatically make that person more happy than Y. It may still be Y or even less than Y, if there are downsides of having more X and very little ‘real’ upside.

          • Creutzer says:

            @Aapje: I’m sure there are diminishing returns, but I don’t think they kick in nearly so soon. With 100k, you can live for a few years without working. With 1 million, you don’t ever have to work again if you live modestly. That makes a huge difference.

          • Yes. 20x your yearly income means that if you can get 4% yearly returns post-tax (which you have historically been able to do very easily) you can withdraw your salary from your returns forever.

            This is pending that the economy remains in roughly in its current status, but anything big enough to wreck retirement accounts (which are heavily index funds, meaning they’re basically the entire stock market) will be a invest-in-canned-food-and-bullets scenario.

          • Anonymous says:

            @Robert

            Yes. 20x your yearly income means that if you can get 4% yearly returns post-tax (which you have historically been able to do very easily) you can withdraw your salary from your returns forever.

            This is pending that the economy remains in roughly in its current status, but anything big enough to wreck retirement accounts (which are heavily index funds, meaning they’re basically the entire stock market) will be a invest-in-canned-food-and-bullets scenario.

            This is basically my thinking, too. I’m about halfway there to the earliest point at which retiring is conceivable. Now if only I can stomach working for 2-3 more years…

          • Anonymous says:

            Is that 4% at the time of annutization or is there an escalator for inflation? Either way I think you are overselling the safety, but dramatically so in the latter case.

          • Anonymous says:

            Either way I think you are overselling the safety, but dramatically so in the latter case.

            I think he isn’t, really, provided you properly diversify – and don’t do stupid shit like invest in a country which is long-term likely to fuck itself up economically.

          • Anonymous says:

            Easier said then done. Do you have some timestamped proof that you called Japan correctly circa in the 1984?

          • Anonymous says:

            I wasn’t even *alive* back then.

            And that’s not the point. Shit happens, of course – the Japanese scenario, should you have invested in the Nikkei index directly, rather than some subselect of companies, hardly leaves you destitute. Sure, it cuts you down to 40-50% of your top asset value, but that’s still a lot of money that you can do stuff with, 8-10 yearly incomes. Unless you achieved your rentierhood right at the peak of the bubble, you’re probably going to be okay, albeit with a substantial cut in income.

        • TheAncientGeek says:

          I associate rationalist with ‘has plenty of time to post in rationalist forums’.

          • Psmith says:

            Just so. “Rationalist” as a common noun is more or less meaningless. “Rationalist” as a proper noun (not capitalized) refers to people who post here, used to post on LessWrong, are nodes in various graphs of tumblr connections, and so on. (Or Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza as opposed to the British Empiricists, but that’s a different meaning yet.).

          • Anonymous says:

            The New York Review of Books recently asserted (if memory serves) “The strongest predictor of a high score on an IQ test is the strength of the desire to achieve a high IQ test-score.”

            Which if one considers it rationally, makes perfect sense.

          • TheAncientGeek says:

            I’m aware of the capital R meaning of rationalist, I just hate it..

            I actually meant somthng snarkier by my comment. Like the way the internet s full of objectivists wh ave plenty of time to lpage online because they are not exactly John Galt IRL. No, it doesn’t reflect well on me either.

        • Corey says:

          The LW crowd, when I tried to be a part of it in the mid-late 00s, skewed heavily towards college-age folks, who skew broke. How the LW crowd might have changed, or how generalized rationalists and/or the SSC commentariat differ from the LW crowd, I don’t know.

        • RCF says:

          My understanding of “Rationalist should win” is that rationalists should take the course of action with the highest expected utility among the choices available to them. Thus, a rationalist should, modulo some randomness, be doing better than a nonrationalist who was given the same choices. It does NOT mean a rationalist should do better than everyone, and it does NOT mean that if you aren’t doing as well as someone who was given different choices, you aren’t a “real” rationalist. If a lion attacks me and I lose, it would be quite ridiculous to say “Well, if you’re such a rationalist, why didn’t you find a way to win?”

          I’ve reported your post as I find it wrong and extremely unkind.

    • Psmith says:

      Welcome back, Dr. Sidles.

  6. Thursday says:

    inequality and immiseration are the very purpose of capitalism

    One of the major problems is that, due to luck, genetic and otherwise, some people just aren’t capable of ever being very productive. Some chunk of these might have made decent enough foragers or subsistence agriculturalists of some sort, so I guess capitalism is to blame for their plight in the sense of not having any useful stuff for them to do. But it hardly seems fair to blame capitalism for in some sense depending on those people being destitute. Capitalism and its supporters would prefer for them to be productive, but they’re not going to be terribly productive under any possible economic system.

    • The one sense in which capitalism is to blame is by raising expectations. The people who are productive under capitalism, most people, live at a standard far above what foragers or subsistence agriculturalists lived at. A basic income that was really equivalent to the latter would be doably small–a thousand dollars a year or so(The link goes to a blog post in which I offer some relevant calculations). But that’s more than an order of magnitude below what either payers or recipients would seriously consider.

      • Thursday says:

        All doubtless true, but I’d still rather be a tribal forager than a homeless dude in an American city, or even some of the other inner city poor.

        Foraging has a lot of non-material benefits. Scott has had similar thoughts here.

        • Swami says:

          I too would much rather be a forager, even with their double digit death from violence and fifty percent child mortality.

          However, foraging can only support tens of millions of people globally (there were less foragers in 10,000 BC globally than current residents of Tennessee.). So the full alternative is 7 billion of us agreeing to die so one tenth of one percent of us could be a thriving forager with a shirt life span and lots of future dead kids.

          That path is gone, and when fully considered, was never really all that good either.

          • Michael Vassar says:

            There were half a million people living in Hawaii when the Europeans arrived and two million in New Guinean. A hundred million ‘tribals’ live in India today. Forager propulsive could easily have been hundreds of millions and with some compatible modern tech, could probably support today’s population.

          • Nicholas says:

            That’s because the indigenous Hawaiians weren’t foragers. They had a complex system of irrigation and fish-farming.

          • NN says:

            Also, agriculture has existed in Papua New Guinea for more than 7,000 years and lots of India’s “tribals” practice slash-and-burn agriculture, so describing either of them as “foragers” is extremely inaccurate.

            There’s simply no disputing that forager lifestyles cannot support large human populations. Attempts to estimate the number of humans that have ever been born generally end up calculating the number of people born between 50,000 BC and 8,000 BC as less than 1% of the total number.

          • Michael Vassar says:

            To clarify, I am disputing the claim about forager lifestyles. Look at the size of herds, or the carrying capacity of pigs, baboons, or other organisms in similar niches to humans.

            I’m also disputing the existence of some ideal form of ‘foragers’. I don’t think the idea makes any sense. There are surely occasional cultures who in some sense don’t know about agriculture, there are Roma cultures which deny knowing about human reproduction even, but if you have lived in the tropics at all, it’s obvious that the divide between agriculture and foraging is much less sharp between that between plow and hoe based agriculture, http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/12/men-at-work-hoes-ploughs-and-steel/#.V0c2r7RViko

            I simply don’t believe that a scientific community that didn’t know that the people of New Guinea existed seventy years ago are likely to know with any confidence that the people there were *not* farming when they got there.

          • “there are Roma cultures which deny knowing about human reproduction even”

            Only one such culture (the Kaale in Finland). And it’s pretty obvious that they in fact do know about it, given the existence of customs for dealing with it while pretending not to.

        • Bugmaster says:

          Given that, as Swami points out, foragers have “double digit death from violence and fifty percent child mortality”, as well as nearly total absence of modern medical care, is there any significant difference ?

          Furthermore, if I was picking a society to be randomly born into, and I had a choice between our current society (where a minority of people are poor) and a hunter-gatherer society (where there’s no money, but everyone’s quality of life is poor), I’d still pick our current society every time.

          • Thursday says:

            Read the link I provided.

          • Bugmaster says:

            I’ve read the link, but IMO it doesn’t directly apply to my scenario. I am not picking between the life of a Comanche Indian and a the life of Pilgrim; I’m picking between 100% chance of living the life of a Comanche Indian, vs. something like a 20% chance of living the life of a modern poor person and a 80% chance of living the life of a modern middle-class person.

            The modern middle-class person has — just off the top of my head — a life expectancy of about 80 years, technologically-mediated resilience against many deadly and debilitating diseases, ability to travel hundreds of miles in a few hours, and access to a worldwide network of instant communication, entertainment and knowledge. Yes, there are costs, and they can be steep, but IMO these benefits are worth the cost (even at an 80% discount).

          • Thursday says:

            I was responding to this part of your comment:

            Given that, as Swami points out, foragers have “double digit death from violence and fifty percent child mortality”, as well as nearly total absence of modern medical care, is there any significant difference ?

            Yes, there is a significant difference, and living as a tribal forager is much preferable to life as a modern homeless person or member of the urban poor.

          • Jill says:

            Nobody really knows what society they would pick if they had full knowledge of both. But I think I’d pick the hunter gatherer. Books such as Sapiens; A Brief History of Humankind, made it sound pretty good back there at that time.

        • vjl110 says:

          This is probably true… but what you really do not want to be is among the similar bottom percentile of tribal foragers, particularly if you are afflicted with the same psychological issues that often accompany US homelessness.

          • houseboatonstyxb says:

            @ vjl11g

            US homeless (especially with psyc issues) who must live in cities for food and clothing they can scavenge, shelter by porches or under scavenged building materials, sometimes on heat from vents — may be constantly harassed by police and others.

            In a community so primitive that it doesn’t have those things either, people don’t lose as much by going far away from other people. Though they have to watch out for bears, and possibly cannibals.

          • Jill says:

            Poor people with low levels of most skills are likely even less than the rest of us to possess the skills necessary to survive in the wilderness. Who is going to train them in those skills?

            Have you met poor people who you think have the ability to survive in the wilderness?

          • houseboatonstyxb says:

            @ Jill

            Sorry my wording was unclear. We had been talking about US/modern urban homelessness vs wilderness hunter/forager life (mostly speculation about pre-historic conditions).

            I thought my “In a community so primitive” would clearly refer to the wilderness/pre-historic situation.

          • Jill says:

            Sorry, Houseboat. Sometimes there are so many posts that it’s hard to keep track of what the initial discussion topic was on a thread.

            I actually do think living in the wilderness might be good for certain homeless people though, if only someone would train them.

            Sometimes I think about things like this. Sometimes energetic volunteers do help poor people to learn skills, get education, find new ways to make money or survive. But that’s usually in other countries. In the U.S. people don’t do that as much, maybe because of particular problems in doing that here, as opposed to in other places with cultures more ready to accept it.

            We do have an issue in the U.S. with that sort of thing. Helping the poor seems to have a lot of political and public relations pitfalls and obstacles. I notice in my reading about this, that the Rockefeller Foundation, the Bill Gates Foundation etc. do most of their work in other countries, probably to avoid those obstacles.

          • ” I notice in my reading about this, that the Rockefeller Foundation, the Bill Gates Foundation etc. do most of their work in other countries, probably to avoid those obstacles.”

            Or because the poor in those countries are much poorer than the poor in America.

      • Julie K says:

        A family that tried to live at such a standard would probably have authorities coming to remove their children from their custody.

      • Brian Slesinsky says:

        Hmm, I’m not really getting it. It seems to me that basic income could start out at any amount. It may not pay the rent, but on the margin, a lot of people would find an extra $100 a month useful.

        • Sivaas says:

          The problem is the only way you’ll get funding for a basic income (with any sort of political backing) is to remove existing benefits. It’s not going to be an extra $100 a month, it’s going to be $100 (or whatever amount) in exchange for things you previously got.

          The hope is that 1. the ease of just giving a flat sum to anyone cuts out inefficiencies in distribution to free up more benefit going to the people, 2. by providing it to everyone we don’t distort the market as much as existing systems, and/or 3. cash in hand to everyone is more utility than intangible benefits like health care to a subset of people (as Scott mentioned upthread, many of the people he deals with don’t really seem like they’re getting money from the government)

          • TD says:

            The other important factor here is that a basic income will only really become necessary when technological unemployment becomes a major factor, and the same process of automation that causes that will make goods cheaper to produce and presumably less pricey. By the time the basic income becomes necessary, the amount you can get from it will probably go a lot further.

          • Wrong Species says:

            If basic income proponents are waiting until tech unemployment hits, they are going to be waiting a while. It’s not happening anytime soon.

      • Psmith says:

        Homesteading as such isn’t allowed anymore. I like the idea a lot, but I’m not sure how well it scales on a population level. Especially outside of North America.

      • TheAncientGeek says:

        Capitalism is more than one thing. The kind of people who identify as pro capitalism generally generally favour a version of capitalism with lower taxes and less welfare, a purer verssion with less of he stuff that ameliorates it, a version which adds to the misery of those whom capitalism has no use for, all other things being equal.

        Exonerating capitalism, the abstraction, doesn’t exonerate its admirers.

    • Randy M says:

      Indeed. I suppose it is another aspect of Moloch that technological progress, which is good for man by enabling providence of goods more efficiently, at the same time makes man obsolete, percentile of the IQ bell curve at a time.

      I have a feeling that at one time people unable to operate in society could at least go off into the frontier and attempt to make something of themselves in an environment they are better evolved for (no slight on them, as technology is moving faster than biology). But I don’t think this is historically true, as part of what allowed humans to thrive in the wild was social connections and being able to share the advantages of intelligence with the tribe. People moved to cities during hard times.

    • Deiseach says:

      But it hardly seems fair to blame capitalism for in some sense depending on those people being destitute.

      Capitalism is a human-made system, not some immutable law of the universe like the laws of physics. Blaming the stars (sorry you chose to be born with shitty genes or in an area of the country that was going to buckle under economic pressures! Boy, the way luck works is so mysterious and unamenable to us doing anything to affect it, isn’t it?) is no more reasonable for “why do we have a system that depends on inequality, else it will not work” than blaming black people for choosing to be born with excess melanin and suffering the consequences of such because it’s not society’s fault you people cannot be acceptable by our standards.

      • Wrong Species says:

        Capitalism may be human made but that doesn’t mean it can be fully controlled. Look at the existence of black markets when governments try to ban capitalism.

      • Thursday says:

        Capitalism does not benefit from people being incapable. The system would do better if these unproductive people could be made productive.

        • TheAncientGeek says:

          Is that a version of captalism where full employment doesnt lead to wage rises and inflation, or a realistic version?

          • Thursday says:

            Nice non sequitur.

          • “Is that a version of captalism where full employment doesnt lead to wage rises and inflation, or a realistic version?”

            Increased productivity under capitalism leads to wage rises, but not to inflation. There were long stretches of the 19th century in the U.S. and U.K. with negligible inflation but rising wages.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            @David Friedman:
            Increased wages has to lead to inflation if there is any scarcity of resources, doesn’t it?

            Perhaps in some hypothetical world where monetary supply and population are perfectly fixed, then productivity gains can’t be made real if there is scarcity. More productive widget manufacture just leads to fewer hours being worked in widget manufacturing or more hours being worked to produce raw widget material.

          • InferentialDistance says:

            Increased wages has to lead to inflation if there is any scarcity of resources, doesn’t it?

            The mistake is “any” scarcity. Increased production is still scarcity, it’s just not as much scarcity. I would assume that wage rises without inflation tend to occur during economic growth, where part of the growth goes to the workers. Who themselves are consumers, and therefor their economic well-being is an integral part of paying for all that new stuff that’s being made.

      • Chalid says:

        Even a post post post singularity integrated array of matrioshka brains is/are going to run internal markets for decision making,

        Could you explain this?

        • pneumatik says:

          Investing limited resources based on expected future events is best way anyone has found to measure people’s actual beliefs about the future. If those people are competing to buy limited assets with prices that respond naturally to demand, then they will collectively provide the best available estimate of the actual value of those assets. (I’m enormously simplifying; there’s lots of way to make markets not work like this)

          Variations on this idea have been almost universally successful at revealing people’s preferences. Assuming that super super super intelligent beings can’t find anything better (and I don’t mean to suggest that they can) then they’ll use a similar approach to determine what the group thinks is the thing for the group to do.

        • Chalid says:

          Right, but Mark Atwood seems very very sure that beings with brains the size of Jupiter won’t be able to come up with anything better, and I am not aware of any reason to be so sure. He alludes to information theory to support this belief, implying that there is some sort of mathematical argument that can be made.

          And now that I look at his post again, demand curves being true for “about the same reason” as the laws of thermodynamics cries out for explanation too.

        • Jaskologist says:

          Demand curves will always exist, because resources will always be “scarce” in the economic sense (ie: they will not be unlimited). As long as different things are different (which will be true until the heat-death of the universe) and come in finite quantities, their relative value will vary depending on the circumstances, and will be adjudicated via some kind of market. Even communism runs markets; they just trade in political power instead of efficient resource use.

          Laws of Computability tell us there are a lot of limits on what we can actually know for sure. If P != NP, as we strongly suspect, then there is a whole class of problems where we cannot find the best solution efficiently (ie: before the heat death of the universe) and so will have to settle for heuristics and approximations instead. Again, judgement calls, tradeoffs, and markets. And there are some problems which cannot be computed at all. Even the post-singularity AI will not be all-knowing and all-seeing.

      • Jill says:

        “Things like demand curves are as immutable and bedrock true as the laws of thermodynamics, and for about the same reason.”

        Just because one believes one’s ideology to be as immutable as the laws of physics, doesn’t mean it is. It’s just another religion that makes perfect sense to its believers, but not to others.

        • Samuel Skinner says:

          Demand curves show the relation between price and quantity demanded. While it isn’t the same as thermodynamics (Giffen goods), I’m having difficulty imaging a situation where a decrease in price causes the volume sold to decline.

        • Nornagest says:

          You know, conservative commentators accuse their political opponents all the time of denouncing supply and demand as mere opinion. And I guess this isn’t the first time I’ve seen an argument presupposing that — thank you, Bay Area housing wars — but I think it is the first time I’ve ever heard anyone just come out and say it.

          Nice to know that dismissing entire academic disciplines as ideologically impure isn’t purely a rightist pastime, though.

        • Dirdle says:

          This is not the correct objection. Economics is a field of study, not an ideology.

          But anything that says that a theory is as immutable as thermodynamics is to be ignored. Nothing is as immutable as thermodynamics. I can, contra Samuel Skinner, imagine sales of something falling as the price falls. Maybe some kind of signalling-good like diamonds. Probably wouldn’t actually happen. Whatever. On the other hand, imagining violation of thermodynamics is. Considerably crazier than that. To say the least.

          TD’s not even a theory, really, just a description of how large statistical ensembles tend to behave. You could say “but economics is also a description of how large statistical ensembles tend to behave” but you’re moving from ensembles of trivially-predictable actors (particles) to ensembles of only mostly-predictable actors (humans*) and far more importantly, you’re moving from an ensemble of a few billion pieces to a few 10^23 pieces. This makes behaviour contrary to the statistical expectation far less imaginable. In other understatements, the distance between the furthest stars is quite a long walk.

          * If you want to say “agents,” which don’t behave quite so erratically as humans, go for it. Just remember that no such agents exist, whereas particles of matter are abundant.

        • Winter Shaker says:

          While you can argue the specifics of economics, the basic insight of ‘people respond to incentives, in ways which are at least somewhat predictable in aggregate’ seems pretty sensible to me.

          Given the existence of human beings as they currently are, the way large numbers of them will respond, on average, to a change in their incentive structures is likely to be about as immutable as the laws of physics unless and until you can change the bedrock distribution of human psychological traits.

          You can argue that we have made mistakes in our predictions of how people-in-aggregate will respond to a change in incentive structure, and if that’s what you were doing then my comment is misdirected. But I don’t think it is reasonable to deny that there are things to be known about how humans-in-aggregate respond to economic incentives, if that is what you meant.

        • Why do you not consider that physics is an ideology? If you do not, why do you think economics is?

          There have been socialist economists, such as Abba Lerner, and they believed in supply and demand curves too.

        • Nornagest says:

          I can, contra Samuel Skinner, imagine sales of something falling as the price falls. Maybe some kind of signalling-good like diamonds.

          The phrase you’re looking for is “Veblen good”

        • Aapje says:

          In general, market curves depend on the motivations and situation of market parties. In practice that means that some markets run counter to basic supply/demand theory.

          For example, Veblen goods explain why people may be less willing to pay for a cheaper good, but there is also a uniqueness premium. So a seller may want to intentionally limit his production to preserve the willingness for buyers to pay this premium. Luxury car manufacturers like Ferrari are a good example. Ferrari could make more money in the short term by making more cars and optimizing the market curves as they are today. However, that would lead to a negative change in the demand curve in the future, once the market becomes ‘saturated’ with too many cars for the brand to still be considered exclusive.

        • Dirdle says:

          @Nornagest: Thank-you, that’s very useful to know =).

      • Nita says:

        Demand curves are capitalism in the same way as linear optimization constraints are communism. That is, not really.

        Additionally, economics is a social science. Let’s try to keep in mind the difference in complexity between human beings and molecules. Physicists haven’t fully figured out how physics works yet, and they’re centuries ahead of economists, so confident pronouncements about bedrock truths might be a little premature.

      • John Colanduoni says:

        Things like demand curves are as immutable and bedrock true as the laws of thermodynamics, and for about the same reason.

        I’m curious (coming from a physics and pure math background) what parallels you see between the laws of thermodynamics and demand curves etc. (and this comes not from the standpoint of “Physics is best and economics is silly and made up”). To me the theory behind basic economics principles is more akin to pure math knowledge in that it is not so much an incidental property of the universe we live in but of the more fundamental mathematical structures we, for whatever reason, have come to use to understand it. It’s easy to come up with a counterfactual universe where the laws of thermodynamics don’t hold (or don’t even make sense), but harder to unseat some of the more well-founded economics work which is unimpeachable within it’s domain of applicability.

        Also, it is important to note that although the fundamental reactions of our world to our actions are mediated by such immovable laws, engineering within them can make a huge difference. Sure, humans can’t fly by taping cardboard to their arms and flapping really hard, but that doesn’t mean we can’t fly. In the same way, I see no reason to assume that there is no way that we could structure our economy and society to ameliorate the some of the disadvantages of market capitalism, just because some approaches that have been tried (e.g. communism) failed.

        • William Newman says:

          I don’t completely support the argument, and maybe don’t completely understand it either, but I think I can at least make a strongman version of something vaguely like it in physics terms. Consider classical thermodynamics, where we use partial differential equations based on ideas like things having a temperature. In principle, it’s kinda a heroic assumption that anything will have a temperature, and in practice it’s easy to find situations where things have at best a really wide temperature range … but in practice, also, most things have pretty well-defined temperatures, and many that don’t have well-defined temperatures now will settle down to having reasonably clear temperatures after cavorting about doing more complicated non-classical-thermodynamic things for a finite time, and so classical thermodynamics ends up being rather broadly applicable.

          So fundamentally economic actors might not have any level of rationality, or anything like a utility function, and returns might not tend to decrease, and reliable communications not be possible, and people might spontaneously mutate into utterly different people so often that trust is impossible, and so forth. There are probably a dozen such things (not happening) that are implicitly assumed in markets working the way we usually expect. And in principle, assumptions that the population of actors has some level of rationality, etc. are heroic assumptions, but in practice those conditions apply rather often. To some extent, in fact, they can broadly resemble the laws of thermo in that some classes of screwy states where the assumptions don’t hold naturally settle down to states where the assumptions hold better. (Off the top of my head, if many of the actors are rational but some aren’t, prices can do all sorts of weird things for a while, but the weird things have a tendency to leave resources concentrated in the hands of the more rational actors, so over time the market tends to look more like a market of rational actors. Dunno how many more examples there might be.)

          Another vague analogy to thermo is that under the aforementioned arguably-heroic assumptions, it’s surprisingly hard to beat free exchange for increasing general utility, vaguely analogous to trying to overcome the tendency of energy to flow from hot to cold. In physics you do this by coupling your system to something else; the more usual thing in economics might be assuming some regularity or constraint not present the usual assumptions. (And then, to the extent that econ tends to be more agenda-driven than phys, perhaps being tempted to be coy about what you have done…) I once read a book-length treatment of arguments against free international trade, and it seemed to me that the relatively careful ones seemed to work by slipping in a truly vital assumption, usually about how the government was a privileged actor in some way that the private actors couldn’t be. (Either fundamentally couldn’t, e.g. because the government was naturally smarter and/or more rational than any of the private actors were, or politically and/or legally couldn’t, e.g. because implicit in the argument was that the government should intervene heavily to prevent private actors from being able to reap the gains from such large opportunities.) E.g., to make the “infant industry” class of arguments work, the government could be the only actor smart enough to reliably notice that the opportunity is lucrative, or we could refuse to allow the social fabric to be degraded by permitting private parties to deploy capital and capture gains on the scale that would be involved in private development of this lucrative infant industry, so we have e.g. confiscatory tax rates and various legal impediments to loans and securities, so now even individuals who are smart enough have had their capabilities and/or rational motivation removed, so million-dollar bills are naturally left lying on the sidewalk, and even if distorting import prices is pretty expensive, it’s not as expensive as leaving those million dollar bills lying around. In my grouchy libertarian biased opinion those vital assumptions generally seemed rather more unworldly or unjustifiable than the basic market ones, but I’ve noticed that not everyone agrees.)

        • Aapje says:

          The issue I have with (most) economists is not so much their beliefs in basics like market curves, but how they jump to conclusions (based on these simple concepts) that people seek or ought to seek the optimum from a short term income maximizing perspective.

          This ignores that people may have other motivations than income maximization, ignores decision making costs that people may seek to keep low, ignores irrationality, ignores that short and long term profit maximization is not the same thing. It also ignores the influence by economists themselves on the markets: the markets are set up by politicians who listen to economists to (mostly) force people into profit-maximizing, so that makes the models by economists into self-fulfilling prophecies. The models are semi-accurate because the system is set up under the assumption that the models are accurate.

        • Jill says:

          Wow, Aapje. Great point there.

        • Urstoff says:

          @Aapje

          I tend to agree with all of that, but the constant critics of economics never offer alternatives that are rooted in thinking remotely as robust as that of economists. People are irrational ergo financial regulation X is not a good argument. Economics is deeply limited by methodological issues, but it’s the only economics we’ve got. Narratives and objections don’t justify policy proposals.

        • Edward Scizorhands says:
        • Jill says:

          There is a whole field of behavioral economics that demonstrates that people do not act rationally and conducts interesting research to find out on what bases people DO act. Here’s a book on it.

          http://www.amazon.com/Predictably-Irrational-Revised-Expanded-Decisions/dp/0061353248/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1464368228&sr=1-1&keywords=predictably+irrational

          Predictably Irrational, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely

        • “This ignores that people may have other motivations than income maximization, ignores decision making costs that people may seek to keep low, ignores irrationality, ignores that short and long term profit maximization is not the same thing. ”

          Economics often ignores irrationality, for reasons that economists have discussed. The rest of the things in your list are all included in conventional economic analysis. I find it hard to imagine an economist assuming that income is the only thing in the utility function, given the importance in economics of the tradeoff between income and leisure.

          Can you give an example of a serious economist assuming that income maximization is all there is, or ignoring the difference between short run and long run, a subject covered in standard elementary texts?

        • Anonymous says:

          @David Friedman

          I have been wondering for a while why behavioral economics is seen as requiring an entirely different set of assumptions than regular economics. Because it seems to me that irrationalities are not fundamentally different than any other obstacles that people face when attempting to achieve their objectives.

          For example – does rational-expectations economics assume that people can travel infinitely fast, and therefore when investigating, say, where people choose to live, the distance between their house and their workplace should be assumed to be irrelevant? If not, why would it require the assumption that people are perfectly free of bias, that when someone has an objective that it would be possible to achieve as a perfectly rational actor, we should expect that they will achieve it?

          Is it just that factoring in travel times is easier than factoring in irrationality, because we understand the former better than the latter?

        • Aapje says:

          @Anonymous & Friedman

          Indeed, these things are examined…and then completely ignored when making models about the entire economy. My criticism was about macro-economists.

          There is probably a self-selection process going on, economy students with an understanding of the limitations of their models end up doing actual science, trying to prove small(er) claims with proper methodology. The ‘philosopher-economist/pseudo-religious’ then end up in macro-economics where one picks a ‘school’ to believe in.

      • eponymous says:

        “Things like demand curves are as immutable and bedrock true as the laws of thermodynamics, and for about the same reason.”

        Granted that something analogous to demand curves will exist in the any solution to a resource allocation problem (even if they give quantity as a function of shadow price rather than market price).

        But that doesn’t seem relevant to the question of whether capitalism as an institution will always exist. Demand curves existed in the Soviet Union, which was obviously not capitalist.

        You seem to be mixing up the qualities of the problem space with a particular institution designed to solve the problem. Unless your definition of capitalism is so broad as to be meaningless, then I don’t see why the regularities of the problem imply that this particular institutional arrangement will always be seen as optimal.

    • Edward Scizorhands says:

      Look out in any bad neighborhood and you find both a lot of work to be done, and a lot of labor that is freely available.

      I want wage subsidy so that those people can find work filling those labor holes. If told that the government would pay them $4/hour if they find someone willing to pay them $3/hour, those people would find employment and conditions on the ground would improve.

      And while Scott blew off “work is ennobling,” there is a big point that communities full of men 22-26 who aren’t working tend to really really suck. People who feel unneeded by society don’t make good neighbors.

      • Julie K says:

        People like to say that low-wage employers are welfare recipients because their employees get government assistance. In your scenario that accusation would be accurate.
        Also, would someone be free to take an easy, pleasant ob that pays $1/hour, or would the gov’t basically auction off his labor to the highest bidder?

        • Edward Scizorhands says:

          People say that, but they are crazy. I see no need to listen to crazy people.

          People wouldn’t need to take a higher paying job than they want. If someone is happy with $1/wage and $8/hour subsidy, okay. I’m not yet decided on whether they should get to choose the job or the job chooses them, because there are trade-offs in either method.

          My biggest worry is people being employed in things that are harmful or distracting to third-parties. This would mean you can’t hire people to go door-to-door marketing, or stand on the side of the road with an advertising sign, or be a telemarketer, or email people, or do political canvassing, or participate in a picket march. All those jobs would need to exist without subsidy.

          • Jill says:

            Makes sense. And I like the subsidies for jobs idea.

            “communities full of men 22-26 who aren’t working tend to really really suck. People who feel unneeded by society don’t make good neighbors.”

            Excellent point there.

      • keranih says:

        I like the wage subsidy idea, and think it needs more review.

        However – this notion has tremendous ability to be gamed.

        In order to get subsidized up to $X per week, I have to show that I am working for $x/hour for X hours a week. So I get a part-time job directing traffic at the local child care drop off (mornings only) for, say, $3/hour. Da gubmint kicks in another $12/hour.

        I get some money in my pocket, less traffic gets backed up at the local daycare, and more momspops make it work on time (sos they can pay their taxes). EVERYONE WINS!

        Except, this is what is actually happening –

        Me and Ivan have this deal going with the daycare manager, who issues W-2s showing that me and Ivan are working both the morning shift and the afternoon shift. Only there really isn’t enough work for both of us, and after the last drop off around 10 am, I leave my reflective vest and go work laying laminate flooring for my brother. My brother pays me $10/hour, in cash, so there’s no record of my income. And yeah, I could be getting $15 for three hours of traffic rental cop, and my brother’s work is sporadic, but when he has a job, we work until 10, 11 pm, with a radio and beer and such.

        Ivan? Oh, right, Ivan part times with a landscape crew in the mornings. He’s just a raker, but he can’t sleep at night and so he’s nearly always at the meet up on time. He works 4-5 hours, naps, gets up and takes the afternoon shift at the daycare. Then he goes home and naps until midnight or so. Ivan’s really got a better job than me, because he’s on disability.

        In order to manage fraud, we would have to eliminate cash. And while I’m perfectly okay with eliminating fraud for this, I think getting rid of cash would have other, more difficult issues.

        • Edward Scizorhands says:

          You can definitely have “I hire you to watch my kids for $1/ hour and you hire me to watch my kids for $1/hour and neither of us actually anything” as far as I’ve described it.

          Morgan Warstler’s Uber4Welfare has you put out your bid at $1/hour and then whomever hires you gets you. That takes care of that. I’m not sure it’s the right solution, though. What if I hire you for a job that is 2 hours away? I guess commute time could be part of it.

          A better solution might be to require everyone to swap jobs periodically. Or, as in the case of double-ended fraud, provide immunity and compensation to any party who flips on the other.

          In any case, I think it would suck less than a pure welfare state.

          I’m not sure if it’s a problem if you get a $10 off-the-books side job. 1) You would be limited in the number of hours you can get subsidized per week. 2) A whole lot of under-the-table stuff is going to be pulled above the table, because that’s how the laborer gets the subsidy.

          EDIT:

          Somewhere reading the rest of this thread, it occurred to me that we could snip out the very bottom of this market. So the bottom isn’t getting paid $1/hour by your employer with a $9/hour subsidy, but instead $5/hour from empoyer with a $5/hour subsidy. This stops the “I hire you and you hire me” scenario.

          And we aren’t going to jump into this situation all at once. We will gradually enter it, probably by first replacing the EITC with a near mathematical equivalent of my proposed scheme, and then gradually lowering the “minimum wage.” So we will have some time to analyze the real-world scenarios before this plan ever becomes profitable for fraud.

    • NN says:

      I understand why foraging is no longer viable in most of the world, but is there really anything preventing people from becoming subsistence farmers? The Amish seem to have no problems living as subsistence farmers, or carpenters, or hand shoemakers, or other low skill jobs, in the middle of the richest country in the world. If they can do it, why can’t other people?

      I think that a much more likely explanation is that nowadays most people simply desire a lifestyle beyond what life as a subsistence farmer can provide. As hard as it may be to believe, this probably applies even to the worst off. For example, many homeless people are drug addicts, and it is probably a lot easier to obtain most drugs if you live in a city rather than on a small farm in the middle of nowhere.

      • Brian says:

        If you’re willing to do the work required for subsistence farming, you’d do just fine picking grapes in California or some other form of low pay, low skill work in the modern world, and would get considerably more value for your work.

        • NN says:

          True, which makes my point even stronger. Why doesn’t the underclass that would supposedly be better off as subsistence farmers take the same jobs that illegal immigrants are doing?

          • Aapje says:

            They aren’t as productive as the illegal immigrants, so they won’t even get the job.

      • Hlynkacg says:

        is there really anything preventing people from becoming subsistence farmers?

        Land ownership, more specifically owning enough land of high enough quality to subsist on.

        • NN says:

          Again, the Amish seem to be able to acquire enough land just fine despite very high population growth.

          Also, like Bryan said, there are plenty of low-skill agricultural jobs still available. You may have heard them referred to as “the jobs that illegal immigrants are willing to do but Americans are not.” But why are illegal immigrants the only ones willing to do them?

          • Thursday says:

            The Amish can acquire land because, as a whole, they seem to have enough intelligence and conscientiousness to do well in the mainstream, if they so chose. We’re talking about the really dumb/feckless, who are not going to acquire themselves decent land anytime soon.

          • null says:

            It’s not that illegal immigrants are the only ones willing to do them, it’s that these jobs are low-skill enough that companies can pay illegal immigrants below minimum wage to do them, and they don’t have to pay payroll taxes.

          • Civilis says:

            But companies can pay citizens under the table to work the same jobs they pay illegal immigrants to work. Given the perverse incentives involved, it might be better to take the below-minimum-wage under the table job and keep all the benefits than take an on the books minimum wage job and lose some of the benefits.

            The ‘freelance recreational pharmaceutical dealer’ career path is built around just such a model. Further, unlike drug dealing or other criminal enterprises, my understanding is that paying employees under the table for manual labor is relatively safe for the worker; if you get caught, the fines and criminal sanctions almost entirely hit the employer.

          • orangecat says:

            But companies can pay citizens under the table to work the same jobs they pay illegal immigrants to work.

            Illegal immigrants can much more credibly promise to not rat you out.

          • Zakharov says:

            I don’t know, but it might be because US citizens can sue their employer for paying less than minimum wage, whereas illegal immigrants have a harder time doing so.

          • Jill says:

            American citizens also aren’t as willing to live in substandard housing conditions– living 10 people to a small room or even a tent– and to work in substandard working conditions. And most are not able to do such backbreaking manual labor out in the sun all day.

          • Civilis says:

            The ability to rat out your employer is a deterrent to the employer, not the employee. The predominant memetic description is “the jobs that illegal immigrants are willing to do but Americans are not”, but what’s now being described is “the jobs that employers are willing to hire illegal immigrants for but not Americans”. How is it we have economic circumstances where certain jobs are only viable if both sides are willing to break the law? Also, isn’t this argument directly supporting the claims by opponents that the minimum wage costs jobs?

            Most [Americans] are not able to do such backbreaking manual labor out in the sun all day” is an interesting claim as well. It changes the description to “the jobs that illegal immigrants are able to do but Americans are not”. Why aren’t (most) American workers able to do ‘backbreaking’ manual labor? Is it genetic? Cultural? Every answer I have come up with raises a lot of issues.

          • The Nybbler says:

            How is it we have economic circumstances where certain jobs are only viable if both sides are willing to break the law?

            Those aren’t economic circumstances, they’re political ones.

          • bluto says:

            One summer I worked for a farm that employed legal immigrant labor during the year, and illegal immigrant labor as well as legal immigrant and non-immigrant labor during the harvest.

            They paid by the piece and the extended family of the legal immigrant labor would come for a “visit” but work.

            Along with citizen who wished to stop for work (they had a sign advertising for short term work on a nearby highway).

            Picking paid slightly better than minimum wage pretty close to a market wage for the area and farm labor is not subject to overtime rules.

            The biggest reason the farm hired illegals was the citizen labor tended to be considerably less experienced and reliable than the immigrant labor. It was short term work, so the US workers tended toward drifters who drifted on before the work was done, while the immigrant labor wanted to maximize their earnings during the short period to take a solid income supplement back home.

      • John Schilling says:

        The Amish seem to have no problems living as subsistence farmers, or carpenters, or hand shoemakers, or other low skill jobs

        Farmers, carpenters, and shoemakers are not “low skill jobs”; to make a living in those fields requires about as much skill as making a living writing code.

        And the Amish are not subsistence farmers; they prosper by growing cash crops for sale in the market.

        The modern equivalent to foraging is, e.g. scavenging for recyclables in urban trash, which I would guess requires approximately the skill, discipline, and hours of a stone-age hunter-gatherer and provides about the same material standard of living. As you note, there’s an expectations problem. And a reception problem, because part of the paleolithic standard of living was not being surrounded by rich snobs who treat you with utter contempt for only being a forager.

    • Matt says:

      I disagree totally. The problem is that the baseline for productivity is way too high. If you’re unable to pass that bar, you’re relegated to charity in our current setup. But this is not capitalism’s fault, per se. Through our vast gains in knowledge and technology, it should be a trifling matter to make a decent living. You shouldn’t need to be very productive to make a living in our modern economy. Just a little pitch in here or there should be enough. But it isn’t. This is due to monopoly privilege. Monopoly of land, monopoly of money, monopoly of information, in that order.

    • Neanderthal From Mordor says:

      Unsurprisingly, communism was even a worse solution to the poverty of unnecessarians than First World capitalism because soviet style governments offered jobs, not welfare, but there are people who can’t hold a job so they got no support.

      • anonymous says:

        Well, this is not exactly true.

        In post-WWII Soviet Union you were required to hold a job (Joseph Brodsky, Nobel winner, was prosecuted for ‘tuneyadstvo’, which is literally translated as official joblessness), and if you were not able to hold that job, goverment paid you some money for basic neccessites and even provided a room.

        Homelessness and drug addition were rare in Soviet Union, but alcoholism was rampant, because your work made no sense most of the time, and drinking helped to numb that feeling.

        source: I’m middle-aged russian.

        • Anonymous says:

          I’m from a Soviet satellite nation – over here, the way they did “welfare” was basically not enforcing that people needed to actually do the work. Whether you stand, or lie down, you’re entitled to the pay.

        • Winter Shaker says:

          Homelessness and drug addition were rare in Soviet Union, but alcoholism was rampant

          I don’t follow. Alcoholism is drug addiction, albeit to a drug which is legal to use in most places. And there are plenty of other drugs that also help to numb the feeling of your work being purposeless. If it was rare for people in the USSR to be addicted to other drugs apart from alcohol, I’m skeptical that that was the reason.

          • Two McMillion says:

            Maybe drugs other than alcohol were too expensive or unavailable for most people to get?

          • Winter Shaker says:

            Yes. Or the law treated users of other drugs much worse than they treated alcohol users, like in most countries today. It just struck me as odd that finding one’s work meaningless would steer people to abuse alcohol in particular rather than other drugs, if there weren’t already some other societal forces in place making alcohol the drug of choice.

    • TheAncientGeek says:

      Capitalsm is more than one thing How destitute the unemployed are depends on how much and what kind of redistribution is in place, which can vary a lot. It is reasonable to blame a cutthroat rather than cuddly capitalism for some degree of immiseartion,

    • JayT says:

      I would wager that the Venn diagram of “people that would fail in a capitalistic society” and “people that would fail in a hunter gatherer society” would have a LOT of overlap.

      • Nornagest says:

        I’m not so sure about that, but it’s an interesting question. What are some failure modes of industrial capitalism that wouldn’t have shown up in a forager society, or vice versa?

        “Eaten by predators” is an obvious one.

        • James says:

          “Eaten by predators” is an obvious one.

          Yes, in one of those two kinds of society, you risk being ripped to shreds by those more powerful and bloodthirsty than you as they consume your hard-won energy reserves for themselves… and don’t get me started on the forager society! Ho ho ho.

        • JayT says:

          Well one obvious area is people with disabilities. They make up about 30% of the poor in America, and I would guess the vast majority of them would do very poorly in a hunter-gatherer society.
          Low IQ people would be another one that I would guess wouldn’t perform any better in hunter-gatherer societies. If you can’t figure out how to get a low end job you probably will have a hard time figuring out how to hunt.

          • Saint Fiasco says:

            But you don’t have to hunt. You can be the guy who takes care of small children, gathers fruits/berries or cuts/prepares/cooks the meat.

            Physical disabilities would be much more of an issue.

          • keranih says:

            You can be the guy who takes care of small children, gathers fruits/berries or cuts/prepares/cooks the meat.

            I’m going to assume you knew that in H/G societies, this “guy” was most of the women, and that you were trying to make some sort of point.

            An inability to walk three to eight miles to the berry patch and physically skin the mammoth puts a dent in the contributions the gatherer part of the tribe can make. Oh, and no strollers.

          • Saint Fiasco says:

            Of course people with physical disabilities had a hard time. Or they just died miserably. But JayT specifically mentioned people with low IQ, and they at least had it relatively better than some people with low IQ do now.

          • JayT says:

            As keranih mentioned though, in most cases the low-IQ guys weren’t the ones doing the gathering and child-rearing, it was the women. Even then though, if we just talk about low-IQ women, I think the point still stands. The smarter gatherer will almost certainly eat better and be less likely to accidentally eat the wrong berries. Surviving off the land isn’t exactly an easy task. I don’t see any reason to think that being more intelligent wouldn’t be a benefit.

        • Saint Fiasco says:

          In the other direction, maybe something like “has severe dyslexia/dyscalculia” wouldn’t matter much to a hunter-gatherer.

          Scott writes about some other examples here.

        • Loquat says:

          Being genetically vulnerable to alcohol/drug addiction seems like it’d be much less of a problem in a society where addictive substances are rare and frequently subject to social controls like “this substance is sacred and only used in certain religious rituals”.

  7. E. Harding says:

    Random thoughts:

    * Just a day before this post was published, I had pointed out on my major blog that the past three jobless recoveries have mostly resulted from lack of strong manufacturing recoveries, as well as the burden of job losses in recessions being increasingly concentrated outside of manufacturing (click on the graph):

    https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=4xeC

    * The problem is not so much unemployment as high unemployment duration among the unemployed.

    https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/LNS13025703

    * The first major-party attempt at nominating a class-struggle type candidate (and, no, a rich plantation owner cannot be called a class-struggle type candidate) was in 1896 and it ended in failure. And it probably would not have been a good idea if he had won, as his major program was minting more money -something that was not correlated with strong working class success in the 1970s.

    Yes; the mystery of solving Asiatic poverty in Cambodia is a much smaller one than that of Ending Poverty In California.

    • Galton's Bulldog says:

      Inflationary monetary policy in the 70s was intended to stimulate growth and employment. Inflationary monetary policy in 1896 was supposed to transfer wealth to poor farmers from the bankers who held their mortgages, which seems much more feasible.

      • E. Harding says:

        Yes, but a key Bryan schtick is that he was going to be able to win the industrial workers in Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana as well with the same advocacy for cheap money. Didn’t work out; in fact, led Kentucky to go Republican.

        • Schmendrick says:

          I mean, all the populists talked a good producerist game, and according to that ideology there should have been a natural alliance between the people who produce value from land and the people who produce value from ore and ingots. However, in a shocking turn of events, the industrial labor force actually looked at policy stances and voted accordingly.

  8. DanielLC says:

    I think we should allow free immigration, but make the immigrants second-class citizens who don’t get basic income and who can’t vote.

    • suntzuanime says:

      We tried importing a labor class with a lower tier of rights before. It led to a really bloody war and then they got those rights anyway. Not recommended.

      • E. Harding says:

        Slaves didn’t come to the U.S. voluntarily; millions of contract workers would. A bunch of contract workers did come to the American West in the 1840s-1870s; they mostly died off due to lack of women, and both parties agreed that it was not a good idea to import any more.

        • William O. B'Livion says:

          Do the children of the “voluntary” immigrants get citizenship?

          If not, are they voluntary?

          If so, do they vote benefits to their parents and grandparetns?

          • E. Harding says:

            Did you post in the wrong thread?

          • Murphy says:

            @E. Harding

            ???

            William O. B’Livion’s post was coherent and relevant to the above.

            If the plan is to import a voluntary labor class without rights what happens to their children in important.

            If they also don’t get rights then you’ve just created an involuntary slave class. If they do get rights then it’s in their interest to vote en mass to change the system such that their aging parents get benefits rather than weighing down their children.

          • “If they also don’t get rights then you’ve just created an involuntary slave class.”

            The proposal wasn’t to import people without rights, but people without two specific rights–the right to vote and the right to collect welfare. It isn’t the lack of those rights that makes someone a slave. A foreign tourist in the U.S. can’t vote or collect welfare either.

            The proposal added a right–the right to come into the U.S. (or whatever country the proposal applied to). It did not subtract rights, since it was being applied to people who didn’t have the right to vote in the U.S. or collect welfare in the U.S.

          • neurno says:

            Yes! Thank you! I posted about this as being the natural conclusion to the problem proposed in Hive Mind (Jones). I was hoping others had similar ideas but got no direct response to my comment. We want to raise the average IQ of our citizenry, have plenty of labor force, allow humanitarian immigration ( e.g. refugees), but not overburden our social net… Solution: Allow immigration, but limit citizenship (and thus voting and social services). The resulting “underclass” aren’t slaves, they are free to leave and meanwhile are beneficiaries of our infrastructure (plumbing, police, etc) and economy.
            We increase average citizen IQ (and economic and political understanding) by granting citizenship to anyone who passes a difficult test based on IQ/politics/economics.
            What are the downsides to this plan?

          • Fazathra says:

            What are the downsides to this plan?

            That it’s an unstable equilibrium. It will end the moment one faction figures out it will gain power by giving suffrage and benefits to the non-citizen underclass in return for their votes.

          • Murphy says:

            @David Friedman

            It’s not the parents I’m talking about.

            ok, lets put it more frankly.

            What happens when mom and dad get hit by a bus?

            Little timmy has no right to social welfare services in the country since we’re disallowing these migrants from accessing local services. The welfare system, the health system, the school system, the foster system, etc are not available to him.

            His “home” state (where he wasn’t born) may either not recognise him as a citizen or as a citizen with the right to support services either since his parents haven’t been resident and paying taxes there or because he wasn’t born there.

            Little Timmy now has the right to nothing, there is no supplier of care of last resort and even when he grows up he continues to have no rights, had no education and gets to live some kind of pseudo libertarian nightmare where he’s subject to all the disadvantages of the state paired with none of the advantages combined with all the disadvantages of statelessness paired with none of the advantages.

          • “by granting citizenship to anyone who passes a difficult test based on IQ/politics/economics.
            What are the downsides to this plan?”

            One downside is that the test may filter for political and economic views that the people running the system like.

          • “What happens when mom and dad get hit by a bus?”

            You are now describing a very unlikely situation. Nothing prevents private assistance to orphans.

            “Little Timmy now has the right to nothing, there is no supplier of care of last resort and even when he grows up he continues to have no rights, had no education ”

            You seem to identify “rights” with access to government assistance. He still has the right not to be murdered, robbed, enslaved–the normal set of rights that distinguish free men from slaves. And government schooling isn’t the only way of acquiring useful skills.

          • Murphy says:

            Private assistance to orphans has historically been pretty unreliable.

            People kind of assume that people wouldn’t leave toddlers to die on the street but actual history tends to contradict that.

            If he does find productive work in a child brothel does Timmy have to pay taxes to his host country for all these services that he has no access to? I get the impression that the plan above was to extract as much wealth as possible from him to fund the 1st class citizens.

            He theoretically has the right to not be robbed raped or enslaved but if he actually is robbed, raped or enslaved he’ll apparently need to be able to pay the hourly rate for police assistance if he wants anything done about it. A right that you theoretically have which nobody is enforcing isn’t much of a right.

          • TheAncientGeek says:

            @David

            I don’t know why you think you can make headway by offering to swap ‘no one will prevent you from being voluntarily given X’ for ‘you have a right to X’. Would you swap a new PC with an extant warranty for a secondhand one that is advertised as ‘not prevented from working by any known force’ ?

            @Murphy

            Its rude to expect Libertarians and Marxists to put forward anything that could work in the real world.

      • Ghatanathoah says:

        African slaves came here involuntarily. Second-class citizen immigrants wouldn’t.

        A much better analogy would be the white indentured servants who came to America at around the same time the African slave trade was starting up. They agreed to be slaves for a few years in return for being brought over to America.

        As far as I can tell, the majority of indentured servants completed their terms and were absorbed into the rest of the white population. No bloody war. They got rights eventually, but only after a few years of hard work. I don’t want to make it sound idyllic, some of them were abused in the same way black slaves were, and sometimes they were assigned extra-dangerous tasks since they were going to be freed soon anyway. But a modern second-class immigration system would be much more humane.

        There was no bloody war over indentured servitude. There probably wouldn’t be one for second-class immigrants either.

        • None says:

          Many, maybe most of the indentured white servants did not come voluntarily. There is a huge amount of documentation of kidnapping and auctions of “indentured” people.

    • jaimeastorga2000 says:

      Unstable.

      • E. Harding says:

        I don’t think so. If everyone agrees they’re still citizens of their home country and they have to visit it every set number of years, I think it’d work.

        • Thursday says:

          It’ll work for the first generation, but the ones born in rich countries are going to start thinking of themselves as primarily rooted in those rich countries and start agitating for equal status there. Unstable is right.

          • E. Harding says:

            Make the requirement to reside in the country of origin to be half of every three years for parents with children, then, and continue the requirement for the children.

          • Thursday says:

            I can hear the protesters now: “It is so unfair that these people who have lived half their life in our country are treated like total aliens. It’s so unfair. Besides, being shuttled back and forth between countries hurts is hurtful to the development of children. They never really become part of a community. Etc. etc. etc.”

            I have come to see people who advocate for “key hole solutions” as utopian beyond belief. The prospects for this working in the long term are not much better than the state melting away under communism.

            See also Scott’s reply below.

          • E. Harding says:

            Hopefully, they’ll be so many of them, an excessively easy pathway to citizenship for the second generation will be considered madness by most people.

            And Communism was built on the state, so it’s far less plausible that would happen than the no-vote, no-basic income rule would never be subverted in spirit.

          • Randy M says:

            Yeah, it would require some kind of either deportation when pregnant, revocation of birthright citizenship, or required (say, implantable) birth control. None remotely politically feasible, apart from the debate ending rebuttal of “second class citizen?!”

          • Douglas Knight says:

            I think that the example of Turks in Germany falsifies some of Thursday’s predictions. They kept speaking Turkish and didn’t think of themselves as German. I don’t think that they really agitated for equal rights, but I’m not sure. But if that right had been money, it might have been different.

          • The ones born in rich countries under circumstances in which their parents had to work to support themselves are going to be, on average, productive rich country people, like the children of the massive immigration at the beginning of the 20th century, such as my parents. If they end up as ordinary citizens I don’t see the problem. They can help pay the taxes to support the children of the people who lived on the basic income.

          • Thursday says:

            If there are that many of them, it’s going to be that much harder to say no to their demands for equality.

            See my remark about the state withering away.

          • Thursday says:

            The ones born in rich countries under circumstances in which their parents had to work to support themselves are going to be, on average, productive rich country people

            Mexicans and blacks have been in the US for a long, long time. How’s that actually working out?

            There’s either some deficit in average genetic potential, or some insanely intractable cultural problems, ones that aren’t going to be solved in the next few decades, if ever.

          • od says:

            Strangely enough, the middle east seems to be solving this problem much better than the countries of the west, despite caring far less about the rights of guest workers.

            The middle east manages to have a lot of guest workers whose children are aware they will never be rooted in those countries and manage their lives by either migrating back to their origin countries or to better places in the west. They’ve been doing this for generations.

            I am a child of one of these guest workers to the middle east, I know that my family has done far better for ourselves than the extended family that never went to the middle east. This despite the fact that I and my brother have had to move out of the middle east and find jobs elsewhere and my parents have had to leave the country they lived for more than 3 decades post my father’s retirement.

            This is the standard life outcome for workers from my country who emigrated to the middle east. Emigration started well before the 70s, and continues even now, so it seems to have worked out for several generations of guest workers, not just my family.

          • Some Troll's Legitimate Discussion Alt says:

            Hopefully, they’ll be so many of them, an excessively easy pathway to citizenship for the second generation will be considered madness by most people

            “You think there’s “too many” people of _____ color in the country!? Well then, tell us what, exactly, you suggest we do about it?” *waggles eyebrows in an accusing you of being hitler sort of way*

            It would be a short debate.

          • Thursday says:

            I can think of several differences between countries like Qatar and the UAE, and countries like the US and France.

          • Tibor says:

            I thin there are two important things about the Turks in Germany. First, the German government originally did not want them to stay and they were expected to be gastarbeiters only. This limits one’s willingness to assimilate.

            IMO much more importantly, Germany has an extensive welfare state which seems to be quite easy to access (although I am not sure about the situation in the 70s when most of the Turks came). Generally, the US seems to be much more successful at assimilating the immigrants than Europe. Partly, it is because multiculturalism was/is (depending on the country, although it seems to me that the popular opinion is growing against it in most places) possibly much stronger politically in Europe (at least in the former western block) than in the US, also US is less “traditional”, the US culture is more fluid and not at all ethnicity based.

            It also seems to have something to do with the culture of the immigrants. Otherwise, I cannot explain the striking pace at which the Vietnamese minority managed to integrate itself into the Czech society (despite prejudices, especially in the 90s) while the Turks struggle in Germany (on average) and the Arabs in France are doing even worse.

            I don’t think that Czechs have done something better than Germans or the French, save perhaps for the laws which make it hard for recent immigrants to access welfare (and the welfare state, even though perhaps more extensive than in the US is not nearly as big as in Germany…also taxes are lower which is at least in part a motivation to work). I am not sure how much can the difference between the Vietnamese and the Turks be explained by a different culture and how much by different laws. Both probably play a role, but generally I think that if you make the welfare state accessible for long-term residents only, most of those who will come anyway, regardless of their culture, will be people looking for work and opportunity rather than those who want to live of welfare payments.

            Also, I think that Germany’s Turks are still doing better than France’s Arabs because the labour laws in France are horribly restrictive, whereas Germany’s are much more liberal – both are way more restrictive than US labour laws. Then even those who came to France to work might have found themselves in a position where they could not get any and they they ended up in a welfare trap and in ghettos.

        • Viliam says:

          If everyone agrees they’re still citizens of their home country and they have to visit it every set number of years, I think it’d work.

          More importantly, they have to return to their home country when they are at the retirement age. We could even send them the pension there — they deserve it if they paid taxes — but after productive age, they would not be allowed to stay here anymore. So everyone will think about their home country as a place they will one day return to.

          I think Switzerland has something similar to this.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      We could make a lot of win-win deals if not for activists who would feel lots of self-righteous outrage and protest everybody involved until they were forced to change the terms. But they will so we can’t. This is the essence of n–r–ct–n. The rest is just commentary.

      • Jiro says:

        At first glance that sounds like sarcasm, but it doesn’t seem like you’re saying anything so blatantly wrong that it must be sarcastic–you’re just expressing actual agreement with the Death Eaters while laughing it off at the same time.

        And it actually is true that this is a flaw with many policy proposals. Yeah, you could avoid a lot of the problems caused by unlimited immigration by not giving the immigrants social services, except it’s politically infeasible to not give them social services and stick to that decision. Just like it’s politically infeasible to have a tax for purpose X without creating a special interest group or bureaucracy that benefits by receiving the tax money and will cause X to expand out of control.

      • anonymous poster says:

        I don’t think that’s it at all. I think a lot of it is suspicion that win-win deals are even possible, along with a commitment to ensuring at all costs that, if only one side can win, it’s going to be yours.

      • Still Anonymous says:

        Come on Scott, how are you going to ban a word to avoid further engaging with a community, and then actively engage with them through paper thin censorship?

        It’s just Si-ly.

        • Pymander says:

          I always think of the movement-that-shall-not-be-named as “Petticoat Junction.” For those of you who aren’t ancient, it was a TV show from the 60’s (I’m too much of a technophobe to attempt a link, but you can find it on youtube).

          Not only is there the pleasing metrical similarity, the show even has its own “trichotomy.” There’s the tom-boyish redhead, Betty-Jo, who enjoys driving the train (obviously a Tech-Com), the studious and book-loving brunette, Bobbie-Jo (a clear Traditionalist), and finally, the boy-crazy blonde, Billie-Jo (whose nordic appearance and obsession with who she should be dating mark her as an Eth-Nat).

          Taking it perhaps a little too far, we can assign the infamous Mr. M.M. Bug the role of the Shady Rest Hotel’s middle-aged manager, Kate, and set up Mr. Land in a rocking chair on the porch as “Uncle Joe, who is moving kind of slow.”

      • Brandon Berg says:

        The activists like feeling self-righteous rage, so it’s win-win-win.

      • Deiseach says:

        Well, okay then Scott, let me be offensive here about applying a guest worker solution.

        Hey, you’re of Jewish heritage, so your natural homeland is Israel, right? Okay, let’s take E. Harding’s proposal: every three years you have to return to Israel to live there for whatever period (six months, a year) as mandated. You don’t get an American passport but you can have an Israeli one so you can fly back and forth between Israel and America for your doctor job. You pay taxes in America but you don’t qualify as an American with full rights to services like native-born citizens. And no matter how long you live in America, no matter that you were born in America, you are not nor will you ever be American.

        And okay, maybe it’s disruptive having to tell your employers every three years “Sorry, I have to leave the country now or else I’ll be permanently deported for not fulfilling my mandatory home-nation residence”. And trying to find accommodation in Israel and keeping two homes/two legal addresses. And spending time and money flying out and flying back. And always being reminded of your alien status because do the native Israelis think of you as an American or not? Where do you fit?

        That’s a win-win deal, sure?

        I’m happy to see such “win-win deals” implemented IF they get implemented equally and isn’t just for YOU PEOPLE but not us, the nice assimilated productive people who have nothing in common besides an unfortunate ancestral commonalty.

        I want the nice middle-class achievers to get it in the neck and then maybe they won’t be so utopian when it comes to “the poor” when they have personal experience of being shuttled around and told “march here, dig that hole, now fill it in”.

        • I’m at least 80% sure that Scott’s parents would, if they had Scott in a guest worker situation, then move back to their home country to ensure stability during Scott’s formative years.

          There are fairly good odds that they’d be taking careful precautions not to have any children while in a disruptable life situation, in fact.

          The problem with wanting the middle class to experience the situation of the poor is because the middle class, like the Fonz, often have habits and culture which limit their exposure to those situations in general.

        • Scott Alexander says:

          This is clearly worse than me being an American citizen, but (conditional on America being better than Israel) clearly better than me being stuck in Israel without being allowed to go to America at all. That’s what I mean by “win-win deal”.

          As far as I can tell, you’re arguing in favor of open borders. Or at least, your argument would only make sense as a response to my argument if we already had open borders.

          • HeelBearCub says:

            Deiseach doesn’t appear to be arguing for open borders.

            I think the argument is for full participation rights in the community for people you let in to the community, or a plausible path thereto. This is a good Schelling point.

            Although, to be fair, the guest worker program in Switzerland works this way. It makes being a guest worker far less desirable (which I think is a feature, not a bug) and I don’t think people do it long term. I also think it involves stays in the home country every singe year.

          • Deiseach says:

            No, I’m saying it may be okay to have temporary work visas (God knows, hundreds or more of Irish students went to America for work and money on J1 visas).

            But if you’re going to implement a “you can live and work here for forty or sixty years until you die, but you’ll never have the rights of a citizen and to remind you of that, we’re going to require you to periodically uproot yourself” policy, and then shackle that upon the children born in America, brought up and educated and in every way that matters as culturally American, but never permitted to be American citizens – and their children in turn – when or where does it stop?

            There’s immigration. There’s guest workers. There’s exploitation. One subtly shading into another is not a win-win deal for anyone, host nation or guest worker.

            Mostly, though, I want the children of immigrants who managed to get up the ladder and assimilate to think about how it would be like to be treated the same way they’re proposing to treat the poor – because it’s really inconvenient for a nice, smart, middle-class boy to have his college education and early career interrupted by either having to traipse off to Old Country for six months to a year every three years, or else have the “family stay in Old Country, father goes to work in host nation” (as my grandfather and many other Irish people did – go to England to work on the building sites in the summer, come home for the three or four months of winter, leave your wife and kids to live without you and you live without them) but when it comes to the poor, it’s not inconvenient for them, they don’t have real lives like real people, they’re not doing anything important, they have lots of spare time to be forced to do bureaucratic hoop-jumping and lots of spare money to spend on plane tickets back home, right?

          • Scott Alexander says:

            Deiseach, I’m saying that right now nobody can come to the US. I’m not sure how you think it’s hurting people to give them an option to come to the US under unpleasant conditions.

            I’m proposing something that’s at least a mediocre deal for poor Third Worlders. Unless you’re supporting open borders, it sounds like you want a horrible deal for them.

          • multiheaded says:

            Deiseach: *fist bump in case you are feeling like the only person here with something approaching basic decency*

          • Anonymous says:

            I think Deiseach is talking about dignity and Scott is talking about cold analysis.

            Consider offering black people 50 dollars, a pack of booze and a rap CD if they accept sterilization. Maybe make a nice campaign.

            Obviously a great idea, you are offering something, you aren’t forcing them to pick anything. They should be grateful!

            Yet for some reason most black people wouldn’t be thrilled, I guess.

            I say kill them if it comes to that, dignity is a real thing, irrational of course but still…

          • multiheaded says:

            Scott, here’s a modest proposal: why stop at the dubious Schelling point of “no political rights”? Why not keep immigration *illegal* but make border controls deliberately poor? People would still come to the country, due to their illegality their employers would have even more leverage over them (as with Mexicans in the US now) and thus labor will be cheaper and more easily controlled, presumably increasing demand, which would let even more people work – and boost economic growth, etc? Doesn’t that sound neat? Also no need to waste basic social infrastructure-type services like legal representation or humane policing on them, just shoot to kill if they are out of line.

          • Ruprect says:

            I dunno… it’s Alan Kurdi policy making, isn’t it. (Just awful. But I don’t think the reaction helped anything, or had anything to do with the problems)

            In Japan, you had the case of Noriko Calderon, who was raised in the country by illegal immigrant parents. They had lived there for twenty-odd years, but were deported when they were discovered. Noriko (who had lived in Japan her entire life) was allowed to stay in the country, staying with friends, until she finished her education.
            Seems sensible to me. Separate from the question of whether migration is desirable, if you decide that you don’t want people to move long term to the country, make it clear that it won’t be allowed. Worst possible case is an unclear legal system with concessions made for exceptional circumstances.
            Hard cases make bad law.

          • Jiro says:

            multiheaded: If you make immigration illegal so that immigrants can’t get the benefit of the law, one problem is that not all laws are only for the personal benefit of the immigrant. For instance, if the immigrants can’t complain about being paid less than minimum wage, that also affects citizens who get their jobs taken by the cheaper illegal immigrants. And if you deny benefits to the illegal immigrants, they could just try to steal the benefits–the fact that they have to operate in the shadows and risk getting shot anyway means that it’s a much shorter jump to normal criminal activity.

            Also, this only works for low-skilled immigrants who stay poor. A small chance of being shot dead or even just deported is a bigger threat to a skilled person who wants a middle class lifestyle than it is to someone who has nothing.

          • Jiro says:

            Worst possible case is an unclear legal system with concessions made for exceptional circumstances.
            Hard cases make bad law.

            “I precommit to expelling illegal immigrants regardless of whether they’ve been raised as Americans. This precommitment will, if credible, reduce (by reducing incentives) the number of such people who have to be expelled, thus making the situation better, even though the precommitment will make things worse for any individual whom I end up applying it to.”

          • multiheaded says:

            Why not precommit to sending death squads after them? Surely an even more effective disincentive.

          • Nornagest says:

            Because you’re not a cackling pantomime villain?

          • Ruprect says:

            “Why not precommit to sending death squads after them? Surely an even more effective disincentive.”

            Why not give them 10 million dollars as well as a visa?

            It’s a balance of proportionality and fairness within the society we wish to create.
            Somebody who shoplifts doesn’t deserve to die (and such a severe punishment would itself create really bad incentives), but if we’re serious about discouraging shoplifting we have to impose some consequences.
            It should be the same if you wish to control immigration.

          • John Schilling says:

            I’m not sure how you think it’s hurting people to give them an option to come to the US under unpleasant conditions.

            I think part of Deiseach’s objection was the children of the guest workers, who are likely to be raised as culturally American but denied US citizenship. Their only options will be to live in the US under “unpleasant conditions”, or live in Ruritania where they hold citizenship but e.g. don’t speak the language.

            Depending on how unpleasant the conditions for noncitizen guest workers in the US are, that could be a worse set of options than the singular “live in Ruritania as a Ruritanian from birth”. In that IMO likely case, the children will have been done a harm. Arguing over who did that harm is secondary.

            And telegenically-sympathetic suffering children are a source of political power even if they can’t vote. So the bit where the children of guest workers don’t get to be US citizens is not going to be comfortably stable. And if the children are going to be US citizens, you might as well cut to the chase and let their parents be citizens too – or you’re going to wind up with a huge voting block whose primary motive is going to be payback for the needlessly unpleasant lives their parents endured.

          • erenold says:

            Please bear with the non-American with the stupid question, who finds this debate greatly interesting, but somewhat mystifying:

            The premise here seems to be that the foreign workers can, in fact, bring their families to America and raise them there in the first place. Is this, in fact, the law? If so, why not simply prevent that from happening?

            I.e.
            1. You can work here if you get a work permit and a local employer-sponsor. If either of these are cancelled for any reason, at any time, you leave. No exemptions. Pensions do not count. (That addresses the problem of caring for these individuals in the long term.)

            2. Your spouse can visit on a social visit pass (or its American equivalent – 30 days duration, perhaps). She can bring your children on such a social visit pass.

            3. You cannot chain social visit passes into one big long-term visitor pass. You can therefore only obtain one social visit pass a year.

            4. If you meet a nice American girl, marry, and settle roots, great. We’ll chalk that down to organic immigration.

            5. Otherwise, you simply cannot bring your family over long-term as a guest worker.

            Does that not resolve the situation? Or do I, as is probable, misunderstand the objection?

          • ii says:

            @Deiseach
            >then shackle that upon the children born in America, brought up and educated and in every way that matters as culturally American

            and this is the crux of the matter, as a non-American why the hell would this matter unless you view being American as morally righteous and denying citizens who’ve obtained enlightened Americanism as being somehow barbarous and outweighing concern for the people who live outside the border since they’ve yet to undergo the purification process

            People can work at Yale as cleaning staff and their kids can be Ivy League in every cultural sense that matters yet nobody would be seen objecting if they then failed to qualify for college themselves.

            What would that sort of objection even entail? That it’s inhuman to subject someone to the conditions where they don’t have an Ivy League diploma? That you can’t imagine a world where innocent children are subjected to the prospect of not graduating from one of the world’s top colleges and clearly the people who want to hire from the lower classes are dishing out cruel and unusual punishment thus we must continue the policy of only hiring janitors with PhDs?

          • John Schilling says:

            @erenold: Even if we could prevent guest workers from bringing their existing children to the United States, the US Constitution is quite explicit on the part where anyone who is born in the United States is a United States citizen, full stop. Children of guest workers, children of illegal immigrants, children of illegal immigrants actually in prison pending deportation, children of terrorist infiltrators who are plotting to fill the US with a new generation of terrorists, doesn’t matter – if the mother is physically located between the Rio Grande and the 49th Parallel when the baby exits the womb, that’s a United States citizen.

            Also, we can’t stop guest workers from bringing in their existing children. We can make it illegal for them to do so, but that won’t stop them. And once they’re here, they are cute sympathetic innocent children and the voters mostly won’t tolerate anything that hurts them – like tearing them away from their parents and/or sending them back to squalid third-world countries.

          • erenold says:

            @John Schilling

            Ah, thanks for your reply. You make a good point about the democratic optics of tearing children from their families and sending them back forcibly. Hmm.

            Could one possible solution be to require a hefty deposit for foreign Gastarbeiter bringing their spouses/children in, even on a social-visit pass? If their womenfolk/children do not leave on time, or commit non-immigration related offences while in America, they forfeit it.

            The real point, of course, is not the money – the real point is to discourage the poorest of the Gastarbeiter (and hence the most likely to overstay) from ever bringing their families in in the first place. Perhaps this might have bad optics as well, but necessary. As you rightly point out, the set of options for the children of Gastarbeiter raised in America are quite possibly worse than if they had stayed where they were. And yet the set of options for Gastarbeiter is expanded, and their utility therefore increased, by having at least this option than no option at all.

            Deposits – which obviously must be many times larger to take effect – could be taken from the employer-sponsor as well, requiring them to make the Gastarbeiter aware of and compliant with the relevant regulations. Employers generally seem to be far more aware of what their employees are up to, and generally are far better at controlling their employees, than the state. As the Chinese proverb has it – the emperor is powerful, and far away.

            These are things my country does regarding our transient workers, and generally it seems to work quite well, with everyone – including the transient workers – generally satisfied with working here under those stipulated terms and conditions. But, of course, I’m aware these solutions may not scale well for any number of reasons.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ multiheaded:

            Again, your point doesn’t make any sense.

            You may say that the US government has no right to deny welfare and the right to vote to people who come here. But it’s difficult to see how letting them come and denying them welfare is worse than not letting them come (and therefore also denying them welfare and the vote).

          • erenold says:

            I agree, and suddenly I remember why I find this particular conundrum so familiar:

            This debate reminds me of when PETA offered to pay for the water supplies of Flint residents so long as they disavowed the consumption of meat. In that it’s very difficult to refute the objection that the only alternative – doing nothing at all – is necessarily, and by definition, Pareto-inferior for all concerned. I’d go so far as to say it’s impossible to refute.

            That has nothing, of course, to do with the trickier question of whether a particular society at a particular time may for some reason consider it objectionable on wholly subjective, arbitrary social-norms grounds. But let’s be absolutely clear – that’s a purely cultural argument, not any kind of principled or intellectually coherent position, any more than “you must bow to your professional superior when you meet him/her.” Which, of course, is a cultural norm in several countries, but which I imagine most Americans would find shockingly repulsive.

          • Jiro says:

            Things can be Pareto improvements and still bad ideas because they create bad incentives. If you look at a specific situation, they are improvements, but they change the balance of what situations are likely to exist.

            This is also related to precommitment. If you precommit to do X, that means you do X even in a situation when X would be a Pareto negative, but the fact that you’ve made the precommitment affects your chances of getting into that situation in the first place.

          • erenold says:

            @Jiro, would I be correct in interpreting your post to say that citizenship-never-possible work permits would cause Americans to accept such a state of affairs, when without such an option, Americans would insist on a more liberal immigration policy, i.e. eventual-citizenship work permits? Thus, the balance of possible future situations being made worse despite apparent Pareto-efficiency?

            If so, respectfully request two clarifications:

            Conceptually, my intuitive understanding of the concept of Pareto efficiency is that it should extend across both space and time at least to a reasonable degree. Otherwise, under your definition, flooding the market tomorrow with cheap, legal ketamine would be Pareto-optimal in that those who want to take it can take it, while those who don’t, don’t. Thus, the set of possible options has been expanded, notwithstanding that one tick later, the balance of possible situations is worse by any reasonable measure. To the contrary, I understand something to be Pareto-optimal iff the short to medium term is accounted for. If my understanding is wrong, please correct me.

            Substantively, I take your point and I think it is a good one. Still, request clarification as to the American psyche and mindset. As I am not American and know very few Americans, my confidence in my ability to read your country is virtually nil. Would Americans really pressure their government to allow eventual-citizenship work permits if never-citizenship work permits were impossible?

            I can speak only of my own country and my own opinion, but if given the choice of creating a permanent underclass or no immigration at all, I would definitely prefer the latter. Moreover, it seems to me that your suggestion limits American utility by forcing the American people to artificially choose between two options by arbitrarily taking away the third.

            (Of course, as you have not actually made any of these points explicitly, I apologise if I have misunderstood and am strawmanning you!)

          • Jiro says:

            No, I was suggesting more or less the opposite. You often see people propose amnesty or some other benefit that affects immigrants who are already here, on the grounds that it helps them and doesn’t really harm anyone else–that is, because it’s a Pareto improvement. “How can you ignore those poor kids who are brought up never knowing any country except America….”

            But if you grant amnesty, or if you allow people to stay in the country because of how they were raised, or if you do any of the other things suggested for this reason, you create an environment which incentivizes more immigrants to come in to take advantage of future grants.

          • John Schilling says:

            @Jiro: But looking at that from the opposite direction, you seem to be supporting a system that punishes one group of people, some of them unambiguously innocent, in order to disincentivize the hypothetical future behavior of a different group of people.

            I agree that this is likely to work the way you want it to, though perhaps not as well as you want it to. Find another way, please.

          • Jiro says:

            I don’t consider refusal to give a non-citizen something to be punishment.

          • erenold says:

            Ah, ok – I misunderstood you to be specifically critiquing on policy grounds the never-citizenship suggestion by Scott above.

            I agree that deporting an individual who has no right to be in a country is not a punishment, but a restoration of the correct state of affairs.

            I’d go one step further and say that that individual is not “innocent”, as John Schilling puts it, in the first place. Certainly not in the legal sense of the word. There was no offence as such when the child first moved to America, as mens rea was not present. But once the undocumented immigrant reaches a sufficient age to understand the law, his own status, and the illegality of the latter vis-a-vis the former, the mens rea becomes present and the offence is perfected. Cf the concurrence doctrine at common law.

            (Just to be clear – not suggesting that that necessarily makes mass deportation either good policy or good ethics, though.)

          • John Schilling says:

            I don’t consider refusal to give a non-citizen something to be punishment

            The net effect of raising a human being who speaks English but not Ruritanian, and then forcing them to live in Ruritania, is either punishment or malicious harm. If you want to but 100% of the blame on the people who did the first part and 0% for the latter, I better not find that you’ve been e.g. paying them to spend their prime child-bearing years in an English-speaking country, then taking back some of that in taxes to support English-language public schools, on account of you like having cheap labor around.

        • Anonymous says:

          Hey, you’re of Jewish heritage, so your natural homeland is Israel, right?

          No! I can’t speak for Scott, but my mother has had a genealogy hobby for the past 25 years. She’s been able to identify the names, dates of birth, marriage, and death of around 40 of my direct ancestors. Not one was born in Israel/Palestine. As far as we know not one set foot in that place until my parent’s generation. It is not in any way, shape, or form my homeland.

          • Tyrant Overlord Killidia says:

            “As far as we know not one set foot in that place until my parent’s generation. It is not in any way, shape, or form my homeland.”

            Oh? What about your Jewish ancestors at the time of Bar-Kokhba?

          • Anonymous says:

            I was referring to the forty identified ancestors. I have only very weak evidence as to where my ancestors were living in 100 CE. My best guess is that the group included those living more than a thousand miles from each other. If I grant for the sake of argument that some, but not all, lived in Roman Judea, so what? How does that make Israel “my natural homeland”?

          • Deiseach says:

            If we’re not giving citizenship to the immigrants, or their children (despite the children being born there) or their children’s children on down, why should it be any different retrospectively? If three generations of “born in America” still don’t give you rights to be considered American and you have to go back to “the Old Country” once every three years to comply with the scheme, why should “nobody in my family for forty generations has ever lived in Old Country” matter?

            If we’re going for “win-win plans”, let’s at least make sure the teeth bite everyone equally, otherwise we’re talking about re-introducing indentured servitude without even the possibility of attaining the right to be a citizen of the new land.

          • Anonymous says:

            @Deiseach
            Did you mean to post this in a different thread?

          • Desertopa says:

            Deiseach: If you make a set of criteria for attaining citizenship in a country, it doesn’t follow that you have to apply the same standards retroactively to every country a person’s ancestors have ever lived in. Citizenship criteria aren’t approximations of the process that imbues the Platonic quality of citizenship, they’re sets of incentives based on what the government thinks is in the country’s interests.

      • Jill says:

        This sure is a hard board to make sense of when you first arrive. Someone just give me a hint. Like what does the word rhyme with? Or maybe give me an extra letter or 2, LOL. Or a euphemism that means essentially the same thing as the word.

        n–r–ct–n? What?

        • Edward Scizorhands says:

          NẸ?-rєa?tⓘ?N?r?

          • Jill says:

            Thanks much, Edward. I’ll go look that one up, along with paleoconservative.

            I didn’t know about these things before. Such an unusual board.

        • Anonymous says:

          You can find them on the blogroll/sidebar as “those who belong to the emperor”. Writing their real name causes your post to be filtered, hence Scott censoring himself on his own blog.

          • Jill says:

            Oh, what an interesting sidebar “those who belong to the emperor.” Some of the other sidebars are too. But I don’t see the list of names that cause your post to be filtered there. Or at least n___y isn’t on the list. Perhaps it was moved?

          • Anonymous says:

            There is no official list, but I think jaime posted an unofficial one a couple threads back. The filter is for posts here, not for posts in their blogs – try responding to me with NẸ?rєa?tⓘ?N?r? without the fancy symbols and see what happens.

          • Jill says:

            Anonymous. You’re right. I typed the post with that word. And then hit Post. And the post disappeared instead of getting posted.

        • Hero/main character of the matrix series + “for every action there is an equal and opposite ____” + ram shaped zodiac sign.

          Even if I disagree with you I will defend to the death your right to understand what people are talking about. =D. I also like riddles, but that should be obvious by my D&D gaming.

        • jaimeastorga2000 says:

          Or a euphemism that means essentially the same thing as the word.

          Novo-regressivism. Death Eaterism.

          • Jill says:

            Thanks. Am looking up those too.

            This environment is unusual. And yet it is a lot easier to learn to understand than new environments usually are, because there are so many people who are helpful.

            In some new environments, you are expected to not even ask questions at all. So this is good here.

      • workedness says:

        You think its hard to silence activists? Never been easier. You seem to have faint familiarity with corporate public relations.

        http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/31/us/politics/pr-executives-western-energy-alliance-speech-taped.html?_r=0

        The company executives, Mr. Berman said in his speech, must be willing to exploit emotions like fear, greed and anger and turn them against the environmental groups. And major corporations secretly financing such a campaign should not worry about offending the general public because “you can either win ugly or lose pretty,” he said.

        “Think of this as an endless war,” Mr. Berman told the crowd at the June event in Colorado Springs, sponsored by the Western Energy Alliance, a group whose members include Devon Energy, Halliburton and Anadarko Petroleum, which specialize in extracting oil and gas through hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking. “And you have to budget for it.”
        Mr. Berman repeatedly boasted about how he could take checks from the oil and gas industry executives — he said he had already collected six-figure contributions from some of the executives in the room — and then hide their role in funding his campaigns.
        “People always ask me one question all the time: ‘How do I know that I won’t be found out as a supporter of what you’re doing?’ ” Mr. Berman told the crowd. “We run all of this stuff through nonprofit organizations that are insulated from having to disclose donors. There is total anonymity. People don’t know who supports us.”

        • Jill says:

          Thanks for the article, Workedness. I am usually the only person on any board I am on who is aware of propaganda and other covert tactics.

          Sometimes Moloch has a face, and has large organizations behind him. The types of destructiveness attributed to Moloch are not just a result of everyone’s random actions where all have benevolent intentions.

          • workedness says:

            “Sometimes Moloch has a face, and has large organizations behind him.”

            Yes. But people here don’t want to be hearing that. Not even a “sometimes” worth.

          • Jill says:

            Thanks, workedness. Have been trying to understand this board, and this helps.

    • anonymous poster says:

      Nathan Smith had an cool post on the 2000AD style setting that would result from totally open borders combined with a tiered system of rights

    • TD says:

      Why not just enforce the borders, do more to prevent visa overstay, and ban visas and emigration from places like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia etc (there’s going to be leak through other countries, but it at least lessens the effect)… ?

      It’s not evil (civic nationalism =/= ethnic nationalism). I’d rather keep incompatible cultures out than allow them in and then piss them off, which is basically what happens when progressives allow everyone in, and then far-right parties get into power because of the inevitable results and then make things more unstable by banning the burqua and genuinely pushing things in oppressive directions.

      My model for the 21st Century is a liberal triad:
      1. competitive markets (classical liberalism) to remain wealthy
      2. safety net/public services (social liberalism) to cover for the useless
      3. borders (national liberalism) to keep the whole thing solvent

      • Atol says:

        You miss out on a lot of smart people if you completely cut of immigration.

        • TD says:

          Well, you don’t do that. Be very selective about who is allowed to immigrate and you are fine. (Easier said than done)

        • Some Troll's Legitimate Discussion Alt says:

          Their homelands do too. Their homelands which, almost certainly, are more in need of what economic resources they can muster than the US is. An especially clever citizen of an impovrished hell hole could be the architect of an industrializing boom. if he immigrated to the US, maybe the iPhone gets 11% cooler, but homelandivania is still poor as dirt and are out one genius, and all of their maybe-genius descendants forever.

          The first world plundering the rest of the planet, again, just with the novel twist of the loot being able to say “hey, I wanna go!”

          • Anonymous says:

            This is such a transparently hypocritical argument. It’s like when the textile unions claim to be very concerned about the welfare of sweatshop workers.

            Stick to xenophobia, don’t try to pretend to be a unilateralist humanitarian. You aren’t fooling anyone.

          • Wency says:

            For those keeping score at home, we call Anon’s response “the ad hominem fallacy”.

          • Desertopa says:

            On the other hand, the genius in the impoverished nation may not have access to infrastructure which will allow them to take full advantage of their abilities.

            Say you’ve got a modern day Edison in Sierra Leone who wants to create an industrial lab to drive technological innovation. They’ve got the tech skills and the management ability, and can prove it. A wealthy nation with reasonable immigration criteria would be happy to have them, but they probably can’t get a sufficient investment or loan in Sierra Leone to get started, nor are they likely to be able to draw in a sufficiently qualified local workforce.

          • makomk says:

            Not only that, but their impoverished homeland may well have already spent a bunch of resources on training those people up as – for example – doctors and nurses before the West swoops in and plucks them off to make use of their skills. This is already a concern even with current immigration policies. Now suppose Scott’s proposal happened and other countries didn’t have to pay the political and financial cost of giving them welfare or citizenship. Suppose countries like the US could cream off the best those countries had to offer, get them to work for a while paying US taxes, then dump them back on their homeland as soon as they’re too sick or old or unwanted to be employable, letting that country deal with all the costs.

            Individuals would obviously be better off taking that deal than not taking it, since it’d hugely improve their standard of living for a while. Of course, it’d be bad for the impoverished nation as a whole since it’d gut their medical system and industry and tax base, and sooner or later the people who took the deal would have to return home and would be harmed by this too – but it’d still be in every individual’s interest to take it nonetheless, since the net benefit to them is huge and the harm is diffuse and mostly to people they don’t even know.

          • Saint Fiasco says:

            it’d be bad for the impoverished nation as a whole since it’d gut their medical system and industry and tax base

            Anecdotally this hasn’t happened in my country. Competent people leave to other countries but they don’t take their whole families with them, they send remittances(sp?) instead. Those families are using that money to send their kids to college and hopefully we are going to end up with more skilled educated professionals than before the “brain-drain”

      • safety net/public services (social liberalism) to cover for the useless

        The taboo question, whether ‘because’ of immigration or automation, is what numbers of ‘useless’ can the new elite (those with jobs and/or wealth) sustain? Because if you ask the taboo question you may be obliged to contemplate even more taboo solutions. Which is why most people just kick the problem down the road for someone else to deal with later.

        • TD says:

          If technological unemployment has made 99% of the populace unemployable, then machines are capable of doing all those jobs, including making more machines in lights out factories. The price of producing things will drop immensely because the labor cost, the cost of persuading people to work above their subsistence level will essentially disappear. It would be as if the economy was run off slave labor, only machines can replicate faster, and are hardier. Part of the welfare system could involve doling out slavebots to people for them to own, making everyone into some sort of techno-aristocrat. I also think that by the time this sort of thing becomes an issue we’ll be mining asteroids, so we’ll have more resources to apply to the problem.

          So, my super super speculative answer is: a very very large number of people, because prices would drop drastically in a heavily automated economy, and that means that most people could be made bourgeois (through the basic income), and we’ll likely have access to more resources that we don’t have access to now. At a certain point, the elites aren’t really doing much to support the masses personally, it’s just happening because you have an automatic workforce*, and in many cases automatic capitalists*. It’s possible to eventually conceive of public programs that require zero taxation to run, and under such conditions the distinction between a public program and private charity would disappear.

          *This will kill us if FAI isn’t solved.

      • multiheaded says:

        >It’s not evil

        Proof by assertion is one hell of a drug.

        • TD says:

          It’s not. It’s selfish (I don’t care about every single person in the world equally! Wow!), but if you think that’s evil you have no idea what evil can really be. Borders per se are not oppression. Hell, the wall of my house is a border. So, it’s not the borders in of themselves; you need something more to make that claim. With national borders you can say that there are people escaping hellholes, but you really have to factor in whether it is the belief systems of these people that contribute to making those places hellholes. You also have to consider the issue on the meta level of what the reaction by the locals will be.

          Europe basically has two choices; 1: either enforce the borders/control visas, preventing overwhelming levels of third world incompatibles coming in, while preserving liberal freedoms for existing minorities, or 2: keep letting them flood in, resulting in a right wing police state being voted into power as a reaction, ending with the crushing of those liberal freedoms in the name of security. The irony is that the third world is much much more right wing than us on everything to do with women’s rights, the rights of sexual minorities, and generally what is culturally permitted, and since I’m not right wing, I’d like some borders around my liberalism.

      • Anonymous says:

        It’s not evil (civic nationalism =/= ethnic nationalism).

        Hey, ethnic nationalism isn’t evil!

        • TD says:

          Uprooting people from where they’ve lived and settled for a long time because of their race is pretty douchey.

          • Anonymous says:

            1. Ethnicity is more specific than race. Why bring up race?

            2. That would make the Allies pretty damn evil.

            3. If they had permission to move in the first place, sure. Which just makes the situation into a choice between two bad outcomes.

          • suntzuanime says:

            The Allies were pretty damn evil. Hell, the Allies included among them the Soviet fucking Union, come on.

          • Anonymous says:

            Yes, yes, I know, you know, but not everyone does.

          • TD says:

            Why bring up race?

            Ethnic-nationalism is race based, it’s just that “ethnicity” includes other things apart from shared ancestry, such as language and culture in addition to race. Ethnic-nationalism therefore goes an extra step from civic or cultural nationalism because it adds in race (“blood”) as being a factor to define the nation that the nation-state is supposed to be for.

            “If they had permission to move in the first place, sure.”

            Illegal immigrants are one thing, but the kind of nationalism I have disdain for is the kind that wants to change the legal status of already legal and settled immigrants based off of their race. We shouldn’t even be doing that on any basis. Preventing large floods of third world illegal immigrants is a good idea for cultural and political reasons, so as to prevent liberalism collapsing due to toxic inflows. On the other hand, you have to maintain liberal rights to cultural minorities which are already established within the state, even if they are toxic, because if you don’t then you aren’t building a border around liberalism to protect it, but just throwing it straight into the bin.

            All illiberal politics are garbage since they produce winner takes all dashes for control of everything, rather than some sense of proportionality and an informal truce between different groups within society. Alt-right types should be clobbered on the head if they break that truce.

          • Anonymous says:

            Illegal immigrants are one thing, but the kind of nationalism I have disdain for is the kind that wants to change the legal status of already legal and settled immigrants based off of their race. We shouldn’t even be doing that on any basis.

            Why? Why should this particular issue be sacrosanct against legal change? It’s not like there aren’t plenty of examples of things that were legal, but later became illegal, or were illegal but then became legal. Hell, amnesties legalize illegal immigrants. Why not delegalize legal ones?

            Preventing large floods of third world illegal immigrants is a good idea for cultural and political reasons, so as to prevent liberalism collapsing due to toxic inflows.

            Liberalism is the cause of these floods. A closed-borders, our-citizens-only liberalism is at best very inconsistent in its principles, and therefore unstable.

            On the other hand, you have to maintain liberal rights to cultural minorities which are already established within the state, even if they are toxic, because if you don’t then you aren’t building a border around liberalism to protect it, but just throwing it straight into the bin.

            Just so.

            I, on the other hand, think that toxicity is grounds for expulsion.

            All illiberal politics are garbage since they produce winner takes all dashes for control of everything, rather than some sense of proportionality and an informal truce between different groups within society. Alt-right types should be clobbered on the head if they break that truce.

            I think you’re barking up the wrong tree. It’s democracy that makes power in society up for grabs – based on population, where immigration policy is of paramount importance – enabling and encouraging permanent low-level civil war.

          • TD says:

            Why? Why should this particular issue be sacrosanct against legal change?

            Because making that change means crossing a dangerous line in regards to individual rights, creating a precedent. Also, because trying to enact racial cleansing policies would produce so much opposition (I’d be among them) and of such intensity that normal politics would cease, and civil war would begin, killing millions. Then there’s the fact that I don’t want a racially pure state in the first place. Picking people out for removal based on the average traits of people who share their skin color/physical traits rather than what they believe is something I find to be unpleasant. I mean, I don’t even think Muslims (who are legal citizens) should be removed, so why would I want to go further and start removing all people with dark skin?

            Liberalism is the cause of these floods. A closed-borders, our-citizens-only liberalism is at best very inconsistent in its principles, and therefore unstable.

            That’s only inconsistent if you believe in universal natural rights. I’m a materialist and a moral nihilist (I think, I’m not educated in moral philosophy), so I don’t. Liberalism (and all political ideology) should be treat as a system designed to facilitate fundamental desires, not as an objective moral code. Liberalism is good because it is based upon proportionality and equality before the law. This is good because it means that no groups within society are afforded more legal privilege than any other, and this benefits all groups in turn, including whatever group I happen to belong to. If you choose something other than liberalism, then yes, your group might get to control everything for a while, but there’s no end of history, and when things turn around, your opponents will have no reason not to try for the same play. Liberalism is a truce, not a morality.

            It’s only by seeing liberalism from this standpoint that you can understand that it is vulnerable to those who want to defect and take everything (fascists, communists, Islamists etc), and since “rights” are derived from the state and not the magical equality fairy, it’s not inconsistent with the overall strategy of liberalism to prevent the state being swamped and taken over by illiberals. It would be quite another thing for the state to start removing rights arbitrarily from pre-existing citizens. Borders delineate the authority of the state which confers the “rights” (goodies, or whatever you want to call them).

            Yes, left-liberals/progressive liberals are the cause of those floods, but that’s only one possibility within the broad range of liberal ideology. Most modern conservatives are also liberals, only they emphasize their liberalism in support of the free market and defense of free speech. Liberalism needs reform, not destruction.

            I, on the other hand, think that toxicity is grounds for expulsion.

            But I translate this as “I think toxicity is grounds for civil war and millions of dead”. The Muslim problem isn’t big enough to justify such actions. It’s big enough to justify controlling immigration, not enough to say “fuck individual rights” and start repealing freedom of religion and so on. Carefully, carefully now.

            I think you’re barking up the wrong tree. It’s democracy that makes power in society up for grabs – based on population, where immigration policy is of paramount importance – enabling and encouraging permanent low-level civil war.

            Power is always up for grabs. Permanent low level civil war is actually preferable to the alternate, and that’s what a lot of antidemocratic ideologists get wrong. Liberalism is a truce, and democracy is just a higher level of truce. Instead of groups that hate each other bashing each others brains in to access totalitarian power, they instead agree to take part in peaceful competition and step aside gracefully if the other party wins; because they know they get a chance again in however many years between elections.

            Of course, the problem is that the one level of truce endangers the other; people can vote away liberalism with liberal (free party) democracy. So yes, there’s an unfortunateness to democracy in that any sort of prescribed rights are in conflict with the changing public whim, but on the other hand, removing democracy just means that the only option for change is a violent revolution.

            Truces also only work if both sides agree. You could hold out your hand and then the other guy puts a knife through it. Still, the alternative to trying to gain mutual agreement is no holds barred knife fights all the time every time.

            You are right that democracy incentivizes the importation of voters, but since we can’t have anything other than democracy (except the violent chaos of the pre-democratic era); we can only be left to fight mass immigration to prevent the illiberalization of the nation-state. Within the nation-state you have to maintain cultural, economic, and political liberalism, because the alternative is to defect and give in to the chaos, sending strong signals to everyone else that it’s a free for all.

            To me, an Islamic state is equivalent enough to a far-right traditionalist state. So, if my goal is to prevent the emergence of an ultra-traditionalist state, how does setting up an ultra-traditionalist state help with that? Why bother fighting it in that case? Why not just convert to Islam?

            Only liberalism gives me what I want, we just need to shave the rough edges from it.

          • Anonymous says:

            Because making that change means crossing a dangerous line in regards to individual rights, creating a precedent. Also, because trying to enact racial cleansing policies would produce so much opposition (I’d be among them) and of such intensity that normal politics would cease, and civil war would begin, killing millions.

            Ethnic cleansing can cause civil war, but only if the state actor is weak (such as in Yugoslavia). If the state is strong, such as was the case in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, the Ottoman Empire, or just about any pre-modern kingdom that evicted the Jews, the ethnics get cleansed. It wasn’t civil war that brought down the Nazis, did it?

            There is no doubt in my mind that if the US government wanted to cleanse undesirable minorities from within its borders, it could do so, and would not face civil war over it.

            Liberalism is good because it is based upon proportionality and equality before the law. This is good because it means that no groups within society are afforded more legal privilege than any other, and this benefits all groups in turn, including whatever group I happen to belong to. If you choose something other than liberalism, then yes, your group might get to control everything for a while, but there’s no end of history, and when things turn around, your opponents will have no reason not to try for the same play.

            The point isn’t controlling everything, the point is exactly the opposite – leaving 99.9% of the people in peace, not involving them in politics. Not riling them up to constantly vie for power to lord it over the rest, when they are not capable of that in the democratic process, prompting them to periodically revolt. (See: Ireland under the British Empire.)

            Yes, left-liberals/progressive liberals are the cause of those floods, but that’s only one possibility within the broad range of liberal ideology. Most modern conservatives are also liberals, only they emphasize their liberalism in support of the free market and defense of free speech. Liberalism needs reform, not destruction.

            We’ll have to agree to disagree about this one.

            But I translate this as “I think toxicity is grounds for civil war and millions of dead”. The Muslim problem isn’t big enough to justify such actions. It’s big enough to justify controlling immigration, not enough to say “fuck individual rights” and start repealing freedom of religion and so on. Carefully, carefully now.

            Freedom of religion is an illusion. There is always a state religion, and the state will always want to convert its populace to it. I’d actually prefer them not to lie about it, at least.

            Power is always up for grabs.

            Except when you beat it into the potential rebels’ heads that they haven’t the slightest chance of succeeding.

            Instead of groups that hate each other bashing each others brains in to access totalitarian power

            Instead, we have groups competing by relative population sizes for access to totalitarian power.

            removing democracy just means that the only option for change is a violent revolution

            Or accepting that things won’t be changing.

            (except the violent chaos of the pre-democratic era)

            You mean the pre-mutually-assured-destruction era. You’ll also recall that it was the French Republic who resurrected the Roman Republic’s idea of human wave tactics, and begun the era of slaughter as professional soldiers got replaced by mass conscription and escalated towards total war where everyone is a target, civilian or not, over the next two centuries.

            To me, an Islamic state is equivalent enough to a far-right traditionalist state. So, if my goal is to prevent the emergence of an ultra-traditionalist state, how does setting up an ultra-traditionalist state help with that? Why bother fighting it in that case? Why not just convert to Islam?

            Because I’m not a moral nihilist like you, and don’t happen to believe in Islam. The specific features of Islam (the totalitarianism, the excessive brutality) make it inefficient compared to, well, most other traditionalist ideologies.

            Only liberalism gives me what I want, we just need to shave the rough edges from it.

            Those ‘rough edges’ are core substance of liberalism. I don’t think reform is viable. Excise the cancer, instead.

    • qwints says:

      Are you familiar with the bracero program?

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bracero_program

    • Matthias says:

      That would make economic and utilitarian sense.

      But people in rich societies don’t want to have to look at poor people. See eg http://openborders.info/local-inequality-aversion/ and more directly http://openborders.info/second-class-residents/

    • Atol says:

      That second class citizenship is called a visa lol. The upgrade to 1.5 is the green card.

    • Urstoff says:

      Can I as a citizen sell my vote to these people? I’d like to sell it now, but I think these types of immigrants would pay me more.

      • Jiro says:

        Voting is based on the idea that you vote in such a way which maximizes utility for the country. The fact that this is done by letting lots of people maximize utility for themselves as individuals is simply because that’s the best way to maximize utility for the country, not because that’s a terminal goal. So it is possible that some ways people have of maximizing utility for themselves, such as selling their vote, can contradict the goal of voting.

        So no, you shouldn’t be able to sell your vote. Ideally, voting should be set up so it’s hard even to try.

        • Matthias says:

          Depends. In the kind of democracy that’s used amongst shareholders to run big companies, I think you are explicitly allowed to strip voting rights from shares? (Or in other words, sell your vote.)

          There’s nothing too magical about not being able to sell one’s vote. Forbidding the practice was a decision when designing the voting system. (The secret ballot adds an additional complication—if you can’t prove you voted a certain way, it’s hard to sell your vote.)

    • Nadja says:

      Some current visa categories for immigrants work a little like this. If you’re a foreign student or an H1B holder, you’re not eligible for government assistance, you have to be in good standing in order to maintain your legal status, you pay taxes, you pay the highest tuition, you can’t vote, and it will often take you 10-15 years to get your citizenship, if you do everything well. (Some people fail in this process, and have to leave the country.)

      Many American people don’t like the H1B program because they assume foreign workers will work for less money, complain less, and jump through more hoops, which weakens the Americans’ negotiating power. Now, the H1B program is very limited. I can’t imagine American workers would be thrilled at the proposal of allowing unlimited numbers of foreign workers into the country.

    • ii says:

      Pretty undeniably the actual solution for people whose main interest in the topic isn’t pretending to be virtuous while leaving all the kids arbitrarily living outside their borders to whatever fate. So probably nobody who actually matters.
      The whole dignity argument falls flat on account of the fact that voting rights and welfare benefits only translate to personal dignity in the world we’re living in aka where being the citizen of a wealthy nation makes you a human being and not giving everybody you meet that sort of acknowledgment is an obvious shorthand for evil. Somehow residency rights seem to still function fine as they’re currently implemented even as according to these predictions they should naturally result in bloody civil war.

    • LPSP says:

      In other words, the Roman model of slavery. Worked extremely well, was actually honest unlike our current system of slavery (which has the temerity to even pretend it’s free) and doesn’t lead to the raping of public coffers as we see in, say, modern Britain.

  9. suntzuanime says:

    Well, I’m crying. The world is a horror and it can’t be helped.

    • The Nybbler says:

      “The poor you will always have with you”

      Yeah, I know it’s out of context, but rather revealing even so.

    • Tyrant Overlord Killidia says:

      Life is the theatre of tragedy.

      I only feel apathy.

  10. Daniel Speyer says:

    There’s an important caveat here, in that at least national-level economic data paint a rosy picture: the unemployment rate is very low,

    That seems to have more to do with unemployed people giving up than finding jobs. The employment/population has barely recovered from the ’08 crash.

    • E. Harding says:

      Nope; discouraged workers aren’t a huge part of this, and this has been going on since the mid-1990s for men:

      https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=37TY

      I blame college.

    • Chalid says:

      Much of the reason for employment/population not rising in your plot is due to retirees. Employment in the working age population has been rising strongly and steadily:

      http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2016/02/yes-cyclicalists-really-won-bet.html

      • Miriam says:

        I followed your link, and then followed its link, and I still see what looks like a major flattening in job-growth rate if you look back a few more years (which since this particular graph doesn’t account for population growth, amounts to a decline). Admittedly the flattening seems to begin in 2001, not 2009, but I can remember people complaining that the 2001 recovery wasn’t a “real” recovery either.

        link

        • Chalid says:

          I am very specifically targeting the claim that discouraged workers are the reason employment/population has barely recovered from the 2008 crash. The second and third plots in the article I linked demonstrate that if you take out demographic effects a great deal of this goes away. (Note that those plots end pre-2016 and the economy has, as far as we know, continued to make progress.)

          On your plot, to argue for a change since 2001 you’d you need to take out the effects of the changing rate of population growth and of changes in the population age distribution.

      • eponymous says:

        This is probably the graph you want to look at (prime age men):
        https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=4xVZ

        There is a long-term downward trend, but we’re pretty clearly still below that.

    • Daniel Speyer says:

      I am unimpressed.

      So the ’08 crash was part of a larger trend of dropping employment. The crash was the general trend happening faster. That’s kind of what a crash is. So what?

      And “increasing retirement” sounds like a euphemism for “technological unemployment hits the old hardest”. Are these people retiring happily on adequate savings or retiring because they don’t have another option?

      • Salem says:

        Actually, the opposite is occurring. Retirement is going up as the population as a whole ages, but employment levels are higher than ever in the oldest demographics, and disappointing in the younger ones.

      • Chalid says:

        And “increasing retirement” sounds like a euphemism for “technological unemployment hits the old hardest”

        It means that old people are a higher fraction of the population than they were before. I don’t see why you don’t think that this is an obvious and necessary thing to adjust for. Surely you would grant that, in equivalent economic conditions, 70 year olds are less likely to work than 60 year olds?

  11. meyerkev248 says:

    Let people move to places with high wages.

    Right now, what’s happening is that the top oh… 10% or so have places where rents are 5x what they should be, but that’s OK because wages are 2x what they “ought” to be. And if you’re in the top 10%, that works out very well, and if you’re not in the 10%, time to move to Vegas.

    Which means that the not-engine cities are full of desperate poor people and maybe the occasional doctor or car salesperson makes a decent income.

    And while the rich people are yakking it up in expensive cities, because they’re expensive cities, they make ridiculous sums of money and then spend it all trying to not have multi-hour commutes or get the rare apartment with working plumbing.

    So poor people are poor, and rich (er, not-quite 1%ers) people are… also poor.

    /Of course, when a vacation is $1500, and a year’s rent on an apartment within 45 minutes of work and air conditioning is an extra $15,000, yeah, I finally made it out to Zion.

    • E. Harding says:

      And then they tell those below their ability to make rent to suck it up, as people like them are ruining their view, and that it’s politically impossible to build public transportation in the most Democratic-voting city of a fully Democratic-run state. That’s the basic gist of the comments on this article:

      http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/business/economy/san-francisco-housing-tech-boom-sf-barf.html

      • meyerkev248 says:

        Oh, it’s absolutely politically impossible.

        The problem is that as the wage spread grows, the housing premium is noticeably more than the rent premium.

        Or in other words, right now, you make $35,000 by moving from Dallas to SF Metro (San Jose is similar). That’s median income. Take out taxes, and throw on a slight premium for “We’re forcing people to move and inertia is really powerful”, and that’s the rough rent premium.

        The PROBLEM, and the reason why this will never get fixed ever, is that that wage premium goes up $1,000/year. It started back in the 1970’s and just opened up more and more and more.

        So the housing premium is not just “How much is an 80% payraise worth?”, it’s “How much is an 80% payraise today, and a 160% payraise in 30 years worth?”

        Or in practice, a $1.6 Million house (~$10,000/month at 4% plus 1% property taxes) rented for $5,000/month. And in my current zip code, where I’m paying $2100 and will be paying $2500 in August when my lease is up, not a single CONDO sells for less than $1.1 Million.

        Which means that a lot of people have literally millions of dollars (and keep in mind that mid-level tech makes $150K, or about $90-100K after taxes, we’re talking decades of income here) tied up in ensuring that not only does the problem not get better, but that the problem get twice as bad in the next 2 decades.

        So of course we’re not going to add mass transit, that would reduce the housing premium for living near work. (Of course, there’s 3 jobs for every house, but).

    • Matthias says:

      That’s an excellent idea. It will also drive up rents in those desirable places.

      The solution is to build higher there, and to tax away the part of the rent that’s purely due to the unimproved value of the land. (The second will drive the former.)

    • Psmith says:

      Trouble with this is that having poor people living nearby creates undesirable externalities. Hell, even growth can create substantial undesirable externalities if you happen to be a settled homeowner in the area. Zoning is one way that people who don’t want new people moving in (unless they’re sufficiently rich) respond to this, but even if you do away with zoning you’re going to have some mechanism keeping poor folks out. If nothing else, private HOAs/POAs. “Build more” is not really a viable program unless you have greenfields, in which case you need to deal with commuting.

      • Matthias says:

        > Trouble with this is that having poor people living nearby creates undesirable externalities.

        The solution is of course to offset the externalities created: you tax the poor (since they cause those undesirable externalities), and give to the rich (the people previously living there).

        Snarking aside, a land tax would make NIMBYs pay for the policies that keep housing in short supply. As opposed to rewarding them like today. (And thus would lead to less NIMBYs protesting; and more “Build more”.)

        Today:

        NIMBY sits on land with a house; lobbies to keep housing expensive, benefits from expensive (house+land).

        With land value tax:

        NIMBY sits on land with a house; lobbies to keep housing expensive, land under his house is expensive, so the NIMBY pays a lot in taxes.

        • The Nybbler says:

          A land tax gives the NIMBYs more reasons to be a NIMBY, not less. Forbidding improvements on land lowers its value.

          • Matthias says:

            I think it might depend on which government entity is getting the land tax.

            Basically, there will be a strong incentive (higher taxes) for that level of government to face down NIMBYs. (I think there are some more reasons.)

            But yes, if you get a zoning that allows only exactly your land use (eg “only Bob’s house can be build here”) the value of the land will be virtually zero.

            Don’t most NIMBYs currently like high prices? (And isn’t `this would decrease property values around here’ usually the underlying rallying call?)

          • The Nybbler says:

            NIMBYs don’t want their property (land + improvment) values to go down, but they also want to retain their current use of the land, thus they don’t want to be taxed out of it. Their land would perhaps be a lot more valuable if a 100-unit apartment building could be built on it, but that only helps them if they sell; until then, they’re paying the taxes for land beneath a potential 100-unit apartment building even though they only have a single-family home.

  12. Rafal Smigrodzki says:

    The southeast corner? Welcome to reality 🙂

    Now, I may be going out on a moral limb here, but why should we help the poor? As you note, the problem is intractable and attempts at solving it either don’t work or harm the non-poor (i.e. productive, useful) members of our society. Why not free ourselves of the stone-age desire to signal moral fibre by pretending to help the downtrodden and the useless? Why not admit the cold-hearted core of our being and devise ways to gently usher economic non-contributors and their genes out of our gene pool? A Conditional Basic Income (CBI), predicated on a willingness to forgo reproduction, would in a few scant generations work wonders.

    I don’t have much hope that this approach would gain traction in the blogosphere, since an unflinching acceptance of cold, hard truths is indeed very unpopular. On the other hand, the Age of Em is coming, so maybe the whole issue is soon going to be moot for those who ascend to the electronic realm and keep up with software updates to stay mutually useful. It will be a glorious future!

    • anonymous poster says:

      On the other hand, the Age of Em is coming, so maybe the whole issue is soon going to be moot for those who ascend to the electronic realm and keep up with software updates to stay mutually useful. It will be a glorious future!

      It will be moot for the uploaded copies of their minds. They themselves will still be poor, useless fleshbags in an era of perfect, immortal machines.

      • jaimeastorga2000 says:

        Destructive uploading more plausible.

        • anonymous poster says:

          It will be moot for the uploaded copies of their minds. They themselves will be dead.

          • Murphy says:

            But for the version of themselves pre-upload it’s win-win whether it’s destructive or not. Their future world line gets to include becoming a perfect immortal.

          • anonymous poster says:

            How is bringing a machine with vaguely humanoid characteristics that pretends to be me into the world a win from my perspective?

          • TD says:

            It’s your son! (sort of)

          • Murphy says:

            How is making sure that a vaguely humanoid chunk of flesh that pretends to be you still exists next week a win from your perspective?

            It’s brain is probably in a sort of similar state to yours but it may have some very different beliefs even though it shares many of your memories.

            It’s in your future world line but between now and then your consciousness will lose coherence multiple times.

          • anonymous poster says:

            >it’s a ‘you don’t experience continuity of consciousness from moment to moment’ thread

      • Hlynkacg says:

        Why bother uploading useless minds?

        • Rafal Smigrodzki says:

          If they pay for it, sure. Delete when they can’t pay for storage though.

          • Murphy says:

            Nah, auction off for extra dystopia.

            That way the future could include people systematically collecting ownership of all the stored minds of everyone they ever went to school with.

            Though with the way storage is going you’d have to be hella-poor to not be able to afford storage unless human minds are really really vast. It won’t be long before exabytes fit in a matchbox.

            even sticking to todays storage , using 20 dollar, 128GB microsd cards an exabyte of storage would take a little over a liter of physical space.

    • TD says:

      “Now, I may be going out on a moral limb here, but why should we help the poor?”

      Because I’m the poor. It’s in my interests to find crafty ways of making you do my bidding.

      • Rafal Smigrodzki says:

        It’s nice to have a leech admit he is just a leech, one who does not pretend there is a moral imperative for me to submit to his demands. It’s better to face an enemy in the open, rather than wage war against adversaries cloaked in hypocrisy.

        • Murphy says:

          Not going far enough. Need to extract economic value by harvesting the organs of their children. The livers from a scant half dozen poor families toddlers could keep an economically “productive” trust fund owner healthy enough to continue drinking heavily his whole life.

        • Soumynona says:

          All this talk of “leeches” sounds kind of like communist rhetoric. Perhaps there’s a certain spiritual kinship between crazy people on both sides of the political spectrum.

          • suntzuanime says:

            A centrist is defined as someone who doesn’t want to massacre the poor or the rich.

          • William Newman says:

            “A centrist is defined as someone who doesn’t want to massacre the poor or the rich.”

            Close, probably close enough for government work, since Left and Right were named after seating patterns in France, while Center was originally a reference to the power centers in The Matrix.

          • Rafal Smigrodzki says:

            Communists diagnosed opposition as a form of mental illness. Will you try to cure me of my beliefs, Soumynona?

    • GT says:

      I can’t believe I’m about to post something as saccharine as this, but anyway… Perhaps the working class and conservatives have had the solution from the start: the furthest you try to project your charity, the less you will accomplish. Instead of trying to socially enforce altruism towards strangers, with a political and economical policies that fight against our instincts, the solution could be a safety net of strong interpersonal bonds: deep friendships, nuclear families, close communities (which tended to be religious, but could be something else). Would we even need complex, badly understood economic policy (I’ve yet to be convinced that anyone understands macro-economics) to create safety nets if people had their friends and family’s backs?

      The media and modern life in general has been regularly attacking the instincts that lead to this kind of immediate community. We use social media to associate to a larger set of people in a looser way than we used to. Community pride is attacked as being non-inclusive. We shame people for wanting to prioritize their friends and family, and not helping refugees from across the world. All of these attacks are based on the idea that you could include as many people in your “protected” community bubble as you want, and get the same result, thus the only reason not to include more people is hatred or apathy. I’ve seen no proof of that, and plenty of anecdotes that hint at the opposite.

      • Hlynkacg says:

        Pretty much.

        Welcome to the party.

      • Samedi says:

        @GT

        I think what you have described is the best solution. Treat the problem as a local problem and then focus one’s effort on strengthening and empowering local institutions. Technocrats of all stripes seem to like the idea of large-scale, centralized solutions so I doubt we will see much progress on this front.

        I wish there were charitable foundations that were specifically focused on helping people in one’s own city (perhaps there are and I just don’t know of them?). It seems odd to me to donate to some distant, anonymous charity when people in your own city or community are suffering. That feels unethical to me.

        • Izaak Weiss says:

          There are and you can. Most cities have local charities, food banks, homeless shelters.

      • Randy M says:

        United Way I think uses as a promotional point that most of the money is used in the community in which it is donated.

      • nm. k.m. says:

        >family

        What if the insular community you are born in sucks? Either in general (alcoholics that are not much of help / authoritarian sociopath manages to create a living hell to other members), or specifically to you (damn you if dare to read this heathen literature written by atheists; conform or get ousted).

        >friends

        What about those that have trouble creating a community of their own? Finding friendships isn’t that easy. I hear many people build life-long friendships when in school. What about that introvert kid that’s bullied?

        In conclusion, how do you ensure that everybody has a viable community that supports them in a need? The thing is, it’s not like the government anywhere actively works on to destroy those communities. They *exist*. For some people.

        The other thing is, every day those communities *fail* some people. Some of them will take it peacefully and live (and then die) on the street when their security net fails. Someone might be more aggressive about when they end up in situation with nothing to lose. (And someone might even feel a tiny bit of guilt about the lack of altruism towards strangers, and want to introduce an universal safety net…)

        It rather seems that this is arguing for a position “fuck the unlucky strangers, and damn you if you try to make me feel bad about it”.

        • Anonymous says:

          “Sometimes fail” seems a damn sight better than “always fail”.

        • Rafal Smigrodzki says:

          “fuck the unlucky strangers, and damn you if you try to make me feel bad about it” – this is my position, succinctly expressed!

          • Nornagest says:

            Once someone gets to the point of proposing mass murder, my position is that the conversation has run its useful course.

          • Anonymous says:

            Mine is that we should exterminate all people with such a view. I don’t think they are evil or anything like that, I simply want a world where people care about unlucky strangers, it would be much more kawaii. Maybe use explosive collars to keep the lizardmen in line and harness their lizard skills.

            Have you considered that you, in fact, are the lizardman?

          • Anonymous says:

            Have you considered that you, in fact, are the lizardman?

            Of course.

          • He will be the last lizardman. Not the lizardman that we need but the lizardman we deserve.
            When all other lizardmen have been chained, he will wrap the chains around his own neck, as a single tear rolls down his face. The doors close, a switch is thrown, and the vault of the lizardmen is flooded with leeches.

        • Samedi says:

          @nm. k.m.

          I think your characterization of the position is uncharitable, at least according to my reading of it. You are, of course, correct that there are terrible families and terrible communities. If your community was decent they used to apply strong social pressure to influence badly behaved families. For example, neighbors “pot banging” the house of domestic abusers. Or nowadays the strong disapproval you will find for people hitting their children in public.

          But the best answer in a case where they are both bad is just to leave. I don’t think there is any way to “ensure that everybody has a viable community that supports them in a need”.

          • Murphy says:

            Case study:

            Amish community where it’s discovered that a girl is being raped daily by her male siblings for years.

            The Amish community requires the perpetrators to apologize to the community and spend 6 weeks in penance while they’re shunned.

            The girl is left with the people who’ve been raping her for years.

            The girl eventually goes to the external secular authorities to escape her rapists and is then utterly shunned and is utterly cut off from the family she had left by the same community because her rapists had already “served penance” and thus their actions should be forgotten and they decide that she’s done something far far worse by “failing to forgive them” and by going to the secular external authorities.

            That’s the real face of “community social pressure”

            it cannot be relied on even a little to be remotely fair.

          • Jaskologist says:

            Is that the “real face,” or is it anecdata?

            Case study:

            Underage girl is raped by multiple men, multiple times. They abuse her in a variety of ways, including pouring gasoline on her and threatening to set her on fire. They even kill her pet cats.

            Fathers in the community who got concerned about this and the many other girls being treated similarly are then arrested by the police when they try to stop it.

            If yours is the real face of community social pressure, this is the real face of the alternative.

          • Jiro says:

            Rotterham is not “the alternative to community social pressure”. It’s “a particularly bad alternative to community social pressure”.

            Pointing out that a government infested by political correctness does as bad as the Amish is a condemnation of political correctness, not an exoneration of the Amish.

          • Jaskologist says:

            They’re both bad arguments. The Amish are not a monolith, and even if they were, not the central example of community social pressure. Every system is going to have injustices that don’t get righted. The ability to point to such an anecdote means nothing.

          • Nita says:

            There’s a reason why abuse often gets ignored, hushed up or ‘handled’ as described above. It’s not an accident, but a predictable result of the needs and incentives involved. More serious measures can endanger the community (or family) itself, especially if there is any disagreement over the judgment or the facts, and most humans are quite sensitive to risks of that sort. So, everyone who could do something has a strong incentive to take the path of least wave-making, and communities tend to settle into a see-no-evil, speak-no-evil equilibrium.

          • keranih says:

            So, everyone who could do something has a strong incentive to take the path of least wave-making, and communities tend to settle into a see-no-evil, speak-no-evil equilibrium.

            And this sort of (understandable, human) see-th-right-in-both-sides, local community-based decision making is what we try to avoid by having hard hearted dispassionate outsiders with no understanding of local custom or the challenges facing the humans involved deciding our accusations of criminal activity by strict rules of evidence, prosecution, and a preponderance of previous case law.

            Rule of law sucks, just not as bad as the alternatives.

          • Samedi says:

            I am not suggesting that community social pressure is a substitute for rule of law. I think both are useful. Social pressure can act as early negative feedback to correct undesirable behavior before the police/law mechanism kicks in. Because Americans tend to be so atomized (at least in the suburban metropolitan communities I’ve always lived in) we tend to rely almost exclusively on latter and make little use of the former.

            Also, both are merely mechanisms. If the community norms or laws are “bad” then so will be the results.

    • Walter says:

      Uh, I think if you pay someone to not have kids they will take your money and have kids anyway. What are you going to do about it? Stop giving them money? Still a good idea for them to take this bargain, money for a while is better than never money. Sue for the money back ? HA!

      If you want to be all like “screw useless/jobless people”, good luck getting their votes. Your rival, who swears up and down that their troubles are not their fault and they all deserve ponies, will beat you in a landslide. He’ll get half of the productive folks, and all of the unemployed folks who can be bothered to vote.

      • Hlynkacg says:

        What are you going to do about it?

        The obvious answer would be shoot euthanize the child.

        • Walter says:

          If I’m like “your platform will make you lose elections”, and you like “nuh-uh, we can make this work by murdering people’s children” I feel like I’ve sort of won. Is that fair?

          • Rafal Smigrodzki says:

            It depends. The ancient Assyrians seem to have been quite successful running on the “we’ll murder your children” platform. History has a way of repeating itself.

          • hlynkacg says:

            See Rafal’s reply above ^

      • neurno says:

        There is, currently (but not for much longer), a simple technological solution: only women qualify, and they must exchange their uterus for the payment.

        • Randy M says:

          Swap it for ovaries, and it will work indefinitely.
          Swap it for testes, and you make the population more docile at the same time.
          /A modest proposal

          • Anonymous says:

            And the next generation will be selected primarily for non-compliance with this policy.

      • Rafal Smigrodzki says:

        Vasectomy and tubal ligation are well-established, cheap procedures.

        And yes, general suffrage is a bad idea. A properly constituted society would only enfranchise land or capital holders of some stature.

        • Matthias says:

          > And yes, general suffrage is a bad idea. A properly constituted society would only enfranchise land or capital holders of some stature.

          If you want to entertain such a proposal, I suggest making voting rights in every period proportional to actual taxes paid.

          Though, what are you trying to accomplish?

        • Anonymous says:

          @Rafal

          I would go further – suffrage is harmful and unnecessary, especially when the constituency is poor and not-very-smart. James Anthony Froude makes a pretty good case for this being so in The Bow of Ulysses.

    • Bugmaster says:

      A Conditional Basic Income (CBI), predicated on a willingness to forgo reproduction, would in a few scant generations work wonders.

      Moral (i.e., entirely subjective) considerations aside, why are you so sure of this ? As far as I understand, reproduction is a pretty basic human desire, so what is your evidence that you can easily suppress it with CBI ? Are you not risking riots and revolutions by going down that path ?

      • Rafal Smigrodzki says:

        The demographic transition implies that reproduction is not a universal human desire. There are many women proudly announcing they are “child-free”. A CBI would make it likely that this propensity in the economically uselessness would translate into actual lack of reproduction, without accidental pregnancies.

        Of course I realize that my modest proposal has no chances of being implemented but if it was, it would work.

        • Anonymous says:

          The demographic transition implies that reproduction is not a universal human desire.

          The existence of suicides and martyrs does not refute that living is a universal human desire.

          The demographic transition is temporary – the future members of society are recruited solely from those who have elected to reproduce. Whatever genetic factors that made them do it – in the presence of massive pressures against it, as there are in modern day western societies – are going to be more prevalent in their generation. In addition, much of the childlessness is the result of women failing to understand female biology – starting childbearing late does not guarantee success. They do want children, but are under the impression they can wait until their mid-thirties before starting on that project.

        • Tyrant Overlord Killidia says:

          “There are many women proudly announcing they are “child-free”. ”

          LOL These are the women who usually have other things in life that give their lives meaning; e.g., a ThD in Gender Studies (yes I wrote ThD on purpose) and lots of cats. There are very few poor people who proudly announce they are child free. Indeed, having children seems to be the one thing that gives their poverty-stricken lives meaning.

          But the discussion is specifically about poor people, not SWPLs.

    • Maware says:

      Because people will turn their cold hearts on you next, because you stripped the protections for everyone, not just the poor. I doubt you realize that you are probably just as much a waste and just as replaceable as the poor you want to get rid of, in the long run. The people running the show can always find someone hungrier and more productive than you, you know.

      • Rafal Smigrodzki says:

        Please note that I am not suggesting infringing on private property, just the opposite, I suggest strengthening the norms protecting it. “Thou shalt not covet your neighbor’s house” even if you say it’s for the poor.
        I would take issue with your claim that I am useless. When not engaging in silly debates online I do work, pay my bills, pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes each year, and yes, I pull my weight.

        • Psmith says:

          I would take issue with your claim that I am useless. When not engaging in silly debates online I do work, pay my bills, pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes each year, and yes, I pull my weight.

          The natural worry for many of us is that this will not be true for the rest of the foreseeable future, or even the rest of our working lives.

        • Murphy says:

          There are people with high incomes who are still approximately as useful to society as a rock.

          Take a Rock, it can be a nice shiny rock. Go get whatever pieces of paper are needed to be signed to grant it the ability to act as a legal receptacle for property rights. Then dump some money into a trust fund for it.

          The rock now “contributes” as much to the economy as some people who never work or actually contribute anything to the economy and live off investments, probably more than some since it never eats into the capital and income is reinvested.

          My proposal is to replace all such useless leeches with actual rocks thus strengthening the economy significantly. Money that would otherwise get wasted on drunken yacht parties can instead continue to flow through the stock market.

          • John Schilling says:

            The utility of trust-fund babies is as a positive motivation to people who actually create and/or direct vast fortunes. Scrooge McDuck, wanting to create the best possible future for his beloved nephews Huey, Dewey, and Louie, will behave very differently than Ebenezer Scrooge, who has no one to care about. And the Scrooge who wants to pass a fortune to his children but knows it will be taken from them the moment he shuffles off this mortal coil, will behave differently still. Which of the three do we think is most likely to build valuable and enduring wealth-generating enterprises that incidentally employ thousands of people in decent jobs?

            If the theory is that, denied the possibility of directly aiding their own offspring, the rich will instead devote themselves to altruistically bettering all mankind, I’d rather bet on the theory that has a few million years of evolutionary biology and a few thousand years of observed human behavior on its side.

            But this doesn’t work if you tell Scrooge McDuck that you’re planning to replace his “useless” nephews with shiny rocks. And really, you won’t be able to keep that plan secret. Because here you are, bragging about it in public.

          • Jaskologist says:

            Drunken yacht parties are an important part of the system. They rapidly take capital away from useless trust fund babies and disperse it throughout the economy. And there’s no tax shelter that will protect them, either (except responsible living, of course).

          • John Schilling says:

            Absolutely. Either the trust-fund babies learn to be productive capitalists themselves, or we distract them with the shiny while we take back the money. Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations.

            If the first generation is productive enough, indulging the last is still a net bargain. And in the meantime, yachtmaking is as productive an endeavor as any, easily enough retasked towards ferryboats or Coast Guard cutters if we find we don’t need to do as much billionaire-motivating.

          • Anonymous says:

            Drunken yacht parties are an important part of the system. They rapidly take capital away from useless trust fund babies and disperse it throughout the economy.

            I think the problem with drunken yacht parties is that they waste a lot of productive capacity on things like yachts. Lots of human effort is being burned and all we get is a boat. $100 million spent on a yacht would have produced a lot more utility if it was split up into 10,000 lots of $10,000 and given to poorer people to spend.

            Now, maybe it’s a bad idea to actually do that, but let’s not pretend that drunken yacht parties have no downsides.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            While a lot of human effort might be “wasted” on the boat, I guarantee that the meddlesome busybodies would want to redirect that effort towards some more productive purpose would be an order of magnitude more wasteful.

          • The Nybbler says:

            @Blue Anonymous
            That’s an argument against luxury goods, though, not trust-fund babies. Larry Ellison has yachts too.

          • John Schilling says:

            $100 million spent on a yacht would have produced a lot more utility if it was split up into 10,000 lots of $10,000 and given to poorer people to spend

            The $100 million would not have existed if the people who created it had known you were going to do that. Or it would have been created and most of it spent on lawyers, guns, and money in congressmen’s pockets to make sure you couldn’t do that.

            The choice isn’t a yacht and a bunch of profitably-employed yachtbuilders vs. handouts to 10,000 poor people. It’s the yacht and the yachtbuilders vs. the warm fuzzy you get from having reduced the yacht-owner and yacht-builder to poverty along with the rest.

            Or maybe it’s a smaller yacht, handouts to 5,000 of the most deserving poor, and genuine respect for the rich guy’s contribution. There is at least in principle room for some negotiation here. In practice, the ability of redistributionists to credibly promise real respect for capitalists has taken a rather big hit of late.

          • Dahlen says:

            @Jaskologist: It’s a point to keep in mind, but it’s not as important as you may imagine. The out-of-sight-rich take it as a point of (class) pride to buy the most expensive version of everything that is. (Except labour.) A large cut of the price that they pay for any given item is pure profit for the shareholders of the brand. So in that sense luxury brands form almost a closed circuit. As a simplified model, some rich guy buys Armani suits and Dom Perignon champagne; out of the prices of these goods, little more than the average labour cost goes to the workers who made them, and way way more than average (for that class of goods) goes into the pockets of their highest-paid businessmen, and the CEOs etc. of the brands Armani and Dom Perignon go spend their money on other luxury brands and the cycle goes on. It’s mostly the rich enriching one another. Those who self-identify as upper-class don’t behave like a rational economic agent in avoiding diminishing marginal returns in utility as the price of a good increases. They just go for rich-people brands. After all they can afford to.

            In case you don’t believe me on the profit margins, here’s a half-misremembered word-of-mouth analysis of what goes into the price of a brand-name perfume, by production cost (or profit) on each of its components:
            40% the bottle
            25% the profit margin
            25% the advertising for it
            10% the perfume itself

            I’ve recently learned that there are more expensive perfumes (by a factor of two or three) than Chanel & Dior. The fact that I had to venture into a super expensive fragrance store when I had nothing better to do instead of having it advertised to me a hundred times before means that their advertising costs are lower than shown here. The prices mean that their profit margin is higher. This is the stuff rich people buy. Draw your own conclusions.

          • Anonymous says:

            @Edward Scizorhands:

            While a lot of human effort might be “wasted” on the boat, I guarantee that the meddlesome busybodies would want to redirect that effort towards some more productive purpose would be an order of magnitude more wasteful.

            Right, which is why I imagined straight-up redistribution. That way we use the market to direct that human effort to producing whatever poor people want, instead of producing yachts. Net utility should increase because of the diminishing marginal utility of money.

            (I acknowledge that we may not want to actually do this because it will reduce the incentives to make money in the first place, as John Schilling points out.)

            @The Nybbler

            That’s an argument against luxury goods, though, not trust-fund babies. Larry Ellison has yachts too.

            Absolutely.

            @John Schilling

            Or maybe it’s a smaller yacht, handouts to 5,000 of the most deserving poor, and genuine respect for the rich guy’s contribution. There is at least in principle room for some negotiation here.

            Right. I don’t want to reduce anyone to poverty. Of course we want to preserve the useful incentives to get rich. But I think it’s hard to deny that poor people have a much higher marginal utility of money, so that from a utilitarian perspective there’s a lot of good to be done by a medium amount of redistribution.

            I confess I don’t understand your emphasis on respect. No one can promise that society will respect you.

            I guess I agree that respect is important in that we don’t want people to say “rich people are useless, let’s take ALL their money.”

          • Anonymous says:

            There are people with high incomes who are still approximately as useful to society as a rock.

            Take a Rock, it can be a nice shiny rock. Go get whatever pieces of paper are needed to be signed to grant it the ability to act as a legal receptacle for property rights. Then dump some money into a trust fund for it.

            The rock now “contributes” as much to the economy as some people who never work or actually contribute anything to the economy and live off investments, probably more than some since it never eats into the capital and income is reinvested.

            My proposal is to replace all such useless leeches with actual rocks thus strengthening the economy significantly. Money that would otherwise get wasted on drunken yacht parties can instead continue to flow through the stock market.

            I will henceforth be your number one enemy, because you a) are homicidally inclined towards me because of my retirement plan, b) apparently want to liquidate my grandparents (and shortly parents too).

          • Murphy says:

            @John

            That’s assuming that the majority of wealth is in the hands of people who actually did something positive sum to get it. Most money is old money mostly built on fortunes based on who’s great grandfather was best at murdering people and taking their stuff.

            I’m being literal with the rock example. Take the old money that hasn’t seen a productive hand in hundreds of years and drop it into lots of competing trust funds and let the money strengthen the whole economy while staying hands off.

            It should reduce the cost of capital long term since these funds don’t have the same yacht associated costs as real trust fund baby humans funds and then you leave them to stew.

            It’s essentially making it harder for pure capitalists to compete by introducing more competitive, simpler agents. Though you’d probably need something as solid as a constitutional amendment blocking politicians from asset-stripping them since they’re non voters and non lobbyists.

            It has many of the same problems as 1-off wealth taxes that occasionally get instituted in the real world but unless you do it regularly it doesn’t affect the economy much.

            In his pre-politics days even Trump proposed such a 1-off wealth tax (taking X percent of the wealth of everyone with more than Y assets) as a trade for the estate tax so even power-mad billionaires themselves can sometimes be in favor of such wealth taxes.

            Now honestly I’m not a big fan of lump-sum wealth taxes myself but they are a viable option that have historically worked without destroying economies despite the claims that nobody would ever even try to build companies if they couldn’t be sure that their great great grandchildren could still use the proceeds to live and look like jabba the hut.

          • John Schilling says:

            That’s assuming that the majority of wealth is in the hands of people who actually did something positive sum to get it

            If you were paying attention, you might have noticed that I didn’t make that assumption. Only that a majority of the wealth was in the hands of people the creators personally cared about, e.g. their children and grandchildren.

            Most money is old money mostly built on fortunes based on who’s great grandfather was best at murdering people and taking their stuff.
            I’m being literal…

            And I’m calling bullshit, or at least asking for evidence.

            The 10 richest families in America collectively control assets worth 530 billion dollars. Most of that wealth, $305 billion, is in the hands of four families where the founders’ children are still in control. Two more families, worth $67 billion, are run by the founders’ grandchildren. Fortunes in the hands of great-grandchildren and below seem to represent a distinct minority of families (40%) and money (30%).

            None of these seem to have made their money by murder or robbery, and aside from maybe the Hearsts none of them were among the great families of gilded-age robber-baron capitalism.

            Old money exists; the Rockefellers aren’t broke yet. But it is not nearly so large a segment of the economy as you imagine. Really, most of the wealth is in publicly-traded corporations that are no more than two generations old, not family fortunes of any age.

          • Salem says:

            Most money is old money mostly built on fortunes based on who’s great grandfather was best at murdering people and taking their stuff.

            Do you actually believe this, or are you just saying it for effect?

            Almost all wealth in the world has been created in the last century – the amount of “old money” is trivial. Did Bill Walton’s great-granddaddy steal everyone’s logistics operations and bequeath them to him? Even the dubious wealth has been stolen in the past century, because the stuff your great-granddaddy stole just isn’t worth much any more. Carlos Slim’s great-granddaddy didn’t murder everyone and steal their telecoms contracts, because they didn’t exist at the time, and Boss Tweed’s great-grandchildren aren’t particularly rich. Look at the wealthiest people in the UK or the US. They aren’t aristocrats, they are businessmen and financiers.

            A classic example is Fitzwilliam Darcy, the heart-throb in Pride and Prejudice – he’s an aristocrat who has presumably inherited his land over many generations (which you would describe as “his great-grandaddy stole it,” no doubt), and one of the richest men in the country, with an income of £20,000 a year from renting out farmland. If he’d kept his money in land, his income would be around £2m a year – still rich, but not even close to the richest people in the country, and not enough for the upkeep of his stately home*. The other normal investing opportunity for people of his time was to put his money in government bonds – if he’d done so, he’d still have an income of £20,000 a year, and be poor.

            The only way for Fitzwilliam Darcy to still be one of the richest people in the country would be to continually transform his capital into whatever was going to be successful at the time – sell his land and invest in railroads, then sell his rail stock and invest in electricity, and so on, while not making missteps, and not spending too much. But (1) this is really hard, which is why the old aristocrats are mostly not rich at all and (2) continually directing resources into the areas of the economy that most need them is productive work – it’s basically being a financier.

            *Reality would be even worse than that, because Death Duties and Inheritance Tax would have wiped out his holdings over the generations, and almost certainly the holdings would be dispersed over many heirs.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            @ Salem:

            Exactly. Very well said.

          • Anonymous says:

            I will henceforth be your number one enemy, because you a) are homicidally inclined towards me because of my retirement plan, b) apparently want to liquidate my grandparents (and shortly parents too).

            Given that elsewhere in this thread you are advocating mass ethnic cleansing it’s a little hard to take your moral outrage seriously.

          • Murphy says:

            The forbes rich list and similar are lists of the wealthy who also want publicity.

            Keep in mind that just a few years ago it turned out that Qaddafi was effectively richer than the 3 top people on the Forbes rich list combined. (though they clearly state that they exclude people like dictators and kings who’s holdings blur with those of the states they control)

            http://www.businessinsider.com/qaddafi-200-billion-richest-2011-10?IR=T

            (It’s apparently lucrative to be a dictator in a country with lots of oil reserves and is pretty close to the mark of a job that tends to involve killing people and taking their stuff)

            Old money families are rarely stupid enough to make a lot of noise so it’s reasonable to expect that there’s a fair number of spectacularly wealthy families that you’ll never ever see listed on the forbes 400.

            Moving money into reasonably profitable ventures that beat inflation is pretty much what hedge funds are supposed to do.

            Lots of wealth was created in the last century but ask any startup founder and you’ll find that the lions share of the wealth (quite reasonably) tends to end up in the hands of investors rather than employees or founders. My contention is that the system still works fine if some of those VC firms are bankrolled by funds belonging to wealth-receptical-rocks.

          • John Schilling says:

            @Murphy: So, instead of evidence, what you have is a conspiracy theory in which the absence of evidence confirms that the old-money conspiracy exists because hiding evidence of its existence is what the old-money conspiracy does.

            I do not believe it is possible to hide hundred-billion-dollar accumulations of real wealth from people who are looking for them. I will require evidence if I am to take you seriously on this matter.

          • Anonymous says:

            Given that elsewhere in this thread you are advocating mass ethnic cleansing it’s a little hard to take your moral outrage seriously.

            That’s misrepresentation of my position and putting words in my mouth, and you know it.

        • Anonymous says:

          I would take issue with your claim that I am useless. When not engaging in silly debates online I do work, pay my bills, pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes each year, and yes, I pull my weight.

          As I tried to explain to Hlynkacg in a prior thread, though I’m not sure he understood the point, taxes paid is only one half of the ledger. If, to take a random example, the income from which you paid those hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes came from Pratt & Whitney for service rendered in lobbying on their behalf with respect to the F-35 project than you’d not merely be useless to our society but affirmatively harmful.

          • Murphy says:

            Or more generally, if you constantly participate in negative sum transactions and/or rent seeking you can end up with a high income while still making the society around you poorer and worse off than if you’d never existed.

          • Rafal Smigrodzki says:

            No, I never lobbied for the F-35.

            As to the pulling-my-weight claim (which is indeed separate from paying taxes) I treat stroke, seizures and similar afflictions for a living.

        • anonymous says:

          >I would take issue with your claim that I am useless. When not engaging in silly debates online I do work, pay my bills, pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes each year, and yes, I pull my weight.

          You’re worse than useless. You’re murderous.

          • Rafal Smigrodzki says:

            Really? Oy vey, the hyperbole, it hurts!

            Relax, Boy/Girl Anonymous.

            Be nice.

          • Anonymous says:

            Paying taxes is murder? Who would have thought!

          • The Nybbler says:

            @purplish anon
            Leftists. If I had a dollar for every time I heard that I was complicit in “Bush’s war crimes” or whatever because I was an American who supports the US Government with my taxes, I’d probably be in a higher tax bracket.

          • Corey says:

            @Anonymous: I know of a few (admittedly pretty hardcore) Iraq War protestors who switched to low-paying jobs so as to not support said war with their tax dollars.

          • Jill says:

            Anon, no paying taxes is not murder. This is a Libertarian board. Paying taxes is worse than murder, LOL.

            Corey– interesting. Yes, I’ve known people who refused to pay taxes at all for that reason. Most got in trouble with the law.

          • Anonymous says:

            I’m sorry complexity is difficult for you, but there’s more the world than “Jill is totally right about everything” and “hardcore Ayn Rand libertarians LOL”.

          • Anonymous says:

            Anon, no paying taxes is not murder. This is a Libertarian board. Paying taxes is worse than murder, LOL.

            Well, jokes aside, it isn’t really a libertarian board. There are libertarians here, but the proprietor here has a big ol’ document up where he explains at length why and how he is not one.

          • TD says:

            I’m basically a libertarian, and I support welfare programs. I don’t think that taxes and business regulations are the same thing.

            There’s a lot of diversity in libertarianism, since all you have to do to be classed as a libertarian is to prioritize individualism in your politics over other concerns.

          • “all you have to do to be classed as a libertarian”

            All you have to do to call yourself a libertarian is to call yourself a libertarian. What you have to do to get other people to classify you as a libertarian depends on those other people. For many of them, it’s more than prioritizing individualism. For quite a lot, supporting welfare programs funded by taxation marks someone as not a libertarian.

            My own view is that treating “libertarian” as a binary category (you are or are not) is a mistake. Some people are more libertarian than others, or more libertarian on some dimensions and less on other.

    • jes5199 says:

      Why should the non-poor bother keeping any power? I think it would be better for the rich to engineer *ourselves* out of existence – what’s so great about being useful or producing things? The only application of technology that’s not an endless hedonistic treadmill is voluntary extinction.

      • Anonymous says:

        Not to be rude, but why aren’t you committing suicide right now? Honest question.

        • jes5199 says:

          A single person committing suicide doesn’t change anything – there would still be millions of people more or less like me and you. And I like existing. No one above is quite proposing slaughtering the living poor just because we imagine their lives are miserable – our commenter friends just want that class of existence to stop happening. I want the same thing, I just have a different judgement about what types of existence have negative ultimate utility (or whatever the pseudo-academic phrase is that people are using to justify proposals to enshrine their unreflecting narrow preferences in actual replacement to the ancient evolved machinery of the world that gave them life)

          • Immortal Lurker says:

            I also hope that my questions are respectful. People for voluntary human extinction don’t usually bring it up in casual conversation, so I just have no idea what they actually think on a couple of topics.

            You say that you like existing, but that existing is against your terminal values (I think that is the pseudo-academic phrase these days…). Is this an average vs marginal sort of thing?

            Also, what value of yours is supported by humans going extinct? My three best guesses are animal welfare, reducing human suffering, and the purity of nature.

            Do you have an idealized version of how the extinction would happen? Does everyone just stop having children, or does everyone kill themselves at some point?

            I’m not trying to convince you of anything, though I might dicker back and forth for a few posts. I’m just trying to fill in an area of my map that is currently tiled with questions marks.

          • jes5199 says:

            I’m not really quite a voluntary human extinctionist.

            If you want to hear a rational, reasonable argument in favor of non-existence, I recommend Sarah Perry’s book “Every Cradle is a Grave: Rethinking the Ethics of Birth and Suicide”.

            Don’t expect me to make such an argument.

            I, personally, don’t actually have terminal values. I don’t think suffering can be “reduced” – I think it will come when it comes, and that as sentient beings our only choice is whether or not to try to mitigate it somewhat, i.e., whether to be kind.

            I think that some of our friends in this forum are committing incredible hubris to think that they can change what sorts of things emerge in reality. They want to change the fundamental forces. I think they think they can replace it with software, because software works so well and never has unintended consequences? I think this is a half-assed measure that cannot work.

            It is not sufficient to eliminate the poor, because we will be unable to prevent forming another underclass.
            It would not be sufficient to eliminate humans, because there are plenty of great apes who would just evolve language in a few millennia.
            It would not be sufficient to eliminate apes because pandas already have opposable thumbs.
            It would not be sufficient to eliminate multicellular life, because microorganisms will always learn to form colonies.
            It would not be sufficient to eliminate all DNA, because matter trends towards self-organization.

            If we must intervene, we must do it the whole way, and completely stop the gears of the universe from turning. My understanding is that there are several philosophies and religions that already consider this to be moral, unlike other forms of genocide.

          • Immortal Lurker says:

            Thanks for the book recommendation. I’ve seen that one mentioned here before, but I guess I should read it to counterbalance my technophile/Whig history tendencies.

            If the big picture amount suffering can’t be reduced, do you think it can be increased, or changed at all? My understanding of history is pretty limited, but it really looks like it the amount of suffering can be changed, at least on the geographic scale of countries/regions, over the timescale of decades/centuries.

            The three examples that I am thinking of are the thirty years war, the black death, and the eradication of polio.

            The first two seem like the big picture level of suffering temporarily increasing on a regional to continental scale. The third seems like the big picture level of suffering decreasing on a global scale.

            Are certain types of suffering which can be reduced, and certain kinds which can’t? Or is something as bad as the thirty years war or the black death simply something that happens every century or so, and can’t be avoided? I can see modern examples in Syria and the Spanish influenza.

            The Spanish influenza is probably a very good equivalent, but Syria does not seem as bad as the thirty years war. Maybe I am mistaken.

            The third example though, seems to be an example of something getting permanently better. I’m guessing polio eradication is brought up to your attention approximately every time this topic comes up, so you probably have a counter argument. Do you think that if people can’t get polio, another disease which is just as bad will grow until approximately the same amount of suffering is caused?

            Or am I barking up entirely the wrong tree here, and you are referring only social suffering? Things like, inequality, loneliness, abusive relationships, etc.

  13. Jiro says:

    When you respond to three random Internet articles about subject X, how do you avoid weak-manning?

  14. Eric L says:

    “And part of me wonders – if setting up a social safety net would slow domestic economic growth – or even divert money that would otherwise go to foreign aid – does that make it a net negative?”

    Hardly any money goes to foreign aid; that’s not how successful developing countries have developed. Also, it seems likely to me that the poor will spend a larger portion of their income on cheap goods from developing countries, so it seems just as plausible to me that a basic income here would help third world countries develop.

  15. Thursday says:

    One of the things that annoys me about DeBoer is that he will rage against any hierarchy based on deserts, and then describe how he couldn’t even run a dinky peace protest without that kind of hierarchy. I hardly think that economic resources are distributed fairly in our society, but what we have is a lot more fair than the kind of non-hierarchical society DeBoer and others advocate for.

  16. J says:

    I’m starting to get fairly cranky about the “technological unemployment, basic income” meme, so I’m going to rant for a bit.

    I see techies saying “gee, I dunno if I should work on this, wouldn’t want to put someone out of a job”, which… I literally can’t. even. I mean, go back to 1807 and imagine that’s Eli Whitney going “gee, automating agriculture would put /basically everyone/ out of work, maybe I should just scrap this cotton gin thing.” And I see people arguing that economizing a task harms people that were doing it less efficiently, so they should be compensated. I’m *pretty* sure we’re smarter than that on SSC, but I see way too many smart people kind of nodding along to this without paying attention.

    Apparently we’re calling it the Luddite Fallacy when people don’t buy the technological unemployment thing, because apparently every argument we disagree with is not just unsupported, but an error of logic. (Also: “false analogy” and “false equivalency”, which… don’t even get me started on those.) And the crux of that argument is that if super AI ever comes along then we’ll be out of work, so technological unemployment must be inevitable (and thus basic income or whatever). Which, okay, sure, and a supernova would also cause sunburns but that doesn’t mean we should subsidize sunscreen companies. The existence proof isn’t enough: if there’s going to be an implied “thus basic income”, you have to show that it’s happening now or going to happen in some specific timeframe where that solution would actually help.

    As to basic income, if we can’t trust the government to even admit how many unemployed people there are, why would we trust them enough to double their budget and handle everybody’s expenses? Even if we did, as Scott points out, one of the big problems is unbounded spending (and I see that in my personal circle for both poor folks and people with six figure incomes). (I have more objections here for later).

    • anonymous poster says:

      Apparently we’re calling it the Luddite Fallacy when people don’t buy the technological unemployment thing, because apparently every argument we disagree with is not just unsupported, but an error of logic.

      No, the Luddite Fallacy is the term for when people do buy the technological employment thing.

      • J says:

        Oh neat, thanks, I looked it up before and ended up 180 degrees off; must have been skimming too fast.

        • anonymous poster says:

          The problem arises from the people who do believe it referring to the ones that don’t as the Luddite Fallacy Fallacy

    • E. Harding says:

      My problem with the basic income is that there will be immediate demands for it to be raised. And raised. And raised. And raised. And Donald Trump will promise not to touch it. And he won’t. Don’t we already have a pretty big entitlement expenses problem in America?

      • Miriam says:

        Why do you assume that?

        Alaska has had a proto-basic income for decades (the Alaska Permanent Fund dividend) and the only changes I have ever heard proposed are cutting it. I’m far more worried about the opposite problem: politicians using the threat of reducing or eliminating the UBI to keep the population in line.

        • E. Harding says:

          Is it truly universal? I’ve never heard of it.

          Social Security and Medicare, for example, are sacrosanct in America. Even Paul Ryan regards them as too important to be significantly interfered with. And when Social Security extends to every American, I expect the same instinct to continue.

          And we live in a democracy; politicians aren’t stupid enough to threaten people like that.

          • E. Harding says:

            Seems pretty universal.

            Interesting how demands for it to be cut look more like the general reaction to means-tested cash grants than non-means-tested ones.

            I wonder why isn’t there a big demand for it to be raised. People like money.

          • Miriam says:

            It’s universal, but it’s not enough to live on.

            I actually think Social Security is a pretty good analogy for this, too, albeit complicated by the elderly being a special and particularly coveted demographic due to their propensity to actually go out and vote. No one threatens to cut Social Security, but when was the last time it was raised by more than inflation? Meanwhile politicians make a lot of hay implying to younger people that it’s going to run out before they have a chance to retire and take advantage of it so they ought to support (cutting taxes for wasteful programs/raising taxes to properly fund things) depending on their particular slant.

      • Tracy W says:

        There’s the minor issue of the cost, which is a massive argument against raising it. Or introducing it in the first place.

      • Corey says:

        America’s entitlement-expense problems are pretty small, even when projected way out in the future, except for medical inflation. If we don’t fix that then we’re screwed no matter how we finance the government.

        Plus there is *always* a constituency for lower taxes, no matter how few people are subject to them. (Consider the US estate tax, for example).

        • Edward Scizorhands says:

          At the Federal level, only “small changes” are needed to Social Security. (Which usually means something dramatic like removing the cap on SS wages, which puts the marginal tax rates on the rich in the US above European levels.)

          At the state level, lots of states are doomed by retirement entitlements.

      • jes5199 says:

        > My problem with the basic income is that there will be immediate demands for it to be raised. And raised. And raised. And raised

        Yes, I am in favor of that.

    • orangecat says:

      why would we trust them enough to double their budget and handle everybody’s expenses?

      I don’t trust them at all, which is one reason I only want them to cut checks rather than running dozens of programs trying to address specific symptoms of not having money.

      • E. Harding says:

        Ah, but the dozens of programs are, at least hypothetically, easier to cut, and they have a reasonable limit to how much people want them increased. Not so with universal basic income.

        BTW, means-tested cash transfer programs are extremely easy to cut, as they are not politically popular.

        • J says:

          I think basic income is getting pushed hard from the top (hard to imagine politicians not salivating at it), and the “it’ll replace the welfare bureaucracy” is a useful motte and bailey argument to appeal to the libertarians, but unlikely to survive in practice:

          – Bureaucracies are really good at self-preservation

          – Is the public really actually okay with little Timmy’s family being out on the street when dad immediately spends the basic income check on hookers and booze? Or are we going to keep Section 8 housing and food stamps, and the school lunch program, etc. for Timmy’s sake?

          – If we assume that lots of people have unbounded spending, and look at the amounts of debt they get into, why wouldn’t they spend the net present value of the basic income on more consumer goods they don’t need and be right back at square one? I’ve seen people propose that basic income be off limits as collateral, but money is pretty darn fungible and I think it’d be pretty darn hard to enforce, and we already have things like Easy Loans for People on Disability

          – Complexity is fuel for politics, and I don’t see any reason why Basic Income would be immune to that. They’d propose cost of living adjustments for all sorts of things, preserve existing welfare programs arguing that basic income just isn’t enough or doesn’t cover some special need, ad nauseum, very much like the current tax code but with trillions of dollars more at play.

          • Swami says:

            I agree. I strongly suspect that BIG is something which sounds good in the utopian abstract but which would be horrific in practice and I fear in effect.

          • Anonymous says:

            As much as I really like the idea of basic income, I share the exact same concerns and am glad to hear my thoughts coming out of someone else’s mouth. Even if UBI was eventually forced into the overton window by supporters’ efforts, I find it hard to believe that it could be put into place without running into these issues.

            I did feel similarly about problems that arise as part of the interaction between immigration and UBI, but have since heard not altogether terrible solutions for it, which gives me hope that I will eventually hear something similarly workable regarding BI as collateral and how BI interacts with children.

            Complexity and bureaucratic resilience seem more unassailable problems. I can only hope that in the process of BI being pushed into the overton window, everyone recognizes that BI is supposed to be attractive mostly because it avoids these issues and legislators somehow realize that implementing a BI that doesn’t would be missing the point. Not a likely scenario.

    • qwints says:

      Ricardo’s “On Machinery” is a better reference.

    • hypnosifl says:

      “And the crux of that argument is that if super AI ever comes along then we’ll be out of work”

      No, not super AI, just AI smart enough to do all the work that doesn’t rely on high levels of creative intelligence (which includes both things like the creation of art as well as creative problem-solving like engineering) or people skills (teaching, public relations, psychotherapy etc.), which a healthy majority of present-day jobs probably don’t.

      But I’m not too pessimistic about what will happen at this point–once AI is able to do all the relatively unskilled physical labor humans do at present, including virtually all factory work, then we will presumably have reached the point of self-replicating machines that can also replicate virtually any manufactured good given enough energy and raw materials. At that point, market competition would tend to drive down the price of the self-replicating machines, along with whatever manufactured goods they can create, to little more than the price of the energy and materials that go into making them–if you have a 3D printer which can make a copy of itself using materials and energy which which only cost say $20, anyone who tries to sell such a printer for much more than $20 would have their price undercut by other sellers. And this drastic price drop for manufactured goods should allow people to live comfortable middle-class lifestyles on a much smaller budget than would be needed today, so to fund a livable basic income for everyone you might not even need a particularly high tax rate on the remaining fraction of the population that still works at jobs which can’t yet be replaced by AI.

      • J says:

        When my grandparents eloped, they took a pot, a plate and a fork because that’s what their parents could spare. Whereas when I was in college I walked around the super walmart and realized I already had all the household goods I could possibly need. And that’s not even going to a thrift store.

        So I think we’re well past the point where stuff is ridiculously cheap to make and buy, and it’s sad to me that so many people make so much money and still manage to be in debt up to their eyeballs, drowning in crap they don’t need.

        • hypnosifl says:

          I suppose it depends on how you define “ridiculously cheap”, but I’m pretty sure the costs of most manufactured goods these days are many times greater than the raw materials and energy that went into making them (if break down a car and sell the scrap metal, how much money would you make compared to the cost of the car?) Housing also isn’t cheap, and once robots can do basically all the work of construction workers (and also more cheaply manufacture all the parts that go into a house), that should greatly drive down the price of building new housing, though land itself would be scarce.

          • Nornagest says:

            if break down a car and sell the scrap metal, how much money would you make compared to the cost of the car?

            Steel’s about $600 a ton right now, so probably about 5% of the price of the car. Potentially up to 10% or a bit more if you’re buying used and you pick something with a particularly good weight-to-cost ratio, like a beat-up old SUV.

            Cars are capital-intensive, though — you’re mostly paying for tooling, design work, and testing.

          • Ptoliporthos says:

            I was thinking that you were mostly paying for your local representative’s congressional campaign and the television ads that jump up 5 levels in volume from the show you were just watching.

        • Murphy says:

          When my parents bought a house the house cost about 3.5 to 4 times the average yearly salary at the time.

          They had no furniture for a while but they did ok.

          When I bought a much much smaller house much further from work it cost approximately 12 times the average salary.

          We were able to fit the house out with cutlery/furniture and all the other household and consumable crap we need for significantly less than 1% of the cost of the house.

          More than 99% of our debt is purely having a 1 bedroom flat to live in.

          of course before we could buy we had to save up a deposit and in that time we spent about 12% of the cost of a house paying rent on a crappy single room in a shared house.

          That massive spike in house prices also massively pushed up rents because landlords expect to make x% return on the present value of a house even if they originally paid one third of the current price for the house adjusting for inflation.

          Anyone blaming cheap consumable crap for the mountain of debt many people are under is willfully ignorant.

          Who ended up with this massive pile of wealth?

          Anyone who owned a house before about 1995. Anyone who owned a house before 1995 won the lottery and got a gigantic pile of free money dumped at their feet utterly disconnected from their actions, the pile of money was funded by the massive debts of the younger generation.

          On that front I’m lucky.

          My slightly younger peers ended up with massive college debts roughly equivalent to about half a mortgage thanks to degree inflation and the generation above them who had often got free university in their own youth and who’d just received the massive piles of free money deciding that they don’t really want to pay taxes on that money to pay for young peoples education.

          So those youngens got saddled with the debt to pay for that on top.

          Much of that debt owned by those same old peoples pension funds.

          It’s entirely the older generation utterly utterly screwing the younger generation in every possible way, aided by the government because old folks are a strong voting block.

          • J says:

            Thanks for offering your viewpoint. Your input is valuable even without declaring in bold that I must be willfully ignorant or that things are entirely the way you say they are. The folks I was thinking of when I posted are indeed in debt due to spending on consumer goods, both the ones with six figure incomes and the ones at minimum wage.

            But I also agree that housing costs can be quite oppressive, and university education has also increased in cost. I don’t agree that it’s due to evil old people, since government education expenditures have risen much more than they’ve declined. But something has indeed caused costs to rise significantly, and that sucks for the college-bound.

          • Murphy says:

            @J

            Apologies, I just get sick of seemingly every entitled, detestable, arrogant pensioner in the universe declaring that because they saved 100 pounds(adjusted for inflation) per year bringing packed lunches that that entirely explains how they’re now sitting in a 1.2 million pound house and that the young people stuck with hundreds of thousands of pounds of debt brought it on themselves by buying a 2 pound can opener.

            When someone comes along parroting the same things I react less charitably than I should.

            Almost every iota of consumable crap is so cheap that unless the “consumable crap” in question is hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of diamond jewellery it’s almost certainly a tiny speck when compared to those same peoples student loans, housing costs etc. I’m sure people absolutely could ruin themselves buying overpriced vanity items such people are not the norm.

          • J says:

            I would have thought so too about consumer goods. At the low end, I watched someone blow his minimum wage paycheck on cigarettes, energy drinks, video games at the local cinema, and drinking at bars (>$100 per month in each of those categories).

            At the six-figure end, when we’d visit we’d end up watching several pay-per-view movies per night ($10 each?), seeing multiple re-furnishings of the house per year, frequent new cars, and tons of consumer electronics. Apparently it’s not at all uncommon for people to spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on stuff like that when they have a spending habit.

      • John Schilling says:

        And this drastic price drop for manufactured goods should allow people to live comfortable middle-class lifestyles on a much smaller budget than would be needed today

        Manufactured goods are necessary but not sufficient for a middle-class lifestyle. Your scenario does not posit any mechanism for increasing the amount of skilled services which can be provided. I suspect that supply will contract slightly, and be significantly concentrated in the still-employed segment of the economy.

        At which point we get to find a new name for the lifestyle that is characterized by lots of stuff but almost no skilled services.

        • hypnosifl says:

          Well, the two big skilled services most middle-class people need are medical care (which is already successfully provided for with tax money in many countries, and in future can probably be automated to a significant degree though not completely) and education (also already provided for with tax money in many countries, and post-scarcity would probably lead to a larger number of people looking to get teaching jobs who wouldn’t need the money to live on, probably leading to lower costs of taking classes even if they weren’t state-funded). Aside from that, what skilled services are really necessary for a middle-class lifestyle?

    • Corey says:

      Human-level AI is *sufficient*, but not *necessary*, for technology to eliminate jobs.

      All you need is productivity increasing faster than aggregate demand. “Robots” as used in the econ-blogosphere is shorthand for this.

      Productivity increases from technology advancing hasn’t cost us jobs (long-term) historically, because demand kept up so new jobs got created. Thus the anti-Luddite argument goes: we always got new industries for people to move into before, so we expect new technology (up to and including Singularity) to follow the same pattern. It’s obvious to see how AI would break this argument; not as easy to see for other tech advances.

      But we’re already seeing persistent aggregate demand shortfalls in the US (my pet theory is that it’s largely distributional: ~all the wealth is in the hands of people who literally can’t spend it all, and because new industries are low in capital demands there’s a shortage of productive things in which they can invest).

  17. Rusty says:

    Fascinating piece. Open borders and basic income both seem to be like two cars playing chicken on a single track road. My own random thought is that with the Internet anyone has access to wonderful ideas and a free education. Maybe not rich in dollar terms but by comparison to even a few years ago it’s pretty much a miracle. But most people don’t take advantage. They eat badly, abuse substances and get fat and ill. They are thoroughly demoralised. That being so I’m not seeing how giving them a bit more money is going to turn lives around. Anyway put me in the corner that is even more pessimistic than Scott.

    • Anonymous says:

      Open borders and basic income both seem to be like two cars playing chicken on a single track road.

      Solution: World government. 😉

      • TD says:

        That isn’t a solution, because the world government would have to decide whether to allow complete free movement worldwide, or enforce some kind of restrictions (“borders”). The only thing that changes is who administrates the policies.

        • Anonymous says:

          AFAIK, none of the current large, federative polities have severe restrictions on internal movement. Might be wrong.

          • hlynkacg says:

            Have you been paying attention to the news over the last 9 months?

          • Anonymous says:

            I haven’t osmosed any particular restrictions about internal movement within Russia, the US, China or India.

            You must mean the European Union, which is the least state-like organism of the five, but even here, the restrictions are being implemented just now, in response to abuse by non-citizens. Yet still, it is still very much possible to travel and move trouble-free within there.

        • Corey says:

          As long as illegal aliens don’t migrate to Earth en masse, we’d be fine.

      • IOW, a basic income that would be regarded as pathetic in First-World nations.

        That’s not such a bad idea (we could do worse) but good luck in trying to convince either the Trump or Sanders supporters.

  18. Jugemu Chousuke says:

    >I expect the average 2100 poor person will be one paycheck away from the street. I can’t explain this, I just accept it at this point.

    I think this is just a result of expectations increasing to the level that people can (sort of) afford. Houses are bigger today, food is better (McD’s and mac’n’cheese are better than whatever canned vegetables with mercury in it the poor would have had back then), communications and home entertainment are much better. Desires are ~infinite so people with high time preference will spend all their money and more, regardless of the level of overall development. Nonetheless poor people today tend to have a much higher absolute standard of living than in 1900, overall.

    (Also with cities there’s an aspect where livable land is in finite supply).

    • suntzuanime says:

      Yeah, it only costs one paycheck to keep you from being one paycheck away from the street for the rest of your life. It’s not a matter of how much money you have, it’s a matter of trying to fill a bucket that has a hole in it.

      • meyerkev248 says:

        Eh…

        We’re missing about 5% of the housing stock per capita that we had back in the 90’s. And we’ve basically stopped building housing period, even in the cities like Dallas and Atlanta that everyone usually uses.

        Which means that the rent used to be 24% of median income, and now it’s 30%. Which might not sound like much, but it’s a marginal 6% that matters.

        There’s definitely some “Bucket with a hole going on”, but there are also major serious expenses that just didn’t exist.

    • Viliam says:

      In 2100 all rich people will live on Mars. Poor people will be unable to buy a house on Mars, and most of their paychecks will be spent on travelling by rocket to the work and back, because all decently paying jobs will also be on Mars. The second greatest expense wil be air in bottles, necessary to staying alive.

      People on internet will write about how much the situation has improved since 2000, when no one was able to travel to Mars, and that even the most smelly air in bottles has higher quality than the air people in 2000 were breathing in some cities.

      In this scenario, “rich” refers to the top 0.01% of the human population, and “poor” refers to the top 1% of the human population. The remaining 99% of humans living on Earth and unable to buy air in bottles will be infected by various nanobots and become zombies. No one will care about the zombies; the important political topic will be whether all fifty genders are sufficiently and properly represented in the quantum video games.

    • nm. k.m. says:

      >McD’s and mac’n’cheese are better than whatever canned vegetables with mercury in it the poor would have had back then

      Do we have data on this? I had the impression that the working poor who made enough not to starve in 19th century / early 20th century ate somewhat healthier that McD’s. (Bread, eggs, fish.) Of course, that kind of comparison excludes those unfortunate who *were* malnourished. McD’s are probably better than the brink of starvation.

  19. “But aside from the lunch people, this category must also include libertarians who think that all we need to do is remove regulations that prevent the poor from succeeding”

    I’m not sure why this goes in the cooperative rather than exploitative category. Your description of the latter is put in terms of capitalism as a force for misery and inequality, but couldn’t it as easily be anti-capitalism, government interference frequently defended as helping the poor, frequently helping other people and hurting the poor? That’s clearer abroad, where countries like India have a first world elite on top of a third world population, with a good deal of the former having government jobs. Perhaps clearer still in the old USSR, with special stores and special highway lanes for the elite of a society that claimed to be socialist. I’m reminded of my father’s old point that the defenders of exchange controls argued it was important to keep India’s scarce foreign exchange from being wasted on luxuries for the wealthy–and made those arguments in conferences held in air conditioned hotels in New Delhi.

    I think your Red Queen’s race only works if you see it in terms of rising expectations. In real terms, per capita income is much higher in the U.S. than it was in 1900, when the median income was about half the current poverty line (from memory but I think correct)—your inner city poor person would not be happy living the life of the 1900’s poor farmer. He takes it for granted that his life will include a lot of things that farmer didn’t have–and should include a lot more.

    • Thursday says:

      Your description of the latter is put in terms of capitalism as a force for misery and inequality

      If I understand you both correctly, this is not what Alexander is saying. Alexander is, I believe, saying that capitalism in any form is incapable of raising some people out of poverty. That’s not the same thing as saying it is exploitative of those people, a cause of their misery. Alexander would likely agree that capitalism creates a lot of inequality, but he would also likely say that this is not the result of any exploitation.

    • Swami says:

      Agreeing and adding on… On a global level, prosperity, lifespans, reductions in extreme poverty, health, education, freedom, and so on are at unprecedented levels of improvement, with the last generation seeing greater gains than any generation ever.

      So Scott becomes a pessimist? Exactly how much do things have to improve before his pessimism is relieved? Don’t get me wrong, there are challenges, and challenges always seem hard before we solve them.

      I suggest looking at what has tended to work, what has tended not to work, and doing more of the former and less of the latter. If actual living standards stop rising then revise as appropriate.

    • ADifferentAnonymous says:

      > I think your Red Queen’s race only works if you see it in terms of rising expectations.

      Perhaps, but this doesn’t make the problem less severe. Unless you have a good way to fight expectation inflation?

  20. TD says:

    People are just going to have to accept becoming useless. Trying to force our way back from a services heavy domestic economy to an industrial one is just trading off living standards for some nebulous concept of dignity.

    No one owes you dignity, and if you fall to pieces when you don’t have it, then tough titties I’m afraid. We can’t redistribute dignity. Politics which have some nebulous notion of “equality” as a terminal goal are ultimately about dignity. It’s not enough that the poor don’t die, aren’t sick, that they have food on their plates and good healthcare, because there are still people who have yet more amenities to enjoy, people to feel envious of. It won’t even be enough if you redistributed all their wealth, because you’d find that they mysteriously were occupying all of the bureaucratic positions, looking down on you, sneering at you. You’d be dependent on them all the same. The feeling of being useless will never go away, so making it a central part of politics just creates a perpetual conundrum.

    • qwints says:

      poor don’t die, aren’t sick, that they have food on their plates and good healthcare,

      But the poor die sooner, are more sick because they have less food and lack access to healthcare.

      • TD says:

        Yes, so solve that problem instead. That problem is solved by focusing on “bread” and not dignity, which is my entire point.

        • qwints says:

          Oh, I get you. You’re criticizing opposition to materially beneficial programs on the grounds that they have undefined emotional drawbacks. I mostly agree.

      • James Bond says:

        Well yes, but to play the devils advocate you can say that about the moderately wealthy compared to the extrememly wealthy. Im sure that with a 100 million dollars I can find ways to re-organize my life to make it a bit longer, including rreducing stress ( about doing well in school to get a job), spending all my time at the gym , and obsessively reducing any semblence of risk. As well as getting a professional chef to cook all my meals with perfect nutritional needs.

    • Viliam says:

      People are just going to have to accept becoming useless.

      Unless everone is surrounded by robotic servants, friends, and therapists, people can still be useful to each other. The problem is that without basic income, being useful to other people will not help you get food, if you are useful to the wrong (read: poor) kind of people.

      In other words, taboo “useful”. There is a difference between increasing someone’s happiness, and being able to make money by increasing someone’s happiness. Even today, there is a lot of work that needs to be done, but doesn’t get done because no one can make money doing it, so most productive people do some less meaningful but better paying stuff instead.

      • Wrong Species says:

        I think part of the problem is that in the old days, you may not have been economically productive but you at least had a community that cared about you. So maybe we should focus on building communities to help ease the transition(assuming it’s going to happen).

      • MichaelT says:

        Being usefull to poor people has made the Walton family quite rich

    • Maware says:

      You can’t accept being useless. I wonder about people who post here sometimes, because they seem to say things that are incomprehensible in this way.

      Feeling needed and useful is a core concept of being a human being. If you went to your job one day, and they told you “Hey, you are useless. We don’t need you any more, you add nothing to this job now that we have this new AI.” How would you react? Picture your coworkers and boss saying this. Wouldn’t a large part of your identity be taken from you in an instant?

      What would you do? What if it just stuck, that no matter what you did you are seen as useless? What would you think of yourself then? Do you think you’d turn your emotions off and just accept it? I can tell you that people don’t generally do that.

      The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya had Haruhi destroy and recreate the world just because one day, watching baseball, she realized that she was more or less useless in the great scheme of things. That there were tons of stadiums and tons of little girls watching them, and she really had no utility at all. Kind of a powerful story about what needing to be useful or wanted is for a person.

      • Anonymous says:

        I think maybe you shouldn’t speak for all of humanity.

      • suntzuanime says:

        I’d probably post on the internet.

      • Watercressed says:

        There is useless to the economy and there is useless to other humans. I feel useful when I help my soccer team score a goal, even if I’m not good enough for people to pay me for it.

      • TD says:

        “You can’t accept being useless.”

        I did. Don’t be needy. I need bread, not dignity. The problem is that we can’t give you dignity in an automated society, so if you are asking for that, then you are asking for the impossible… unless you are saying you want to prevent the possibility of an automated society, and I can’t allow that.

        “Feeling needed and useful is a core concept of being a human being.”

        Therefore I am an alien from Rigel 7, and you’ve planted a small seed of contempt in me for these “human beings”.

        “If you went to your job one day, and they told you “Hey, you are useless. We don’t need you any more, you add nothing to this job now that we have this new AI.” How would you react?”

        Job? I’m already living the frugal basic income lifestyle of utopian joy.

        “Wouldn’t a large part of your identity be taken from you in an instant?”

        What? No! Besides, if I liked my job for anything more than the money then I could keep doing it as a hobby.

        “The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya had Haruhi destroy and recreate the world just because one day, watching baseball, she realized that she was more or less useless in the great scheme of things.”

        What a bitch.

        “That there were tons of stadiums and tons of little girls watching them, and she really had no utility at all. Kind of a powerful story about what needing to be useful or wanted is for a person.”

        Unperson here.

      • Acedia says:

        It’s true (despite the other replies) that most humans need to feel needed, but “needed” doesn’t have to mean “creates economic value”. Certainly that’s a common mental association in our present culture, especially for males, but I think we could transition, perhaps slowly and painfully, away from it.

    • ADifferentAnonymous says:

      > No one owes you dignity, and if you fall to pieces when you don’t have it, then tough titties I’m afraid. We can’t redistribute dignity.

      This relies on empirical claims that I’m not certain are true. Suppose experiment after experiment showed that ~99% of humans were much happier with a $X-per-year economically-pointless job than with a $X-per-year unconditional income and no job, no matter how much economic rationality you tried to instill in them. At that point, would you suppress your contempt and support a large-scale makework-oriented public welfare system (ideally with a non-work option for Rigelians like you and probably me)?

  21. Rick G says:

    I always wonder why Morgan Warstler’s Uber4Welfare proposal hasn’t gotten more traction. Massively subsidizing (up to UBI levels) any job at any wage (all the way down to $0.01/hr) completely addresses the calcified idle people objection to UBI, and should completely address the “low wage jobs suck; why bother making people do them” objection, since there are plenty of potential $1/hr jobs (that don’t currently exist) that I would way rather do than any existing $8/hr jobs, as long as I was still getting a massive wage subsidy. The only failure mode is “the $1/hr job is a scam and you don’t actually do anything” which just makes it equivalent to UBI for some people.

    • Julie K says:

      If you get the same take-home pay no matter which job you do, people have no motivation to seek out the job that allows them to be most productive, or to improve their skills.
      (If I as the taxpayer am topping up your wage, I would rather you take the $8/hour job than the $1/hour one.)

      • Corey says:

        In a world of technological unemployment, that’s a feature, not a bug.

        • eh says:

          Let’s say I have a business selling hand-crafted artisan organic chocolates made with Genuine Love ™, and I want to hire more people, but the cutoff line for profitability is $4/hr. Unfortunately, Jim’s Alcohol Quality Testers is “hiring” people at $0.01/hr (“employees must buy their own drinks, pints of house draught are $5 during happy hour”), so everyone buggers off down to the pub. After a couple of weeks of making and selling chocolate while everyone else has fun, I go join them, and the wealthy corporate overlords have to find another brand to give their mother-in-law at Christmas.

          They and I weren’t completely useless, we just weren’t useful enough to produce work equivalent to a living wage. Now we’re all going to die of liver failure and ennui at 55.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        It’s not a 1-for-1 replacement. IIRC it drops $1 for every $2 you make. So there is still an incentive to find better paying work and for employers to pay more to get better workers.

    • Swami says:

      Agreed. Much, much better idea IMO than BIG. Details can be worked out via experimentation and feedback.

    • How about subcontracting?

      I pay you $1 for $1’s worth of work, and you get paid $8. You take those wages to start a company to subcontract two people, who you pay $1 to do half of your $1 workload, and they get subsidized up to $8. Then they start their own sub-subcontracting companies, and so on.

    • jes5199 says:

      it seems like there’s an unnecessary indirection in that scheme. In subsidized employment, person A can spend time in any way that person B thinks is valuable. In UBI, person A can spend time in any way that person A thinks is valuable. Those seem roughly equivalent to me, except in UBI we don’t have to waste time justifying our actions to other people.

      • houseboatonstyxb says:

        @ jes5199
        it seems like there’s an unnecessary indirection in that scheme. In subsidized employment, person A can spend time in any way that person B thinks is valuable. In UBI, person A can spend time in any way that person A thinks is valuable. Those seem roughly equivalent to me, except in UBI we don’t have to waste time justifying our actions to other people.

        Right. Except that B is not one person but a massive tangle of politicians, lobbyists for their particular industries to get approved for the subsidy, consultants who think they know what voters will freak out at, etc etc.

        And most A’s care about what is valuable for their family, neighbors, online friends, etc. Real help. Or about things like fixing their own roof, their own car, home cooking for their own kids. Real things.

  22. Shion Arita says:

    Well, I agree with footnotes 1 and 2. 2 is obvious so I won’t comment on it further. As for 1:

    While I think that this kind of export capitalism is somewhat responsible for the problems faced in the U.S., I think the best way to solve it is to try to ‘fill in the holes’ as fast as we can by having industiralizing nations make tons of shoes and plastic toys. And I think that once the international poverty is solved things will get better domestically as well because the field will be even again.

  23. eqdw says:

    I can’t even really believe that a rising tide will lift all boats anymore. Not only has GDP uncoupled from median wages over the past forty years, but there seems to be a Red Queen’s Race where every time the GDP goes up the cost of living goes up the same amount. US real GDP has dectupled since 1900, yet a lot of people have no savings and are one paycheck away from the street. In theory, a 1900s poor person who suddenly got 10x his normal salary should be able to save 90% of it, build up a fund for rainy days, and end up in a much better position. In practice, even if the minimum wage in 2100 is $200 2016 dollar an hour, I expect the average 2100 poor person will be one paycheck away from the street. I can’t explain this, I just accept it at this point. And I think that aside from our superior technology, I would rather be a poor farmer in 1900 than a poor kid in the projects today. More southeast corner gloom.

    Ok, so this is more of a handwavey explanation than a rigourously supported one, but bear with me.

    Just, think about this for one second: Do you really not believe we are (at least) 10x wealthier than we were in the 1900s?

    I mean, my grandma was born in the 1930s. In Canada, not exactly a 3rd world country. She didn’t have running water or electricity until she was in her 20s. She lived on a farm where if you had to go to the bathroom, you went to the outhouse. In the middle of the Canadian prairie, where it hits -40 pretty regularly in February.

    That isn’t even the 1900s. That’s the 1930s! I’d go so far as to argue that in some ways, homeless people (the ones in temperate climates like SF, anyway) have a higher quality of life in many dimensions than my grandma did. And my family was not poor. This was just the reality of farming in the early 20th century.

    Sure, you see people still just scraping by. The GDP went up 10x but we still are one paycheque away from bankruptcy. But the thing you’re ignoring is that our baseline expectation of consumption is also an order of magnitude higher than it was in the 1900s. I know this is a handwavey hypothetical but, if you actually reduced your quality of life to what was typical a century ago, you’d have no problem at all saving 90% of your income.

    The reason you see people not saving all that money, imho, is because they don’t want to. Why do they not want to, when it is “obviously” the right thing? People have many motivations. I’m sure some people are just permanent screw-ups and they will utility monster you as long as you let them. For most other people though, perhaps it is worth it to them. Perhaps it is more valuable to have a modern standard of living than it is to have a large life savings. Like, my favourite example: The poorest person today enjoys more air conditioning than the richest king of the 1800s did. If someone who lived in, say, Arizona, decided that they prefer air conditioning and no savings, to living like a 1900s man but lots of savings, I can’t say I’d do any different in their shoes.

    If you say that “GDP went up, but cost of living also went up, so we are not any wealthier”, this is not true if you don’t pin down a rigourous, unchanging definition of what ‘living’ is. The cost of living increases didn’t just happen. They happened because our idea of what a baseline life is got more expensive. Just a rough grab bag of things we consider expected these days that my grandma didn’t have growing up:

    * Electricity
    * Running water
    * Schools with a separate grade system (eg she had a one room schoolhouse, 5 yr olds and 15 yr olds in the same class)
    * A house with separate bedrooms for each resident
    * A large house (iirc houses are ~2x in per capita square footage now compared to then)
    (Once she moved to the city, where people did have modern utilities)
    * More than one car per household (2 parents 3 children only one vehicle?!??!)
    * Health care coverage (Medicare was introduced in the late 40s/early 50s)
    * Television
    * Computers and Internet
    * Public transit
    * EI and CPP
    * Affordable long distance travel (eg planes, trains, and greyhounds)
    * Year-round fresh produce
    * Furnace you didn’t need to feed manually with wood/coal

    The list can go on and on.

    I’m not trying to make an argument that the poor have it easy, and we shouldn’t care. They don’t, and we should. But it is ridiculously naieve to look at life today, look at life 100 years ago, and conclude that we are not unfathomably wealthier

      • Swami says:

        Bingo! We are unimaginably better than a century ago and the improvements are even greater for the vast majority of non Westerners.

        Scott has a distorted view of the past and it is affecting his perspective on the present and the likely or possible future. The last generation globally has seen more improvement on more dimensions than any generation in the history of the species. So we need to change course? Huh?

        • arbitrary_greay says:

          UBI is not about what you have when you have. The concern is that there is a cliff face, and that cliff is getting higher and higher all of the time because when you have, you have all of these things. But more people are getting pushed towards the edge by increased housing costs. Your elevation is still higher than sea-level right on the edge of that cliff, but that doesn’t make the edge any less undesirable a location. That the height of that edge keeps increasing means that if you fall off, it’s that much harder to make it back without people from above sending down something to climb.

          In the past, it wasn’t so much of a cliff, as a slope to the bottom, and so it was more tolerable to live at those levels of income, and much easier to start climbing back up. But now, the homeless can’t even own a shed because someone determined that these were apparently more dangerous than living out of makeshift tents???

          UBI proposes to make that cliff edge the new sea level. There definitely should also be some lifting of regulations to allow that slope to come back, and make the “required” UBI lower to begin with. But the existing elevation of the current cliff edge is not a reason to discount UBI.

          • J says:

            So housing costs are high because government, but the solution is giving government twice as much money (roughly doubling the federal budget)?

          • Y Stefanov says:

            UBI would also incentivize reckless risk-seeking. By providing a floor, there is much less incentive to save and more incentive to spend or invest frivolously.
            I disagree with the cliff metaphor. Suppose you live paycheck to paycheck but you spend a lot of your paycheck on 401k investment, mortgage, paying off student loan etc. Once you lose your job it’s not like you become destitute – you can suspend loan payoff and quit saving for retirement for a few months. Heck, you can borrow from your 401k plan or use your good credit to borrow at 0% interest for about a year or so. Even if things remain bad, you can take out equity on the house or sell and downsize it.
            Bottom line is. UBI dramatically changes incentives. Also, in a modern economy we have plenty of mechanisms to fatten the “cliff face.”

          • arbitrary_greay says:

            @ J: My last paragraph stated that there will probably need to be lifting of restrictions and regulations to lower the required UBI amount.

            The overall point of the comment was to point out that the much increased material wealth of the lowest class is not in and of itself a “disproving” of the need for UBI. That has nothing to do with government.

            @ Y Stefanov:
            I’d consider people living paycheck to paycheck due to saving for retirement to not be at the actual edge of a cliff. That still counts as a buffer. Even someone with a social community to couch-crash between jobs counts as a buffer.
            The cliff edge is homelessness and inability to get even a minimum wage job.

            In addition, some of the changed incentives due to UBI are a feature, not a bug. Employers have to offer tangible reasons to work for them, and employees have more than survival as a motivation to work, which increases both employee quality and job conditions.
            UBI theoretically provides for survival needs only. Nothing is left to frivolously invest. (Of course, practical concerns of preventing people from increasing the amount distributed past this level in democratic societies is a valid problem)

            The current lowest class is already incentivized not to save. They can’t save because it’s all going to survival needs, the amount of cash that needs to be saved is so great that the tradeoff with the decreased current standard of living isn’t worth it, in a community with lots of leeches most saved money is wasted on the leeches. UBI addresses most of these concerns, and makes saving possible in the first place.

          • Y Stefanov says:

            UBI would also incentivize reckless risk-seeking. By providing a floor, there is much less incentive to save and more incentive to spend or invest frivolously.
            I disagree with the cliff metaphor. Suppose you live paycheck to paycheck but you spend a lot of your paycheck on 401k investment, mortgage, paying off student loan etc. Once you lose your job it’s not like you become destitute – you can suspend loan payoff and quit saving for retirement for a few months. Heck, you can borrow from your 401k plan or use your good credit to borrow at 0% interest for about a year or so. Even if things remain bad, you can take out equity on the house or sell and downsize it.
            Bottom line is UBI dramatically changes incentives. Also, in a modern economy we have plenty of mechanisms to flatten the “cliff face.”

    • Thursday says:

      A lot of the issues around poverty in the West are about the social dysfunction of poor people rather than their lack of material resources. For example, starvation has virtually been eliminated in the modern West. Somebody has to make some extremely terrible decisions for it to happen.

      • Corey says:

        I know Japan isn’t “the West” but they have poor people with ~no bad behaviors.

    • Steve Sailer says:

      I’m 57 and my standard of living is almost exactly what it was when I was 7 … except for Moore’s Law stuff, where the difference is immense.

      For everything else, the quality, safety, and convenience of manufactured goods is now higher (although tools tend to be junkier), but I have pretty much exactly the same kind of appliances today as when I was young. My parents got a dryer when I was about 5, a dishwasher when I was around 8, an air conditioner when I was 10, and a microwave when I was 21. I can’t think of anything all that amazing in the way of new appliances other than (of course) electronics over the last 36 years.

      My parents and I flew to Europe in 1965 and to Mexico in 1967. The jetliner went exactly as fast a half century ago as it does now. Cars can be driven slightly faster today, although the 405 to LAX is usually a lot more crowded now than in 1965-67.

      If I were 114 years old, I no doubt could tell you about amazing changes like my first automobile ride, but I’m only 57, so not all that much has changed.

      • Steve Sailer says:

        Perhaps the most unexpected difference is that San Fernando Valley real estate is immensely more expensive today relative to, say, the median worker’s income than 50 years ago.

        When I was 7, I assumed we’d have flying cars in 50 years. If we did, land would be cheaper (because more land would be within a reasonable commuting time).

        But we don’t.

        • Steve Sailer says:

          By the way, my father’s first job after he got his AA degree in aeronautical engineering from Pasadena City College in 1938 was designing one tiny piece of a flying car.

          The flying car business didn’t take off, though.

          • Tyrant Overlord Killidia says:

            “The flying car business didn’t take off, though”

            This pun flew right over my head

      • Gbdub says:

        Broadband internet is at least as amazing as jet travel, and affects my life more on a daily basis.

        Yeah, my washing machine isn’t vastly better than my grandparents’ – but I can order a new one and have it delivered to my house in two days or less using nothing but a device I carry in my pocket.

        Writing off “electronic stuff” as mere frivolity is ridiculous. Those advances have been hugely game changing.

        • Steve Sailer says:

          Advances in information technology have been wonderful for me, because I love information. For other people …

          • eponymous says:

            Ironically, commenters here are disproportionately people whose lives have been hugely altered by the IT revolution.

        • NN says:

          Long before the internet, you could get a new washing machine delivered to your house in a few weeks using nothing but a handheld device known as a “mail order catalog.”

          One of the more annoying traits of the current generation is the tendency to assume that everything that can be done with new technology was impossible before that new technology came along. But if you take the time to talk to your parents, you’ll find that most of it did exist in some form before the internet. For example, my mother, a computer programmer, was sending emails using Telex machines for decades before the Internet became a thing.

          What the Internet has done is make all of these things significantly cheaper and more efficient. Running an online store is a lot easier and less expensive than running a mail order catalog, and publishing a blog is a lot easier and less expensive than publishing a magazine. Which is a very significant change to be sure. But thinking that before 1991 farmers in rural Montana had to drive hundreds of miles to the nearest town every time they wanted to buy a new appliance is absurd.

      • Tracy W says:

        Quality and safety are fairly big deals.

        Also the quality of medical care has gone up, eg anaesthetics strike me as having gotten much pleasanter over 20 or so years, we have things like LASIK surgery.

        And clothing: I recall raincoats before goretex. Or when synthetic fibre meant nylon and polyester.

        Blackouts are now a lot less common than when I was a child, I can’t recall the last time I dug out candles at home because the power went off and the street lights (and I grew up in a city.)

        • Steve Sailer says:

          Quality and safety of manufactured goods are great, but they don’t much affect your class status (class is basically about who and when you can marry). In contrast, cheap suburban real estate (such as the opening up of the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles) that became accessible due to the spread of automobiles and freeways in the middle of the 20th Century promoted a whole lot of people from working class renters to middle class homeowners.

          California, for example, became broadly middle class in the mid-20th Century, but now it has become highly stratified by class.

          • Tracy W says:

            Your claim was about living standards, not class status.

          • vV_Vv says:

            Class status is a positional quality pretty much by definition, obviously its average can’t change over time (barring extreme scenarios such as a catastrophe that leaves every survivor a lowly scavenger).

          • Steve Sailer says:

            But the percentages of people who are middle class vary over time and space. For example, Benjamin Franklin pointed out in 1754 in a crucial essay that influenced Malthus and Darwin that Americans, due to higher wages and cheaper land prices due to lower population density, had a much higher chance of being landowners than Europeans, and consequently married earlier and more universally.

          • vV_Vv says:

            Ok. In this sense then I would say that the percentage of the world population, or even of first-world population, that is middle-class certainly increased a lot since you were born.

      • I thought I’d make a list of things I have now that I or my family didn’t have 50 years ago and include the approximate date I or we acquired them:
        1970 color television
        1976 pocket calculator
        1982 home computer
        1985 vcr (and descendants)
        1989 central air conditioning
        1991 dishwasher
        1993 answering machine
        1994 internet connection
        1996 microwave
        2002 cell phone
        2012 e-book reader
        2016 “smart” phone

        • Steve Sailer says:

          Most of those are Moore’s Law innovations, while air conditioning, dishwasher and microwave were pretty common 15-20 years earlier.

          • hlynkacg says:

            that may be, but they were fantastically expensive luxury items.

          • The Nybbler says:

            Microwave in 1976, dishwasher in 1971, and air conditioning in 1969 would have all been luxuries but not fantastically expensive. Sears was selling a microwave for less than $200 in 1975, for instance.

      • Bugmaster says:

        It sounds like you’re saying, “all the modern appliances are the same as the ones I had when I was 7, except for all the ones that are dramatically different”. That’s not exactly an earth-shattering revelation.

        On top of that, I think you may be underestimating the number of modern appliances that are different from their 1960 variants. For example, while modern cars may not be dramatically faster than their predecessors, they are several times more fuel efficient; much safer (even in the case of a collision); more comfortable and convenient; and even possessed of limited autopilot capabilities (with full autopilot coming in a few years, IMO). And that’s just cars, a single example…

        • Steve Sailer says:

          Like I said, safety is great. Fuel efficiency is nice, although not as nice as 29.9 cents per gallon gasoline. The sound quality of the car’s speakers on which I listen to Vin Scully do the play-by-play for the 2016 Dodgers is better than when I was listening to Vin Scully call the Dodgers game in 1966.

          But none of this stuff is very lifechanging.

          The Moore’s Law stuff is life-changing, but it’s also pretty limited. When it leads to self-driving cars, on the other hand, that might be as life-changing as cars were.

          • Anonymous says:

            What’s utterly life-changing (by definition) is medical care.

            In relative terms, compared to pre-scientific medicine, humanity has made fantastic progress in the past two centuries.

            In absolute terms, compared to urgent human needs, humanity is still in the dark ages.

            In technological terms, continued rapid progress seems assured, albeit at a sufficiently large cost, that healthcare technologies and delivery systems are destined to compose humanity’s most extensive and sophisticated infrastructure.

            In economic terms, efficient-market postulates fail nowhere more dismally than in controlling access to medical care.

            Yet it is true too, that in the long-run medicine-as-infrastructure offers plausibly the greatest job-creating prosperity-creating happiness-creating opportunities of the 21st century.

            As footnote 2 of Scott Alexander’s OP, notes

            Obviously invent genetic engineering and create a post-scarcity society, but until then we have to deal with this stuff.

            In moral terms, at present there’s little discourse between folks who conceive pretty much nothing in moral terms — morality being for these folks a self-labeling surrogate that is chiefly predictive of self-interested action — versus folks who advocate strongly for access to medical care as a basic right that is vital to all other moral objectives.

    • Steve Sailer says:

      “I mean, my grandma was born in the 1930s. In Canada, not exactly a 3rd world country. She didn’t have running water or electricity until she was in her 20s.”

      In contrast, my father, born in 1917, tended to live in fairly futuristic places, so most of this technology was fairly old hat to him. His father had been Roentgen’s delivery boy while the physicist was inventing the x-ray machine in the 1890s, and so he became an international x-ray machine traveling salesman. My father grew up in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park, Illinois on a street of Frank Lloyd Wright prairie-style houses. He got a job in the late 1930s at Lockheed Aircraft in Burbank. From the late 1940s onward, my parents were eating regularly at the Googie-style steel and glass Bob’s Big Boy drive-in restaurant next to Warner Bros. movie studio.

      I grew up in the 1960s assuming the future was going to be even shinier and faster:

      http://takimag.com/article/the_future_isnt_what_it_used_to_be_steve_sailer/print#axzz49QXnFigK

      Instead, it’s been something of a disappointment.

      • LTP says:

        Yes, but clearly your family was privileged at the time. But we’re talking about the quality of life of the poor/working class, not educated professionals.

        • Steve Sailer says:

          Interestingly, my grandfather didn’t go to college, while my father had a junior college degree and my mother didn’t go to college. You could have a pleasant middle class existence without investing massively in education.

          That’s another big change.

      • eqdw says:

        I think this might be the root of the difference. Perhaps many of these modern wonders have been available, in some form or other, to city people for a long time, and a large amount of the growth that happened was the existing benefits of the urbanized elites being extended to larger and larger groups of people.

        A model like this could account for a perception of stasis, and a perception of immense improvement, for different people over the same period of time

        • Steve Sailer says:

          Right. Compared to Canadian farmers, my paternal ancestors were living in a much higher tech world. On the other hand, they weren’t “urbanized elites” by Chicago or Los Angeles standards, they were middle class people. They did, however, have access to the current technology of their times.

          As an 18 year old, my paternal grandfather lucked into a ringside seat for the epochal invention that won the first Nobel Prize in Physics of all time: in the 1890s he’d deliver lenses from the factory to Dr. Roentgen for use in his first x-ray machine. From there my grandfather eventually hustled his way into a pretty lucrative salesman job in the 1920s selling hospitals in Asia and South America their first x-ray machines.

          On the other hand, keep in mind, my grandfather was just a high tech salesman. It gnawed at him that he hadn’t gotten to go to college.

          My father was less relatively prosperous than his father. He went to junior college for two years and then ended up as an engineer at Lockheed Aircraft for 40 years. He lacked my grandfather’s salesman personality and didn’t move much up into management. He wasn’t much of a designer, either, he was just a stress engineer who could be reliably assigned to worry over whether microscopic cracks meant that an airliner’s wing would someday snap off. He said his IQ had been tested at 105 (although I’d add that his 3-D cognitive abilities were far better than his verbal skills and he was a worrywart, which is what you want in an airliner stress engineer: the L1011s he worried over tended to crash much less often than their rival DC10s).

          That earned him enough money, without his wife having to work, to comfortably afford a 1600 square foot house on a 1/6th of an acre lot in the San Fernando Valley, the vast suburb you can see on a million old TV shows, and to send me to nice (but not particularly fashionable) Catholic schools in Sherman Oaks.

          It did not seem an elite existence at the time: there were 1.5 million people in the San Fernando Valley living the same kind of life. For example, the “Brady Bunch” house in ritzier Toluca Lake three miles away was vastly larger.

        • Steve Sailer says:

          On the other hand, we were living the California Dream.

          Benjamin Schwarz’s 2009 review in The Atlantic of historian Kevin Starr’s book “Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance, 1950-1963” is the most eloquent evocation of this historical summit of the middle class:

          “IT WAS A magnificent run. … In 1959, wages paid in Los Angeles’s working-class and solidly middle-class San Fernando Valley alone were higher than the total wages of 18 states. … It was a sweet, vivacious time: California’s children, swarming on all those new playgrounds, seemed healthier, happier, taller, and—thanks to that brilliantly clean sunshine—were blonder and more tan than kids in the rest of the country. For better and mostly for worse, it’s a time irretrievably lost. …

          “… the California dream. By this he means something quite specific—and prosaic. California, as he’s argued in earlier volumes, promised “the highest possible life for the middle classes.” It wasn’t a paradise for world-beaters; rather, it offered “a better place for ordinary people.” …

          “Until the Second World War, California had proffered this Good Life only to people already in the middle class—the small proprietors, farmers, and professionals, largely transplanted midwesterners, who defined the long-underindustrialized state culturally and politically. But the war and the decades-long boom that followed extended the California dream to a previously unimaginable number of Americans of modest means. Here Starr records how that dream possessed the national imagination (and thereby helped define middle-class aspirations and an ideal of domestic life that survives to this day) and how the Golden State—fleetingly, as it turns out—accommodated Americans’ “conviction that California was the best place in the nation to seek and attain a better life.” …

          “In the brief era Starr examines, the world rushed in to grab that life: the state’s population nearly doubled between 1950 and 1970. This dolce vita was, as Starr makes clear, a democratic one: …

          “To a Californian today, much of what Starr chronicles is unrecognizable. (Astonishing fact: Ricky Nelson and the character he played in that quintessential idealization of suburbia, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, attended Hollywood High, a school that is now 75 percent Hispanic and that The New York Times accurately described in 2003 as “a typically overcrowded, vandalism-prone urban campus.”) Granted, a version of the California Good Life can still be had—by those Starr calls the “fiercely competitive.” That’s just the heartbreak: most of us are merely ordinary. For nearly a century, California offered ordinary people better lives than they could lead perhaps anywhere else in the world. Today, reflecting our intensely stratified, increasingly mobile society, California affords the Good Life only to the most gifted and ambitious, regardless of their background. That’s a deeply undemocratic betrayal of California’s dream—and of the promise of American life. As R. H. Tawney wrote, “Opportunities to rise, which can, of their very nature, be seized only by the few,” cannot “substitute for a general diffusion of the means of civilization, which are needed by all men whether they rise or not.””

    • Tracy W says:

      Also see Megan Mcardle’s article on living standards in Little House On A Prairie, hint, at one point Laura gets a cup for Christmas and she’s delighted because it means she doesn’t have to share a cup with her sister anymore. And the Ingalls were landowners and educated by the standards of their time.

      Little House on the Prairie is of course pre-1900 but presumably we all agree that the USA didn’t suddenly get massively richer to 1900 and then stop.

      • Steve Sailer says:

        Here’s a fair portrait of standards of living in 1870, 1920, 1970, and 2016:

        http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/15/upshot/what-was-the-greatest-era-for-american-innovation-a-brief-guided-tour.html

        Here’s the sensible conclusion:

        “In short, the sheer number of ways a person can be in touch with others, and consume information or entertainment, has exploded, and the price has collapsed.

        “This is the area in which human [American] life has changed the most in the last 46 years. We live and travel much as we did in 1970. We eat more variety of foods. Products of all types keep getting a little safer, a little more efficient, a little better designed.

        “But the real revolution of recent decades is in the supercomputer most people keep in their pocket. And how that stacks up against the advances of yesteryear is the great question of whether an era of innovation remains underway, or has slowed way down.”

      • Julie K says:

        Quote from linked article:
        “Payless will sell you a pair of child’s shoes for $15, which is two hours of work even at minimum wage.”

        In the Little House books (which I’m currently reading to my kids) Pa can earn $1/day and boots cost $3.

        • Anonymous says:

          What did Pa pay in mortgage/rent/property taxes?

        • alaska3636 says:

          What was the depreciation lifetime of the shoes then versus the Payless shoes?

          Many people today buy new shoes every year or so; older shoes needed to be re-soled a lot less often.

          • Nornagest says:

            On the other hand, people move less now, too.

            The uppers on a traditionally made pair of shoes will last many years if they’re properly taken care of, but I’d expect a 19th-century farmer or miner or cowboy to go through soles much more quickly than modern people buying shoes of a similar type.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            There’s this story of the rich man who buys $50 boots that last ten years, and the poor man who buys $10 boots that last one year.

            It’s a story, though. It’s not the real world. Consumer Reports still exists and tests stuff.

          • Anonymous says:

            Just yesterday I heard someone make this argument. About how $450 shoes were really a good investment because “they will last forever and never go out of style”!

            It’s bullshit. First resoling isn’t free. Two resolings and you’ve bought a new pair of decent shoes. Second, there’s no way to know what will or won’t ever go out of style.

          • Nornagest says:

            It’s not totally wrong. There is a point at which stuff is too cheaply made to be a good investment in terms of dollars-per-wear, though the worst offenders tend to be fast-fashion houses selling trendy stuff for middling prices rather than makers of basic, unpretentious staples. (I’ve bought jeans that fell apart in two months, but I still have my pair of Chuck Taylors that I bought five years ago.)

            But if you’re paying $450 for shoes, you’re probably well into diminishing-returns territory there. It might still be a good purchase, but not for those reasons.

    • anon says:

      If I wanted to go without most of those advancements, I would be either made into a criminal or a social pariah. Technological wealth isn’t something a person is capable of foregoing unless they can convince a lot of other people to forgo it too. It might not be that people are choosing a modern standard of living for themselves, but because there’s no practical choice otherwise.

    • eh says:

      The size of your house is irrelevant if you can’t afford rent because it’s illegal to build a smaller house. The location of your toilet doesn’t necessarily make you happier than having enough land to piss on a tree without being arrested for indecent exposure. Hydroponic lettuce can’t help you if the only shop within walking distance is a KFC and you don’t own a car.

      Some of the other things, like living in a room with your siblings, owning a single car, suffering through a 41c (105f?) summer day without aircon, trying to find enough candles to read by during a power outage, or feeding a wood fire by hand with logs and kindling split with an axe, are things that I grew up doing. With the exception of the hot days, I miss them. My father grew up without power, proper refrigeration, and in an area where dirt-floored huts were still around, on a farm where they still used draught horses instead of tractors and where they lived primarily on their own produce. He misses the horses, even if he doesn’t miss the backbreaking labour.

      Neither he nor I find it particularly hard to fathom how much wealthier we are because of these things. It’s really not that bad to eat dried, preserved vegetables, or stored vegetables in winter, to cut up a stack of firewood, to share a car, or to share a room. It’s not awful to have to look things up in Encyclopaedia Britannica, to call your grandmother for an explanation of pyroclastic flow, or to send checks in the mail rather than buying from Amazon. You will still be very sad if your wife leaves you, if your mother dies of alcoholism, or if someone breaks into your house, no matter how many air conditioners you have.

      Poverty might be less important than the degree to which someone’s needs are met. We’ve all got food, but housing is unaffordable in many countries, stable families are getting rarer, entry-level work is harder to find, jobs seldom last forever unless they’re awful, wages have stagnated, and so on.

  24. jaimeastorga2000 says:

    I expect the average 2100 poor person will be one paycheck away from the street. I can’t explain this, I just accept it at this point.

    Eliezer, Michael blame monopolies; Vladimir zero-sum games.

    • vV_Vv says:

      I think the straightforward argument against basic income, at least in an economy where human labor is still necessary, is that it will just inflate all the prices until it effectively neutralizes itself: if you pay people enough money that they can live without having to take the shitty jobs, then nobody will take the shitty jobs, but if there is still a demand for shitty jobs, then their wages will rise, driving up all the other wages and all the prices of all the goods, until the basic income isn’t enough to allow people to live without working and so they will have to take the shitty jobs again.

      • Teal says:

        I think that argument only works in a closed economy. With imports I don’t think it does. But I am not an economist.

        • Tracy W says:

          Imports only apply to tradeable goods (as opposed to say haircutting, or plumbing, where there’s a limit as to how far anyone will travel.)

          • Teal says:

            So what’s the equilibrium? My intuition is that the phenomenon vV_Vv discusses only happens partially. Inflation in the costs of non-tradeable goods & services eats up some of the utility improvement of the BI but not all of it.

          • vV_Vv says:

            I’m not an economist either, but my impression is that in developed countries, nearly all the minimum-wage exportable jobs (mostly low-skilled manufacturing of consumer goods) have already been exported to developing countries.

            The minimum-wage jobs that remain are things like construction worker, cleaning service worker, shop assistant, fruit picker in a farm, truck driver, and so on, all jobs that can’t be easily outsourced to China.

          • Teal says:

            If we accept that as true, I still don’t think it is sufficient to get to your claims re: all the benefits being eaten by inflation.

            Maybe we can get David Friedman to comment by invoking his name.

      • Corey says:

        I picked this up in another subthread. It doesn’t have to cause equal inflation, because prices are not determined by costs. The cost of making something provides a floor to the price, but beyond that everything’s determined by supply and demand.

        • vV_Vv says:

          But if supply decreases and demand stays the same prices will go up, right?

          • Corey says:

            Correct, but my point is that there’s no force making the amount of price increases (on individual products or in the aggregate) the same as the amount of benefits, because all that supply & demand has lots of factors going into it.

  25. Randy M says:

    It seems like technology should theoretically enable less intelligent people to hold a wider range of jobs, by filling in the gaps they lack, like a cash register for a somewhat innumerate person. I imagine that in reality this is not true for two reasons.

    One, this kind of technology would magnify the errors made, without an ability to sense check the results. The cashier presses a wrong button, sees she should give $100 change instead of $10, and there goes the value added by that employee for a week (stand in for similar technological aids).

    Second, while technology could go and aid people, it can also, and more efficiently, replace them entirely, if not just as easily then shortly after. It won’t be long between back-up cameras being on cars and fully automated cars, etc.

    • Edward Scizorhands says:

      Some economists talk about normal jobs versus “O-ring jobs.”

      If you are in the right place, it’s hard to dig a ditch “wrong.” You might dig it slow, or inefficiently, but someone else can come by and finish up your work.

      If you are designing an O-Ring for a space shuttle booster, no one else can fix it if you screw up.

      I don’t necessarily have a conclusion here, just giving the framework.

      • Randy M says:

        Right, and technology probably can’t find a use in the O-ring jobs for people below a certain level; it can make the ditch diggers more productive, but it won’t be long before their labor is the lesser part (moving from shovels to backhoes) and eventually it actually value negative, once the technology is in place (automated backhoes or something).

    • Y Stefanov says:

      The damn jobs keep evolving and adding frills and duties though so technology never replaces people. Here’s an example – ATM proliferation actually took place while human bank tellers actually OUTPACED other employment.

      It’s just that nowadays tellers are not just cashiers – they are also required to be more friendly, cross-sell and up-sell services, get new competencies etc. etc. There’s always a friendlier, more industrious, more conscientious, more knowledgeable etc. person whom the employer wants to employ to stay abreast of his competition. Thus, a job is never “solved” by technology.

      I see this in my own job – seems like every damn month there’s something extra I have to do or be as part of my job. I wouldn’t mind if I got a raise withe very other “continuous improvement” fucking idea from management but I only get a small yearly raise. There’s definitely “mission creep” like that with a lot of jobs ….

      • Randy M says:

        You have a good counter example, but it is far from proving this: “Thus, a job is never “solved” by technology.”
        Many jobs are solved by technology. We may have more bank tellers, but do we have more gas station attendants, agricultural workers, telephone switchboard operators, etc.?

        I think there will likely be a long market for human-facing positions (sales, etc.) as most people currently will prefer personal service to a screen. I’m not sure that will hold true in a generation, though. You can observe more people who prefer a screen to the friend or date sitting next to them, and as voice recognition & other interface software improves alongside interface-aculturation, we may well see radical changes in the service industry.

        • Nornagest says:

          This is a nitpick at best, but I’m pretty sure “gas station attendant” is more a story about custom and law than about technology.

          • The Nybbler says:

            Yes and no. As with elevator operator, a “gas station attendant” used to have a job that required a small amount of skill (and strength); the attendant would manually pump the gas into a clear reservoir with markings showing the amount of gas. Then attach the hose to the car, open a valve, and let gravity do the rest. And collect payment of course.

        • Y Stefanov says:

          “but do we have more gas station attendants, agricultural workers, telephone switchboard operators, etc.?” – yes, it’s just that we call them different things and the jobs keep changing more or less. We have all sorts of mechanics or people who work at places life Jiffy Lube who are not quite mechanics but do a lot of things people used to do for themselves (changing oil, car clean up, wiper change etc.). We have many more people who are not agri workers but work with food sourcing/preparation in some way. I work in a call center so not quite switchboard operator but there’s even more of us despite having a “smart” system whereby virtually everything can be done online or over the automated phone line.

          tl;dr – jobs are never solved! even a particular job incarnation (gas attendant, switchboard operator)) becomes obsolete, the job of “car care” is not only never “solved,” but is expanding and branching out.

          • Artificirius says:

            I don’t think this extends into infinity.

            Technology either makes people obsolete for a given application, or makes people in said application more efficient or capable. See buggy whip makers and ditch diggers.

            So we have some jobs drying up as human labour fields. Some become reduced in terms of productivity per worker, but can certainly expand to employ as many or more workers as they have before. Ditch digging requires far few people per unit of work, but we did far bigger and longer ditches now. And new fields open up, employing more people.

            The first issue is that it is unlikely that a field, once automated, or rendered obsolescent, will make a return to human production.

            The second is that while we’ve not been able to produce something that directly replaces a human being in it’s physical capabilities in the past, I don’t think that will hold true in the future.

            Take your bank tellers. I suspect they will shrink as a source of employment as the people less comfortable with online banking being to pass away, and are increasingly replaced with people with comfortable with online banking, and generally spend very little time needing to see someone face to face for anything.

            Or truckers. The advent of self driving vehicles is going to have massive repercussions, and not simply for the people employed as drivers.

            Now, maybe we’ll find more jobs for them ( I remain unconvinced, unless we require that self driving vehicles have a competent driver behind the wheel at all times, which I also cannot see as a long term solution)

            But let’s allow that we will see a mass producible automaton that closely mimics or exceed human range of motion, with many times the strength, endurance and consistency, and it get’s introduced into our current world. (Most jobs still require human participation, mass and large 3D printing is still non existant, etc)

            What happens then?

          • NN says:

            Take your bank tellers. I suspect they will shrink as a source of employment as the people less comfortable with online banking being to pass away, and are increasingly replaced with people with comfortable with online banking, and generally spend very little time needing to see someone face to face for anything.

            There is a lot of banking that simply isn’t safe to do online no matter how secure the encrypted connection is. The most common is opening many kinds of new accounts. Another is things like money orders, which my last apartment required me to get for the initial payment. And while I don’t have any personal experience with mortgages and the like, I’d be very reluctant to sign up for a $100,000+ loan without discussing it with at least one human being face-to-face beforehand.

            I’m sure that once you move past the personal level into the finances of corporations that move around millions of dollars every day, there are all kinds of things that no one in their right mind would trust to be communicated entirely over the internet.

            Think about it: is there anything that we can do with online banking now that we couldn’t at least theoretically do decades ago in a slightly less efficient manner with snail mail and telephones? If people are willing to do away with face-to-face banking, why hasn’t that happened already?

            Finally, it would logically seem to me that older people would be at least as if not more likely to use online banking than young people, if only due to age-related mobility problems.

            Or truckers. The advent of self driving vehicles is going to have massive repercussions, and not simply for the people employed as drivers.

            Now, maybe we’ll find more jobs for them ( I remain unconvinced, unless we require that self driving vehicles have a competent driver behind the wheel at all times, which I also cannot see as a long term solution)

            We’ve already had self-driving vehicles in air travel for several decades and in rail travel for more than 50 years, yet virtually all planes and trains still have pilots and drivers, respectively. So it does indeed seem highly likely that self driving cars and trucks will be required to have a competent driver behind the wheel at all times for a long time to come, save perhaps for vehicles too small to do much damage if they crash into anything (a la civilian UAVs), military vehicles that are already expected to cause a great deal of “collateral damage” (a la military UAVs), and vehicles that travel in walled off highways that members of the general public aren’t allowed to walk on (a la the handful of elevated and underground trains that have been automated).

            Also, the current progress in self-driving ground vehicle technology has been greatly overhyped. Google’s monthly reports reveal that their “self-driving cars” are manually driven by humans more than a third of the time, and that they have an accident rate much higher than conventional cars.

          • Artificirius says:

            There is a lot of banking that simply isn’t safe to do online no matter how secure the encrypted connection is. The most common is opening many kinds of new accounts. Another is things like money orders, which my last apartment required me to get for the initial payment. And while I don’t have any personal experience with mortgages and the like, I’d be very reluctant to sign up for a $100,000+ loan without discussing it with at least one human being face-to-face beforehand.

            I don’t think many of those are as undo-able online as you seem to think. For instance, the credit union that I use is starting to offer online applications for loans up to 30k. I only suspect this trend to increase.

            Secondly, I think that the majority of teller time is speent on routine matters such as depositing/cashing cheques/money, etc, not opening new accounts. As people who are comfortable with online banking become the vast majority, need for multiple tellers for face to face mass transactions will further decline.

            Speaking of cheques, you don’t even need to find an ATM for them, increasingly, with the ability to simply deposit it with a picture from your phone. Not that cheques are exactly a big thing anymore, but hey.

            I’m sure that once you move past the personal level into the finances of corporations that move around millions of dollars every day, there are all kinds of things that no one in their right mind would trust to be communicated entirely over the internet.

            I would think that almost all of that business is conducted over the internet.

            Think about it: is there anything that we can do with online banking now that we couldn’t at least theoretically do decades ago in a slightly less efficient manner with snail mail and telephones? If people are willing to do away with face-to-face banking, why hasn’t that happened already?

            Define ‘slightly’. I wouldn’t call trying to do all of the things I can do online with my money with a letter slightly more inefficient. Leaving aside the time differences, you have costs of postage, etc.

            Finally, it would logically seem to me that older people would be at least as if not more likely to use online banking than young people, if only due to age-related mobility problems.

            Only by ignoring the tendency for people to stick with what is comfortable. If you’re barely able to negotiation your email for the yearly christmas card, chances are you are not doing your banking online.

            We’ve already had self-driving vehicles in air travel for several decades and in rail travel for more than 50 years, yet virtually all planes and trains still have pilots and drivers, respectively. So it does indeed seem highly likely that self driving cars and trucks will be required to have a competent driver behind the wheel at all times for a long time to come, save perhaps for vehicles too small to do much damage if they crash into anything (a la civilian UAVs), military vehicles that are already expected to cause a great deal of “collateral damage” (a la military UAVs), and vehicles that travel in walled off highways that members of the general public aren’t allowed to walk on (a la the handful of elevated and underground trains that have been automated).

            And the biggest reason for that is still probably people being uncomfortable with the notion that an automated system could be better than a human one. (Presuming that they are, which I don’t know about.) Second to that would be a tossup between people not wanting to surrender their jobs, and companies not wanting to fork out mass lump sums to upgrade.

            And I expect there will be a transition period in which driverless vehicles will require a licenced driver behind the wheel, that is nothing more than a sop to stupidity.

            Also, the current progress in self-driving ground vehicle technology has been greatly overhyped. Google’s monthly reports reveal that their “self-driving cars” are manually driven by humans more than a third of the time, and that they have an accident rate much higher than conventional cars.

            I am surprised that they are driven manually as much as they are, but don’t really care. Weigh them on the time spent driving autonomously, and what occurs then. And so far, while the rate of not at fault accidents is higher than would be expected, this has at least a good chance of being due to the much higher conscientiousness of the accident reporting done by Google, lest they get caught concealing the dangerous faults of their vehicles, and people driving less well around them.

          • NN says:

            Secondly, I think that the majority of teller time is speent on routine matters such as depositing/cashing cheques/money, etc, not opening new accounts. As people who are comfortable with online banking become the vast majority, need for multiple tellers for face to face mass transactions will further decline.

            Maybe they did 40 years ago, but given how long ATMs have been around, I highly doubt that nowadays bank tellers spend a large amount of their time depositing or withdrawing money. As for checks, the fact that the massive decrease in the number of transactions handled using checks in recent decades has not resulted in any significant decrease in the number of bank tellers would seem to suggest that they don’t spend all that much time on handling checks nowadays, either. From what I’ve read, their job duties have shifted to include more of things like providing advice to customers.

            Define ‘slightly’. I wouldn’t call trying to do all of the things I can do online with my money with a letter slightly more inefficient. Leaving aside the time differences, you have costs of postage, etc.

            Only because you aren’t used to mailing things. Back in the day, people did all sorts of things through the mail, including buying things remotely and having them delivered to their home using mail order catalogs. Also, banks and other services still do a lot of stuff through snail mail with pre-printed forms, often included with the monthly bill/account statement, so many things can be done without having to sit down and write out a letter.

            As for postage, one stamp for a first class envelope costs just under half a dollar. You would need to send more than 70 letters in a single month just to equal the cost of one month of a cheap $35 high speed internet subscription.

            But leaving that aside, what about telephones? Automated telephone systems of the “press 1 to check your account balance” variety have been around for decades, and while they are less efficient than online banking, the difference really isn’t that great when you come down to it. Also, fax machines were around decades before the internet and I’m sure that people did banking over them. And before either of those there were telegraphs; the first wire money transfer was done in 1875.

            The bottom line is that I’m not seeing anything revolutionary about online banking that could put bank tellers out of work when snail mail, telegraphs, telephones, fax machines, and ATMs have failed to even significantly reduce the number of bank tellers after decades or centuries of existence.

            Only by ignoring the tendency for people to stick with what is comfortable. If you’re barely able to negotiation your email for the yearly christmas card, chances are you are not doing your banking online.

            30% of Americans age 65 or older own a smart phone. 32% of them own a tablet. 55% of them own a desktop or laptop computer. Old people aren’t anywhere near as uncomfortable with technology as they are commonly thought to be.

            Regardless, for a lot of older people it is physically difficult or even impossible for them to go to the bank in person, so they have a choice between doing some kind of remote banking themselves or getting an assistant or younger relative to do it for them. So again, I’m having a really hard time buying that this demographic is the only reason that bank tellers still exist.

            And the biggest reason for that is still probably people being uncomfortable with the notion that an automated system could be better than a human one.

            Except that isn’t a concern with freight trains and planes, and virtually all of those still have drivers/pilots.

            Second to that would be a tossup between people not wanting to surrender their jobs, and companies not wanting to fork out mass lump sums to upgrade.

            I could buy people not wanting to surrender their jobs holding back this kind of progress for a little bit, but for more that 50 years? As for the cost of upgrades, the vast majority of commercial airliners and freight planes already have systems that are fully capable of taking, off, flying, and landing without any human intervention. There’s also the question of why these factors haven’t stopped several elevated and underground trains from being automated (though even those still have manual override brake buttons that staff can use).

            A far more plausible reason is fear of lawsuits and bad publicity, and the potential risk of lawsuits and bad publicity for automated cars and trucks that drive on the same streets that kids play in is much greater than for automated freight planes and especially freight trains. Until robots obtain legal personhood, only human beings will be qualified for the extremely important job duty of “being someone that the higher-ups can blame in the event that something goes wrong.”

          • Y Stefanov says:

            @Artificirius
            I see your point but I still think it extends ad infinitum …. With more technology, we see vast innovation in complexity and types of services. Many people will find it easier/more efficient/convenient to hire someone to give them the quick rundown and help them with their bitcoin margin call contract (or whatever).

            In a more advanced economy where people specialize and get paid high wages per hour, it really pays on the margin to delegate jobs to others even if you can use technology to take care of it yourself….

        • NN says:

          You can observe more people who prefer a screen to the friend or date sitting next to them, and as voice recognition & other interface software improves alongside interface-aculturation, we may well see radical changes in the service industry.

          Because Clippy and Siri were massive successes. Oh wait…

      • jaimeastorga2000 says:

        It’s just that nowadays tellers are not just cashiers – they are also required to be more friendly, cross-sell and up-sell services, get new competencies etc. etc. There’s always a friendlier, more industrious, more conscientious, more knowledgeable etc. person whom the employer wants to employ to stay abreast of his competition.

        Problem: Less conscientious, unfriendly people no longer competitive tellers. No job for them.

        • NN says:

          Were they ever competitive tellers? After all, “bank teller” has to be in the top 10 list of jobs where you are most likely to have someone point a loaded gun at you and make demands. Being able to deal with that kind of situation already sets a pretty high bar, and if anything that issue has significantly decreased in importance as crime rates have plummeted in the past 2 decades.

          Also, any job where you are trusted to handle large amounts of Other People’s Money has to have a high conscientiousness requirement no matter what.

  26. Thursday says:

    The QZ article warns that it might create a calcified “perpetually under-employed stagnant underclass”. But of course we already have such an underclass, and it’s terrible.

    You’re right that we already have this, particularly in the U.S., but also in other parts of the West. The real issue about a guaranteed income is whether it will expand this underclass. Willing to hear arguments either way.

  27. Lemminkainen says:

    I have several historically-informed reasons to believe that you’re overly pessimistic about the possibility of eradicating poverty in developed countries.

    Over the course of the 20th century, the problem of poverty in developed countries has actually been highly tractable. Even in the 1950s, large swathes of Western Europe and the United States resembled today’s poor countries. (See Tony Judt’s “Postwar” for an extensive discussion of the European case). However, the period between the end of the Second World War and 1968 saw both massive growth and a dramatic narrowing of inequality in both areas. In the US, it also saw significant decreases in economic inequality between black and white Americans. This period was generally characterized by dramatic government investment in basic research and social-democratic policies which effectively redistributed a great deal of wealth. Much of Bernie Sanders’s platform (with the noteworthy exception of his support for dramatically increasing the minimum wage) is actually calling for a return to the policies of this era. There’s nothing utopian about say, free college tuition– it’s a policy which the state of California actually had in the 1960s.

    Unfortunately, during this period, the developed world’s economy also featured an inflexible system of currency pegs, a crippling dependency on fossil fuels, and an abundance of growth-constricting regulations. The structural issues which these problems created caused significant economic contractions in the 1970s. A run of governments in the rich world’s biggest countries (especially the US and Britain) spent the next two decades basically untangling this set of problems. Unfortunately, in the 1980s, they also basically crippled the redistributive systems and intensely progressive tax regimes which had helped eliminate poverty in the first place. So, the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s saw significant growth but also a huge surge in inequality in these parts of the rich world. Other countries (France is a great example, as is Italy) kept a lot of their redistributive apparatus while keeping a heavy-handed, paternalistic regulatory state. Those countries have less inequality, but they also have stagnant growth and really high unemployment rates.

    The major exception to this trend of growing inequality, Scandinavia, is also the region which successfully eliminated growth-constricting regulations while maintaining its redistributive state.

    tl;dr: It’s totally possible to combine massive economic growth with significant reductions in poverty and economic inequality, even in the world’s richest countries, because this combination of circumstances has actually happened in the US and Western Europe, and continues to happen in Scandinavia.

    • E. Harding says:

      “they also basically crippled the redistributive systems and intensely progressive tax regimes which had helped eliminate poverty in the first place”

      -Did they? Haven’t really seen examples of this.

      Italy seems to have much larger growth-related problems than France.

      And Sweden can no longer get an unemployment rate of under 4.5%, as it routinely used to before the 1990s. This is not the case for Denmark, which has less rigid labor codes.

      • Lemminkainen says:

        In 1952, the US had a marginal tax rate of 92% on income past $200,000. The current highest marginal tax rate is 39.6%. This change happened over the course of the 20th century, with the most dramatic drops happening during Reagan’s presidency.

        The decline of redistribution has been a bit more subtle. Entitlement programs have survived, but they contracted relative to inflation during the 1970s. In the 1990s, Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich worked together to pass a welfare reform program that probably got rid of some welfare cheats, but also made it significantly more difficult for everyone to claim benefits, which made it harder for the low executive function people who often most need the benefits to claim them. Entitlements aren’t the only redistributive program whose scope has been curtailed. Subsidies for university education have dropped considerably since the 1980s. Also, in recent decades the US government has not pursued any major new infrastructure projects on the scale of the TVA, the REA, or the interstate highway system. (It did create the internet, but the cables which information flows over are privately owned and operated, which I think has been to consumers’ detriment. My experiences with getting electricity from my local TVA affiliate have been much more pleasant and efficient than my interactions with Comcast and AT&T.)

        (Please note– I’m not trying to claim that the neoliberal reformers of the 1980s and 1990s were evil, or that the consequences of their reforms were universally negative. I quite like affordable air travel.)

        • Tracy W says:

          Top marginal rate is not the same as average rate, the level of exemptions matters too. If you tax every $ at 45% versus taxing every other $ at 90% are you being less redistributive?

          • E. Harding says:

            Income tax revenue as a percentage of GDP has stayed extremely stable since 1943:

            https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=4xZL

            The real increase in regressivity has come from the Federal government’s increasing reliance on payroll taxes.

            “but they contracted relative to inflation during the 1970s”

            -Haven’t seen any evidence of this. Social Security was indexed to inflation during the 1970s.

        • Steve Sailer says:

          I’m not sure how many people actually paid a 92% marginal rate in 1952. It was often joked that Ronald Reagan was one of the few individuals to fully bear the brunt of the absurd marginal tax rates of the time because he was one of the highest paid salaried employees in America, whereas most other highly compensated individuals were in management and had more means to structure their income to avoid the full brunt of the tax rates. High tax rates seemed to be a particular problem of movie industry employees (athletes didn’t make that much back then). Screenwriter Ben Hecht’s amazing 1952 autobiography “Child of the Century” is full of complaints about how much he was paying in taxes and how America doesn’t respect rich people anymore.

          • Steve Sailer says:

            On the other hand, nobody seems to be able to explain why today the marginal tax rates on income keep going up to somewhat under a half million and then stop going up, other than that rich people don’t want them to continue going up, and the rich tend to get their way.

            Why shouldn’t Alex Rodriguez have to pay a higher marginal tax rate than Scott does? Alex can afford it.

          • Tracy W says:

            Does Alex Rodriguez get more votes than Scott?

            In a democratic system, basically every citizen gets the opportunity to vote for the government of the day, so every citizen should bear the costs of what they vote for. Obviously some citizens are not in a position to be able to pay the full set of costs, eg the very poor need their money more for living, so tax exemptions/lower rates/etc make sense for the poorest. And we can’t raise enough money to fund all the demands of modern society for government services through a poll tax (a poll tax is something like $x per head), so we do have an income tax so the richer pay more than the middle class. But to go beyond that and say that we should charge Alex even more, use a higher rate, just because he can afford it, strikes me as very undemocratic.

    • James Bond says:

      The growth rates in Scandanavia once you exclude Norway ( Oil is to a national economy what steroids are to a bodybuilder, it forgives a lot of bad decisions), are significantly below America or other strongly capitalist places like Switzerland and Hong Kong.
      Scandanvian social democracy
      https://www.google.com/#q=finland+gdp+growth
      https://www.google.com/#q=sweden+gdp+growth
      https://www.google.com/#q=Denmark+gdp+growth
      Lassiez-faire Capitalism
      https://www.google.com/#q=switzerland+gdp+growth
      https://www.google.com/#q=american+gdp+growth
      https://www.google.com/#q=singapore+gdp+growth

      And the wealthiest country on here is Switzerland ( per person) so Scandanavia is not suffering the law of diminishing returns. The highest return for a social democracy ( Sweden at 1.5%) is lower than the lowest return for a laissez-faire country ( 1.9%). Correlation isnt causation, but is sure makes you wonder.

      • Lemminkainen says:

        It’s worth looking at the time axes here. All three of the Scandinavian countries you linked to had GDP growth higher than the US’s at points over the past twenty years. I’m also not sure that Switzerland and Singapore are sensible comparison cases. It would be difficult for most other states to imitate Switzerland’s banking secrecy laws, or the structural benefits which Singapore accrued from being a key mercantile center for the British empire.

        • TheAncientGeek says:

          Yeah. If there is a case for excluding Norway because of its oil, there is a case for excluding Switzerland because of its mountais and so on.

          • eccdogg says:

            I think there is a case for excluding them all when compared to the US. They all have smaller populations than North Carolina.

          • Tatu Ahponen says:

            I’ve never understood the “smaller population” argument. Sure, US is big, but it also has a relatively devolved government, and in some ways, both 300 million and 5 million people qualify as ” a lot of people”.

            Anyway, if you exclude Norway because of oil, shouldn’t you also exclude US because of, you know, oil (and other resources)? Sure, oil is not as significant as in Norway, but it’s not exactly insignificant, either.

          • Jiro says:

            I’ve never understood the “smaller population” argument.

            Countries with small populations have high variances in their statistics compared to countries with large populations. Oil is actually an example of this–in the US you have some oil, but it’s a certain proportion of the economy. In a small country, it’s either a huge proportion or zero; the range of proportions includes more extreme cases.

          • eccdogg says:

            ^Right variance is most of my concern. Many US states are bigger than European countries and there is lots of variance between states.

            But also I just think that small country policies likely do not scale to large diverse countries. I mean at some level we all understand this, that is why you don’t see people saying that we should adopt the policies of say Bermuda. My general threshold is that a country needs to be at least the size of Texas before we start comparing them to the US and proposing we adopt their policies.

    • MichaelT says:

      The 1950’s and 1960’s also had no EPA, no clean water/air act, had fewer regulations at all levels of government, almost no safety net for working age males, many fewer women workers to bid down wages, etc. Why does it have to be your preferred progressive policies that caused growth and not these?

      And as other people have mentioned, almost no one paid the 91% rate, so there wasn’t much redistribution going on at those rates:

      http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324705104578151601554982808

      Most rich people arranged their affairs so that they had very little income that had to be declared. One of the things Reagan did that neither side wants to own up to was to eliminate a ton of deductions that the rich previously took advantage of, which raised their declared income. That’s why I am always skeptical of inequality data that relies on tax information, since rules change over time and it’s hard to compare the tax data of the rich in the 1950’s to today.

      • Tracy W says:

        The 1950s also had the widespread adoption of the internal combustion engine (cars, trucks, tractors, etc) and the building of long-distance motorways. Arguably a once-off, like building a railway network.

  28. Matthias says:

    > […], but there seems to be a Red Queen’s Race where every time the GDP goes up the cost of living goes up the same amount.

    That’s ’cause land is hogging a bigger and bigger share of GDP. (See http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2015/03/wealth-inequality)

    We can tax away all land rent without any economic deadweight loss (since land supply is fixed, thus perfectly inelastic), and leave capital and labour completely untaxed.

    And that’s not even controversial: it’s standard orthodox economic theory. Any tax reduction on labour will in aggregate lead to people bidding up land values higher. Because as Scott mentions in his comment about the Red Queen race, that’s where surplus income goes. The nice thing is that for individual economic actors, the marginal tax rate will be zero with a lump sum tax on land values.

    The funds raised from a land tax can easily cover our infrastructure investments (when done right, they increase our land value and thus tax take, and are thus `free’ for the state to invest in). And after paying for infrastructure and a lot of other things, we’d still have enough money left over for a basic income.

    Even with the best robots rendering human labour worthless, land will still bring in rent. It’s also hard to hide or move to offshore, thus easy to tax.

    (If we ever get too much land too thanks to space exploration or underground living, we have to think again. But that’s a nice problem to have.)

    See the American classic of Progress and Poverty (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress_and_Poverty), if you want the same argument in the 19th century language of the book that kicked off the Progressive Era.

    > Maybe we should be optimizing for maximum economic growth until we’ve maxed out the good we can do by industrializing Third World countries?

    This sounds like there’s some kind of trade-off—which there is with taxes on labour and capital that blunt incentives for working and investing. Fortunately, we don’t need a trade-off. We can tax land rental values 100%, and not do the economy one epsilon of damage. (Just the opposite, because this will force people to actually use their land.)

    On the monetary side, we could do a lot for ordinary people right now by eliminating recessions, ie drops in GDP, by letting the central banks target GDP to keep it on a stable growth path.

    • E. Harding says:

      How easy is it to hide the value of the land?

      Maybe the U.S. should have some really easy to fix recessions (like that in 1981), with fast recoveries, in order to cleanse the economy of unnecessary jobs. Worked for Reagan.

      • Matthias says:

        > How easy is it to hide the value of the land?

        Right now, relatively easy, because the regulations are weak. But on a technocratic level, that’s easy to fix (and some fixes have been done in some places). At the crudest, make people self-declare the value at which they would be willing to sell. Make them pay taxes based on that value, but to give it bite: make them sell to any comer at that value.

        (You need to do some slightly cleverer mechanism to separate the value of the land from the value of the house on top. But that’s doable. Private sector assessors do it all the time.)

        > Maybe the U.S. should have some really easy to fix recessions (like that in 1981), with fast recoveries, in order to cleanse the economy of unnecessary jobs. Worked for Reagan.

        Why the snark? I said to get rid of recessions, not to introduce extra recessions.

        See http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?page_id=3447

        (But yes, by having a much more stable outlook for the economy both in terms of stable full employment thanks to NGPD level targeting and stable high levels of welfare and infrastructure spending, we could move much quicker to `cleanse the economy of unnecessary jobs’, ie introduce more structural reforms and remove paper pushers.)

        • E. Harding says:

          “Why the snark? I said to get rid of recessions, not to introduce extra recessions.”

          -It wasn’t snark. I was floating an opposing viewpoint. A lot of the jobs lost during the 2008 recession did not re-appear in the recovery, suggesting it was probably a good idea to get rid of them, anyway, and the recession just quickened the inevitable.

          The problem with demand-side recessions is they lead to a lot of bad government programs.

          • Matthias says:

            OK, I see what you mean. Though I suggest we restructure the labour market without a recession.

            Jobs get lost and created all the time.

      • Steve Sailer says:

        “How easy is it to hide the value of the land?”

        Hard. The government can take pictures from the air. For example, the Greek government got more serious about collecting property taxes around 2009 and discovered from aerial photos there were 53,000 swimming pools in Athens that hadn’t been reported to the taxman.

        Conversely, Thomas Piketty’s theory that there _must_ be all piles of Old Money riches that the Forbes 400 doesn’t know about because equation can be tested with aerial photos. Where are, for example, the personal backyard golf courses that these hidden billionaires would have built? I’m familiar with a half-dozen personal golf courses in Southern California and five of them were or are owned by very famous guys like Bob Hope, Walter Annenberg, and Larry Ellison. If Piketty’s theory isn’t just an updated leftist version of the theory that the Rothschilds have all the money in the world, his followers ought to be able to point to lots of backyard golf courses on Google Earth.

        • suntzuanime says:

          I feel like it’s at least possible to have money without compulsively spending it on golf courses.

          • Meyerkev248 says:

            You would be very, very surprised.

            But Steve’s point is not a bad one. If these secret billionaires have billions, either they’re hoarding for the sake of hoarding, or they’re spending it somehow.

            And if someone’s dropping even 10% of a bunch of billion-dollar fortunes, we’d have noticed.

          • Anonymous says:

            Yeah, it would cause inflation like nobody’s business.

          • Steve Sailer says:

            There undoubtedly are billionaires who have stayed off the Forbes 400 radar. For example, a couple of years ago it emerged, when he started to donate generously to local Jewish charities in New England, that a New Hampshire man in the wholesale groceries business might be worth somewhere between $2 billion and $10 billion and nobody in the billionaire counting business had ever noticed him before. He’s just a great businessman who kept a low profile.

            But the personal golf course test is a pretty good one since satellite photos didn’t become easily available until quite recently. Granted, Piketty’s theory could still be true if Old Money has secret underground lairs full of Vermeers. But rich guys tend to like golf and golf courses are extremely visible from above.

          • Steve Sailer says:

            Another resource for testing Piketty’s theory of Vast Secret Old Money is this list of the 200 biggest yachts in the world:

            http://www.boatinternational.com/yachts/the-register/top-200-largest-yachts–25027/page-19

            Interestingly, quite a few of them that are under construction have their owners kept secret, although that usually leaks out within a few years of delivery.

            The identifiable owners tend to fall into roughly three main categories:

            – Persian Gulf government officials

            – Friends/Enemies of Putin

            – Famous rich guys (e.g., Americans near the top of the list include Larry Ellison, Paul Allen, and David Geffen).

            On the other hand, there are a number of giant yachts whose owners are not publicly identified. Piketty’s theory would suggest that those superyachts whose owners were only identified recently would tend to be secretive Old Money rather than entrepreneurs.

            That seems like a fair test, but I don’t know what the answer would be.

        • Matthias says:

          Clever argument.

          Though: pictures from the air can show you where the land is, but not how much it is worth.

          Under a land value tax, people would try to claim that the value is all in the improvements (house on top etc) and not in the land. Ie the hiding would be done by the accountants.

          There are some standard ways around that; public and private assessors around the world price these things regularly.

          A nice feature is that land is easy to seize: you don’t pay your taxes on the land, it’s no longer yours.

          • John Schilling says:

            A nice feature is that land is easy to seize: you don’t pay your taxes on the land, it’s no longer yours.

            Does it matter whether it’s “yours” if you still get to live there?

            Eviction is not “easy”. In the contemporary United States, it is hard because of the lawyers. Get rid of the lawyers, and it becomes hard because of the minefields. And under a Georgist system, strategically placed minefields, figurative or literal, seem like a rather appealing sort of land “improvement”.

            My father has forty acres of woodland that could be profitably farmed, logged, or developed, but which he mostly prefers to walk through. He also has friends with access to a nuclear reactor. And he can do the math on how much shallow-buried low-level waste would make the land safe for occasional walks but not for permanent habitation, food production, etc. If you’re placing heavy taxes on the underlying value of the land, I’m seeing a perverse incentive.

          • The Nybbler says:

            It’s hard to evict poor people living as tenants. Wealthier people who own a home were much easier to evict prior to 2008, and probably mostly still. Basically, the more you have to start with, the more ruthlessly the system will tear you down if you lose it.

            As for your “perverse incentive”, it’s an intended feature of land value taxes that it strongly encourages the most economically productive use of the land. That’s why urbanists generally support it; they want to tax people out of their low-density housing so they can build apartments.

          • Anonymous says:

            The lesson of 2008 is that it is easy to evict one upper middle class person but it is impossible to evict lots of upper middle class people. They go running to Papa government and as they are the favorite children they get their way.

          • Matthias says:

            > If you’re placing heavy taxes on the underlying value of the land, I’m seeing a perverse incentive.

            Your nuclear ploy is available today as well.

            Suppose I am renting a forest to walk through. If I put in the nuclear waste, my rent would surely go down (since I would no longer be competing with other would-be renters trying to log). Why don’t I do that today?

      • pheltz says:

        Land value per se (i.e. lot value, as opposed to improvement value) would be very hard for a taxpayer to willfully conceal.

  29. newt0311 says:

    What about Carlyle’s proposal? See Latter Day Pamphlets part 1.

  30. Atol says:

    How does the entire asian-american model minority dynamic work? The first generation is poor & uneducated, barely learns english, has the stereotypical restaurant business eventually and works very very hard. The second generation are engineers, doctors, accountants, in finance, business, etc. Is it culture?

    • Jugemu Chousuke says:

      Probably a combination of of a culture that values education and hard work, and good genes for intelligence.

  31. Anonymous says:

    Optimization (Not just technological, think psychosocial, cultural etc.) + Inequality (The natural state of the world) increases the amount of useless people, and obviously counterindicates wasting resources on those useless people. I’m glad at least some are consistent in their Molochianism and are suggesting culling or sterilization, this would be a better solution than doing nothing indeed, utilitarian mercy. I would support this avenue if not for the fact that what we call progress and optimize for is actually horrible inhuman shit. We should be sterilizing the lizard people instead!

    One alternative is to consider that it might be a good idea to preserve or rebuild traditional lifestyles instead of trying to uplift everybody, at least until we can actually uplift people. I’ve been to places with no electricity or modern tech of any kind, the joy, energy and general wellbeing of the people there was so high that they would’ve been sent to the shrink in the city. I would say their lifestyle was close to optimal for them, probably more than ours for many of us. Offer lands to the poor and help them start rural communities or something like that? The most insulting thing about the “Learn to code!” approach is that not only it ignores that people can’t learn, it ignores that many people don’t like coding or that kind of stuff, at all. To the point a simpler life without the advantages of coding would be preferable for them.

    In a cold way its not dissimilar to dealing with something like whales. We can’t ask the whales to understand how suboptimal it is to live in the oceans like that and convince them to join our world and start participating in Democracy and Productivity, they are what they are after all. I like whales, I think they had a better time than we do until we came along. So we must decide, how much optimization are we willing to sacrifice so that whales continue to exist as they do?

    Sadly useless people are not cool like whales so we can’t optimize for them as a side effect of optimizing for cool.

    Inb4 I get accused of luddism for suggesting a purpose for your life, friends, community and so on might be more important than plumbing (Overrated) and television (Dangerous).

    • Wrong Species says:

      I suggested a similar idea before and while I did receive some criticism, I don’t see any reason it can’t work. Call it “The Amish proposal”. I’ve never been Amish before but it doesn’t that bad of a lifestyle.

      • Anonymous says:

        Copy-paste the amish, replace the extreme apollonian lifestyle with something more fun, depend on the tech enclaves for medicine and other nonmolochian tech you want. Doesn’t sound that bad at all.

        • Matthias says:

          Alas, you’d have to keep the tech-enclavers money from bidding up the assets the traditional lifestyle depends on. (Like cheap land.)

    • Simon says:

      If it’s either potable water and sewers or friends and community I’m tending towards not having cholera, dysentry and piles of shit stacking up in the street.

      • Anonymous says:

        Ah. I’ve lived with no plumbing and all that. There was no cholera, dysentry or piles of shit stacking up in the street. In fact the rural wilderness I know is far cleaner and healthier than any city I know, the water is amazing, the food is amazing, everybody is physically active etc. Granted this was in a rather virgin part of the world, you can’t go somwhere polluted and stripped of resources and expect something like it.

        Even if it came to cholera, dysentry and piles of shit vs friends and community, I’m sure a lot of people would take the friends and community, I surely would.

        I have a very hard time understanding pampered people and the technology worship they engage in, its like they romanticize and fetishize technology and decadent comfort more irrationally than any luddite romanticizes the past. I wonder what will be next? Perhaps pave and sterilize the entire world? Save the savages everywhere from nasty germs, unchlorinated water and, ugh, general lack of seriousness!

        Reminds me of the “What human experience are you missing?” thread and how so many people confessed they don’t really like animals or pets and thought everybody else was signaling or using them as props. Way too many people said that. I wonder if something similar happens with lifestyles not optimized for comfort and security, I wonder if most people actually love those and would sacrifice everything else for optimal comfort and security. They might think the rest of us are crazy, evil or signaling for having our kids ride dangerous filthy horses or play in the mud instead of taking them to Disneyland.

        • Jiro says:

          Even if it came to cholera, dysentry and piles of shit vs friends and community, I’m sure a lot of people would take the friends and community, I surely would.

          Says someone who by his own admission lives in a place that doesn’t have cholera, dysentery, and piles of shit.

          • Anonymous says:

            I live in the city now, I have worse. The air is toxic, the people are zombie robots, the noise is maddening and harmful, crime is rampant, there are no children playing in the streets, way too many people are killing themselves every day, food quality is trash especially if you have no money or time. Most people are overweight and ugly, going to the store is a nightmarish scene. Should I go on?

        • Anonymous says:

          What are you doing on the internet?

          • Anonymous says:

            I love technology, I’m trying to be rational here and acknowledge the price it has. I don’t think everybody else should have a lifestyle like I do. For some people, tech and comfort are all. I love these people and they should get what they want, as long as they don’t force it on everybody else and straight refuse to see that what they have is a preference at best. In particular I’m thinking about the US “ossified underclass” Scott was talking about in his post, not the geeks in their ivory towers or myself.

            Besides, we can have whatever mix of tech and savagism we desire, if we do it right. You can have the internet but refuse vehicles and noisy engines in your village.

          • Anonymous says:

            How exactly am I forcing technology and comfort on anyone else, much less everyone else?

            What *exactly* are you proposing? That we create reservations without modern technology and deport people without jobs to them?

        • Nornagest says:

          Getting by without running water or publicly supplied electricity is pretty doable, even potentially idyllic in a hippie kind of way, when you e.g. live on a thousand-acre plot and support yourself by doing forestry management for the people that own it. (A family friend did this when I was a kid; I spent a lot of time at his place.)

          But this presupposes a huge amount of resources lying around, the skills to be competitive in a similar role, and a ready market for your services. It doesn’t come close to scaling up to population levels, and getting by on subsistence farming, which does scale, is nowhere near as romantic.

          • Anonymous says:

            I think subsistence farming can be sufficiently romantic if done well, that has been my experience at least. More romantic than living by yourself in a vast plot. The biggest problem would be the environment I think… I know places with natural hotsprings everywhere, no natural predators or poisonous things, enough delicious life to hunter-gather your way to a full belly with little effort. So easy that the natives never bothered to evolve past the stone age. People doing subsistence farming + some small trade to buy radios or whatever are doing pretty fine there.

            On the opposite end, some places are straight uninhabitable without modern tech. Are there “garden of eden” type wildernesses in the US? Big enough to accomodate the ossified underclass? Rich people probably would prefer to keep their gigantic plots of virgin land though, can’t blame them.

            Obviously filling a garden with poor people is going to have a toll on the garden itself, I’m sure we can find a good balance. Or counter the toll entirely with harmonious use of resources. Even if we can’t, for all I love nature myself, I think people have the priority here.

            Abandoning the decadent aspects of tech does not means abandoning tech entirely. If we want to share and not be assholes we can always lend a radio to the village and send an helicopter when someone needs an artificial heart or whatever, even if they don’t deserve it from a market/darwinian perspective.

    • Anonymous says:

      These savages, they are so noble!

  32. Anonymous says:

    Have you thought about selective protectionism as a way to bring back a lot of jobs from outsourcing?

    I agree with you and Charles Murray on the issue of requalifying the poor – it isn’t going to happen. But it might be possible to bring the jobs back home, through import restrictions. Basically, put high tariffs on products which can be successfully produced at home (trying to grow rice in the Arabian desert is probably not going to work without absurd expenditure) by people who can’t learn to code. Similarly, put down severe restrictions on how big a company is allowed to produce these goods – this is basically what Japan has done to keep its inefficient mom-and-pop shops, while keeping their export industries highly efficient.

    At the bottom line, this is a lot like welfare – you effectively tax the middle class and the rich, through increased grocery and raw material prices, and give to the poor through them having jobs – but avoids the insult of actually being dependent on welfare.

    • Wrong Species says:

      I think we’re past the point that selective protectionism could bring back manufacturing jobs to the majority, just like we’re past the point where we could bring back agricultural jobs to the majority. If you wanted to do that, it would probably involve massive amounts of government control which would probably make us all worse off in the end.

  33. JerboaFify says:

    “… fully open borders is a bad idea, because the risk of it destabilizing the country and ruining the economic motor that lifts Third World countries out of poverty is too high.”

    Completely agree. I simply cannot understand this preoccupation with Open Borders among some quarters.

    We are now centuries past the spread of industrialization and modern political ideas or institutions into the rest of the world, yet there continues to be an order of magnitude difference in present-day technological and social innovation between the West and the rest, and often in social indicators as well. If long-run gdp per capita is used as a proxy for societal competence, such gaps show no signs of closing (Except maybe in the case of East Asia?), and we’ve been watching closely for over decades now. The ‘flying geese’ model of development, where West pushes the technological and socio-cultural frontier ever outwards, with the rest of the world following behind a fixed distance away, seems to be what holds for the foreseeable future.

    In most of history societies stagnate institutionally and technologically over very long periods, and in the last millennium many of them did so despite relatively high standards of living and relatively free inquiry. I’m not a westerner myself, but I hope people recognize just how unique the Great Divergence and the endogenous transition to modernity we see in the West actually are. There’s probably some kind of sociological ‘fairy dust’ somewhere, that we haven’t fully accounted for, in the societies of the West, that produced a highly persistent difference–cultural or otherwise–between the West and the rest, and which continues to drive her primacy. (My own suspicion is that its centuries under the nuclear family system, with relatively free mate-finding (marriage), and concomitant individualism–the tendency for social status to accrue to individuals as opposed to families or groups.)

    If we use such historical data to inform our judgement, rapid demographic change in the West may result in another dark age or something–the standard of living may be high for some time, but we’re eating into our savings of social and cultural capital, which is no longer growing. From purely utilitarian considerations this would be an absolute disaster.

    • Completely agree. I simply cannot understand this preoccupation with Open Borders among some quarters.

      “Here are a bunch of poor people, let’s set up radical new taxes to support them.” vs. “Here are a hundred times as many poor people, let’s remove obstacles put in their way to let them support themselves.”?

      I mean, if you want to cook the omelette of equality, it’s a matter of whose eggs are going to be broken, and there are strictly more people who’d benefit from open borders than will benefit from basic income in one country.

    • meyerkev248 says:

      And what if the magic fairy dust is at least in part geographical?

      America, at the end of the day, is:

      * a continent.
      * With more natural ports than the rest of the world combined.
      * On 2 oceans.
      * And the single largest river system, that, thanks to the intra-coastal waterway, connects those ports to every major internal city. It might be a bit roundabout to get from Pittsburgh to Boston via New Orleans, but it was possible, and more importantly, free.
      * That just so happened to be running through the largest single piece of good farming land in the world.
      * And now thanks to fracking, major energy deposits sitting underneath that good farming land.

      Which meant that as Europe was desperately scraping together cash in order to get a railroad system together, America… was building a canal and a road.

      And even though I’m absolutely a smart fraction guy, America punches about 30% above where its IQ says it should in terms of GDP(PPP)/capita.

    • Corey says:

      I’m not an open borders advocate, though I can see one dimension of appeal: capital flows freely across borders, so why prohibit labor from doing the same?

      (In the US, I’d support stapling green cards to foreign students’ diplomas, and we could probably increase immigration modestly without hurting anything, though anything resembling open borders would be pretty chaotic)

      • ckp says:

        >I’m not an open borders advocate, though I can see one dimension of appeal: capital flows freely across borders, so why prohibit labor from doing the same?

        Yes, capital can be freely bought and sold, why not human beings?

      • Y Stefanov says:

        I was a foreign student once (had to get married to get a green card, though). The minute you decide to “staple green cards to diplomas” you’ll create a huge market for degrees.

        Smugglers are currently charging really poor Latin Americans around $10K to get people across the border (without any status and at huge risk). How much do you think ambitious Asians and everyone else will be willing to pay for a degree? What do you think this will do to education?

        If you think private higher ed institutions have been ripping people off and are an expensive scam, think about their incentives to take their game global…

        I’d much rather just charge potential immigrants and require they buy unemployment insurance.

    • NN says:

      I think you are overly pessimistic about the prospects for the third world. By virtually every economic measure, most of the third world, not just East Asia, has advanced by leaps and bounds in the past few decades. The global rate of extreme poverty is less than half of what it was 30 years ago. True, there are some glaring exceptions, like Syria, Somalia, and North Korea, but there are also some stunning success stories. Chile joined the OECD in 2010 and by some measures now has a lower poverty rate than the US. It is well on its way to becoming a first world or developed country by any definition, if it isn’t there already. If Chile can come this far less than 30 years after the fall of a brutal military dictatorship and just 34 years after an economic collapse, it seems highly likely that many other currently third world countries will be able to do the same in the foreseeable future.

    • Luke the CIA stoog says:

      JerboaFify

      To your question about the “fairy dust” of western societies.
      We have identified what it is: it’s the rule of law and property rights, look at any Index of country by gdp and you have and index of which countries protect property rights. This carries over to dictatorial third world countries, Chile, Hong Kong and Singapore being prime examples.

      The problem is poor people respect neither rule of law (not in that they break the law but that they’d rather the law be governed by populism instead of consistency) nor property rights, so democracy and development are mutually exclusive for most of the world.

      Combine this with developed countries rejection of empire and contempt for dictatorship, and it’s pretty easy to see why most of the world has failed to develop significantly.

      • NN says:

        The problem is poor people respect neither rule of law (not in that they break the law but that they’d rather the law be governed by populism instead of consistency) nor property rights, so democracy and development are mutually exclusive for most of the world.

        On the other hand, many dictators have little respect for rule of law and property rights, and it is not uncommon for them to adopt populist measures, since while dictators don’t have to worry about getting voted out of office they do have to worry about popular uprisings. Worse, dictatorships have a tendency to collapse into succession struggles and/or civil wars, which is the worst possible state for economic development.

        This seems to be a restatement of the truism that a benevolent despot is the ideal form of government. The problem is that benevolent despots are very rare.

        Combine this with developed countries rejection of empire and contempt for dictatorship, and it’s pretty easy to see why most of the world has failed to develop significantly.

        What, exactly, do you mean by “most of the world has failed to develop significantly?” It is certainly true that most of the world is far behind the West economically, but compared to where they were 30 years ago most of the world absolutely has developed significantly. India and China are the most famous examples, but they are far from the only ones. Several Latin American countries have advanced by leaps and bounds in the last few decades. Even in Sub-Saharan Africa there are a number of success stories, such as Botswana, South Africa, and Namibia.

        Incidentally, Botswana, South Africa, and Namibia are all democracies, as are all of the most successful Latin American countries. Which would indicate that in much of the world, democracy and development are not, in fact, mutually exclusive.

        • Luke the CIA stooge says:

          To your point your broadly right about democracy and growth not being completely mutually exclusive, but that covers up the fact that they are largely incapable of taking a very poor country and turning them into a middle income (gdp per captia over 10 000) country in any reasonable time frame. In the past 3 decades we have seen china sky rocket while India flatlined (in comparison) because the communist party did not have to assuage the concerns of the masses or try to explain to a peasant farmer why pro business policies would benefit them more than just confiscating the wealth of the rich, all while a rival party shot down their suggestions and whispered populist nothings in the farmers ear.
          Looking at the development of western societies its pretty clear that the societies with the most consistent path to development started off Monarchical became Aristocratic and only very late did they embrace the universal franchise. And while its true most monarchs and dictators do not respect rule of law or property rights, or (in the case of china just basic respect for private enterprise) it is true that the only countries to embrace these liberal principles have been either dictatorships or aristocracies (remember only land owners could vote during America development).
          The simple fact is government only works when the people who hold power have a vested interest in maintaining law, property rights and free market enterprise. Western democracy works when that group is the majority of the nation. Aristocracy works when those with power share that interest, and monarchy works when the monarch is enlightened enough to be persuaded of that ideal.

          THus a developed democracy will be the most stable form of government, but democracy would be an awful fit for underdeveloped countries as maybe only 10% of the population are invested in the values that would make it work.

          All of the above is basic Hobbes.
          He showed how a social order could come about by mutual self interest and how the state must respect the rights (what he calls natural laws) of the people or risk throwing them out of the social order and into war with the state, as they would no longer be self interested in maintaining the state.
          This is the basic logic by which he comes to his more famous ideas that:

          1. Each subject is bound to obey the state even if he disagrees with the law
          (for as long they remain a subject it is in their interest for the state to
          govern effectively)
          2. Monarchy will be the most efficient form of government because both aristocracy and democracy are prone to wither and collapse, as both are easily captured by people who will violate the rights of their fellows for personal gain, and thus create decay, crime and quite possibly war.

          THe fact that we’ve invented a forth form of government Rich Liberal Western Democracy, does not mean that classical democracy, the democracy that poor countries inevitably get since their people are neither rich, liberal or western (culturally), is any better a system than when hobbes decried it as the worst form of government.
          The only way i can see for poor countries to develop is to go from enlightened dictatorship, to liberal aristocracy to rich liberal western democracy (as happened in Britain, America, Chile and South Korea).
          Thus it seems the only way we could help base poor countries to develop would be to support secular liberal dictators/ aristocracies and impose regime change on other regimes that fail to meet that standard/ overstay their welcome once the populace has become Rich Liberal and Western.

          • Skivverus says:

            the communist party did not have to assuage the concerns of the masses or try to explain to a peasant farmer why pro business policies would benefit them more than just confiscating the wealth of the rich

            Well, that, or because they tried the alternative first, and the results were not so much to their liking.

            Not to take away from the rest of your point, though.

          • NN says:

            To your point your broadly right about democracy and growth not being completely mutually exclusive, but that covers up the fact that they are largely incapable of taking a very poor country and turning them into a middle income (gdp per captia over 10 000) country in any reasonable time frame. In the past 3 decades we have seen china sky rocket while India flatlined (in comparison) because the communist party did not have to assuage the concerns of the masses or try to explain to a peasant farmer why pro business policies would benefit them more than just confiscating the wealth of the rich, all while a rival party shot down their suggestions and whispered populist nothings in the farmers ear.

            On the other hand, the Kim family also did not have to assuage the concerns of the masses, and North Korea is now one of the poorest countries in the world.

            The only way i can see for poor countries to develop is to go from enlightened dictatorship, to liberal aristocracy to rich liberal western democracy (as happened in Britain, America, Chile and South Korea).

            Chile had a per-capita GDP of about $2,000 when Pinochet’s regime was replaced by a democratically elected government in 1989. South Korea wasn’t much richer when it became a democracy in 1987, with a per-capita GDP of about $3600. Most US states had universal adult white male suffrage by the 1840s. So all of those countries except Britain actually became rich and developed after they became non-Aristocratic democracies.

            Thus it seems the only way we could help base poor countries to develop would be to support secular liberal dictators/ aristocracies and impose regime change on other regimes that fail to meet that standard/ overstay their welcome once the populace has become Rich Liberal and Western.

            Because it’s not like supporting dictators that we like and imposing regime change on dictators that we don’t like has ever turned out badly.

          • Anonymous says:

            People love using meaningless numbers to say Chile is doing great. It isn’t, at all. Pretty much everything besides exploitation opportunities for the wealthy is trash. You wouldn’t believe how bad it is on everything that actually matters.

            “Enlightened dictatorship” LMAO you have no idea what you are talking about, Pinochet was no more enlightened than Bin Laden. Stealing money for himself, having literal dogs rape the commie kids before dropping them in the ocean, such enlightenment.

            Its turning more like the USA every day. I’m pretty sure after a few more decades of degeneration you will feel right at home here. The saddest thing is that we serve as a model somehow for other SA countries that want to do their share of Moloch worship.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            Its turning more like the goddamn USA every day.

            Pretty sure that’s the goal.

          • Psmith says:

            Pretty much everything besides exploitation opportunities for the wealthy is trash. You wouldn’t believe how bad it is on everything that actually matters.

            For instance…? (non-Chilean checking in, all I know is what I read in the papers)

          • Luke the CIA stooge says:

            NN your example of iraq war doesn’t work since that is a prime example of the US trying to make democracy happen instead of either installing a puppet dictatorship or administering it as a protectorate/ colony of the US.
            I don’t think regime change is a policy that would consistently work I’m just saying that before 1991, back when the US was to busy fighting the cold war to worry about self government the US had vastly more success: Kuwait, Grenada, Panama, Chile, South Korea, Greece, Italy(CIA rigged elections), Indonesia, Japan and Germany is a list of relatively successful countries (Indonesia is still poor but doing much better than India which seems a good comparison case) where the US did not care about democracy with Cuba, Vietnam and Iran being cases where this policy didn’t workout, while the cases where the US Has made democracy a priority at the expense of liberal principles (rule of law, property rights, efficient administration, free trade)
            These nations are: Haiti, Iraq and Afghanistan, three of the worst off nations in the world. And it need be this way, Imigrants from these nations have thrived. There is nothing inherently wrong with them. it is simply that they do not have the institutions of functional government and are in no position to institute or maintain them democratically.

            Anonymous “enlightened dictatorship” does not mean the regime is pleasant, respects human rights, or meets even the most basic definition of good government. They don’t.
            Enlightened dictatorship or a liberal aristocracy though are the only way to go from an underdeveloped miserable state to a developed healthy state (which then has tribunals and inquests into the crimes of the old regime)

            The choice isn’t between enlightened dictatorship/aristocracy which produce growth and another type of government which doesn’t do awful things. The choice is between enlightened dictatorship/aristocracy that produces growth and does awful things, and unenlightened dictatorship/aristocracy/unreformed democracy which doesn’t produce growth and still does awful things. It’s between a decade or 3 (China took 3 the next country will take less) of brutal government to get to prosperous good government or spend forever under broken combinations of democracy, aristocracy and dictatorship without things getting better.

            Seriously I can not think of a country that has made the leap to developed without an undemocratic government or a war

          • Anonymous says:

            For instance…? (non-Chilean checking in, all I know is what I read in the papers)

            Its like a mix of the worst caricature stereotypes of “right wing capital A Americans” mixed with appalling poverty and inequality that gets hidden pursposefully. Obviously this includes tribalism, our own instance of the “Ctrl-Left”, doing pretty much the same idiotic shit they do in the US, etc. One difference is that we’ve only had “democracy” for 25~ years, blood still runs hot for many people, and there is a big bunch of the population that is really low class. Low class in a way that doesn’t exist in civilized places where it goes “Poor -> Lower-Middle -> Middle -> High and so on. Lower class as in “Viewed as subhuman by everybody else but not homeless/starving”. An unholy mix between the Hindu castes and old-school british open disdain.

            70%~ of the population is obese. Natural resources of all kinds are being exploited by foreign businesses at practically no cost, massive destruction of ecosystems is ongoing to satisfy international demand, the best goods are all exported leaving locals with subpar product. Traditional cultures are all destroyed, centralization and city life is queen now. Healthcare and education are trash. The worse are the cultural changes though, but this is pretty subjective. Chileans are tryharding to be like what they think europeans or americans are like, its gross.

            Its a modern banana republic disguised and presented simultaneously as Dubai and some kind of possible liberal happyland.

          • NN says:

            Seriously I can not think of a country that has made the leap to developed without an undemocratic government or a war

            Botswana has been a democracy since it gained independence in 1964, and in that time it has gone from one of the poorest countries in the world to one of the richest countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. And again, your go-to examples of Chile and South Korea became rich after they became democracies.

            You seem to be engaging in Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc. Lots of countries that are now rich have previously had undemocratic governments and/or wars. It does not immediately follow from that that undemocratic governments caused their economic development. For all we know, they might have developed faster if not for their undemocratic governments. Especially since plenty of countries that are currently poor also have previously had undemocratic governments and wars.

          • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

            I mean, I don’t agree with the characterization of Chile as a almost first world (unless your standards are pretty low to begin with), but consider it’s being compared to its neighbors. You’ve been dealt a pretty shit hand to begin with with a country with awkward geography, low population not a great deal of natural resources and constant natural disasters. Compare to countries like Argentina or Venezuela, the former which had a huge head start (used to be a top 10 economy) and all the advantages you don’t, and the latter had (has? some of the biggest oil reserves in the whole word), just keeping up (Argentina) is notable, heavily outperforming (Venezuela) is pretty good.

            Like, what kind of system would you like implemented?

          • Anonymous says:

            @Whatever Happened To Anonymous

            Chilean geography is actually amazing, one of the best in the world. Huge possibilites for renewable exploitation, lots of coastline, lots of fertile land, the biggest reservoirs of fresh water, minerals (Mining is big)… The natives never bothered to evolve past the stone age for a reason.

            One maglev or superloop thing would work wonders for transportation all along the central valley. We were never dealt a heavy hand when it comes to that.

            You might think Chile is doing better than our neighboors but this is simply not true. Argentina for example has better education (And free) + they are leagues ahead culturally. Low population is a plus for me.

            You ask what I propose but I must ask, from whose position? President? Myself? Ideal theoretic benevolent dictator?

            This link should be interesting:

            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilean_nationalization_of_copper

            What little good we have we do despite the dictatorship and foreign interests, not thanks to them.

          • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

            Argentina for example has better education (And free) + they are leagues ahead culturally.

            Only at the university level, Argentinian education is notoriously bad at the other levels, which is why, despite it being “free”, the actual percentage of college educated people is relatively low. Besides, public university is going to be free in Chile now, right?

            + they are leagues ahead culturally.

            If you like European culture, sure. Besides, as I said, huge head start.

            You ask what I propose but I must ask, from whose position? President? Myself? Ideal theoretic benevolent dictator?

            I mean, in general, what kind of government would you like to have instead of a vaguely liberal one (sometimes leftier, sometimes rightier)? You give off Nat-Soc vibes (not that there’s anything wrong with that), but I know better than just assuming those kind of things.

          • Anonymous says:

            I mean, in general, what kind of government would you like to have instead of a vaguely liberal one (sometimes leftier, sometimes rightier)? You give off Nat-Soc vibes (not that there’s anything wrong with that), but I know better than just assuming those kind of things.

            We are not yet at the point where we could pick one system and expect it to work. I don’t care if its more leftist or more rightist honestly, vaguely liberal is fine. The real problems are corruption and the fact that we don’t have a sovereign government, laws are literally made by foreign interests in order to have an easier time consuming what they want.

            I suppose it would be easier to understand if I say that I firmly believe underdeveloped but happy > “developed” (For show and exploitation) but miserable.

            “Development” should be sought but not at all costs, this is why some countries that are no better in any statistical studies sense are simply much more fun places to live in, especially for the “lower classes but not poor”.

    • Virbie says:

      We are now centuries past the spread of industrialization and modern political ideas or institutions into the rest of the world, yet there continues to be an order of magnitude difference in present-day technological and social innovation between the West and the rest, and often in social indicators as well. If long-run gdp per capita is used as a proxy for societal competence, such gaps show no signs of closing (Except maybe in the case of East Asia?), and we’ve been watching closely for over decades now.

      There’s probably some kind of sociological ‘fairy dust’ somewhere, that we haven’t fully accounted for, in the societies of the West, that produced a highly persistent difference–cultural or otherwise–between the West and the rest, and which continues to drive her primacy. (My own suspicion is that its centuries under the nuclear family system, with relatively free mate-finding (marriage), and concomitant individualism–the tendency for social status to accrue to individuals as opposed to families or groups.)

      There are many, many blind spots in your model here. I’m always surprised that models of this sort are popular, but I suppose most people prefer simplicity at the cost of being wildly wrong, especially if it means you don’t have to bother learning even the basics of history.

      I’ll just use Eurasia for my counterexamples, for simplicity (the geographic developmental hurdles of the Americas or Australia just muddy the waters).

      AFAICT, the industrial age was one of those sui generis moments that ossify even those differences in development that were semi-random or cyclical. It’s not a coincidence that industrialism spread to non-Western countries that maintained some measure of political sovereignty (Russia, Japan) much more so than to countries that didn’t. I hope you understand how silly would be to blame cultural factors for the development of institutions over a time period where political sovereignty was held by other countries and pointed towards their own interests.

      The idea that we have a sort of naturalistic experiment of “decades of development” is ludicrously ignorant of the history of the postwar years. The end of the colonial era didn’t mark the beginning of isolationism in the West: The Cold War (and post Cold War) era was marked by the West actively meddling in the affairs of other countries in ways that were often detrimental to their longterm development. There’s plenty of feedback cycles in economic and cultural development, and I’ve yet to see a credible case for the West’s unique propensity for development that doesn’t rely on wishing these away. Look at the centuries of bloodshed that it took to gradually sort-of stabilize the boundaries of Europe, and then look at the borders in South Asia and the Middle East, which by all accounts the British drew with a crayon on their way out. Iran is another example. Pretending to be ignorant of history and treating it as an inevitable Muslim-country eternal-backwater mess ignores its actual history, which included a transition to constitutional monarchy 100 years ago, ending with a US-organized coup that installed an autocratic gov’t, because their functioning democracy chose policies we didn’t like. The idea that revolts against brutal autocracies lead to subpar postwar institutions (the Islamic Revolution and “modern” Iran) is a trope at least as old as the French Revolution.

      On top of that, your model pretends Communism isn’t one of those “modern political ideas” of the industrial age. It’s fairly easy to predict that, in new democracies with underdeveloped economies (immediately post-colonialism), a backlash against the institutions of the West in general would be popular among the voting masses of the time. You saw this in India, where things like the onerous anti-labor laws of the British Raj led to an electoral backlash to what the masses perceived as capitalism. The aforementioned borders-invented-by-morons problem (for one, it’s an absurdly large, absurdly diverse country: only 50% of people speak the most commonly spoken language) started post-colonial India off on a bad footing, but 50 years of a democratic Soviet-style economy looms large in what’s caused their developmental problems. India and S Korea were roughly as wealthy as each other in the early 50s: 50 years of ~1% growth smashed the hell out of that rough equivalence. It’s not a coincidence that the beginnings of opening the economy in the 90s (like that of the Chinese in the 70s) has yielded a massive amount of development.

      You could use your same reasoning (or lack thereof) to argue that some “fairy dust” makes Europeans uniquely violent savages: after all, they’re the only region that managed to ignite not one but two conflagrations that touched much of the world and had death tolls on the global scale. Of course, doing so would be willfully ignorant of history, and the fact that these primarily European wars were so damaging not because of Europe’s unique barbarism but because of their influence over much of the world at the time. The circumstances magnified the importance of their actions, much as the advent of industrialization magnified the importance of random fluctuations in development.

  34. anonymous says:

    AFAIK the flat income argument is not supported by the data. 3 Extremely large wrenches in the narrative are 1: decreasing household size, 2: changes in worker demographics, 3: the chages in wage to benefit ratios due to benefits being tax advantaged and thus favored by workers. The analyses I’ve seen indicate these three not only explain all the “decoupling” but combined indicate that we are wealthier than jst keeping even with GDP. This is supported by spending on luxury goods, services, vacation hours, etc are all up substantially.

  35. Peter Bloem says:

    Jevon’s paradox is relevant to this issue:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

    No technological breakthrough alone will create a post-scarcity society, because people will naturally consume and waste more in step with the increased production. And the distribution will stay uneven. Invent a way to produce twice as much food from the same resources, and the upper and middle classes will start inventing ways to eat and waste more food per person.The same proportion of the food will go to the rich and the poor will get just as much.

    Invent a car that burns half the gasoline tomorrow, and people will start driving twice as much the day after, ordering more packages, because transport is cheaper and so on. The net effect will be a slight boost to the fossil-fuel-based market.

    People can fight and overcome natural impulses like these, but until we do, and until everybody understands this, we may be better off not looking for life-saving technologies.

    • Brandon Berg says:

      Invent a way to produce twice as much food from the same resources, and the upper and middle classes will start inventing ways to eat and waste more food per person.The same proportion of the food will go to the rich and the poor will get just as much.

      Well, that’s the theory. In practice, the opposite seems to have happened.

  36. Brandon Berg says:

    Hey there, neighbor! As another southeaster, I agree with you broadly. But an important correction: Cost of living increases have not been matching GDP increases for the last forty years. If that were the case, real GDP per capita would have remained stagnant, and that’s not the case. In fact, it’s doubled in the last 40 years.

    For a variety of reasons (chiefly increases in wage inequality, greater spending on non-cash compensation for employees, and changes in household composition, though note that, contradicting the exploitation story, an increasing share of income going to holders of capital is not a major contributor), wages haven’t doubled for all households across the board. However, when you control for household size, they have been increasing.

    The reason so many people live paycheck-to-paycheck is that certain people, because of culture, or genetics, or whatever, just won’t save. There was a recent essay making the rounds about “the secret shame of the middle class” or something like that that illustrates this point nicely. The author, who should have been able to save a fair bit of money, recounts how he consistently spent right up to the limits of his means.

    As far as I can tell, some people just don’t have the impulse to save. If they make more money, they’ll find something to spend it on.

    • Swami says:

      Agreed completely. I will even add that the safety nets which we built are contributing to this very behavior by making it less risky.

      • Plus there is that common theme or maybe cliché that you hear around startups and self-owned businesses, if you have a job to fall back on it is much harder to push yourself to do what you need to do in order to turn it into a successful venture. You have to fall out of your nest first until you can build up enough speed to fly, but waddling out of the nest makes it hard to build up that same speed. How much of that is survivor bias? Dunno.

        I know I’d be pounding the pavement so to speak to write more content and grow my audience if I had to make writing work or be down and out. How much do safety nets increase risky behavior and how do we price moral hazard externalities? How much do safety nets encourage complacency and how do we price that opportunity cost?

    • DES3264 says:

      Here is an analogy that made me much more sympathetic to the people who don’t save: They spend money like I spend time.

      Do they make new purchases when they are already in debt? Do I agree to new commitments when I am already over booked? Especially to commitments months in the future?

      Do they incur penalties by not paying bills on time? Do I raise expectations for myself when I claim that I need more time to deliver something great?

      Do they give money to friends and family that they need for their own costs? Am I available for my friends and family even as I stay up night after night trying to catch up?

      Maybe this will make you look down on me as much as them but, to many prosperous intellectual workers I’ve made this analogy to, it creates a lot of sympathy.

      • Jiro says:

        But you can waste time without me being considered a callous and greedy capitalist exploiter for not donating some of my time to you when you start to suffer consequences for wasting too much time.

      • Swami says:

        You are replying that somebody above you was “looking down” on people who have trouble saving money (or spending too much). I fail to see who was doing this.

        Reread the arguments. One of the arguments is that “sympathy” (safety nets) are contributing to the problem.

        I have sympathy for your time management problems. I have sympathy for people’s issues with delayed gratification. What I don’t plan to do is enable it, sponsor it, or redesign some extremely effective institutions in the mistaken belief that this will fix it.

        Giving a BIG to a professional in NYC with $300 shoes who sends his kids to elite schools and worries he can’t find spare change for a pack of gum is like giving free booze to a drunk.

        Some people are simply incapable of saving or reducing their living standards beyond the edge. We need to accept that.

        And yes, I have extreme sympathy for alcoholics too.

    • Corey says:

      One failure mode I personally know exists amongst some US poor folks (having grown up amongst them): saving is seen as futile, because if you have any, some emergency will pop up quickly and consume it. So if you get hold of any money, you spend it right away before a car breakdown / family problem / etc. gobbles it up.

      Of course, in the long term then your life becomes a constant series of crises, but I think a lot of people can’t imagine that life can be any other way.

      • Walter says:

        This is a super true comment. You combine a culture where everyone pitches in when asked with a norm that if you have trouble you should ask and everyone understands on some level that if they don’t spend their money instantly it’ll be used to pay for Bob’s gambling debts or Alice’s depression meds or Frank’s bail. So they all spend instantly. So they are always desperate for cash and begging each other. Everyone pulls each other back down. No one can get out.

        • Brian says:

          Ayn Rand fans may recognize this as the fate of the Twentieth Century Motor Company, and of all institutions that live up to the doctrine “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need.”

        • orangecat says:

          Right, and there’s a plausible argument that this environment makes buying lottery tickets rational, because your marginal value of money is increasing. Having an extra $500 in your checking account doesn’t do you any good because beggars will siphon it off, so it can make sense to trade it for a 1% shot at $25,000 which you could use to escape.

          • John Schilling says:

            No; if you live in that environment you have relatives who can and will siphon off $25k. Or $250k or $2.5 million. We see this in the actual behavior of lottery winners – poor people generally don’t trust official government safety nets, are closely tied in to informal community or family equivalents, and are mostly honorable enough to pay it back when fortune turns their way.

  37. blacktrance says:

    Whatever we do in the short term, there’s an attractive but unpopular long-term option that’s cheaper than basic income – eventual nonexistence. If the barriers to making people productive are high enough to make some of them “useless”, and for whatever reason we can’t reduce them to a level at which this wouldn’t be much of a problem, and we don’t want a permanent underclass, we can adopt “The Poor Will Not Always Be With Us” policies: expanded access to birth control, stigma against having children in a position of financial instability, and perhaps making basic income conditional on sterilization.

    • Anonymous says:

      expanded access to birth control, stigma against having children in a position of financial instability

      This actually seems to be the policy in place for the middle class now. And it’s totally working, if by ‘working’ one means that they’re not reproducing very well (often at all).

    • suntzuanime says:

      Yeah, you’re the guy the second article was talking about who wants to deal with AIDS by throwing all the gays in camps. I appreciate the wide overton window this blog has, but I think it can stop short of actual genocide, even of white people.

      • blacktrance says:

        I’m not calling for anyone to be killed or thrown into a camp, or for any coercive measures at all. I grant that there’s a superficial similarity of solving the problem by reducing the population of those who are experiencing it, but calling that “genocide” is the noncentral fallacy.

        • Anonymous says:

          Well, it’s genocide by the United Nations definition.

        • suntzuanime says:

          Oh heavens no, no coercive measures whatsoever! Just a stigma for suicidally-depressed people and conditional welfare payments for people who rely on them to live. Fuck you and your idea of what “voluntary” is.

          • Anonymous says:

            Do you believe it is the duty and obligation of other people, through the government, to support the poor through welfare payments?

          • blacktrance says:

            Mine is the more humane “compromise” solution. The other alternatives are to retreat into private gated communities with armed guards and leave the rest of the world to suffer, or to be forced to support a potentially growing class of unproductive people forever. Yes, there are costs, and it may be tempting to avoid paying them now, but we’ll end up paying more later if we don’t.

            (If you want to get into this, it’s basic income that’s coercive.)

          • suntzuanime says:

            If your base position is “yes, let the poor die in the streets”, then offering people money to get sterilized is not coercive. But, again, fuck you. If you’re calling it a “basic income”, the whole point is that it’s not conditional, that’s how it works. And then threatening to take it away if I don’t caper to your jig is definitely coercion.

            I appreciate that you’re looking for a “humane” solution. A euthanasia of the Midwesterners, not an execution. I understand that heroin overdose is a nice peaceful painless way to die.

          • TheAncientGeek says:

            @Anonymous

            Would you happily starve to death if you became unemployable?

          • Anonymous says:

            I’d seek non-employment means of support, including but not limited to:
            – family support,
            – patronage,
            – church charity,
            – begging,
            – dumpster diving,
            – subsistence farming.

            I wouldn’t want to die, just as nobody sane does. I wouldn’t take starvation lying down, though. I have been unemployed for considerable stretches of time, but found means to stay alive anyway, despite never receiving a single cent of welfare payment.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            I’m with blacktrance here.

            Well, I mean, I don’t grant the premise of this whole post. I’m in the “northeast quadrant”.

            But suppose it’s true that there is or will be a huge class of people who are unproductive and incapable of being made productive. I don’t see why the productive people are obliged to support them. They may wish to support them out of human sympathy, if it doesn’t come at too big a cost. But then such sympathy would demand putting an end to the conditions that create a large class of unproductive people.

            If the problem is people irresponsibly having children whom they cannot afford to support, then the way to solve that problem is to convince them not to do that—and if they insist upon doing it, give them charitable aid only on the condition that they don’t have any more children to perpetuate the problem.

            Again, though, I don’t grant the premise of this whole discussion. I don’t think there’s any problem of technological employment, or of people somehow otherwise being unemployable.

            The thing is that it’s very difficult to imagine what outcomes will be produced under a free market. Imagine if you told people in 1800 that 90% of the people employed as farmers would “lose their jobs” through industrialization. “What are they going to do, learn blacksmithing lol?” They couldn’t even imagine the kind of jobs that exist in a modern economy.

            I predict that if you had a free labor market and eliminated the disincentives for working, the 55-year-old former truck driver would find something to do.

            But you know the thing that really pisses me off? It’s the people who grant (condescendingly) that there’s all these useless, unemployable people. And then they give this blackmail kind of argument: “You better support basic income for all these people, or you’re going to regret it! They’ll turn to crime; they’ll vote for Trump; they’ll hang you from the lampposts!” Fuck that! There could be no worse argument for making me feel any sympathy or desire to help these people—because I can think of a lot better solutions than paying the Danegeld.

            It can’t possibly be in the interest of the poor to support an atmosphere of class warfare. Because if we had a class war, I know who would win.

          • Gbdub says:

            Coercion goes both ways – in a world of readily available birth control and expensive social services, an insolvent person who produces offspring is making a choice that forces the rest of the community to support them.

            Is suggesting that we maybe not encourage such behavior really worthy of a “fuck you”?

          • multiheaded says:

            suntzu, dude, we’ve often been at odds before, but let me just say I am unironically happy that you picked the “not cackling villainy” side after all

          • LCL says:

            But you know the thing that really pisses me off? . . . blackmail kind of argument [for UBI or welfare state] . . . if we had a class war, I know who would win.

            The class warfare thing is a fantasy.

            The more relevant danger is that a mass of dissatisfied, marginalized, unemployable people represents a tempting potential base of power for one set of ambitious elites to use against another set. Likely in ways that would prove very disruptive for society as a whole.

            Reducing the risk of that happening is valuable to society and represents a potentially reasonable use of collective resources. Above and beyond any utilitarian benefits it may have for the marginalized people themselves.

            A pretty big group around here has concluded that cost/benefit calculations justify investments in reducing the risk of technological catastrophe. What’s so infuriating about applying the same logic to a risk of political/social catastrophe?

          • jaimeastorga2000 says:

            @suntzu: Agreed.

      • Brandon Berg says:

        This kind of hysterical rhetoric doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence in the quality of the actual counterargument you’re holding back.

      • Slow Learner says:

        It seems that blacktrance subscribes to the theory that poor people are poor because of their personal virtue or lack thereof, and that therefore if a future society is solely descended from rich people, there will no longer be poor people.

        I would call this theory hilarious, if it were in fact in the least funny that people can apparently seriously subscribe to it.

        • Brandon Berg says:

          Now that we’ve established that you’re a really good person who believes all the proper things, would you enlighten us as to the evidence against the non-strawman version of this proposition: That there are certain highly heritable cognitive and personality traits that predispose people to poverty and welfare dependency in a modern economy, and that reducing their fertility will reduce the number of people born with such traits in future generations, reducing but not eliminating poverty and welfare dependency? Or are you such a good person that you don’t need evidence to believe the proper things?

          • Slow Learner says:

            The existence of poverty (I will leave aside the nonsense of ‘welfare dependency’) is an outcome of the structure of our economy:
            There are only so many jobs out there which pay adequately, only so many opportunities. There are a lot more people than such jobs, therefore many people live in poverty.

            It’s like trying to theorise that steerage class passengers on the Titanic were generally poor swimmers – look how many of them drowned, after all! – while totally ignoring that from the very moment she was fitted out, let alone left port, she had far too few lifeboats to accommodate everyone on board and first class passengers were accommodated closer to where the lifeboats were.

            ___

            To put it another way, let us grant for a moment that whether one ends up in affluence or poverty is based entirely on cognitive and personality traits.
            Now are they heritable? Or is it more that socioeconomic position is largely heritable, and being in the same socioeconomic position fosters similar personality traits and ways of thinking?
            Because if it is the former, then perhaps eugenics could gradually ameliorate the situation. If it is the latter, eugenics will make fuck all difference, because a roughly fixed proportion of the population will find no opportunities and find themselves in a socioeconomic situation that fosters the cognitive and personality traits you find so troublesome.

            Guess which option is, if you will admit no other option, at least faster to test?

          • “There are only so many jobs”

            Over the history of the U.S., the number of jobs and the number of people looking for jobs have both increased about a hundred fold. During that period, there have been only a few years when the two numbers differed by as much as ten percent. That is strong evidence against a model with a fixed number of jobs independent of the number of workers.

    • Anonymous says:

      Mine is the more humane “compromise” solution. The other alternatives are to retreat into private gated communities with armed guards and leave the rest of the world to suffer, or to be forced to support a potentially growing class of unproductive people forever. Yes, there are costs, and it may be tempting to avoid paying them now, but we’ll end up paying more later if we don’t.

      I would propose a different one.

      Phase out publicly-funded welfare (hopefully cutting taxes to match), pointedly suggest to those objecting that instead of whining, they should do their part voluntarily, for example by directly paying their friendly neighbourhood homeless person a stipend, or through their church or NGO. I think that most of the underclass would, under pressure, be forced to – and succeed in – finding some means of profitable employment or other way of financing themselves. Just as they did before the age of welfare.

      • blacktrance says:

        There’s a lot to like about your proposal, but a couple of objections concern me. First, what if the barriers to productive employment are higher now than they were before the age of welfare, and cuts to the welfare state don’t reduce them enough for most people using it to finance themselves? For example, hiring a questionable person as a janitor could cost you more than you’d get from their labor if they were trustworthy, so they stay unemployed. Second, what if they choose to finance themselves through crime, or if people turning to their local communities for aid exacerbates the negative aspects of those communities (e.g. the formation of gangs)?

        • Anonymous says:

          First, what if the barriers to productive employment are higher now than they were before the age of welfare, and cuts to the welfare state don’t reduce them enough for most people using it to finance themselves?

          Good question – I don’t know. The best way around this that I can see is to implement a sort of limited test, “One Government, Two Systems”-style and see if it actually works in that setting before going forth with any national-level solutions.

          Second, what if they choose to finance themselves through crime

          Punish them, of course. They will get the picture quickly if odds of getting caught are high – but fixing policing and punishment is at best tangential to this issue.

          or if people turning to their local communities for aid exacerbates the negative aspects of those communities (e.g. the formation of gangs)?

          What do you mean?

          • blacktrance says:

            What do you mean?

            “Of course we’ll help you, you’re a member of the ingroup. And just to make sure we’re all good ingroup members, let’s go rob and murder the outgroup. What, you don’t want to? Who else is going to help you?”
            When people’s ability to stay alive is dependent on their social capital rather than their productivity, it opens up more opportunities for dysfunctional social norms to assert themselves.

          • Anonymous says:

            That falls under the heading of crime-fighting, I think. There used to exist mutual help associations before welfare, and a lot of help was gotten out of the extended family – none of which needs to become tribal and criminal.

      • multiheaded says:

        [insert standard rage outburst, low quality guillotine.jpg, etc, god i’m so fucking tired of you people. i’d show you “pressure”, you shit.]

      • Ilya Shpitser says:

        Have you been to Baltimore before? Or seen ‘The Wire’?

    • CecilTheLion says:

      One issue here is that people have a range of incomes over the course of their lifetime. Some people spend some time on welfare only to later break into the top 10%, or 20%, or whatever. Sterilizing people simply because they reached a nadir would ignore the dynamism observed over the average human life. Not to mention the inhumanity of pressing people in legitimate distress into making a profound life decision in exchange for eating.

      “We are all failures — at least the best of us are.” – JM Barrie

      • Gbdub says:

        True, but then there really is a “calcified underclass”. While I’m not a fan of “forced sterilization for welfare” (unless it is reliably reversible, but right now that’s not really available for men). But “easy access to birth control” and “social pressure” seem like reasonably good ideas.

        Also, why is it that we hold the right to reproduce so sacrosanct? For every other right, including life itself, we recognize that society can be justified in taking it away if it is used irresponsibly.

        An acquaintance has adopted multiple kids from a woman who is an unemployable drug addict. She has produced I think 4 kids, all of them with severe developmental issues due to meth use during pregnancy. The last couple went straight from her womb to state foster care. Are we really saying there’s no way to justify tying this woman’s tubes, or putting an IID in her until she gets her act together?

    • Psmith says:

      Aside from what everyone else has said, it strikes me as a live possibility that “we” may be “them” pretty damn soon, if we aren’t already. Soft Landian accelerationism is certainly a position one could take, I suppose.

      (Another unhappy possibility: only the very rich and people who don’t respond well to incentives reproduce. Solve for the equilibrium.).

    • Anonymous says:

      @blacktrance

      stigma against having children in a position of financial instability, and perhaps making basic income conditional on sterilization.

      You don’t need to do either of these things. Just make sure the basic income only kicks in at 18 and doesn’t have any escalator provision for parents. And jail parents that abandon or neglect children.

      • blacktrance says:

        The idea is to reduce the number of people who need basic income, so if they reproduce at replacement, the population that’ll need it will be steady. Unless you’re proposing an income so low that having children on it would be unreasonable, in which case there’s the real risk of people having children anyway, and then living at subsistence, which may also be politically unstable because voters won’t want to see children living in those conditions.

        • Anonymous says:

          I wouldn’t say unreasonable so much as requiring painful trade-offs. It recreates the situation vis-a-vis reproduction where there is no UBI or welfare and child labor is illegal. Whereas when welfare is increased on a per child basis that recreates the pre-industrial situation where kids are economic resource.

          The prison for abandonment and neglect takes care of the living at subsistence problem. Well as long as you eliminate conjugal visits and prison rape anyway.

        • multiheaded says:

          Voters? What? I didn’t assume you intend to keep even a fiction of democracy…

  38. Qays says:

    The author of the unnecessariat article sadly seems to have no idea how the Obamacare subsidies work. There is no member of the unnecessariat who is going to be stuck paying $1k/month for a $5k deductible plan. This sort of innumeracy is a bit baffling in the context of the article’s generally high quality.

  39. hlynkacg says:

    I can’t even really believe that a rising tide will lift all boats anymore. Not only has GDP uncoupled from median wages over the past forty years, but there seems to be a Red Queen’s Race where every time the GDP goes up the cost of living goes up the same amount.

    A cynic (or the folks at Shadowstats) would suggest that this is because GDP hasn’t grown, we’ve just been playing fast and loose with the numbers. If you declare 1 dollar to be 10 dollars you may be making yourself 10 times “richer” but a can of soda will end up costing you $7.50.

  40. James James says:

    “GDP uncoupled from median wages over the past forty years”

    Has anyone ever broken this down by race or immigration status? I wonder if it’s true of people who were Americans 40 years ago and their descendants.

    • Anonymous says:

      Wages is also a tricky word. What’s wanted is total compensation or maybe total employment cost.

  41. naath says:

    It always seems to me that initiatives like “teach people to code” or “give people lunch so they do better in school” are the sorts of things that (might) work for *one person* but when you give them to *all people* then you are back where you started – with a lot of people competing for a few jobs. Maybe now you have more people competing for jobs that actually exist, rather than jobs that don’t, but it doesn’t mean your economy can now use all the people.

    A poor person in the UK today likely has vastly more than a medieval peasant, but they don’t feel rich in comparison to some person who lived hundreds of years ago, they feel poor compared to rich people in the UK today (and indeed middle-income people in the UK today, and slightly less poor poor people…). It seems to me that poverty is the state of “being in the bottom N% of the (local) population” not a state of not being able to afford any particular thing; so I’m not sure that it is possible to eradicate poverty without somehow stopping anyone being richer than anyone else. You could prevent anyone from “being so poor they can’t afford food and rent” by handing out “enough money that you can have food and a basic-but-acceptable home” to everyone, but that isn’t going to make those people not feel poor compared to those of us who can afford gourmet meals and large homes.

    • Anonymous says:

      Segregation and communication limitations may work. Segregation – people of roughly the same means living in the same neighbourhood. Communication limitations – get off Facebook where everyone postures, stop reading news that imply that you’re poor in comparison to some other people.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        ISTR that mixed income neighborhoods are good for avoiding status races. No one tries to buy a shiny car to show up their neighbor because you will never have the Rolls Royce that the guy on the hill has. But if everyone is roughly equal, then a lot of resources go into status games.

        I dunno whether it’s easier to fix the status games or the comparison games.

        • Anonymous says:

          ISTR that mixed income neighborhoods are good for avoiding status races. No one tries to buy a shiny car to show up their neighbor because you will never have the Rolls Royce that the guy on the hill has. But if everyone is roughly equal, then a lot of resources go into status games.

          Interesting! Source?

    • Corey says:

      That’s one of the useful things I’ve gotten from reading Megan McArdle (I have to avoid anything healthcare-related of hers because I facepalm too hard though).

      She points out about “efficiency wages” e.g. Costco paying well and seeing benefits in reduced turnover, better quality of employees and such: it can’t work for everyone, because then the efficiency wages just become market-average wages and then you’re back where you started.

      • Chalid says:

        I don’t think that’s right – you can have every employer in an industry paying efficiency wages. (Unless by “market-average wage” you include all the unemployed people earning zero, in some risk/utility adjusted way.)

        One model:

        When full employment is achieved, if a worker is sacked, he automatically finds his next job soon. In the circumstances, he does not need to exert his effort in his job, and thus full employment necessarily motivates a worker to shirk provided that he is happy with loafing on the job.[3] Since shirking makes a firm’s productivity decline, the firm needs to offer its workers higher wages to eliminate shirking. Then all firms try to eliminate shirking, which pushes up average wages and decreases employment. Hence nominal wages tend to display downward rigidity. In equilibrium, all firms pay the same wage above market clearing, and unemployment makes job loss costly, and so unemployment serves as a worker-discipline device.

        • Corey says:

          Interesting, thanks!

        • Gbdub says:

          The point though is that Costco benefits from being a “premium” employer – they get the best employees by offering higher wages, and their employees are motivated to work hard because it’s easier for Coatco to replace them than for them to get an equivalent paying job elsewhere. The added productivity lets them absorb the extra cost without raising prices much.

          If Wal Mart increases their wages to match, the premium workers will be diluted – Costco will no longer get the “cream of the crop”. To maintain their model Costco would need to pay more.

          But then you’re really just playing with inflation, unless you can increase the real productivity of the average unskilled retail worker.

          • Chalid says:

            In the Shapiro-Stiglitz model linked above, the efficiency wages *really do* increase average worker productivity.

            It only maps imperfectly onto the Costco case of course.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      I don’t know if your first paragraph is right. It’s possible that there are a lot of jobs available for people with certain skills, but none available for people without them. For example, in a medieval peasant economy with a lot of free land, there are no jobs available for paralyzed people, but many jobs available for people who can do physical labor. Curing paralysis wouldn’t just mean “more people competing for the same amount of jobs”, it would improve utility on net.

  42. Artir says:

    “Including only people who think society should be in the business of collectively helping the poor at all (ie no extreme libertarians or social Darwinists)”

    I think that if we understand ‘should’ as a moral obligation (though not one that should be coercively enforced), ‘social Darwinists’ (I remember you linked two pieces criticising the concept) are in the southeast corner. At least Herbert Spencer: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2598818
    Spencer was even more pessimist, in that he thought that coercive welfare transfers would make the poor *worse off*.

    For extreme libertarians, Randians and Rothbardians certainly reject a moral duty of charity, for them helping the poor is merely voluntary, so this part of the caption I don’t disagree with.

  43. Primadant says:

    My favorite writer on poverty is Matt Bruenig, who I believe belongs to the southeast corner with you (you might have heard of him because he got involved in a heated twitter fight this week with identitarian liberals, which ultimately got him fired).

    One of his points is that focusing on skills mismatch when talking about poverty is misleading because most poor people wouldn’t be able to work anyway. Poor people are mostly children, elderly, disabled, and students. Also, saying that poor people are poor because they’re dumb and useless is pretty insulting besides being false.

    His solution is expanding welfare, primarly through a basic income program.

    See this post : http://www.demos.org/blog/12/3/15/problem-work-focused-poverty-initiatives and his other posts at demos there : http://www.demos.org/policyshop/Matt%20Bruenig?page=1

    Also his case against free college : https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/matt-bruenig-left-case-against-free-college

  44. Salem says:

    aside from our superior technology, I would rather be a poor farmer in 1900 than a poor kid in the projects today

    Sure. And aside from the murder-cannibalism, Hannibal Lecter was a charming dinner companion.

    Our “superior technology” is not a thing that just happened, it’s not stuff that simply rolled along on a schedule. Technological advance, like entrepreneurship, is a crucial development that capitalism encourages, and is in turn enhanced by.

    It’s not just poor Canadian farmers, as in the comment above. So much that we now take for granted wasn’t available at any price in 1900. One obvious example; in 1924 the US President’s 16-year-old son died from an infected blister caught while playing tennis at the White House. Thanks to antibiotics, poor kids in the projects today are immune to tragedies that struck down even the richest and most powerful of the past.

    Now I agree that, technology aside, a lot of stuff has gone downhill since 1900. But the UK (and I believe the US too) has got markedly less capitalist since then, so it seems strange to go even further away from capitalism to fix it. Let’s reverse the trends, and see what happens. If we have as free an economy as we did in 1900, and the situation hasn’t improved, we can think again. Until then, no, I’m not even going to think about a basic income.

    • TD says:

      Why not a really free economy AND a basic income? The two seem to go together well to me.

      • Salem says:

        To the extent that people are complaining about things that seem broken now but seemed to be working in 1900, a basic income is a strange solution. They didn’t have a basic income in 1900. Let’s fix the problems we know how to fix, then we’ll see what new problems we face in that situation. If the basic income seems an appropriate solution at that stage, we can try it.

        Otherwise cynical minds might suspect that a basic income is a solution in search of a problem.

        • TD says:

          The basic income is a solution to the problem of technological unemployment, which lots of people think is coming in decades as we improve automation technology. We certainly shouldn’t have a basic income now, but we’ll need one in the relatively near future.

    • Hlynkacg says:

      @ Salem

      Off topic, but I just wanted to say that I’ve really enjoy reading your comments. Keep up the good work.

    • Slow Learner says:

      In 1900, the poverty in Britain’s inner cities was so stark that entire swathes of recruits were too stunted, too weak, too malnourished to be accepted as soldiers.
      Even if you are willing to return to that situation, enough of our fellow Britons are not, that it’s never going to happen, try as our Government might.
      You might need a plan B.

      • Salem says:

        In 1900, the poverty in Britain’s inner cities was so stark that entire swathes of recruits were too stunted, too weak, too malnourished to be accepted as soldiers.

        Yep, another great example of why “aside from our improved technology” is a pretty huge aside. The technological marvels created by capitalism have so improved our lives that the problem of the poor is obesity, not undernourishment.

        Scott is right that there are still problems, but we need to keep them in perspective.

        Even if you are willing to return to that situation, enough of our fellow Britons are not, that it’s never going to happen, try as our Government might.

        I do not advocate rolling back our technology to 1900 levels (and nor does David Cameron – at least as far as I’m aware?), and I am surprised that an honest reading of my post lead you to that conclusion.

        • Slow Learner says:

          It’s not about technology (or perhaps it is, it’s about social technology like taxation and the welfare state).

          Do you believe it is possible to go Boldly Backwards to the situation that pertained economically in the UK in 1900 without also dismantling the protections that make it possible for poor people in this country to eat, albeit poorly, and housed, albeit inadequately?
          Because I don’t, and I would love to see any reason you have for such a belief.

          • Salem says:

            It’s not about technology (or perhaps it is, it’s about social technology like taxation and the welfare state).

            Ah, so you think the reason that the poor didn’t eat well in 1900 is that there was less welfare spending (not none, mind you), and they eat better in 2016 because of Universal Credit.

            But think about it. Redistributing money doesn’t create any extra food. All it can do is (indirectly) redistribute the food, due to changed purchasing power. So if it was about redistribution, then poor people having more to eat would mean that rich people have less to eat.

            But this isn’t what’s happened at all. The reason the poor have more to eat is that food is plentiful. Rich and poor alike have a surfeit, if anything (see the obesity threads), and so food is cheap. And it’s not just in the UK. Food is cheap and plentiful worldwide, which is why mass starvation – still a regular occurence in the 3rd world in 1900 – is now essentially a thing of the past.

            And the remarkable thing is that food has become plentiful at a time when the population of the world has gone up dramatically, and the proportion of people and land devoted to farming has gone down dramatically. We have more mouths to feed, and we’re devoting less resources to the problem, and yet we’ve gone from having not enough food, to a surfeit. That’s technology – farm mechanisation, Haber-Bosch, Norman Borlaug, etc – that allows us to do more with less.

            Look at world grain production for example. Do you seriously think that the improvements have anything to do with the British welfare state?

          • suntzuanime says:

            Redistributing money can in theory create more food. Even if you’re rich, there’s only so much food you want to eat, whereas if you’re poor, you may want to eat more food if you come into more money. So redistribution would tend to increase the level of demand for food, which would induce the economy to shift resources from producing e.g. yachts into producing food. The rich would not necessarily end up eating any less, they’d just get fewer yachts.

            In the specific world we live in, of course, technological progress is a bigger factor than redistribution creating additional demand.

  45. Jack V says:

    That’s really interesting, and I have lots of thoughts and I’m not sure how to put them into place.

    I wasn’t sure on the difference between “competitive” and “cooperative”. It seems both are live problems with society. Both that, many jobs are underpaid compared to investment income. And that, some people don’t have ANY job, or a job far short of what they could with the opportunity.

    And things like “went to a bad school so never had a decent chance to get as good a job as you might do” is a way people are exploited, but is solved by giving them a chance.

    I’m not sure about optimism vs pessimism. I think we should keep on trying. But I agree, most of this is so much more complicated than I used to think. As you point out in the Moloch essay, the “exploiters” didn’t DESIGN the system, just rose within it, and maybe err on the side of keeping the status quo.

    I have thoughts about basic income. I agree, creating a jobless underclass would be bad. But the idea of basic income is that it would bridge the gap and prevent people getting into debt spirals, and allow people to take chances on starting businesses without risking starving if they fail. I don’t know if it could be implemented at a stroke, but lots of things are a bit like a basic income. Having free healthcare would go a long way. Having generous unemployment and disability benefits. I don’t know for sure, but it feels like it would be better if America was more like the UK in that regard, and the UK was more like it was before the recent cuts, or even more so like Scandinavia.

    • gbdub says:

      And things like “went to a bad school so never had a decent chance to get as good a job as you might do” is a way people are exploited

      I don’t think that’s really “exploited”. Harmed maybe, or perhaps “ignored”, but “exploited” implies that the fruits of their labor have been stolen. The problem with the “calcified underclass” is that they produce no fruit to steal (and may be fundamentally incapable of doing so) – ultimately they need to be subsidized one way or another.

  46. JBeshir says:

    I think this article summarises things in a way that crystallises them well, like the grid suggested, and share its perspective entirely.

  47. Franz_Panzer says:

    What I have often wondered about basic income (as an economics noob), wouldn’t a universal basic income be negated by inflation?

    Seems to me that if you give everyone x$ per month, pretty soon every shop, retailer and service provider will realise, “Hey, people have x$ more to spend each month. That means they can pay more money for the same stuff. Let’s raise prices.”

    What is the thought of the more economically savvy there? Will this, for some reason, simply not happen? Will it happen, but to a small extent so that it’s still worth giving out UBI? Or will something else entirely happen?

    And if the basic income is inflation adjusted, wouldn’t that incentivise people to charge horrendously high prices, thus raising inflation, thus raising basic income, thus raising the amount of money I can charge? (apart from the question whether a government could pay UBI with sustained raises with inflation)

    • Anonymous says:

      It probably wouldn’t happen if the UBI was a clean replacement to existing welfare systems. In this case, the amount of money doesn’t change (presumably, the political class pockets the difference of running a massive welfare bureaucracy and running a smaller UBI bureaucracy).

      There is also a case to be made that UBI might lessen inflation, by putting more money in the hands of the thrifty, at the expense of the highly time-preferential.

    • Anon. says:

      Will this, for some reason, simply not happen?

      Pretty much, yeah. Unless they coordinate (but that’s illegal).

      In any case, if UBI led to an increase in inflation, the Fed would just counter it on the monetary side. It’s nothing to worry about.

    • Jon Gunnarsson says:

      A basic income doesn’t cause there to be more money (unless the government fires up the printing presses to pay for it), it will just change the distribution of the money. Some people will have more income due to basic income, others will have less money because the elimination or reduction of existing welfare programmes or the increase in taxes is for them greater than the money received.

      • Wrong Species says:

        That’s true but shouldn’t there be inflation in basic living expenses? I imagine that there will be a higher demand for housing and higher housing costs would partially negate the advantages of BI.

        • Tracy W says:

          Every UBI proposal I’ve seen with actual numbers involves significant cuts to the incomes of the poorest, relative to the current system of social welfare (sometimes this is not obvious, eg the headline UBI figure is high but that’s per adult and doesn’t include health care so a widowed solo mum with 3 kids is losing a lot).

          So the poorest will have less money to spend on housing than now, which should put downward pressure on the cheapest houses.

    • Corey says:

      It won’t cause equal inflation out of necessity. Mostly because prices of goods and services have no relation at all to the costs of producing them (except that the price must be greater than the total cost).

      That is, if the cost of making Bic Macs doubles, the price of Big Macs does not necessarily double. If the profit margin was less than 50% the price will increase some, but how much it increases is up to the vagaries of supply and demand.

    • Edward Scizorhands says:

      The people I know who don’t work and have never worked are horrible customers. How will you ever pay any anyone enough to staff the McDonald’s when all their customers are basic income people?

      I know a common response is “no one will pay, and McDonald’s will go out of business, and that’s good.” But I’d like to limit ourselves to one social revolution at a time, please.

      • Randy M says:

        Does the lack of work make people horrible, or are horrible people unemployable?

        • Edward Scizorhands says:

          I think it’s never knowing what it’s like to be behind the counter. But this is a “just-so” story so . . .

      • Tracy W says:

        I’m no fan of UBI, but this strikes me as a weird objection. Firstly, the people who don’t work are around now. Secondly, UBI means a significant cut in transfers to the poorest (at least in every costing I’ve seen) and McD’s isn’t that cheap, so presumably fewer people relying entirely on UBI will be eating at McDs.

  48. Ketil says:

    The terms “cooperative” and “competitive” are confusing to me. You could label them “exploitation” (or perhaps “difference in opportunity”) and “difference in ability” (as explanatory models for inequality), perhaps? Where optimists think this can be mitigated by social reforms, and pessimists don’t.

    Whether there are grounds for optimism depends on what you aim for. Wealth can always be redistributed to the degree you want, but not everybody can be brilliant.

  49. Oliver Lawrence says:

    Devoted fan and guilty libertarian here.

    I think that a discussion of the causes of poverty should at least nod to the monetary system. The libertarian case isn’t just ‘Ditch the Evil Regulations!’. It also includes the argument that when money is lent into existence by central banks, those who see it last will see their cost of living rise. Have you written something about this?

    Thanks for the post,
    Oliver

    • onyomi says:

      Related to this and Parkinson’s Law of Everybody’s One Paycheck away from the Street, I think, is a dynamic which couldn’t work better for elites if they had planned it all ingeniously in smoke-filled rooms decades ago, but really they were probably just all following individual incentives, given the current system:

      Stuff gets marketed and sold to the middle class at a price point right at the level where they can afford it without becoming homeless, but not much lower. To avoid buying stuff at this price means not being able to live in a neighborhood with people of your social/educational/economic background and feeling embarrassed around them.

      The economy, being continually weighed down by regulation and government expenditure, grows ever more dependent on consumer spending to keep it inflated. The economy not only can’t withstand consumers saving a bit more, it can’t even withstand them paying down their credit card debt.

      Every time consumers threaten to save or pay down their debt, Wall St gets jumpy and the Fed funnels more money into the economy via Goldman Sachs. This money goes to Wall St and big banks and enriches rich people’s portfolios first; by the time it trickles down to Joe Sixpack, the increased money supply has been priced into everything he buys. But at least the banks are still afloat and can offer more credit cards.

      • FullMeta_Rationalist says:

        The existence of the Fed makes me slightly uncomfortable.

        Here’s my understanding of banks. Banks accept money via “deposits”. The depositors are under the impression that this money is just sitting in a vault. But actually, this money is being loaned to others. What this means is that money is rarely idle; idle money must be made economically-productive.

        This is all well and good. I’d rather live in a world where {mortgages, etc} were possible. What makes me uncomfortable is that the Federal Reserve tries to increase (or decrease) the amount money being transformed from idle to productive via interest rates, depending on its perception of the economy.

        This sounds good in theory. But I think the Fed is biased towards pain. Because no matter how well the Fed engineers the economy, someone is going to be unhappy. So if the economy is performing below-average, the Fed perceives this as the apocalypse. If the economy is performing above-average, the Fed perceives this as exactly-average. The result is that the Fed consistently encourages more loans than is optimal. Low interest rates becomes analogous to a morphine drip.

        I don’t know anything about economics. Is my worry unfounded?

        • Salem says:

          I don’t know anything about economics. Is my worry unfounded?

          As I understand your comment:

          You are worried that the Federal Reserve will consistently over-stimulate the economy, because they are biased to over-reacting to possible recessions, and this will lead to their methods of stimulation* becoming less and less effective and needing to be done even harder to get the same effect, with this eventually spiralling into inflationary disaster?

          Is that right?

          If so, then it’s a potential failure case – that’s exactly how the Fed behaved from about 1965 to 1982. However, it’s not the problem right now. In fact, in current times (2008 onwards), the Fed is consistently undershooting its inflation target – the exact opposite problem.

          *which is currency creation, not really interest rates, but that’s a side issue.

      • Furslid says:

        This argument always seems seriously off, because of variable incomes. I speak as someone who doesn’t have the greatest job, but avoids living paycheck to paycheck or being in hock to credit card companies.

        If it takes 60K for a family to be middle class, then your argument could explain why a family making 60K lives paycheck to paycheck. It doesn’t explain why a family making 70K lives paycheck to paycheck. There are more people making above the minimum than making the minimum, and your theory doesn’t account for their lack of savings.

        • onyomi says:

          I think there is a point above which Americans actually do start to save and not live paycheck to paycheck; the problem is that level keeps increasing with GDP, so no greater percentage of people reach it, even as the economy is ostensibly growing.

          And there are also different brackets, of course: to not live paycheck to paycheck as a Manhattan professional whose friends all shop at Dean and DeLuca requires a much higher salary than to not live paycheck to paycheck as a Kentucky truck driver whose friends and neighbors all shop at Family Dollar.

          But even if he wanted to, the Manhattan professional can’t just move to rural Kentucky where his money goes farther, since his job probably requires him being in NYC.

          • Furslid says:

            The point is that within each of those brackets people don’t save, even though they make more than the minimum to meet the bracket. What causes them to live paycheck to paycheck is something other than not being able to afford not to.

            A Manhattan professional who makes better money than other Manhattan professionals can save. A truck driver who makes more money than his neighbors can save. This is obviously true, because there are other people living a similar lifestyle on less money.

            I’m not saying that the Manhattan professional can save because he makes 100k more than the truck driver. I’m saying the professional can save because he makes 10k more than other professionals.

          • onyomi says:

            “A Manhattan professional who makes better money than other Manhattan professionals can save. A truck driver who makes more money than his neighbors can save.”

            And this is may be precisely the intractable problem: to save money you need to have more than you feel is necessary to keep up appearances. Therefore you must have more money than average among the people you perceive as your peers. If you’re the only millionaire on your island without a private jet you might go into debt to buy it.

            Conceivably, “why can’t we solve the problem of poverty” is somewhat akin to saying “why can’t we solve the problem of below-average incomes?”

          • Randy M says:

            Not just below average, but below the perceived average, which is really more like below 90% or so.
            Otherwise there wouldn’t be so few households in debt.

          • Furslid says:

            @Onyomi

            Not everyone with a below average income is stuck in the keeping up trap. My argument applies to those who make more than some of their peers. Even if they are below average.

            All of the people in the group are keeping up with the requirements of the group. This includes it’s poorest member. Anyone who makes more than that can keep up with requirements by matching the poorest member, and have some surplus income.

            That these people don’t save is a feature of American culture, not something they are driven to by lack of money.

          • onyomi says:

            “That these people don’t save is a feature of American culture, not something they are driven to by lack of money.”

            I agree it’s part of the culture. The Chinese save much more than Americans despite being much poorer on average. They also are much more averse to going into debt.

            The question is, how did American culture get like this? It’s a kind of “everyone else stood up, so now I have to stand up too just to see as well as if we were all sitting down” situation. And it’s not like Americans always eschewed saving.

            What you’re saying to me now sounds like “black Americans aren’t forced to have a lot of single-parent households by circumstance; it’s a part of their culture.” To which I’d similarly say, “yes, it is. Now. But why?”

            My point is I think that political and economic forces have teamed up to push American culture in this direction, not least of them being social welfare programs. This seems to be a potential problem with UBI: it will probably even further discincentivize savings. Of course, if you’re a “consumer spending is the lifeblood of the economy and savings is the devil” Keynesian, that might be a good thing.

          • arbitrary_greay says:

            Hypothesis: the expenditure amount of luxury goods required to keep up with the Joneses has remained about the same for each class. Everyone’s getting a little more luxurious on the object level due to most goods getting cheaper, like electronics, fashion, availability of variety of food, etc.
            However, the buffer that used to become savings is now eaten up by increased unavoidable costs, i.e., housing. The gentrification narrative is that the same classes are now living in smaller houses, smaller apartments, etc., in order to maintain location and thus class/peer group. Savings may also now be eaten up by insurance, which masquerades as a form of savings.

            If the price of goods has gone down, then people ought to be able to buy more goods and keep up with the Joneses, but still save, like they used to be able to. So where are the sectors where prices are rising? Housing, Healthcare, various forms of property insurance, but maybe Tourism is another? The quality of vacation you take is a major class signal, and for certain classes was traditionally a thing saved for.

          • Jiro says:

            So where are the sectors where prices are rising?

            Taxes. Remember how the Two Income Trap really turned out to be the two income tax trap?

            Also note that an increase in taxes which is a small percentage of total income can be a much larger percentage of disposable income, so “small” increases can have big effects.

          • onyomi says:

            Americans do, in fact, live in bigger houses on average now, I think. By far, in fact. I recall a statistic something like, in 1950, average family of 4 lived in 950 sq ft.

          • houseboatonstyx says:

            @ onyomi
            Americans do, in fact, live in bigger houses on average now, I think. By far, in fact. I recall a statistic something like, in 1950, average family of 4 lived in 950 sq ft.

            If true*, that might have more to do with the number of children the average family had, than with the sizes of houses available.

            * which does not seem totally likely

          • arbitrary_greay says:

            I wonder if that contributed to the decreased supply. Bigger houses, but higher prices to match, and more renters.

  50. tom says:

    “And I think that aside from our superior technology, I would rather be a poor farmer in 1900 than a poor kid in the projects today. ”

    Ah, but you can’t put aside our superior technology and medicine advances that easily. Here’s one post on the subject: http://cafehayek.com/2016/02/40405.html

  51. Stevie Welles says:

    “But I also can’t be optimistic about programs to end poverty. Whether it’s finding out that schools and teachers have relatively little effect on student achievement, that good parenting has even less, or that differences in income are up to fifty-eight percent heritable and a lot of what isn’t outright genetic is weird biology or noise, most of the research I read is very doubtful of easy (or even hard) solutions. Even the most extensive early interventions have underwhelming effects. We can spend the collective energy of our society beating our head against a problem for decades and make no headway.”

    It seems to me that you can’t be optimistic about traditional programs to end poverty. And for good reason! 50 years into the “War on Poverty” and we haven’t moved the needle on the poverty rate, despite many trillions of dollars spent. But the simple reality is that if you give money to people who are poor, sufficient to raise them above the poverty line (or higher as I would suggest), you have ended poverty. Just give poor people money. The UBI contends that giving money to all, not just the poor, insulates it from being overturned down the road when invariably, a party of the meritocracy gets it in their head that the amoral poors don’t deserve our help.

    • Anonymous says:

      >Just give poor people money.

      Many, probably a grand majority of, poor people have an unlimited capacity to waste money. Check out the histories of poor lottery winners. Poor people are by-and-large poor because they are constitutionally unable to retain money.

      • lemmy caution says:

        when you give poor people money you want them to spend it. You give them a check every month and they spend it on food and stuff.

        nobody is saying that you should give them lottery payouts

        • Chalid says:

          Heck, with a bit of technology you could just give them a bit of money every day, or even every minute, and then you wouldn’t have to worry about people splurging at the beginning of the month.

          • You are assuming they have no way of borrowing against future income.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            While not a fan of UBI, a well-designed one would not be seizable in bankruptcy, so lend against it at your own risk.

          • Chalid says:

            ^
            especially if you’re lending to fund irresponsible splurges

          • Anonymous says:

            While not a fan of UBI, a well-designed one would not be seizable in bankruptcy, so lend against it at your own risk.

            The sort of people who lend to poor people tend to be also the kind of people who ignore this sort of law.

      • Corey says:

        except Japan

      • Stevie Welles says:

        The lottery-winner example is clearly a poor (pun not intended) one. Can you think of the one gigantic reason why? I’ll help you, if you give somebody a monthly stipend, even if they waste a month, they’ll have another month coming in, and so on and so forth. People are by nature more likely to blow a windfall, yes, but we’re talking about a monthly stipend sufficient to live on. I suppose there is a small subset of the population that would insanely waste it every month, but nothing’s perfect I suppose. I don’t think there’s any compelling evidence to suggest that a majority, or even a material minority, of poor folks would just blow their UBI every month.

        • John Schilling says:

          No, the lottery-winner example actually does scale. If you insist on the less dramatic but more mundanely applicable example, look at the daily receipts of an inner-city Walmart. If you give people a monthly allotment of cash sufficient to be Not-Poor, they will be doubly Not Poor for the first two weeks of the month and dead broke the second two weeks. And not just a small subset of them; particularly not if we extend it to 3/1 weeks.

          People either do budgeting right or they don’t. If they don’t; spreading out the payments doesn’t make them suddenly do it right, it just locks them out of a class of efficient purchases for which large lump sums are needed to minimize transaction costs. E.g, if you give someone a lump sum on the first day of the month and rent is due on the fifth, they’ll be dead broke by the end of each month but they’ll have a roof over their head. If you pay them every week, they won’t reliably be able to save up enough to pay a monthly rent, requiring them to pay the higher rates at an SRO hotel – now they’ll be broke even sooner, and out on the street when they are.

          The ones who do budgeting right, it doesn’t much matter how you structure the payments – but the ones who do budgeting right tend to be only transiently poor to begin with.

    • Mariani says:

      We already do give money to poor people. Maybe not enough, you say, but it’s enough where the effect is having entire families that haven’t worked in three generations. If that’s not being locked into a cycle of poverty, I don’t know what is. And you’re asking for this to be cranked up to 11.

      Despite what mid-20th century economists would have you believe, the behavior of people changes when the situation changes.

      • Stevie Welles says:

        I guess I just don’t understand the obsession with forcing people to work to prove they’re worthy of basic human dignity. I don’t think it’s outlandish to suggest that some number of people are better off NOT working but still being able to participate in the marketplace. Does paying somebody $15/hr to take your order at McDonald’s make more or less sense than just subsidizing their unemployment and getting on with the automation that would already be in place there if it weren’t for outrageously low wages and a captive employment market that needs to work to live? Sorry for the run-on sentence there.

        • keranih says:

          I guess I just don’t understand the obsession with forcing people to work to prove they’re worthy of basic human dignity.

          Eh. I think the more basic conflict is over what having ‘basic human dignity’ entails. There are people who assume this entails a transfer of money, and there are those who don’t agree.

        • Mariani says:

          Being locked into the poverty of being at the mercy of handouts is the opposite of dignity. That’s not even my point, though.

          My point is that this leads to bad results. Perpertuating immiserating institutions leads to human misery, period. People respond to incentivizes. Subsidizing single motherhoods subsidizes broken and perennially under-achieving families.

        • Skivverus says:

          Replace “work” in your first sentence with “do good for strangers” and the motivation may become clearer – since, allowing for some vagueness and asterisks over who counts as a “stranger”, that’s what most work boils down to.

    • Corey says:

      The unchanged poverty rate is a definitional thing – the “official” poverty rate doesn’t count the effects of antipoverty programs. (For in-kind ones it might be intractable – e.g. Medicaid is equivalent to a nontrivial income – but what income it’s equivalent to is highly variable from person to person).

      • lemmy caution says:

        cash benefits like welfare count against the poverty definition

        https://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/methods/definitions.html

        Poverty definition
        Following the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) Statistical Policy Directive 14, the Census Bureau uses a set of money income thresholds that vary by family size and composition to determine who is in poverty. If a family’s total income is less than the family’s threshold, then that family and every individual in it is considered in poverty. The official poverty thresholds do not vary geographically, but they are updated for inflation using Consumer Price Index (CPI-U). The official poverty definition uses money income before taxes and does not include capital gains or noncash benefits (such as public housing, Medicaid, and food stamps).

        • The Nybbler says:

          Not counting non-cash benefits gets you a huge overcount based on housing aid alone in urban areas.

    • The War on Poverty hasn’t ended poverty, but the free market mostly has if you use a constant definition of poverty. The figure I remember for the U.S. is that, as of 1900, the median real income was about half the current poverty level. Very few people now are what would have been called poor then.

      Similarly for the world. Using a constant definition of extreme poverty, the percent of the world’s population that is extremely poor has fallen (I’m going by memory, so figures are not exact) to about a third what it was thirty or forty years ago. I find it odd that people talk as though poverty was a particular problem of the modern world when it is less a problem now than at any time in the past. It isn’t income redistribution that has been ending poverty, it’s economic growth in market societies.

      • multiheaded says:

        Professor, why is it that you never mention that, uh, say…. personal wealth also massively grew from 1917 to 1989-ish in the Soviet Union? Yes, blah blah, it was not as good, it eventually ran into way too much trouble to stay afloat, etc. But it undermines your whole thesis of there being LITERALLY no alternative to the free market.

        • alaska3636 says:

          It is true that control economies can muster a semblance of economic modernity; however, Soviet-style communism relied on prices formed in the rest of the relatively free-market. The Soviet’s over your stated time period, like China, also benefited from the influx of foreign capital investment. Of course, all the investment went to the connected bureaucrats, but the relative increase in wealth even absent that investment would not have been likely without free market indicators from the US and others.

          • multiheaded says:

            “The Soviet’s over your stated time period, like China, also benefited from the influx of foreign capital investment.”

            The USSR was also literally half razed to the ground by the Nazis, the damage being such that the casualties are hard to assess with a margin of error more accurate than +/-5 million. So there.

          • Anonymous says:

            Germany, OTOH, was razed by the Soviets (who also looted it, taking entire factories wholesale, in addition to all the wristwatches) and the Allies. Yet under the western-capitalist system, West Germany managed to lift itself up quickly, whereas East Germany could not. Must be a coincidence!

            Also coincidental, the correlation with per capita purchasing power and membership in the Warsaw Pact: http://i.imgur.com/52xpnlZ.jpg

          • Tibor says:

            @Anonymous: I regard Multiheaded as either a troll or completely impervious to any evidence and therefore a waste of time to argue with. Still, against the better judgement…

            In all fairness, eastern Europe was poor even before communism (it had also never experienced actual capitalism before that, or only very shortly). The former Czechoslovakia and the former Eastern Germany provide much better data. Czechoslovakia was one of the ten riches countries in the wold before WW2 while even after 27 years after the fall of communism, it has not yet caught up with Germany. Still, the gap between the (western) German and Czech purchasing power is about half as big as it was in 93 and Slovakia is not much worse off, so capitalism is definitely helping a lot. However it takes time to overcome 40 years of stagnation or outright destruction of value…a perfectly free market economy, or at least something akin to Switzerland or Hong Kong could possibly make it in the three decades – based on the astounding economic rise of both HK and Singapore, but communism is really good at wrecking developed industrialized economies.

            The differences between Eastern and Western Germany do not seem as big on this map, but if you look at detailed sociological data, they are still there. The east has a lower life expectancy, high unemployment rate, it still has a lower purchasing power and all that despite benefiting from joining a stable democratic country and receiving a lot of money in subsidies (the east still is subsidized by the west and there are talks about continuing that even though it is supposed to end soon). Like Czechoslovakia, Eastern Germany was (albeit destroyed and exhausted by war) a developed industrial country.

            Communism might have, at the costs of millions of lives, introduced some industrialization to Russia, which was more or less a pre-industrial society before that but it only managed to squander and destroy wealth and development in Germany and Czechoslovakia (or any industrialized country). Basically, it could be that communism is superior to an absolutist monarchy, especially the particularly corrupt and already ruthless Russian version of it (I think it still is inferior to the more elightenment-touched absolutism of France or Austria-Hungary), but that does not say much.

          • ADifferentAnonymous says:

            I’m not so into communism, but I gotta take Multi’s side here–the claim wasn’t that communism matches capitalism as an engine of economic growth, just that communism did produce significant positive income growth. Between-nation comparisons are not relevant.

            Tibor, where’s your citation that “it only managed to squander and destroy wealth and development in Germany and Czechoslovakia”? I only see you comparing them to capitalist countries, not comparing 1950 East Germany to 1989 East Germany.

          • Tibor says:

            @ADifferentAnonymous: You are probably right that 1989 East Germany was better off than 1950 East Germany. However, that is comparing a country exhausted and destroyed by the biggest war in the human history with a country that has been in peace for 40 years. To a smaller extent the same holds for Czechoslovakia (more exhausted by the war demands than physically destroyed, luckily there was not as much fighting and bombardment as in Germany). The communists were able to rebuild the ruins and eventually even end the food stamps (you were allowed only a certain amount of food per person per week during the war in Germany and in the protectorate – the main focus was on supplying the army – and in the communist countries this practice continued much longer than in the west). They did it partly by nationalizing (i.e. stealing), much like Hitler was able to make his country look prosperous for a time (also by nationalizing), also by drastically devaluing the currency, at least in Czechoslovakia, and the savings (savings were devalued 50 times, salaries 5 times), which actually lead to the first anti-communist revolts (started by ordinary workers, by the way) in central Europe in Pilsen.

            Obviously, during these 40 years there was a lot of technological progress and some of it even in the communist countries. Still, the first thing the communists did was to run everything according to the Russian model, which was like if a dictator came to the US and started running everything like in Cuba. That things were done in a more efficient and modern way was not important, the important thing was to do it exactly like the Soviets. This was especially in the 50s, when Stalin and the first Czech communist president Gottwald died (both died in the same year), it got slighlty more relaxed and in the 60s, there were even some economic reforms which allowed for a semblance of market economy (although all still in the hands of the state). There was probably some actual economic growth during the 60s, even though still way slower than in the west. Then after the Russian invasion all of this was deemed reactionary and whatnot, although it never came back to the brutal regime like in the 50s. The country was more or less frozen in time though and there was pretty much no development at all in the 20 years between 1969 and 1989. There were little to no changes in the technologies used, there was very little new infrastructure built (because of the planned economy you would also get constant overproduction of things nobody cared about and extreme scarcity of other things – including basic things such as razors, toilet paper or underpants) and the old was not repaired much. Prague was a gray decaying city in 1989, even today one can see that the streets are (in most parts) not as nice as say in München, although it is nothing compared to what it use to look like.

            So even though I do not have any hard data, I think that there was probably some growth in the 60s, caused mostly by mimicking the market economy, other than that communism brought stagnation at best. True, East Germany or Czechoslovakia in the year 1960 were better off than they were right after the war. But a) this was the biggest war in human history and especially Germany was completely destroyed and drained by it and b) most of the rebuilding was financed by stealing and actually impoverishing even the regular people (not just “big bad capitalist”).

  52. Daniel M says:

    Nice post! It brings to my mind some great essays written by Anthony Daniels (a.k.a. Theodore Dalrymple) who used to work with this same underclass as a psychiatrist. Once you get used to his style, it makes a fantastic reading.

  53. Mariani says:

    >Elites agitate against it constantly…this is a movement, coordinated from above, and its intent is to solidify the already-vast control of economic elites over our political system
    Is there any evidence of this? This is similar to the problem I have with continental philosophy: it’s essentially the meditating on the universe that happens when a relatively sharp guy smokes a fat blunt. They are things that superficially sound good, and the fact that things can sound good before dissection is how every disproved ancient belief was first arrived at (eg classical elements).
    But how do we distinguish correct ones from incorrect ones if it’s all just us giving each other high fives over how grand our ideas sound?

    • lemmy caution says:

      It isn’t a crazy idea to think that elites want a political system that benefits elites. This would seem to be a problem in a democracy where theoretically the non-elites can just out vote the elites. It turns out that that really does not happen.

      Deboer is describing a theory of why that does not happen.

      • Mariani says:

        But he’s arriving at conclusions more specific than “elites like remaining elite.” I don’t necessarily disagree with his particular permutation of this, but it’s just one of many that I’ve heard. So which one is the correct one? There has to be something better than “elites are bad, I am explaining that they’re bad in a good-sounding way, therefore I am right.”

  54. onyomi says:

    Has anyone proposed a “Parkinson’s Law” of money? Something like: “the amount of stuff necessary for you to not feel deprived relative to your neighbors expands until everyone’s one paycheck away from being on the streets”? And I think this can’t always even be remedied just by being frugal and not worrying so much about your neighbors: the economy offers things at the pricepoint most people demand, so there may not be any reasonably-sized, reasonably-priced homes in a neighborhood where people of my class actually live.

    Credit cards, etc. of course make this worse, because now the level of consumption possible before you’re on the street is higher.

    • Anonymous says:

      not worrying so much about your neighbors … in a neighborhood where people of my class actually live

      I think I found the problem.

      • onyomi says:

        1. Fuck you, anonymous, for completely flouting Scott’s ban immediately and continuing to be an asshole. If this kind of snide, anonymous sidewsiping is going to continue to happen, I’m not going to continue to be polite.

        2. As explained here, it’s not as simple as just moving into a neighborhood full of people with a lower education level and different culture. It might also require quitting the high-paying job near which all the housing is expensive, which defeats the purpose.

        • p8njmn95mK says:

          He doesn’t have to move to rural Kentucky. He can move just across the river to the South Bronx. Nothing at all is stopping him except his snobby preference for not living in the South Bronx.

          There’s nothing wrong with being a snob, but there is something wrong with claiming that it is impossible to get by on $200,000 a year these days just to avoid acknowledging the fact that you are a rich snob.

          • Chalid says:

            Even in Manhattan there are only a few areas with median income above $200k. The borough’s median income is around $70k.

          • Anonymous says:

            Yes that’s true, nonetheless I assure you the sentiment I quoted is not a strawman. I’ve heard things like it with my own ears.

          • Chalid says:

            adding that Newark is 25 minutes away from Manhattan on PATH and is *very* cheap by comparison.

          • arbitrary_greay says:

            This is what’s causing the gentrification of the big cities. After all of the rich people practically pick a cheaper place to live, everyone living around that has money to spare, rents go up to pick up the slack, and then once again even those making a pretty penny are living paycheck to paycheck. Commutes creep up to 3 hours one-way, which worsens traffic, which makes non-commute locations even more expensive, which forces the less wealthy to live even further away, which increases commute time, which worsens traffic…

          • Anonymous says:

            Only if you hold the number of units static. Thank $deity NYC isn’t the Bay Area, eh?

        • The Nybbler says:

          Areas of the South Bronx with a good commute to Manhattan aren’t so cheap nowadays.

          • Anonymous says:

            I don’t think they need to be “so cheap” to act as a counter-example to onyomi’s hypothesis. Just cheaper enough as compared to Manhattan neighborhoods so as to make non-trivial savings possible.

          • onyomi says:

            I will say that I am not claiming that the consumers who want to “keep up with the Joneses” bear no part of the responsibility in their own failures of frugality. I am saying that many big factors in the culture and economy are right now arrayed against frugality.

            Doesn’t help that you have professional economists, like Paul Krugman, literally saying that frugality, once considered a virtue, is bad for the economy.

          • Tyrant Overlord Killidia says:

            Why even the south Bronx? I lived in $gatedCommunity in the Bronx when I was going to NYU. It took me about an hour (walking + train) to get to class.

    • The Nybbler says:

      On the NJ side of the NYC area, this law applies _only_ to those with school-aged children, provided you’re willing to adopt a reasonably wide definition of “class”. If you don’t have children, you can find such homes.

      Basically North Jersey housing prices depend on three things — convenience of NYC commute, school ratings, and presence of a downtown area. The last is fashion, but it’s also strongly correlated with NYC commute convenience so avoiding it helps only a little.

      If you’re willing to throw away the class thing as our anonymous suggests, you can live very cheaply in the NYC area and have a decent commute to your high-paying job in Manhattan. However, there are significant disadvantages to this, like high crime rates.

  55. TMK says:

    You call yourself southeasterner, Scott? Phew, you filthy optimist. When the labor-capital substitution goes high enough (and it WILL), the richest will have less than zero use for the rest of us, and we will go the way of soylent green.

    I am actually half serious.

    • Murphy says:

      I can imagine it as one of the the worse case version of a post scarcity society, Manna world. 99% of the population could just be crammed into block housing on a few hundred square miles, ringed with robot guards and forgotten about.

      The government had finally figured out that giving choices to people on welfare was not such a great idea, and it was also expensive. Instead of giving people a welfare check, they started putting welfare recipients directly into government housing and serving them meals in a cafeteria. If the government could drive the cost of that housing and food down, it minimized the amount of money they had to spend per welfare recipient.

      As the robots took over in the workplace, the number of welfare recipients grew rapidly. Manna replaced tens of millions of minimum wage workers with robots, and terrafoam housing became the warehouse of choice for them. Terrafoam buildings were not pretty, but they were incredibly inexpensive to build and were designed for maximum occupancy. They clustered the buildings on trash land well away from urban centers so no one had to look at them. It was a lot like an old-style college dorm. Each person got a 5 foot by 10 foot room with a bed and a TV — the world’s best pacifier. During the day the bed was a couch and people sat on the bedspread, which also served as a sheet and the blanket. At night the bed was a bed. When I arrived they had just started putting in bunk beds to double the number of people in each building. Burt was not excited to see me when I arrived — he had had a private room for 10 years, and my arrival was the end of that. At least he was polite about it.

      At the end of the very long hallway of rooms there was the communal bathroom. This was my least favorite part of the terrafoam experience. The bathroom consisted of a bunch of sinks, a bunch of shower stalls, a bunch of toilets. Given the location of our room, it was about a 200 foot walk down to the bathroom. When you had to go at night, it almost seemed easier to wet the bed and let the robots deal with it in the morning. By the time you walked all the way down and back, you were completely awake.

      There were no windows anywhere in the building. It was a cost-cutting measure, but it also helped to make every room identical. The ceiling height was 7 feet throughout, so it felt very small all the time. LED lights everywhere — our room was absolutely identical to every other room in the building and had a single, bare two-foot LED panel bolted to the ceiling. There was the same panel every ten feet in the hallways. Absolutely everything in the entire building was brown. Brown walls, brown bedspreads, brown ceilings, brown floors. Even the bathroom and every fixture in it was completely brown.

      Downstairs there was the cafeteria staffed by robots. The robots were not bad — the food was acceptable. They also kept the bathrooms, hallways and rooms spotless. Every day at 7AM, 12 PM and 6 PM the breakfast, lunch and dinner meal shifts began. There were six 15-minute shifts per meal to save on cafeteria space. Burt and I had the third shift. You sat down, food was served, you ate, you talked for 5 minutes while you drank your “coffee” and you left so the next shift could come in. With 24,000 people coming in per shift, there was no time for standing in a cafeteria-style line. Everyone had an assigned seat, and an army of robots served you right at your table.

      Because no one had a window, they could really pack people into these buildings. Each terrafoam dorm building had a four-acre foot print. It was a perfect 417 foot by 417 foot by 417 foot solid brown cube. Each cube originally held exactly 76,800 people. Doubling this to 153,600 people in each building was unthinkable, but they were doing it anyway. On the other hand, you had to marvel at the efficiency. At that density, they could house every welfare recipient in the entire country in less than 1,500 of these buildings. By spacing the buildings 100 feet apart, they could house 200,000,000 people in a space of less than 20 square miles if they had wanted to. At that density, they could put everyone in the country without a job into a space less than five miles square in size, put a fence around it and forget about us. If they accidentally dropped a nuclear bomb or two on us, we would all be gone and they wouldn’t have to worry about us anymore.

    • Maware says:

      Won’t happen. Notice how birth rates are falling at the same time this technological advance is happening? There’s something to the idea of a Gaia-level system among us. Humans will simply, instinctively have less kids until we reach equilibrium. It will spread to the third world soon too.

      If anything, our future probably will be more Yokohama Shopping Trip than Soylent Green.

  56. lemmy caution says:

    Poverty is not a hard problem to solve. Give poor people money and then they are not poor.

    • Corey says:

      There’s evidence that housing homeless people, while solving the problem of homelessness, is also actually cheaper (in saved ER visits, jails and whatnot).

    • Walter says:

      Whose money? I am cool with you giving out your money to the poor. I’ll even praise your virtue.

      • Hlynkacg says:

        Agreed, the gods of the copybook heading are going to take their cut.

        • K M says:

          And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
          When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins…

      • Corey says:

        The Federal Reserve’s money, of course. (In the near term in the US it would be macroeconomically helpful if they created some for the purpose, even).

      • lemmy caution says:

        taxes. it is true that poverty is a hard problem for me to solve personally.

        solving poverty isn’t about personal virtue.

        • Walter says:

          So…my money? Hard pass.

          Edit: This is a bit snide. Not trying to be dismissive, rather I’m trying to formulate an objection on the level of succinctness of “Give poor people money and then they are not poor.”.

          • lemmy caution says:

            If you think taxes are theft then, yes, my plan involves stealing money from you then giving it to other people. I like that better than stealing money from you and bombing Afghan weddings or whatever, but your mileage may vary.

          • If Walter was a stated proponent of afghan wedding bombings or even more generally of the military-industrial complex, you might have a point.

            Why not try solving smaller instances of local poverty with your own money along with that of voluntary participants first to see if you can actually solve it with money? That seems like a more rational step than jumping right to taking a cut of everyone’s money to work on the thing you care about. Your political opponents get to use that same reason too, remember, and you will likely end up having to pay for afghan wedding bombings you don’t like.

          • lemmy caution says:

            If you give poor people enough money, then they are no longer poor. This isn’t something that needs to be tested out.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            I hate to bring up “but what about lottery winners?” because it tends to answer just a small narrow question . . .

            but that small narrow question is just what you brought up. Lottery winners were given lots of money, enough to be in the 1%, and by and large they end up poor.

          • @lemmy caution
            It is strictly true that if you give money to the poor they are not poor. I assumed you were making a more sweeping statement than what is strictly true here though, i.e. that it cost effective, possible, and/or sustainable to save poor people by cash infusions.
            If that or some reasonable facsimile is your hypothesis, it should be easy enough to test that with your own money, and the money of those that will voluntarily give, on nearby poor people. Once you can prove that giving to the poor (however you define them) money (how much?) will result in them not being poor (for some unit of time), you’d do a lot better to convince other people to give money or even to rally and vote to get the holdouts into giving back a small portion of their wealth.

            Honestly, if it really does work (my priors are on mixed success at best due to the variety of factors that keep people poor, the same troubles that are usually described in part as the undeserving poor vs. the deserving poor), then you’ll have cold hard data to wield in proving how many people have missed so much low hanging fruit in the war on poverty for so long.

          • Nornagest says:

            @Edward — Lottery winners are intuitively appealing here, but they’re kind of a special case. There seems to be a pretty good chance that winning the lottery will ruin your life even if you were previously financially responsible, and the mechanism for it doesn’t seem to be all about blowing your newfound wealth on, er, blow.

            (All of a sudden you’re publicly known to be wealthy, and with money that everyone considers unearned. So the vultures descend.)

          • lemmy caution says:

            When you give poor people money, you want them to spend it on food and diapers and stuff. The fact that they are unlikely to save the money you give them isn’t a problem.

            The US military is sustainable in that as long as we pay for it we can have it. We have to keep paying for it though. Nobody says “Hey, didn’t we pay for that last year”.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            Then the statement

            If you give poor people enough money, then they are no longer poor

            should be modified to

            If you keep on giving poor people enough money, then they aren’t poor as long as you keep on giving them money

    • Anonymous says:

      “When I give money to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no money, they call me a communist.”

      (Pst: Don’t be a commie.)

    • lemmy caution says:

      I am not being sarcastic or silly. It would take $175.3 billion dollars to move everybody in the US above the poverty line

      http://prospect.org/article/how-much-money-would-it-take-eliminate-poverty-america

      this is like 1% of our GDP or 1/4th of our military spending

      • Nornagest says:

        If you do this by just sending a check to everyone below the poverty line, you’ve created huge fuckin’ perverse incentives (because the effective marginal tax rate on income earned below the cutoff is 100%, and you haven’t even bothered to hide that someplace where an unsophisticated observer won’t look). If you try to take a more sophisticated approach, as most programs historically have, you’ve almost certainly produced a ton of overhead, very likely limited your ability to deliver on your promises (by de-facto conditioning aid on ability to navigate bureaucracy), and probably created the conditions for welfare fraud or other abuses.

        This is not a straightforward problem. If it were straightforward, we or someone else would have done it. There are tons of governments, present and historical, that would love to have destroyed poverty for 1% of GDP, and most of those governments have had people smarter than either of us working for them.

        • Ruprect says:

          “If it was straightforward, we or someone else would have done it. ”

          I really disagree with this (at the very least on the basis that believing in it makes it less likely to be true.)

          It’s an appeal to authority, isn’t it? It’s like… I can’t think of any reason why you are wrong, but if you were right, someone would have already done it. Doesn’t strike me as a constructive attitude.

          At this point I like to quote Dominic Cummings, special advisor to the British Education Secretary, on his experience in government:
          “They operate in a bubble in which it is at most 10 days planning or more usually 48 hours or 72 hours. There is no long-term priority. There is no long-term plan. The central people operate in that kind of culture. They don’t think anything can change. They just think that is politics…It is not abnormal. It is normal. You might think somewhere there must be a quiet calm centre like in a James Bond move where you open the door and there is where the ninjas are who actually know what they are doing. There are no ninjas. There is no door.”

          • Nornagest says:

            It’s an appeal to authority, isn’t it? It’s like… I can’t think of any reason why you are wrong, but if you were right, someone would have already done it. Doesn’t strike me as a constructive attitude.

            It’s an appeal to authority in that it requires holding some degree of confidence in an outside body, meaning the argument isn’t self-contained. Logically speaking that makes it a fallacy. But you could say the same thing of most sources you could cite, out here in the real world where we don’t speak exclusively in syllogisms.

            Long-time commentators here will know that I have no great trust in government, though not to ancap levels or anything. But you don’t really need much trust in government for what I said to be true; you just need to think that some first-world governments out there aren’t malicious and aren’t totally incompetent. (Short-sighted and blunder-prone, sure. But “cut a check” is just about the simplest thing a government can do.)

          • Ruprect says:

            True, true.
            I was really only objecting to that specific argument, not your basic point.
            I think there is a fundamental difference between “I trust this information (presumably for: these reasons)” and “We can’t do this because these people (in this position) haven’t done it.”
            The second is an appeal to authority.

            “you just need to think that some first-world governments out there aren’t malicious and aren’t totally incompetent. (Short-sighted and blunder-prone, sure. But “cut a check” is just about the simplest thing a government can do.)”
            You could also just think that governments are constrained by political considerations – they might not be able to implement optimal policies for reasons related to convention/inertia.

          • Nornagest says:

            You could also just think that governments are constrained by political considerations – they might not be able to implement optimal policies for reasons related to convention/inertia.

            You could, but those reasons need to be temporally and cross-culturally stable, which is actually kind of a tall order. Since there have been plenty of programs based on sending people money if they pass various conditions (ADFC is a famous one), it seems implausible to me that a simpler program conditioning only on poverty would never have been on the table in any first-world country.

          • Ruprect says:

            I would say that inertia is, by definition, the tendency towards cross-temporal (momential?) stability.
            Do you question that this exists in politics/culture ?

            The idea is that there is a tendency to continue to do things beyond the point to which they are optimal. I believe that such a tendency almost certainly exists (and is probably a good thing, since it’ll often be better to continue with an actually suboptimal but (known) effective policy than to implement an untested new one.)

            I don’t know much about the specific example you’ve given there – but, as an alternative example – I receive child tax credits from the UK government – which is conditional entirely upon my income and no other conditions (except having children). Seems to work fairly well (though the government are getting rid of it for political reasons).

        • Lemmy caution says:

          you would have to set up a program to give money to almost poor people so that the incentives would not be so stark. Fine with me.
          2% of gdp then.

          The government already has a program that gives money to almost poor people in the earned income tax credit. This disappears to nothing for the very poor. America really does not want to give money to the poor

          We can get rid of poverty. We just don’t want to.

          • Anonymous says:

            It isn’t a widely mentioned fact but EITC is essentially only for parents.

          • Anonymous says:

            You have a sort of point there. In absolute terms, we have already mostly eradicated poverty in the West. But that would leave all the poverty-fighting organizations jobless! So now we decide poverty on the basis of “X% on the bottom of the income spread” – which is indeed, incurable.

          • Nornagest says:

            The problem is not that you’re giving money to the poor, it’s the incentives you’re creating. The same problem would be created if you decided, for some reason, to peg middle-class salaries to, say, $100,000.

            Repeating something doesn’t make it true.

      • Samedi says:

        @lemmy caution

        Would that it were so simple. You aren’t taking into account second order and paradoxical effects. Complex systems behave in strange and often unpredictable ways. Simplistic, let’s-change-the-effect-but-not-the-cause type solutions rarely work.

        The book “The Logic Of Failure: Recognizing And Avoiding Error In Complex Situations” by Dorner offers an interesting treatment of the subject.

        • lemmy caution says:

          A: It is hot in my apartment. I am going to turn on the AC.
          B: Wow. Simplistic, let’s-change-the-effect-but-not-the-cause type solutions rarely work. In fact, turning on your AC has the second order effect of increasing total carbon consumption that leads to increased global warming.

  57. Galton's Bulldog says:

    Many social conservatives actually fit nicely into the southeast cooperative/pessimistic quadrant, with the basic idea that the poor need to be coerced into adopting better habits and lifestyles with either a stick or a very conditional carrot. Charles Murray actually sort of fits into this group with his focus on things like family structure, but he’s approaching it from an instrumental perspective. More natural denizens of this group would be Mormons, Bill Cosby types, or even the original Puritans.

    • Brian says:

      “the basic idea that the poor need to be coerced into adopting better habits and lifestyles with either a stick or a very conditional carrot.”

      Fails the ideological Turing Test. The social conservative position isn’t about using poverty to coerce the poor into good habits. It’s that monetary assistance can’t solve poverty of values; at most it can keep people on their feet to hopefully have a personal revelation and change their ways. A few hundred extra dollars a month won’t cure addiction, frivolous spending, violence, adultery, theft, or any of the other forms of human nastiness that make underclass life so unpleasant.

      • Hollyluja says:

        without frivolous spending and addiction, where would the US economy be? Also, I’m not sure that poor people engage in addiction, frivolous spending, and adultery any more than anyone else. Some of those things take money.

  58. Point in deBoer’s favor: native americans far more concerned about actual problems in their communities than they are about the name of Washington’s football team.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/new-poll-finds-9-in-10-native-americans-arent-offended-by-redskins-name/2016/05/18/3ea11cfa-161a-11e6-924d-838753295f9a_story.html?tid=a_inl

  59. Corey says:

    A lot of our employment regulations are in place because people need jobs to survive. So a UBI could help to get rid of many of such regulations, by separating the “necessary for survival” aspect of employment from the “help a business get something done in exchange for cash” aspect.

    If everybody has, I believe the technical term is “fuck-you money”, then arbitrary and capricious behavior by employers has a lot less bite.

  60. J Mann says:

    I should do more reading, but here are my concerns. (I should say that none of these are attempts to quibble with most of the obvious benefits of the program, but I’m curious whether proponents take these possible costs seriously and have a plan to deal with them.)

    1) Eugenics. If Scott’s sources are correct that a substantial component of productivity is genetic, does a guaranteed income increase the share of less productive members of future generations? (And if so, does that mean there’s less value produced with which to fund future generations’ guaranteed incomes?) Do guaranteed income proposals have a proposal to deal with that other than angrily complaining that that won’t happen and that only bad people would consider whether it might?

    2) Personal Incentives: I do think that there is value to responding to work incentives – it gets you out of the house, challenges you to improve yourself, etc. There’s also value to be a gardener, plumber, barista, or what have you. What do people think happens to those jobs after a guaranteed income. Do those salaries just go up?

    3) Resentment: My anecdotal experience of people receiving benefits is not that they are delighted by them and try to use their lives in productive ways – it’s that many are resentful that they don’t get more, and burn their calories finding ways to lobby the state into increasing benefits, instead of burning them producing things that other people value. Is that an acceptable cost?

    4) Government incentives: It’s going to make government even more of a spoils system. People can lobby and protest for increases in benefits (and it’s completely rational to do so – if your income is provided by the state, shutting down a city with a strike is a pretty good way of increasing that income). Meanwhile, sooner or later, the majority is going to find someone it doesn’t like enough to cut their benefits — maybe deadbeat parents, maybe sex offenders, maybe people who aren’t sufficiently respectful of the flag or trans people. Is that an acceptable cost, or is there a plan to deal with it?

    Thanks – J

    • Corey says:

      Salaries don’t have to go up, because of the U in UBI. That is, you might be able to take a part-time barista job for $5/hour if your living expenses are taken care of by other means.

    • Corey says:

      For #1, in a world of widespread technological unemployment it doesn’t matter if most people are (economically) unproductive – the whole point of UBI in that instance is that society has enough for everyone to live on even with few people doing work. This also applies to #3 – we don’t care about people producing useful stuff if we already have enough.

      (The standard anti-Luddite argument is “no amount is ever ‘enough'” but that’s not a law of nature or anything, especially if human-level AI happens)

      As for why not just let them all starve, there are two good arguments:
      1) We don’t have the stomach (and IMO that’s a good thing)
      2) Eventually all people will be in that group, as technology improves (and I’m not a voluntary-human-extinctionist)

      For #4, yes, there would have to be political work to try to keep a UBI both “universal” and “basic”.

    • John Schilling says:

      1) The statute of limitations on We Cannot Ever Rationally Discuss This Subject does not expire until April 30, 2045. Sorry.

      2) To the extent that these jobs are not automated away, the salary goes down – but it’s a salary on top of UBI. And any economically viable near-term UBI is going to be quite lean, which will motivate people to take even part-time, low-paying work as e.g. baristas. Which, for most people, is as it should be.

      3 and 4) The great advantage of the UBI (and the reason it will probably never be really implemented) is that the ‘U’ part is a very strong Schelling point against most forms of gamesmanship. The poor will obviously lobby for a blanket increase in the ‘I’, but that would necessarily involve major tax increases, which the not-poor will just as obviously lobby against. That equilibrium is likely to be very slow to shift.

      And if people insist on vociferously arguing the issue, hey, jobs for lobbyists and the like. Which will be ultimately inconsequential makework as they cancel each other out, but will feel like vital productive work. Maybe that’s a good thing?

  61. Heath White says:

    Your southeast quadrant is traditional conservativism of a throwback variety. There is a Natural Aristocracy: some people are just better at life than others. (Maybe this is genetics; maybe culture; maybe early childhood; whatever.) This is not due to any exploitation, and it is not going to change; inequality is not going away. Social programs that try to make life equal for everyone will fail and waste resources, and possibly prevent Natural Talent from taking its most useful place at the controlling heights of the society. The best way to arrange society is in (1) a relatively clear hierarchy of classes such that the Natural Aristocracy governs the Natural Plebes. Two additional features of the best social organization are (2) the Natural Aristocracy must have cultivated in it a sense of noblesse oblige, a duty to society as a whole, as opposed to capitalist self-interest. (3) The Natural Plebes must have a role in society that is useful and contributory. Everyone needs to feel part of the larger social organism, like they have a place and role; it is not important that it be an equal role. Society needs what the military calls “unit cohesion.” (Japan, at least until recently, has been very good at this.) What undermines this is the feeling of being part of the Unnecessariat.

    This was basically the view of society cultivated in the Middle Ages in Europe (and probably all sorts of other times and places).

    One thing that undermines it is the reality that Natural Aristocracies turn pretty quickly into Hereditary Aristocracies, which do not govern by merit but birth, and the sense that more widespread education, nutrition, etc. can cultivate talent from a broader swath of the population. This does not really undermine the idea of a Natural Aristocracy; it just separates it from particular bloodlines. This might actually be a widespread view in Silicon Valley.

    Another thing that undermines this worldview is the cultivation of Adam Smith’s idea that society does better when everyone pursues their own self-interest, as opposed to the more collectivist mentality expressed in the ideas of noblesse oblige and making sure everyone has a recognized social role. Until we recognize the psychological costs associated with, say, robots creating an Unnecessariat, we will not have done a complete cost-benefit analysis of going down the robot route.

    • Simon says:

      Adam Smith was more nuanced than some of his acolytes. I have a feeling this passage has appeared here before.

      “By necessaries I understand, not only the commodities which are indispensably
      necessary for the support of life, but whatever the custom of the country renders it
      indecent for creditable people, even of the lowest order, to be without. A linen shirt,
      for example, is, strictly speaking, not a necessary of life. …But in the present times,
      through the greater part of Europe, a creditable day-labourer would be ashamed to
      appear in public without a linen shirt … Custom, in the same manner, has rendered
      leather shoes a necessary of life in England. The poorest creditable person of either
      sex would be ashamed to appear in public without them. … Under necessaries,
      therefore, I comprehend, not only those things which nature, but those things which
      the established rules of decency have rendered necessary to the lowest rank of
      people.”

      • FullMeta_Rationalist says:

        Thanks for sharing the Adam Smith passage. I’ve unsuccessfully tried to mentally formulate such a sentiment each time “standards vs costs of living” is discussed. It’s frustratingly been on the tip of my tongue for ages.

    • Thursday says:

      What you have described is reaction of the old fashioned variety, rather than the not-to-be-named version that has attracted the attention of people here.

      One thing that has undermined this is the fact that a good number of the farmers turned out to be pretty intelligent once educated and became quite prosperous due to the rise of capitalism and technology. Turns out that some of the poor back then weren’t naturally poor due to their abilities.

      The problem is that a good number of people really were naturally poor. But we have been slow to recognize this because so many people were able to move up so quickly in the past 200 years or so.

  62. Wrong Species says:

    ” I can neither imagine them all learning to code, nor a sudden revival of the non-coding jobs they used to enjoy.”

    There’s a third possibility where the coding jobs get dumbed down so that low IQ people could do it. Maybe this is naive but I don’t think it’s unprecedented. Manufacturing used to be something that required high skill until it was dumbed down for the masses during the Industrial Revolution. I don’t see any reason something similar can’t happen again.

    • Murphy says:

      Programming has been dumbed down from the days when someone needed phenomenal levels of knowledge about the internals of the machine to code.

      Tasks are also already simplified down. We call the operators “users”. They use easier to use tools like Word to do various tasks with most of the underlying API hidden from them or made available through pretty buttons.

      most of the worlds office workers spend their days telling computers to do things, using them to create documents, storing data etc. Most of them don’t need to be programmers.

      But some people can’t even cope with that level of interaction with software.

      • Eli says:

        Programming has been dumbed down from the days when someone needed phenomenal levels of knowledge about the internals of the machine to code.

        I mean, you can say this, but you had better not say this and then apply for a job with the company where I work. Yes, someone actually does have to write the low-level code. We exist!

        • Murphy says:

          Sure, but only a minority and most of those specialist.

          A web designer, even if he has to contend with turing complete languages still doesn’t tend to have to worry about chip architecture.

          It used to be that if you wanted to write a blackjack program you needed to know how the computer read values from the revolving drum that stored memory.

          ( http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/mel.html )

          Now you rarely need to know what’s going on in silicon unless you’re actually working with low level hardware.

          For most normal uses it doesn’t matter if your code is running on a VM being shunted around between data centers and across different chip architectures between one cycle and the next.

          We’re in an era when x86 is technically a high level language since it runs on top of microcode.

          http://blog.erratasec.com/2015/03/x86-is-high-level-language.html#.V0XHV-TW-nU

          Lots of programmers could do perfectly fine even if they assumed that the code was being run by tiny little super-fast gnomes and with modern stacks their code would still run fine if you genuinely replaced the bottom layers with a turing machine operated by gnomes.

      • TheAncientGeek says:

        Modern programmers need to know a lot about APS, libraries, frameworks, etc. The sweet spot would hav been around 1985-1995,

  63. Wunderwaffle says:

    >It reminds me of the old argument of sweatshop-supporting economists – sure, we’re exploiting you, but you’d miss us if we left.

    This seems to imply you think sweatshops are bad for humanity. Is that correct?

    • Murphy says:

      cramming children into dank workshops and working them until they go blind for pennies is slightly better than the alternative of letting them die without the pennies but it’s still almost certainly not how something maximizing for human welfare would organize things. Something can be (barely) a net positive in the world while still being far worse than alternatives which don’t maximise shareholder dividends quite as much this year.

      • Wrong Species says:

        The existence of sweatshops is a step in the process of maximizing human welfare. It would be nice if we could just skip the step but I don’t think we can. If you take away the sweatshops then it’s usually back to square one.

        • Edward Scizorhands says:

          You can make the conditions safe, so that kids aren’t losing their hands in machinery every day, but you can’t realistically boost their wages crazy above the market rates without attracting a bunch of rats, like hiring officers taking bribes.

        • alaska3636 says:

          I think you hit the nail on the head.

          If phrased this way: what if child labor is a necessary step in advancing to the post-scarcity utopia we all want?

          I’m not utilitarian, but there’s that argument. Also, I just think the way people are and have been for many hundreds of years indicates that better conditions are arrived at by an organic process and not by dictating the situation from the top down. Culture matters.

      • “cramming children into dank workshops and working them until they go blind for pennies”

        That doesn’t describe what are usually called sweatshops. Most employees were not children, they didn’t go blind, and their wages were not pennies–low by modern standards, but sufficiently high by the standards of the time that people chose to work in them.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      I think sweatshops are better than everything else being exactly the same except all sweatshops disappear without being replaced by anything else.

  64. Zach says:

    I’m not sure I completely understand the quadrants, but wouldn’t the bottom right position best be occupied by programs to give iPads to poor people who would volunteer to sterilize themselves?

    • Walter says:

      Protesters of the “How dare PETA offer to help only people who agree to go vegetarian” variety derail those schemes. You will get accused of genocide, and that’s the ballgame.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Prevention , but I try not to talk about them too much because I assume their work would be impossible if they started getting media attention.

      • Jill says:

        One of those things like shock treatment for severe treatment resistant depression. It works great. But it sounds really awful to people.

        • alaska3636 says:

          It does sound awful; especially, in contrast to recent studies on the long-term effects of hallucinogens and depression. But I wouldn’t rule it out of the tool kit.

          Here’s a tricky thought: if torture worked in 1 out of 100,000 people with severe depression, do we still rule it out?

          • Anonymous says:

            AFAIK modern day shock treatment uses subtle intensity or anesthesia etc.

          • Anonymous says:

            Ignoring the possibility of anesthesia, this seems like just an extrapolation of already routine decisions doctors have to make. “It’s going to hurt a lot when I cut this infected piece of flesh out of you, but we’ve talked about the risks and agreed that it’s worth trying…” is pretty standard.

  65. Jill says:

    From wikipedia, Guaranteed minimum income, including a section at the end on Minimum income examples around the world

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guaranteed_minimum_income

    Looking at the examples, it doesn’t seem like it’s working out in an awful way. If these countries have a “calcified perpetually under-employed stagnant underclass”, I’m sure not reading a lot about it in the news.

    • Skivverus says:

      Well, no, “news” isn’t where you’d go to find out about this sort of thing; in my probably-biased-experience, “news” gets triggered by distinct events more than by gradual trends.

      Also, that wikipedia article distinguishes between “guaranteed minimum income” and “basic income”; the former covers a small percentage of people, and the latter is relatively untested except in Alaska.

      For that matter, though, I have heard about, for instance, drastic under-25 un(der)employment and ethnic enclaves in various parts of Europe; the blame is usually placed on excessive regulation/red tape surrounding firing, which leads to a corresponding reluctance to hire anyone (in case they turn out to be incompetent or toxic). A bit of searching turned up this link, which paints a rather more intricate picture than said news gets to as far as I’m aware.
      On the other hand, there’s more news out there than anyone has time to read.

  66. Fj says:

    I have a modest proposal. First, all southeast corner pessimists decide for themselves if they are optimistic pessimists or pessimistic pessimists.

    Optimistic pessimists are those who believe that we basically have enough stuff for everyone, but it’s being very unequally distributed. Then the solution is obvious: distribute stuff more equally by heavily taxing the rich and subsidizing the poor.

    The whole basic income thing seems to me a bit of a red herring in this world view: it’s dazzles with its daring mutations and great and vast reformations and obscures the fact that the solution boils down to taxing the rich and subsidizing the poor, while we already have that tool at our disposal and can use it with much less drastic changes (which are both dangerous and impossible to sell to the voters).

    For example, if we have a lot of people that are only able to do low-qualified jobs (janitors, cleaners, cashiers, burger flippers) but our streets are already pristinely clear etc, we mandate a four, then three day work week for those jobs, and have the government pay the proportional part of the salary of those employees.

    The changes can be rolled out gradually so we’ll see if it actually works and if there are problems that have to be sorted out, and also we get around the known problems with unemployed people getting depressed, antisocial, purposeless, entertaining themselves with drugs and violence, and having all that run in families.

    On the other hand, maybe as a result of actually contemplating the above scenario, or because of various interesting observations, for example like someone in the comments here said the healthcare cost as a part of the US GDP is equivalent to $12/hr salary per worker, you might realize that you’re more of a pessimistic pessimist, that is, see the main problem as not having enough stuff.

    In that case of course any solution that might discourage people from producing stuff would be an unmitigated disaster, automating jobs out of existence should be hailed as the best thing ever, and reducing economic inequality, while extremely important of course, is better tackled using more traditional methods, very carefully.

    • John Schilling says:

      Optimistic pessimists are those who believe that we basically have enough stuff for everyone, but it’s being very unequally distributed

      Nit: An optimist has to believe this sufficiency will persist even when potential stuff-producers’ motivations have been shifted by whatever scheme equalizes the distribution.

      • Fj says:

        Yes, let’s just group the “it’s barely enough” people with pessimist pessimists. After all, this is the entire point of having this distinction: to separate the pro-Basic Income people according to whether they think that the having enough stuff consideration is important or not, so as to make them commit and make it impossible to unconsciously switch between these two sides depending on the question (it’s for their our benefit as rationalists, lol!).

        The people who think that it might be barely enough go to the second group, obviously.

    • J says:

      This is a fantastic observation, thanks!

  67. Ruprect says:

    We’re (rightly) worried about our lives being destroyed by processes – unsympathetic and unrelenting processes that chew us up, leaving nothing but meaningless chaos churn.

    The attraction of the market is that we have a social system that is slave to individual sentiment.
    The concern is that capitalism (not markets?) are chaos churn. When I read people saying things like “the problem with increased wealth is that people will find new ways to waste stuff” or “people are not useful to this system, how can we get rid of them”, that says “chaos churn” to me. We’re no longer dealing with relatable, three dimensional actors – we’re dealing with an insidious process operating through the medium of meat robots. This seems especially true where people are motivated primarily by a desire to have (or to appear to have) the highest numbers. It isn’t really good enough.

    Now, if there is a hard limit on resources, increased population will lead to greater poverty (if most of the work was previously done by people can now be done automatically, would such a limit on resources exist?) The humane solution is a society in which a consideration for the lives of our children, and others more generally, tempers our urge to reproduce. The hope is that the appeal of our beautiful society can triumph over Idiocracy-like cancer processes. My sense is that this is working – at the very least, amongst the natives. No further work required.

    Finally, can people be happy without their stultifying scut work? Perhaps not, but there will always be other avenues to satisfy our need for repetitive and pointless activity – internet commenting, anyone? – I’m not sure that this activity needs to be tied to production for the sake of our happiness. (If production provides the meaning, I’m certain that given enough time we can find a new meaning.)

    So, in conclusion, I have hope that we can build the human-centric social system without recourse to too much sword and fire.

    Thank you.

    • Jill says:

      Thank you, Ruprect. I agree that we would benefit from paying more attention to the “visible hands”– and arms and legs and feet and hearts.

  68. Jill says:

    One other issue here is that there is an assumption that only PAID work is uplifting. If unemployed people might end up doing things as useful for the world or their communities as developing Linux, or creating large community gardens to feed themselves and each other etc., what difference does it make if no money exchanges hands?

    We don’t have to keep the same model of everything uplifting revolving around money. It’s not necessary that it does, at all. Some of the most useful work on earth gets done in volunteer organizations.

    • Thursday says:

      If currently upper middle class people were suddenly given a guaranteed income, this is what they would do, but the underclass is not exactly known for doing a lot of volunteer work.

      • Jill says:

        Not yet. The underclass is more brainwashed than any other class to think that activities that do not earn money are not worthwhile. That could possibly change. Maybe there could be free classes that people could choose to attend if they like, on various activities where people could help one another for free– like community gardening.

        • Thursday says:

          That could possibly change.

          I doubt it. Their main problem is showing up for anything, unless there is some sort of extreme incentive for them to do so.

      • Psmith says:

        Whole lotta sweeping generalizations and not much evidence, anecdotal or otherwise, in this here subthread.

    • Anonymous says:

      The dignaty of (paid) work *is* an a pernicious assumption, but unfortunately it is one that is broadly shared across ideology and socioeconomic groups in our society. I don’t see how we could get rid of it in any reasonable amount of time.

      • Jill says:

        It can be easy and quick to change people’s beliefs. E.g. Trump is for some policies that GOP voters never voted for before, but now they do. The TV constantly changes people so that they want and buy stuff they never even heard of before. Political beliefs have been changed in numerous ways in the past ten years or so, by Fox News and Clear Channel. It’s quick and easy. However, sometimes it is expensive. Not always though.

        It might not be expensive in this case. If you build it, they will come. Have a guaranteed income, start community projects that people enjoy participating in– and you never know how far it could go. You’d just have to let whoever is willing have the experience of the dignity of unpaid volunteer work in their community. Experience is very persuasive.

        • Thursday says:

          There’s so many if’s and might be’s in here, that I’m really skeptical.

          • Jill says:

            Well, we may as well try some things. Skepticism has its uses. But it makes no sense to never do anything until you are 100% it will work.

    • “what difference does it make if no money exchanges hands? ”

      The only decentralized mechanism we have for solving the coordination problem, getting large numbers of people to coordinate their activities to produce what is worth producing and not waste inputs producing things worth less than they cost, is the market. Money prices are signals, telling people what other people they have never met and do not know exist need done. Centralized mechanisms for the same purpose work on a scale small enough so that one person can figure out what everyone else should do, fail on a large scale, as demonstrated by the breakdown of the USSR and the failure of central planning in countries such as India and China to bring the promised benefits.

      That is why it makes a difference.

  69. Edward Scizorhands says:

    I used to think UBI was neat, but I had never been challenged on the idea. Megan McArdle popped my balloon with her article about it https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2013-12-04/four-reasons-a-guaranteed-income-won-t-work I’ve become much more interested in wage subsidy, so that even if you are wheelchair bound you can find someone who values your labor, and I think it captures most of the benefits without most of the drawbacks.

    But.

    My family has been helping two other families who have run into problem getting onto welfare and it’s pushing me back towards UBI a bit. Some of the hoops are really stupid, and in one case the parents would be vastly better off if they divorced, simply because the single unworking mother would look great.

    How about we try with something small like “universal food stamps”? Give everyone house an EBT card with $100 per family member. How would that work? Is it an instant non-starter because of cost?

    Let’s give that a shot. If we can’t do that little thing, we can’t do the harder thing.

    • Jill says:

      Great to hear from someone who has jumped in and tried to help 2 poor families, so you are talking from experience with helping people you know, so you know what issues they are facing. You are much closer to the issues than most of us.

  70. eponymous says:

    I think it’s useful to distinguish between three questions:

    (1) Does our economy in fact distribute wealth in proportion to social productive value? (In other words, is it functioning correctly as a capitalist economy).

    (2) Are people able to reach their productive potential? (i.e. no problem with racism or expensive school lunches)

    (3) Should we be allocating consumption proportionally to productivity at all?

    The left two quadrants correspond to a negative reply to question 1, and the upper right to question 2. The lower right says yes to both, though you can still be very sad in this quadrant if you think the outcome is still quite bad. (I’m not sure that it’s so bad, but that’s another topic).

    I find question 3 very interesting. My intuition is that it’s okay and even just for very productive people to be well-compensated, but I admit that this idea doesn’t hold up very well to philosophical reflection. It also differs from 1 and 2 by being a normative (rather than positive) question.

    Of course, there is a positive dimension to it. Many center-left types would probably answer “no” to 3, but would say that we have no alternative to tying distribution to productivity because that’s the only way to provide the correct incentives. Thus they favor the greatest amount of redistribution that is possible without destroying the incentives to produce.

  71. Hollyluja says:

    On the #2 Unnecessariat: I see this as a manifestation of Peter Frase’s Four Futures. Specifically “Hierarchy and Scarcity: Exterminism” wherein the 99% suffers the same fate as domestic horses post-automobile. They are no longer useful, and they cost money to maintain, so therefore we (as a society) don’t. We keep a few around as pets or performers.

    Just for comparison, there were something like 150,000 horses in Manhattan alone in the 1880s. Now there aren’t even that many in the whole state of New York.

    ETA: you are right – the SE quadrant is a dark place to be.

    • Anonymous says:

      Humans are not horses. We are rational utility maximizes who can choose between productive alternatives. Therefore, comparative advantage applies to us, but not horses. Horses are more like hammers than humans.

      For further reading, this is usually considered standard reading. Note that we’ve automated away every single job that existed in 500BC. Nevertheless, humans are still around.

      • John Schilling says:

        Horses are owned by humans who, for the most part, are emotionally vested in the well-being of horses but are otherwise rational utility maximizers who can chose between productive alternatives for themselves and their horses. When a horse is sent to the slaughterhouse, it is because a human tried and failed to find an economically viable alternative. I am less confident than you that the result will be all that different when humans try to find economically viable alternatives for their own obsolescence.

        • Anonymous says:

          Horses are owned by humans who, for the most part, are emotionally vested in the well-being of horses

          I think you’re giving quite a lot of credit to the owners of the 150,000 horses in Manhattan. They weren’t there primarily because of the owners’ emotional interest in them. They were tools, like hammers.

          Some people continue to be emotionally invested in a horse as a pet. They rely on their individual resources to support it. Some people continue to be emotionally invested in high-quality Scotch. They rely on their individual resources to support this interest. When the market turns to prefer gin, we don’t view it as a harbinger of the obsolescence of humans.

          What I’m really missing from your post is an argument for why “the obsolescence of humans” is going to be a thing rather than just an assertion. Are you picking the post-scarcity prong? The “evil capitalists will somehow isolate their economy from ours and also magically destroy supply/demand in ours” prong? By which route are you getting to this obsolescence?

          • John Schilling says:

            Anyone who owns a horse instead of a mule, is either in a very specialized economic niche or they are emotionally invested in horses. Horses are aesthetically, historically, and emotionally appealing, but they are about the highest-maintenance draft animal there is. For most applications, mules (or bicycles) are better.

            And we get to human obsolescence, or at least low-skill human obsolescence, the same way we got to horse obsolescence. By inventing machines that can do all of their work faster, better, and cheaper by enough of a margin that the maximum wage at which a low-skill human can profitably be employed is insufficient to pay for the services that a low-skill human requires from high-skill humans for bare survival.

          • Anonymous says:

            Anyone who owns a horse instead of a mule, is either in a very specialized economic niche or they are emotionally invested in horses.

            We could view this through the lens of inferior goods, the diamond-water paradox, or even just societal tastes. This is not in any way unique in economics. It doesn’t in any way make horses more like humans than hammers.

            we get to human obsolescence, or at least low-skill human obsolescence, the same way we got to horse obsolescence. By inventing machines that can do all of their work faster, better, and cheaper by enough of a margin that the maximum wage at which a low-skill human can profitably be employed is insufficient to pay for the services that a low-skill human requires from high-skill humans for bare survival.

            That’s how we get Skill-Biased Technological Change. I’ve linked a couple journal articles here expounding on why we think that while there is some substitution between labor and automation, they’re often complimentary. As such, SBTC is the most commonly accepted hypothesis among economists. It doesn’t break comparative advantage. It doesn’t render humans obsolete. We’ve gotta do some more reasoning to get ourselves to human obsolescence.

        • Anonymous says:

          Assume robots are the same as humans.

          No.

        • Jaskologist says:

          I tend to find this argument convincing. The problem is I would have found it convincing at the dawn of the industrial revolution, green revolution, or really any of our technological leaps, and I would have been wrong. The argument fails the 1000 year old vampire test.

  72. eponymous says:

    By the way, how do you square the deep culture theory of quadrant 4 with the negligible contribution of shared environment to life outcomes?

    • Scott Alexander says:

      A twin study done half among New Guinea hill tribesmen and half among San Franciscans would probably find a really big shared environmental influence, but nobody does those.

      There’s moderate shared environmental influence when you compare the poorest Americans with everybody else.

  73. Brian says:

    It’s impossible to look at all this in a historical way and ignore culture–because culture is what makes the southwest quadrant tolerable. I’m reminded of Douglas Adams’s line (paraphrasing from memory): “Many people were unhappy, and many people proposed solutions to this problem. Most of these solutions involved the movement of little green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole, it wasn’t the pieces of paper that were unhappy.”

    From a strict materialist standpoint, things have never been better, and that’s for everyone. A previous commenter has pointed out all the material benefits an underclass impoverished kid in the Chicago slums has over a farmer in 1900. Dierdre McCloskey makes this point over and over in her books. At a typical household income in the $150-$200/day range, the American middle class is way beyond our ancestors’ $3/day impoverished subsistence.

    So why do we feel so impoverished? Comparison to others? There have always been kings and nobles; at least we have a shot at becoming super-rich today. Comparison to a perceived utopian ideal? Why would that have become an issue now?

    There will always be people on the left end of the bell curve. What’s missing isn’t material, it’s social. We decided that we preferred privacy to closeness, we don’t have strong community bonds, we got rid of God and religion as a way of finding meaning, and all that was left was material. And if you’re on the left end of the bell curve, you’re left without meaning to your life as part of the unnecessariat.

    Most people were never necessary to the government, or to their nation, or to a larger society than their local community. And they were never necessary for their taxes, or for the things they owned. The solution is to rebuild communities–and that’s not something that can be done by correctly shuffling little green pieces of paper.

    • anonymous poster says:

      Most people were never necessary to the government, or to their nation, or to a larger society than their local community. And they were never necessary for their taxes, or for the things they owned. The solution is to rebuild communities–and that’s not something that can be done by correctly shuffling little green pieces of paper.

      Bold of you to suggest a form of social change and then immediately forfeit your claim to the resources needed to make that change a reality.

      • Jill says:

        I agree, anonymous poster. How do you rebuild communities out of thin air, without using any resources?

      • Brian says:

        How do you use money to re-create social norms like weekly church (or other social group) attendance? How much money do I give and who do I give it to in order to make people feel shame about trash filled lawns, broken windows, or criminal relatives? What’s the right financial incentive to ensure that marriage comes before childbearing?

        • anonymous poster says:

          How do you do those things with no money at all?

        • arbitrary_greay says:

          This seems really obvious:
          Pay people to attend a weekly social group.
          Pay people to dispose of the trash on the lawn.
          Pay people to fix the broken window.
          Pay the criminal relative to not commit anymore crimes. (Or pay someone else to supervise them and prevent them from commiTting more crimes.)
          Pay people planning on having a child to get married.

  74. ConnGator says:

    For a libertarian take on creating jobs (especially for the less skilled) I strongly recommend Low Hanging Fruit Guarded By Dragons.

  75. Yrro says:

    You know, my grandma was a poor farmer’s kid in the 1940’s, and to hear her tell it the advantages to it over living in the slums was that her parents weren’t divorced, and there weren’t enough people nearby for violence to be a concern.

    An inner city kid has better access to education, better clothes, and more options for food. She literally wore burlap sacks and traded off which day she could go to school because they only had one pair of shoes to share among the children in the family.

    Remember that as recently as the 1930’s starvation was a real threat for poor families. Now we’re worried that poor people are too fat to be healthy.

    Every single advantage I can think of is due to the fact that she was dirt poor *despite* being at least 1 SD above average intelligence, from a family who was at least vaguely conscientious and working.

    • Jill says:

      Your grandma probably had a stable home without drug addict or mentally ill or criminal parents. Lots of kids do not have those advantages. Mental health and substance abuse services would help kids that do have these problems. She had a hard life, but seems to have had more sociocultural advantages than many kids poorer economically than her do.

      “An inner city kid has better access to education, better clothes, and more options for food.”

      How many poor inner city kids have you known? Inner city kids probably have more clothes, but access to farm fresh vegetables is certainly not common in the inner city. And inner city educational systems are often big compounds for the babysitting of violent troubled children, where no education whatsoever occurs.

      • keranih says:

        Inner city kids probably have more clothes, but access to farm fresh vegetables is certainly not common in the inner city.

        Not correct. Correcting for poverty, there is more food shifted towards urban areas than towards rural areas. Economics & specialization pushes nearly all farms to specialize in a limited range of crops, so that collecting a range of “farm fresh” foods means traveling quite a ways from the tomato farm to the kale farm.

        The largest factor in determining if a child has a diet with adequate veggies(*) is if they have someone in the household who cooks.

        And inner city educational systems are often big compounds for the babysitting of violent troubled children, where no education whatsoever occurs.

        Not a false statement, but which overlooks that there are generally multiple schools in an urban area, and entire rural counties with only one school.

        (*) “Farm fresh” is not the best choice for vegetables. Frozen veggies are nearly always of better quality unless the veggies come from your own garden. Wonders of modern tech and all that.

      • Yrro says:

        You certainly have access to a wider variety of foods, of greater tastiness. I will agree that “at least we had our garden” is a common part of her stories. On the other hand, most of those vegetables were home-canned almost immediately.

        My grandmother actually did have a fairly abusive and alcoholic grandmother living in the house, and an invalid mother. Child services were certainly not involved. She essentially raised her siblings herself.

  76. Nornagest says:

    Whoever classified free school lunches as optimistic has never eaten a free school lunch. I wouldn’t have thought it’s possible for something to taste of poverty, and yet…

    • Randy M says:

      Eating school lunches doesn’t make you optimistic. Thinking giving them out will be a significant boon makes you optimistic.
      (Sorry for spoiling the joke)

  77. Eli Glowen says:

    There’s not enough discussion of the biggest downside associated with universal basic income: it significantly erodes cooperation among people. It provides incentives for increased violent crime, rioting, promiscuity, drug use, and illegitimacy (among others). In a world with guaranteed income, the opportunity cost of all of these activities is significantly diminished, and I would argue that this at the heart of the decline of African American culture.

    • Nornagest says:

      How?

      • Eli Glowen says:

        In many ways. In a world without guaranteed income, a man whom has children with a woman that commits crimes significantly risks leaving that woman without anything if he goes to prison. If the woman has a guaranteed income that’s no longer true. From a woman’s perspective, choosing a man that is loyal is no longer as valuable either – she gets an income whether he’s there or not. Monotony is discouraged.

        Activities such as rioting and significant drug use can generally only take place if someone has an income that is independent of a job.

        To Ruprect’s point – I don’t find this credible at all. Politicians have trouble making welfare conditional even on drug use. You think they could make it conditional on all of these activities, many of which we don’t even understand? Wishful thinking – particularly given that these people are loyal voters. Moreover, this wouldn’t resolve the problem of crime by men that is largely a result of women receiving a guaranteed income (see point above).

        • Ruprect says:

          So, the mechanism by which crime is incentivised – some men want to commit crimes and riot, but where there is no welfare, they are discouraged from doing so by fear that their children might starve. Without welfare, women are discouraged from breeding with criminal men, because they fear they might starve. Add welfare to the equation and these men start committing crimes.

          I dunno. My suspicion is that men who aren’t discouraged from rioting and violence by the prospect of a lengthy prison sentence probably won’t be discouraged by the fear that their children might starve – though that probably largely depends on the particular social milieu and historical period they live in. They might be discouraged by female rejection, but I think there is more to this than women being reliant on men.
          I mean, maybe some women react in this way, but it feels like we’re getting into an area where so many other factors are in play – my dear old mum, bless her heart, needed a man like a fish needs a bicycle, but seemed to be able to resist the allure of the rioting barbarians – that it’s quite difficult to say what the effect of a basic income might be if these other factors might also be liable to change.

          Not convinced.

          • Eli Glowen says:

            You’re making the mistake of thinking about it exclusively in conscious rational terms, when it’s just as much an evolutionary argument.

            But even from an conscious standpoint, I don’t think it’s controversial to say that *some* individuals would think twice about committing risky crimes (instead of working a low wage job) if they thought getting caught would risk the lives of their children.

            From an evolutionary standpoint, there is significant variation in how wiling men are to commit crimes. Without a guaranteed income, criminals would have much fewer children relative to non-criminals. Again, a criminal’s children would lack the support necessary to survive. Moreover, women that have a preference for criminal types or philandering men would also produce less children in a world without guaranteed income. So with a guaranteed income, over time you get selection towards individuals that are more criminal and more promiscuous. This sort of dynamic is even observed in certain bird species during really plentiful times (so it can emerge rapidly).

            To Jill, empirically no matter where you look (within a given country) those on welfare are invariably more prone to crime and promiscuity relative to the rest of the population. I’m not saying this evidence of causation, but the correlation is obvious.

        • neonwattagelimit says:

          In many ways. In a world without guaranteed income, a man whom has children with a woman that commits crimes significantly risks leaving that woman without anything if he goes to prison. If the woman has a guaranteed income that’s no longer true. From a woman’s perspective, choosing a man that is loyal is no longer as valuable either – she gets an income whether he’s there or not.

          What? Everything you just said could also apply to a woman with a stable job. Are you also opposed to female employment?

          Activities such as rioting and significant drug use can generally only take place if someone has an income that is independent of a job.

          Because activities such as rioting and significant drug use have never occurred in societies where one needs a job to have an income. Ever.

          Monotony is discouraged.

          While I personally am monogamous, I do favor the discouragement of monotony. Score one for the basic income!

          • E. Harding says:

            “Are you also opposed to female employment?”

            -It seems to have resulted in nothing but bad in the U.S., but an international approach is needed to understand its effects. Japan has a low rate of female employment, and it does fine enough.

            “Because activities such as rioting and significant drug use have never occurred in societies where one needs a job to have an income. Ever.”

            -Strawman.

        • orangecat says:

          This is an argument against any welfare, not a basic income specifically. In fact a UBI probably does better than the current system in your model. With it, the mother and kids are unambiguously worse off if the father goes to prison, while today it’s quite possible that the welfare benefits for a single mother would exceed what he’s capable of earning.

    • Ruprect says:

      “In a world with guaranteed income, the opportunity cost of all of these activities is significantly diminished”

      Hmmmm………
      Why couldn’t you create a cost for engaging in these activities even with a universal income? Make universal income conditional upon law-abiding behaviour. Hard labor for those who don’t comply.

      • ConnGator says:

        I would imagine that would be how it would work in practice. Break the law, go to jail and your basic income goes to the jail in order to pay for you to be housed.

        I am in favor of voluntary hard-ish labor in jail as a way to shorten the term by up to 25% or so.

    • Jill says:

      Guaranteed minimum income from wikipedia. Look at all the countries that have it. If they have all the problems you listed, I sure haven’t read about it in the news.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guaranteed_minimum_income

      And there are numerous other factors here>

      Nixon official: real reason for the drug war was to criminalize black people and hippies.
      http://www.vox.com/2016/3/22/11278760/war-on-drugs-racism-nixon

      • brad says:

        Guaranteed minimum income is not the same as universal basic income. Not that I agree with Eli Glowen, but it is an important distinction.

    • Corey says:

      Well, GiveDirectly is about to try a large-scale experiment with UBI in Kenyan villages. They love to do randomized trials, so they can quantify the effects. So we’ll probably have some real-world data about this in a few years.

      (If it works out I suspect we’ll see people arguing that Kenyans have stronger moral fiber than Americans…)

  78. Bland says:

    1. I could probably be classified as an extreme libertarian since I don’t think the government should have any role in helping the poor. However, I do think society should be in the business of collectively helping the poor. It’s called charity.

    2. I think a make-work program is preferable to a universal income program. A make-work program could potentially mitigate skills stagnation. Also, the make-work program could extract some economic value from the workers even if it is less than they are getting paid. Finally, I think that people feel better if they can consider themselves to be contributing rather than living off the dole.

    3. I share some pessimism about technological unemployment, but I’m not convinced that the market can’t offer a solution. For example, I could imagine a company like Facebook paying its users a small amount for each “like” they give or maybe for each “like” they receive.

    • Ruprect says:

      “I think that people feel better if they can consider themselves to be contributing rather than living off the dole.”

      In practice, isn’t this fairly similar to a universal income – under UBI, if people preferred to contribute then they would (even if the pay they were to receive was low).

      The better reason for a make-work program is that we don’t like (poor) people who aren’t convinced of the intrinsic uplifting character of hard work.
      Have to be careful though – the proles might end up believing the propaganda – then where will we be?
      Down the coal mines {:(

    • multiheaded says:

      Finally, I think that people feel better if they can consider themselves to be contributing

      Poor people aren’t that fucking stupid. They know makework when they see it. And it feels humiliating as all fuck.

      Damn.

      • Anonymous says:

        Apparently not. Just look at the millions of people beating their chests over having “served” their country.

        • Ruprect says:

          That’s true.
          I don’t think it’s anything to do with stupidity, more people going with the social flow – the things that are important to most people are the things that appear to be important to those around them (that they are told are important).
          There are, however, quite a lot of people who aren’t convinced that work is especially important.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        You can have actual work performed for other people, and thus desired by other people. Just with the wages subsidized.

      • Walter says:

        Hmm, I think you might be generalizing from being a smart person here. You know what makework feels like, you feel humiliated doing it. Dumber folks might not though?

        I mean, end of the day, we feed folks in jail, yeah? So I’m not starving in our society. I’ll get myself arrested first. You’ll pay, if nothing else, X to put me in a cell and give me 3 squares. Better for you is if I can be taught that I am ‘disabled’, and you get away with X/3 in various social programs. Double better if I can be tricked that my timekilling is for reals, and given a ‘job’ as a greeter or analyst or whatever, down to X/10 or some such.

        There isn’t really any harm in trying, right? If we miss we end up paying X, but we aren’t poorer for having psychiatry and fake jobs as first and second nets.

        • Ruprect says:

          It has nothing to do with intelligence.
          A devout christian with an IQ of 130 likes receiving communion. A 90 IQ atheist thinks it’s a waste of time.

          If people are already convinced that work is the bee’s knees, they’ll do it anyway for whatever low wage they can receive, under a basic income system. If they aren’t, you can make them work on pain of some dreadful inconvenience, but you aren’t going to convince them it’s worthwhile, whatever their IQ.

      • jaimeastorga2000 says:

        Poor people aren’t that fucking stupid. They know makework when they see it. And it feels humiliating as all fuck.

        School = makework + babysitting. Most think education important.

      • Bland says:

        When I refer to make-work, I’m not talking about getting workers to dig ditches one day and then fill them in the next. That would certainly be humiliating.

        My definition of make-work is pretty broad: Any job that the economy would not produce on its own, that is paid at a higher rate than the value that the employer gets out of it.

        By this definition plenty of the jobs the government already provides are make-work. The Peace Corps is make-work. Much of academic research is make-work*.

        Make-work can only be humiliating if you the workers know that it’s make-work. So you just tell them it’s not.

        *Not trying to insult anyone. I’ve done scientific research myself, and I often wonder whether the papers I published were really worth the money that the government paid me to produce them.

        • somnicule says:

          I was pretty solidly on Multi’s side until you clarified. People don’t tend to care about make work that doesn’t provide more value than they’re getting paid for it if they’re still providing some meaningful value. @multiheaded, would you agree that, for example, a $4000/mo state subsidy for writing fanfiction, with 80 readers who appreciate it but not enough to pay $50/month each, would not be humiliating? It’s kind of overspecified, but in general I don’t think people would object to being paid for doing things they find meaningful above the level of value it provides for other people.

          Perhaps a basic income that is optionally conditional. You can just take the money, or you can fill in a form online and specify you’d only like to be paid if you fulfil some obligation, or proportionately to some metric. Alternatively, this could be done by third parties, and then it’s basically Beeminder.

          There’s that proposal a while back about government subsidized pay as an alternative to basic income, which I wasn’t a huge fan of because comparatively well-off people hiring others would be capturing a decent proportion of the subsidy quite directly, which seemed inelegant and inefficient.

          • multiheaded says:

            “@multiheaded, would you agree that, for example, a $4000/mo state subsidy for writing fanfiction, with 80 readers who appreciate it but not enough to pay $50/month each, would not be humiliating?”

            Hm, probably. What I had in mind is more like Deliberately Hard Labor to Build Virtue, blegh. like, a common caricature goes, digging canals with shovels an so on.

    • Adam Casey says:

      “A make-work program could potentially mitigate skills stagnation.”

      ETA: What? I mean … not wishing to be uncivil, but really, go away and think again about this, it’s … comically incorrect. What kind of makework are you imagining the government could construct that would train people in a skill the modern economy values?

      “Finally, I think that people feel better if they can consider themselves to be contributing rather than living off the dole.”

      If people love feeling they’re contributing then why are there any unemployed people who aren’t volunteering? Nobody outside intensive care is so disabled that they can’t volunteer doing *something* for *some* charity. The fact that people don’t do this rather suggests you’r wrong about their preferences. And charities are *much* more fulfilling than government makework.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        Long-term unemployment has deleterious effects on people’s employability. They get out of habit of waking up in the morning.

        While not my position, government-run “make work” projects could be something actually useful to society, and that keeps people’s skills engaged.

        If someone’s a painter, hire her to paint.

        • Walter says:

          The waking up in the morning thing is super clutch! Thanks for pointing this out. It so rarely gets said.

          The biggest dif between unemployed Walter and Walter-on-gig is that when I”m productive I have a schedule. Bed at X, wake at Y.

          I know more than one dude who (2 dudes, to be exact, and a lady), first week on the job at QT (long story why I know a bunch of gas station workers), lost their job due to missing the start of shift or the interview. They hadn’t gotten out of the “stay up late and drink/smoke” habit.

        • Adam Casey says:

          If someone can’t get work as a painter then keeping her skills as a painter is pointless. Any actual job-specific talents are either valued by the market, so people don’t need the makework, or not, so they makework doesn’t help.

          I agree that getting out of bed is hard, keeping that skill up is important if the lack of jobs is a temporary blip. But that’s not the scenario under consideration.

          Make-work for the recently fired during a recession could be justified on this basis. But making sure the long term unemployable have the ability to get out of bed and go to a job the market will never again require them to go to … seems rather pointless.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            Well, are the painting jobs gone forever? Is someone 5 years from retirement? Can we (as keranih implies) switch them from painting murals to painting houses?

            Also keep them from being injured while doing this, obviously.

          • Adam Casey says:

            “Well, are the painting jobs gone forever?” For most of the possible values of ‘paining’ yes.

            If for ‘painting’ we substitue almost any job in the blue collar part of manufacturing, or anything else you’d want to call manual labour then yes. Those jobs are gone, they are never coming back. Keeping people’s skills in that job is *less* useful than teaching them to joust or make clothes from animal skin, because at least you can get a job at a ren faire doing that.

        • keranih says:

          If someone’s a painter, hire her to paint.

          Eh. Houses, or pictures?

          Either way, there are side effects – the use of often-toxic painting materials, and – further upstream – the transport and manufacture of these products.

          On the one hand, this would increase the demand (including employment) for these products. And painting things beautifies them and protects them. OTOH – does this outweigh the negative effects on the environment, and is the increased risk of injury (I’m thinking falls from ladders) worth the benefits of employing people?

          Maybe it’s obvious to most everyone else how the math works on this. To me, it’s not.

          (Complete aside – how I knew Scandinavia was Not Like Home – seeing, over the course of a ten day stay, three different work/remodeling/painting crews that included young, fit women in low-rank, getting-filthy positions.)

      • Randy M says:

        People feel better when they exercise, yet often don’t. Generally people dislike doing unpleasant things, but since unpleasant things have long required doing, there is a resultant feeling of accomplishment afterwards (for certain categories of unpleasant things) that makes people feel valuable.

        • Adam Casey says:

          A scheme that required people to go to the gym before they got the dole is a terrible idea that would make people miserable. This is why hard labour is a punishment, not a reward. Achievements that *you* have chosen and *you* worked hard to accomplish feel good, the same thing forced on you by others feels awful.

          And how good do you really feel when you exercise or when you go to work? Because I feel like our assessments of how enjoyable those things are differ.

          I feel slightly more energised for 10 mins after exercise… that’s it. If it didn’t have health benefits i’d literally not even *consider* exercise as a thing I’d try to do. Likewise if I didn’t have to worry about money I’d not work and never miss it.

          • Randy M says:

            I wasn’t saying pay people to exercise, I was using it as an example of where something people would not choose to do for it’s own sake can nonetheless produce positive mental feelings. I’ve felt accomplishments for writing term papers, and I’ve never done that of my own volition. I did choose to attend the university, though.

            Let me put it this way–accomplishment comes from completing the less pleasant parts of larger goals or tasks. Listening to an enjoyable lecture is fine for it’s own sake, but doesn’t raise my evaluation of myself in the same way doing the exam does. Similarly to eating a meal and cooking one.

      • Bland says:

        Maybe I should have been more clear that my thought, that people feel better if they are contributing, is speculative and based off a generalization of my own psychology. There are some people (at least one–myself) who would feel guilty taking something that they did not earn. Make-work would allow these people to feel that they are actually earning their income.

        • houseboatonstyx says:

          @ Bland
          Maybe I should have been more clear that my thought, that people feel better if they are contributing

          Contributing to whom or what? Every hour spent commuting to some unnecessary office, is time that you can’t use babysitting your own grandchildren.

          Also, outside the family, there are real people who need your real help as a local volunteer for things that really are productive.

          • Bland says:

            Contributing to whom or what?

            The person or organization that is paying them.

          • houseboatonstyx says:

            @ Bland
            >>Contributing to whom or what?

            >The person or organization that is paying them.

            Are you serious? But going to a makework job is not contributing to the agency that pays you the UBI, or even to the nation. It is just wasting the resources of your commute, your McDonald’s lunch, etc, as well as your time. And the time of the supervisors who checked the timeclock records and documented that you did show up and spend the time makeworking.

            Whereas doing things that real people really want (local volunteer work or work for family or neighbors) does contribute to the nation, at least.

          • Bland says:

            Yes, I am serious. Again, I’m just speculating based on how I would feel. I’d feel guilty if I was just given money without providing any work in exchange.

            You seem to have a very specific idea of the kind of make-work job that I’m talking about, but I haven’t specified it at all. I don’t see why the make-work job can’t be the local volunteer work.

          • houseboatonstyx says:

            @ Bland
            I don’t see why the make-work job can’t be the local volunteer work.

            Ah. Now, how structured does it need to be? 8am with a timeclock? A UBI official to keep a record of your hours and report to the Agency?

            How close could it get to being casually on call for family babysitting, giving a neighbor a ride, etc? Cooking instead of eating out — how genetically unrelated would the recipients have to be?

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            Houseboatonstyx’s posts are probably meant to make me want UBI over wage subsidy, but instead they make me determined to never support a UBI.

            It’s either ‘extreme optimism’ or simply ‘not caring about truth’ to think that a significant number of people on UBI will become community volunteers.

            On the other hand, with wage subsidy, a local charity could very easily hire people to do things, with the advantage of price signals to determine what labor is valued.

    • E. Harding says:

      Make-work programs sound OK in theory, but the idea can easily be applied in inappropriate situations, e.g., the Irish and Indian famines of the 19th century.

  79. Matt says:

    Read Progress & Poverty, there you’ll find your solution to the last quadrant. A free market cannot exist where a fraction of the population are entitled to claim the market itself. This is why Says law doesn’t hold true in practice.

    • Jill says:

      Wow, what an interesting document. Thanks for linking to it. Written so long ago that probably most here will be unfamiliar with it. But a very renowned work, according to various sources I am finding.

      A unique and interesting take on the free market.

      • Matt says:

        Amusingly, the key insight that poverty is a product of progress comes from his witnessing the growth of….

        San Francisco.

  80. Dan Simon says:

    The problem with all these discussions of the great swaths of the population inevitably doomed to hopelessness, despair and destitution if we don’t do something radical is that the people engaged in them are all either too young, too weak of memory, or too ignorant of history to understand the cyclical nature of these problems. In the 1970s, the collapse of manufacturing left even more millions of Americans inevitably doomed to hopelessness, despair and destitution if we didn’t do something radical. What happened in the interim? The 1980s and 1990s, of course. And I shouldn’t have to point out that the 1930s were even worse than the 1970s and today–then the 1950s and 1960s came along…

    Economic booms and busts happen, for lots of reasons. (One reason is that the way people behave during booms engenders busts, and vice versa.) During good times, just about everyone can do well and improve their circumstances. Eventually, the good times peter out, and times get hard–especially for the less economically resilient. Unfortunately, all too many people–entire societies sometimes, in fact–assume that the way it is during a boom or a bust is the way it will always be, and end up making shortsighted judgments. Let’s not fall into that trap.

  81. Jill says:

    “But the southeasterners worry school lunches won’t be enough. Maybe even hiring great teachers, giving everybody free health care, ending racism, and giving generous vocational training to people in need wouldn’t be enough. ”

    Maybe it wouldn’t be enough. But since we’re not doing any of those things, it seems quite premature to jump to that conclusion. Why give up before we start? Are these Southeast corner people depressed or what? Aren’t they being unrealistically negative here? How would we know whether or not helping poor people is really hard or not? The U.S. has not tried very much to do this in decades. Who knows what might happen if we actually tried? If we had good community programs for youth, good community programs for mental health and substance abuse needs etc., whole new horizons might open up.

    The trucker doesn’t have to learn to code. If he has a guaranteed minimum income, then, if he chooses, he can do useful activities, like community farming. And these activities don’t have to pay an income because he already has one. We need to expand both the trucker’s possibilities, and our own way of thinking about human possibilities.

    I don’t know why people choose to believe Judith Rich Harris’s ideas that parenting doesn’t influence children’s behavior. There are tons of studies that show otherwise.

    And the challenges of separating genetics from environmental influences are great. E.g. if twins separated at birth had been sitting in wombs full of cocaine or alcohol, this is environmental influence, not a genetic one. But researchers will likely assume the twins’ similarities are genetic, because, after all, they were separated at birth. Also, people who can afford to adopt children are probably almost all middle class or above. So separated twins, having been in an alcohol free womb, and a cocaine free womb, and going to 2 different middle class families– these kids may both benefit from the safe womb, as well as middle class environment of their different adoptive families. So they may both do well for those reasons. If so, their both doing well is due to environment. But the researchers may attribute that to genetics. Because the environments were different. However, the environments might have been more similar than different in the most important ways.

    In social science research, where it would be unethical to control children’s environment by assigning one to an abusive home and one to a great nurturing home, there are a lot of difficulties in coming to valid conclusions on the basis of research. It’s not like chemistry. In social sciences, since you often can’t set exactly the situation that would yield more firm results, you end up with correlations. And it’s far too easy to mistake correlation for causation.

    See below, from wikipedia, about Judith Rich Harris’s book, The Nurture Assumption, and her contention that genetics is just about everything and parenting just about nothing, in influencing kids.

    “However, Frank Farley of Temple University claims that “she’s taking an extreme position based on a limited set of data. Her thesis is absurd on its face, but consider what might happen if parents believe this stuff!”[8] Wendy Williams of Cornell University, who studies how environment affects IQ, argues that “there are many, many good studies that show parents can affect how children turn out in both cognitive abilities and behavior”.[8] Jerome Kagan of Harvard University argues that Harris “ignores some important facts, ones that are inconsistent with this book’s conclusions”.[10]

    It’s super easy for people who have won the “environment lottery” to think that only genetics matters. People who have been born in a safe and fairly nurturing home, supportive of their maturing and of their developing of their their talents– these folks have won the environment lottery.

    But if we can fix up other folks with a safer environment, one more supportive of skill development and/or pursuit of constructive activities– they may become a whole lot better off. Why not give it a try, rather than giving up prematurely?

    • Scott Alexander says:

      “I don’t know why people choose to believe Judith Rich Harris’s ideas that parenting doesn’t influence children’s behavior. There are tons of studies that show otherwise. ”

      Have you ever read Nurture Assumption?

      • Jill says:

        I’ve read numerous reviews of it, but not the book itself. You seem like a bright guy, and you seem to think her conclusions are justified. So maybe I will get the book and look directly at her descriptions of the studies.

      • PGD says:

        FWIW, The Nurture Assumption is *not* an argument against environmental influence. It’s an argument against parental influence, as compared to e.g. peer influence.

        • Jill says:

          PGD, yes so the solution must be to get these poor children better peers. But since parents supposedly don’t matter much, these wonderful peers could maybe have awful parents– but that wouldn’t affect their wonderfulness as formative influences on the poor children who need to be helped by having better peers. And apparently, kids’ teachers don’t affect them much either, so good teachers would not be needed.

          There was a book written about this, a novel, called Lord of the Flies. The novel didn’t portray a glowing picture. But perhaps in real life it would work out great. But I don’t think so, really.

          I will have to get Harris’s book and read it. It’s a really odd viewpoint.

    • Thursday says:

      But since we’re not doing any of those things, it seems quite premature to jump to that conclusion.

      No, there are lots of studies and other lines of evidence that strongly suggest that conclusion.

      • Jill says:

        And lots that show the opposite conclusion.

        • Thursday says:

          No.

          • Jill says:

            Just say no to facts, LOL.

            Head Start programs for pre-schoolers. Giving homes to the homeless. The GI Bill. Social Security. The Marshall Plan for Europe after World War II. Plenty of examples and studies showing that many government-administered social programs work.

            Unless the studies are done by the Right Wing “think tanks” which are really propaganda tanks. Those studies always find the same anti-government-intervention conclusions every time.

          • suntzuanime says:

            Yes, the Marshall Plan in Europe post-WW2 definitively proves that nurture is more important than nature. What the hell is wrong with you?

          • Randy M says:

            Please give one study showing head start reducing poverty.

          • Chalid says:

            Why are you (effectively) asking for someone to link you to Head Start’s Wikipedia page?

          • Thursday says:

            The Head Start program is a notorious failure. You cite one of the stronger pieces of evidence for my position.

            The Marshall plan was about rebuilding the infrastructure of a bombed out Europe. It was never about eliminating underclass poverty, and is therefore simply irrelevant to the question of whether it is possible to significantly reduce or eliminate such poverty.

            In fact, most of the programs you cite have never come close to eliminating underclass poverty. In fairness, they weren’t really intended to.

            That some social programs may be a success given certain criteria, shows us nothing about whether they are able to significantly reduce or eliminate underclass poverty.

            In fact, no one anywhere has ever managed to make significant progress towards eliminating underclass poverty, and the genetic studies that have been linked to in the post, as well as others like them, suggest that it is highly unlikely that any government program will be able to do so.

            In all seriousness, Scott has provided lots of links in the original post. You would be well advised to take a look at them.

        • Jill says:

          The programs I listed were successful government interventions. And you are correct, I can not show you successful government interventions for programs that that were never attempted. But since so many government interventions for various goals have been successful, perhaps we should try some more of them for other goals that haven’t been attempted. Like eliminating underclass poverty.

          Of course there may be some genetic component to poverty. That doesn’t mean that there is no environmental component. And many of the conclusions about genetic components are based on one interpretation of the data, when other interpretations are also possible.

          from Head Start page from wikipedia

          “W. Steven Barnett, director of the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University, rebutted Klein, “Weighing all of the evidence and not just that cited by partisans on one side or the other, the most accurate conclusion is that Head Start produces modest benefits including some long-term gains for children.”[34]

          Thursday, you say
          “In fact, no one anywhere has ever managed to make significant progress towards eliminating underclass poverty, and the genetic studies that have been linked to in the post, as well as others like them, suggest that it is highly unlikely that any government program will be able to do so.”

          So you want to just take it for granted that because of interpretations of studies about a genetic component to poverty, that it can’t be done. You want to just not try at all to eliminate underclass poverty? To just give up without trying?

          What about cures for cancer? Want to just give up without trying? New technologies or energy sources? Just give up without trying to discover them ? Want to just decide that these things are not possible?

          Probably not. But somehow poverty is different.

          • Thursday says:

            So, the range of opinion on the benefits of Head Start on children go from modest to non-existent. The benefits of these kinds of programs tend to be little more than noise by middle age, or even later school.

            But since so many government interventions for various goals have been successful, perhaps we should try some more of them for other goals that haven’t been attempted. Like eliminating underclass poverty.

            This is a huge leap of logic. Because we can do A, we can do B, even though there’s lots of evidence we can’t do B.

            You want to just not try at all to eliminate underclass poverty? To just give up without trying?

            People have tried all sorts of things all around the world and the track record is absolutely terrible.

            But somehow poverty is different.

            That would be the logical conclusion.

          • Jill says:

            Most of the things people have tried for eliminating poverty have not been serious tries. E.g. foreign aid often goes to corrupt government leaders– and the givers of the aid knew darn well it would. Of course, that does not help the common people at all. No reason why it should.

            It’s not been seriously tried either in the U.S. or in other parts of the world. Except the Social Security program which does keep a lot of elders out of poverty and works quite well for that.

          • Thursday says:

            Look, you’ve gone from insisting that there is plenty of evidence that government programs can reduce underclass poverty. Since that’s blatantly false, you’ve shifted ground radically, now merely insisting that nothing has ever really been tried. But that’s also blatantly false. Billions of dollars have been spent in all kinds of ways in many different countries, and many trial programs, like Head Start and Perry, have been conducted. All with not much result.

            This is truly the last refuge of the leftist. I’m sure there are still some old commies out there that insist that true communism has never really been tried. I don’t think their entitled to take another shot.

            Anyway, you seem completely indifferent to things like facts, evidence and good reasoning (you’ll make any argument, even one that contradicts what you just said), so I’m going to have to leave off this argument. You may have the last word, if you wish

          • Jill says:

            Some things that have been tried, have worked, like GI Bill and Social Security. But we haven’t tried eliminating underclass poverty as a whole, and we should.

            I am not indifferent to facts, evidence and good reasoning.

            I do find that you always find some reason to disagree with facts yourself– that there have been some good, but not spectacular results, with Headstart, for example. And that the GI Bill and Social Security have worked.

            The ability of some folks on this site to believe that they are always right and the facts are always on their side, no matter what they are actually doing or believing, and no matter what the facts actually say, is interesting. But perhaps not surprising. People do this on TV all day long.

          • keranih says:

            But we haven’t tried eliminating underclass poverty as a whole, and we should.

            Honey, seriously???

            People don’t starve to death. They don’t die of treatable diseases. They don’t die of exposure unless they are addicts. Their children can go to school and their parents are not put in poor houses.

            Poverty, as defined through the ages *has* been eliminated in the USA. What we are left doing is squabbling over what standard of support the poor can expect from the tax payer.

          • Thursday says:

            Psmith, I know. Total indifference to the facts. These people just don’t care.

  82. Who wouldn't want to be anonymous says:

    > In theory, a 1900s poor person who suddenly got 10x his normal salary should be able to save 90% of it, build up a fund for rainy days, and end up in a much better position. In practice, even if the minimum wage in 2100 is $200 2016 dollar an hour, I expect the average 2100 poor person will be one paycheck away from the street. I can’t explain this, I just accept it at this point.

    The reason the poor live paycheck to paycheck is because the government encourages them to. When large portions of the population actually save, economists can’t shut up about how “consumer confidence” is low and how the government needs to impliment policies to stimulate demand. Countries like Japan, where the savings rate is (iirc) about 3x that of the US, is some kind of travesty. What possible rational reason could these saps have for saving! They need to go out and spend spend spend!

    • meyerkev248 says:

      Or there’s always Michael Pettis’s response, which is that it’s the dirty foreigners and that annoying insistence the USA has on being the global reserve currency.

      No literally. Since the balance of payments must balance, if China buys half a trillion in treasuries, then either Americans must be investing half a trillion back in China, or we must be buying half a trillion in Chinese crap that they aren’t buying in American goods. Thus Americans are required to live beyond their means.

      Hence why the Japanese got rather antsy about the Chinese trying to buy Yen.

  83. multiheaded says:

    I would describe my view as “competitive/depends on how much competition exactly”. I.e. if certain interest groups could just comply quietly and maintain basic social democracy, they could effectively pacify would-be extremists like me. But, alas, they broke free of it and aren’t going to compromise again.

    • Anonymous says:

      Would-be extremists like you aren’t terribly scary. The poor rising up problem is solved by efficient enough meritocracies. When the desperate are all incompetent the worst they can do is sporadic, uncoordinated damage.

      • multiheaded says:

        So you’re saying that it’s ultimately the wiser option for us to sabotage efficient enough meritocracies? (Like shooting Alexander II, who did, after all, make things locally better.)

        • Anonymous says:

          The people that could have made up the backbone and leadership of ‘us’ are instead fat and happy and that trend is only accelerating. What you are suggesting would have been a good strategy for ‘us’ 100 years ago. Now it’s too late.

        • Multiheaded has a point. The more incompetent would-be extremists are, the more easily their movement can be hijacked by competent people, to turn them into purges against their personal enemies and loot the state with the incompetent revolutionaries’ enthusiastic cooperation.

          This is, admittedly, exactly the opposite of the point Multiheaded is trying to make, and suggests that we should be scared and should be aggressively culling the incompetent poor (ideally by encouraging division among them so they do it to themselves), but hey, credit where credit is due.

          • Anonymous says:

            Incompetent people don’t have movements to hijack in the first place. Such movements can still find would-be leadership because fat and happy people can still want to be revolutionary leaders, it’s an exciting job. And they could still find cannon fodder because they don’t need to be terribly competent. But the critically important middle management is going to be tough. That’s traditionally been drawn from the competent but poor, with fervor fueled by anger over the difference between their ability and outcomes. That’s the swamp that meritocracies have drained.

      • Eli says:

        But I’m highly meritorious and I don’t like actually-existing “meritocracy”. Living in a cloistered bubble while everyone outside my own job field finds their standards of living crumbling is distinctly un-fun.

        • The Nybbler says:

          I prefer it to the situation where people who have no job field at all have an ever-increasing claim on my income. “To each according to his need” doesn’t work in the presence of insatiable need.

          • Ruprect says:

            “To each according to his need” only applies where each person’s need can be supplied for by the productive capacity of society.
            There isn’t an insatiable need. At least, not in physical terms.

            In general, increases in income have more to do with knowledge passed on from… wherever… and social circumstances than individual effort.
            So, society has an ever increasing claim on it.

            Because the majority of the increase is owed to external forces.

          • Eli says:

            You’re completely failing to address my point, which is that as a guy making $90k/year in tech plus bonuses, I want a more egalitarian society so that I don’t have to be surrounded constantly by friends and family with horrible problems I can’t do anything (individually) about. I also don’t like the notion that I’ll have to keep up with stupid professional fashions to stay employed long-term, rather than being able to focus on work I actually consider useful and productive (and yet which doesn’t have VC money inflating stupid bubbles).

          • Anonymous says:

            Not liking it is one thing. It doesn’t sound like you are ready to quit your job and join the revolution. Maybe I’m misreading?

          • The Nybbler says:

            The egalitarian society you are looking for, however, is not reachable. We can’t create a society where everyone can be useful and productive enough to satisfy their needs.

            We can only redistribute what productive capacity is available. And the more we redistribute, the more need we will find; sure, Ruprecht’s limit applies, but if we reach that point, society collapses.

      • Anonymous says:

        Would-be extremists like you aren’t terribly scary. The poor rising up problem is solved by efficient enough meritocracies. When the desperate are all incompetent the worst they can do is sporadic, uncoordinated damage.

        The poor rising up is a complete non-problem. Without leadership, they are nothing. It’s the leadership, which inevitably comes from the middle and upper classes, that you have to watch out for. An unorganized riot is mostly harmless in the grand scheme of things. An organized one is a dire threat.

        Interestingly, this is sort of the counter-insurgency policy of the PRC. If they see someone striking, or protesting, they check whether it appears grassroots and local. If so, they send negotiators to calm the situation down. But what they proactively check for is non-state, national movements organizing, even if they appear to be benign – if they’re actually led and organized, they are a huge red light, even if they might be harmless for the moment. Organized rioters get the hammer called on them quickly.

        • suntzuanime says:

          Ain’t no party like a Chinese Communist Party, ’cause a Chinese Communist Party crushes all potential rivals before they can grow.

          • Anonymous says:

            You are simply… a spore, a seed.
            Today you are nothing… insignificant.
            But if allowed to bloom and grow
            someday… someday, you might represent a threat to our freedom and security.
            So we cleanse.

      • Frog Do says:

        How do you measure merit?

  84. multiheaded says:

    Someday those tears are gonna spill.

  85. Edward says:

    I’m confused by the fact that the concept of comparative advantage is not mentioned in this thread at all (and also by the fact that I haven’t noticed in any discussion of the unnecessariat problem. The theory of comparative advanage implies that there is no fundamental reason for the existence of huge unemployment due to automation of lot of jobs. Or am I missing something?

    Comparative advange works like this: there are two goods (“unit of food” and “unit of wine”) and there are two people in the economy: person A and person B.

    Person A can produce 4 units of food during one day or 2 units of wine during one day.

    And B can produce 400 units of food per day or 300 units of wine per day (so this person is super-efficient at producing both goods).

    Now if you think about the situation you will see that it makes sense for person A to produce only food and sell some of their output to B in exchange for wine (because A’s ratio of units of food per day to units of wine per day is higher than B’s). So both of them will gain from these trades.

    You can increase number of agents, number of goods, introduce utilities, but the result will hold: it makes sence for each agent to focus on production of goods/services in which they have comparative advantage.

    This theory is true – it is the best explanation why devision of labor exists – and it implies that even if there is huge unequality in productivity between agents, there will still be trading between them.

    **

    Regarding the fact that the 55 year old Kentucky trucker can’t be a programmer – to find employment, it will be enough for him to find any way at all to be useful to others in the sence that others would rather pay him money to get something done than do it themselves. It doesn’t have to be writing scripts or apps.

    **

    Now, suppose we find ourselves in situation where unnecessariat exists, when there is huge unemployment. So there are lots of people who are barely getting by. Why don’t they take advantage of devision of labor and start new small companies and just ignore the part of economy that doesn’t want to do business with them? That would make easier for them to get by. Also that would make them employed again. And the rest of the economy will want to to business with them.

    I think that this doesn’t happen because (1) there are no good coordination meachanisms (no good markets) and (2) because people are mad (there is a strong link between productivity and income but most people insist on ignoring it and instead of thinking about how can they provide useful services / improve existing processes / choose the most profitable job they can do – istead of this they choose to despair and get frustrated).

    I aso think that both problems are solvable: you can create good markets (search by keywords mechanism design theory, market design, auction theory) – it is about designing rules of the game in such way that optimal strategies lead to good outcomes. Good markets will lead to better coordination and will make the link between productivity and income more easy to notice.

    • multiheaded says:

      “You’re probably reading this thinking: “I wouldn’t live like that.” Maybe you’re thinking “I wouldn’t overdose” or “I wouldn’t try heroin,” or maybe “I wouldn’t let my vicodin get so out of control I couldn’t afford it anymore” or “I wouldn’t accept opioid pain killers for my crushed arm.” Maybe you’re thinking “I wouldn’t have tried to clear the baler myself” or “I wouldn’t be pulling a 40-year-old baler with a cracked bearing so the tie-arm wobbles and jams” or “I wouldn’t accept a job that had a risk profile like that” or “I wouldn’t have been unemployed for six months” or basically something else that means “I wouldn’t ever let things change and get so that I was no longer in total control of my life.” And maybe you haven’t. Yet.

      This isn’t the first time someone’s felt this way about the dying. In fact, many of the unnecessariat agree with you and blame themselves- that’s why they’re shooting drugs and not dynamiting the Google Barge. The bottom line, repeated just below the surface of every speech, is this: those people are in the way, and its all their fault. The world of self-driving cars and global outsourcing doesn’t want or need them. Someday it won’t want you either. They can either self-rescue with unicorns and rainbows or they can sell us their land and wait for death in an apartment somewhere. You’ll get there too.”

    • anonymous poster says:

      Why don’t they take advantage of devision of labor and start new small companies and just ignore the part of economy that doesn’t want to do business with them? That would make easier for them to get by.

      The new automated economy is also capable of producing goods and services at far lower cost than firms which still employ humans to do those jobs. Parallel economies don’t work for the same reason telling people to ‘buy local’ doesn’t stop Wal Mart from opening up shops, or ‘buy American’ doesn’t stop competition from overseas: people prefer lower prices for themselves to paying more but keeping their countrymen employed.

      • Edward says:

        If the aggregated automated economy sells thing to the unemployed, it means there is exchange. When we pay money for things it is a roundabout way of exchanging our labor for things. So it seems like a contradiction.

        If the automated economy sells me something it means one of three things: (1) a gift, (2) a credit or (3) I’m exchanging my labor for goods/services. If it happens systematically its neither gifts nor credits.

        My point is there are good reasons for such trades to take place (because of comp advantage).

        If such trades don’t happen, then automated economy is isolated from a group people, who can run their own economy. But to do it they need good institutions (that is good markets and good coord. mechanisms)

        • eponymous says:

          Edward,

          Comparative advantage still holds, but that doesn’t prevent the market value of your labor falling to arbitrarily low levels.

          This is exactly what happens in a standard economic model if there’s a sudden increase in the supply of the good you sell. That drives down the market price, and your welfare decreases.

          You can always withdraw from the market and take up subsistence farming. In fact, if your market wage falls enough, that’s what you do (unless you have income from other sources, in which case you might just stop working instead).

          • Edward says:

            Market value of any particular skill can indeed drop to epsilon, but person’s labor is a set of skills.

            When comparative advantage holds, it means two things: first, there exists some work which others would rather delegate to me than do themselves, and second, I’m better of focusing on one type of work and exchanging the output for the goods and services I need to get by and have fun (as opposed to subsistence farming).

            So there is a lower bound in the following sense: I choose my production plan as a set of good produced (with quantities attached) per unit of time, and when I change this plan by increasing production of some good at the expense of another, the traded off quantity reflects my values in non-monetary terms. Comparative advantage means that I’m better off when participating in the division of labor.

            Generally speaking, to properly analyze the problem we need a set of coherent assumptions, based on which we will be able to construct a simulation of an economy, run it and see what happens. And then try different assumptions.

            Among these assumptions are:
            – can people learn new skills?
            – will resources be limited?
            – how will owners of highly automated firms choose amounts of goods produced and how will they choose prices?
            – who will be their customers?
            – where do the customers get money to pay for these goods?
            – how are markets designed (from game-theoretical PoV)?

            I agree that its hard to imagine what sort of job can today’s unskilled uneployed people do in future highly automated world. But I’m betting that they will learn new useful skills and not switch to subsistence farming.

            Many of unskilled unemployed may seem unable and not wanting to learn, but I think that it is solvable. I think that that solution is arranging markets in such way that a link between skills ans income is visible. Like, ‘if I learn how to do X I will be able to earn somewhat about $Y with high probability’.

          • eponymous says:

            @Edward

            I agree that it depends on the assumptions we make. Here’s a simple model where it happens:

            Suppose there are two types of households: capitalists (who own a fixed stock of capital K and own the robots), and workers (who own a fixed stock of labor N).

            Suppose the production function is:

            F(K,N+Z)

            where Z is the effective labor supply of the robots.

            Suppose F is Cobb-Douglas. Now let Z go to infinity. Then the income of workers goes to zero.

      • Anonymous says:

        The new automated economy is also capable of producing goods and services at far lower cost than firms which still employ humans to do those jobs.

        So the cost of living goes to zero?

        • anonymous poster says:

          Why would it? Goods and services have gotten massively cheaper over the course of the last 100 years, yet the cost of living hasn’t declined significantly.

          • Anonymous says:

            This depends on what you mean by “cost of living”. If you mean, “The cost of subsistence,” then it would seem that this is going to zero in the hypothetical. If you mean, “The cost of living a comfortable middle-status life,” then of course that goes up, because people want more things, and the amount of things that are required for the new “middle-status” goes up. The only problem is that we then have to ask, “If the cost of new, fun things is going up, doesn’t that have to go to someone who is, uh, providing those products/services?”

            …and suddenly, we’re back to a regular-old economy. Disaster averted.

        • makomk says:

          Obviously the cost of living doesn’t go to zero, because there’s still the cost of raw materials, land, “intellectual property” etc. What happens is that all the cost goes towards the members of the capital-owning class who own all of the above and essentially none goes towards labour.

    • Corey says:

      One of the problems we’re trying to solve is when the non-satiation assumption buried in this model breaks down. That is, it doesn’t matter how good someone is at making wine when everyone has all the wine they want (“robots” is shorthand for this, though it doesn’t require literal mechanical men).

      That sounds ludicrous given economic history, but we’re already seeing persistent shortfalls of aggregate demand – the US has been unable to support full employment wihout some sort of bubble for decades now.

      • Edward says:

        Maybe I’m not getting the point, but, on one hand, if literally everyone has all the goods they want, then it looks like there is actually no problem.

        And on the other hand, if there are two groups of people – a group with super-high productivity and a group with low productivity, then, either they trade with each other (as compar. adv. predicts) or they are independent of each other: highly productive group have everything they want and dont engage in trade and low-productivity people run their own economy.

        • Corey says:

          Good point about the separate economies; I came to that conclusion when thinking about “eliminationism” in another sub-thread.

    • jaimeastorga2000 says:

      The theory of comparative advanage implies that there is no fundamental reason for the existence of huge unemployment due to automation of lot of jobs. Or am I missing something?

      Yes.

      • Anonymous says:

        …did he really just handwave away the entire idea of comparative advantage by pointing to one party’s disadvantage in one category? I mean, does he really misunderstand comparative advantage that badly?!

    • Luke the CIA stooge says:

      The issue isn’t that that can’t have advantageous trade amongst themselves (they can) the issue is that there are no longer industries or means of producing goods or services that they can trade with the outside world. Thus without welfare or disability they would be forced to regress to a cut off almost tribal existence.

      The problem is these communities where set up when cattle rustling, manufacturing and farming required lots of people, and now there are lots of people in geographical locations where they cannot contribute too or benifit from the global economy. Luckily there is an easy way to solve this problem that has worked again and again throughout history.

      Fucking move!!!

      Unemployment in America is now 5%, unemployment in North Dakota Is 3.1%, there are countless opportunities for these people to find jobs and get retrained while working (truck driver becomes welder, factory worker become soil worker) the issue is they insist on staying in failing communities and accumulating social ills. And then they have the nerve to demand that those in the top 50%
      (ie people who have moved and given up the community of their childhood for an education and a better life) they demand they subsidize their not moving.

      We’ve had this problem in Canada for decades where east coast fishing villages and northern indigenous communities are not economically viable, have awful health outcomes and have crisis levels of addiction and suicide. The issue is not genetics (when they move to the economically productive west and south their standard of living doubles and all their welfare indicators go up) the issue is that their communities and cultures lock them into a geography and an isolation that can only end in dependence or disaster.

      Do not make the same mistakes Canada made. Do not subsidize these failed lifestyles. Create a subsidy for them to move to areas of over employment and then cut their benefits if they refuse. Everyone who does not live on the African savanna owes their current standard of living to ancestors who where willing to face uncertainty I search of a better life, everyone who makes above a median wage does so because they have been willing to move and change their lifestyle slat some point (getting an education, moving cities, working late) it is an insult to the human spirit that these people stay in communities and raise their children to a culture of dispair.

      the issue isn’t that they can’t code, the issue isn’t their genetics, the issue isn’t that robots are replacing them (the economic analysis says they aren’t) the issue is they continue to do what has failed and refuse to adapt.
      There are dozens of trades and professions where someone without a college education, who can’t code, can make a rediculously good living, but you have to do things others can’t or don’t want too. You have to give yourself a Comparative advantage. And one of the easiest things you can do to give yourself that advantage is move to where you are most useful

  86. Subbak says:

    That letter after the C and before the first M of “Full Communism”. That’s a Phi, not an O. It’s not pronounced anything remotely like an O. And I’d say there is less than 1% chance you were not aware of this. Why do you do such things on purpose? And I’m not even Russian…

  87. anonymous poster says:

    I bet there is a guy living on North Sentinel Island who thinks he is hot shit right now with a nice hut and an intricately carved wooden bow and maybe he’s good at fishing and gets respect from the fellas and giggles from the ladies. Now, let’s make friendly contact and rock his tiny world.

    Oh, you paddle around the lagoon in an unseaworthy canoe? News flash: we’ve been to the fucking moon. Your village has 50 people in it? Guess what, the greater Tokyo metropolitan area has over 30. million. people. What’s that, you have no concept of million? Or indeed arithmetic, or writing, or other languages? Let me introduce you to Wikipedia, a construct based on technology and cultural concepts so alien to your way of life that you have no hope of ever getting it.

    Now reap the benefits of human civilization! Cotton cloth to replace the dirt rags you’re currently wearing! Food shipped fresh from across the world! Television so you can stay up to date on people considered important, influential, stylish, and relevant to humanity at large. Hint: not you.

    We’ve just taken this chap from top dog to jack squat just by being friendly and introducing ourselves. We didn’t even do anything unpleasant! We even gave him gifts and a new TV, which made it much worse.

    Two years later dude is a non-functional alcoholic who beats his wife, abuses his kids, and doesn’t go fishing any more because what’s the fucking point.

    Sure, he appreciates the antibiotics, they’re great. But did we really do him any favours, when we destroyed everything he ever knew without even touching it?

    -our lord and savior Argumate

  88. TheTrotters says:

    I’m not for open borders either, mainly because it’s not feasible. Nativism and the “us vs. them” mentality is not something that can be rooted out of humans. But I’m for immigration (as much as possible) precisely because we are clueless about lifting up the poor, but we’re great at giving the smart and conscientious a chance to lift themselves.

    • Jaskologist says:

      Given that we’ve found a lot of evidence that the average IQ of a society has a major impact on its wealth, isn’t getting smart people to immigrate just as selfish and harmful to the global poor as cutting off free trade with other countries?

  89. AnthonyC says:

    Today in nominative determinism: the person that coined the term “precariat” was named Guy Standing

  90. Z says:

    Regarding foreign aid, the documentary “Poverty, Inc.” and this thread reveal some unintended consequences – https://www.reddit.com/r/Documentaries/comments/4gy7zp/poverty_inc_2014_the_hidden_side_of_doing_good/

    Maybe foreign aid is still a net benefit, but it’s something to keep in mind.

  91. Jill says:

    This is a situation where power politics prevents good engineering solutions from occurring.

    Why not try UBI and see whether it works? Because there are plenty of people who agree with Grover Norquist that they should ever have to pay a penny more tax than they pay now. And those people are incentivized to invent all kinds of reasons why the poor are responsible for their own poverty and require no help from anyone else– or if they do, then private charitable organizations will take care of it just fine. In fact there are supposed ‘think tanks” that get donations to do “studies” that, for some reason, always come out with the same sorts of conclusions– or at least the studies that ever see the light of day do– conclusions that there is never any need for anyone to pay a penny more in taxes.

    In our society where so many people believe that their personal value and worth is the same as their net worth, how could it be otherwise? There are a number of reasons for Trump’s popularity. But can you imagine him getting this far in running for president if he were NOT a billionaire?

    It’s interesting to pretend that people are rational, and that we are able to look objectively at the needs and experiences of other people in our society. And some of us occasionally are rational and objective. But mostly, we are rather selfishly focused on our emotional needs.

    • Corey says:

      That (plus clinical depression) is why I anticipate the “eliminationism” from Four Futures (linked somewhere above). Eventually, automation will make a small handful of people rich beyond comprehension, they won’t need us to make or guard their stuff anymore, and automated guard labor prevents the traditional solution (redistribution via guillotine).

      All that needs to happen is they decide we deserve to starve, then we do. And it’s already common and easy to rationalize about how the poor made their own problems.

      If we got a decent-sized reservation (and the rich don’t get too itchy for lebensraum) we could just form our own separate economy and probably have OK lives, though.

      • onyomi says:

        This post makes me think of the movie, Elysium, which I didn’t see, but the basic premise of which I think I gleaned reasonably from previews, etc.

        Setting aside the specifics of that plot for a moment, imagine that a group of super rich people with robot servants decided to move into a floating pleasure palace in the sky. It is completely self-contained and they make everything they need there. They don’t interact with the rest of the world at all.

        I feel like this situation would enrage a lot of people, even though, strictly speaking these rich people wouldn’t be hurting anyone or stopping anyone else from having their own functioning economy or even building their own floating pleasure palaces. But it would be felt that they somehow owed the rest of us and, due to scifi, one can hardly imagine such a scenario without all the non-sky castle dwellers being in miserable, grinding poverty.

        If these rich people consistently recruited the most talented people among the earth-dwellers and thereby competed against us for their productivity, we might say they are, in some sense doing us harm. But even that in some sense assumes that the less productive are somehow entitled to participate in an economy with people more productive than them, which I’m not sure is justifiable.

        • Urstoff says:

          In the movie, the rich people refused to trade/sell/give their magic medical technologies to the poor people on earth (presumably out of the fear that the poor people would become less poor and those pose them a threat).

          • Jill says:

            Reminds me of the Ayn Rand books and movie.

          • onyomi says:

            Does that make them evil? I feel like we’re supposed to think “yes,” but my intuition is “no,” so long as they aren’t harming or interfering with the on-ground economy or medical technology.

          • Urstoff says:

            That seems fairly immoral to me. Refusing to sell antibiotics to a third-world country, for example, seems immoral. I don’t see how this would be any different.

          • onyomi says:

            If there are aliens out there who know we exist and about all the bad stuff that happens on earth would they be evil for not intervening?

            If the inhabitants of Galt’s Gulch know that they’d be worse off, in whatever sense, if they agreed to trade and interact with the rest of the world, but the rest of the world would be better off, do they owe it to the world to do so?

          • Immanentizing Eschatons says:

            If there are aliens out there who know we exist and about all the bad stuff that happens on earth would they be evil for not intervening?

            Yes. Screw the prime directive.

          • onyomi says:

            “Yes. Screw the prime directive.”

            Is the United States evil if it doesn’t intervene in any genocide or other horrible thing which happens in any corner of the world which the US military might conceivably stop?

          • Urstoff says:

            The consequences of stopping a foreign war is much less clear than the consequence of giving them antibiotics.

          • onyomi says:

            If there is someone in the world who could unambiguously benefit by you buying them antibiotics and you do not buy them antibiotics even though you could afford to, as evidenced by the fact you have a cell phone and tv, are you evil?

            The consequence of saying that the rich people in the floating palace are evil for not interacting with the rest of the world even though the rest of the world would be marginally enriched by them doing so is that anyone who doesn’t constantly do the maximum effort to get involved in any situation where he might help is evil.

          • Anonymous says:

            The consequence of saying that the rich people in the floating palace are evil for not interacting with the rest of the world even though the rest of the world would be marginally enriched by them doing so is that anyone who doesn’t constantly do the maximum effort to get involved in any situation where he might help is evil.

            What? No, that doesn’t follow.

            When there is a natural disaster somewhere in the world, we don’t say, “Tough luck, we see no obligation to intervene.” We do feel obligated to intervene. But we don’t say, “we must now spend 50% of our GDP on disaster relief.” We take a middle ground where we give a proportionate and affordable amount. Doesn’t seem inconsistent to me.

          • onyomi says:

            So any country which can afford to help out with any given disaster which happens in the world and doesn’t is evil?

            There seems to be a huge failure to distinguish morally obligatory and supererogatory here.

          • Anonymous says:

            So any country which can afford to help out with any given disaster which happens in the world and doesn’t is evil?

            Well, I’d say that there’s some level of disaster relief which is obligatory for a rich nation. We can argue about what that level is, but a nation giving far below that level–say, a nation giving zero–is failing their moral duty. I guess we could call it evil? Maybe we should reserve that strong word for more comprehensive moral failure, though.

            Just to check–wouldn’t you agree that some interventions are obligatory? Like Peter Singer’s drowning child, whom you can save by extending your arm? Isn’t that obligatory even if you don’t like getting wet?

            There seems to be a huge failure to distinguish morally obligatory and supererogatory here.

            I think you’re the one blurring this distinction? I tried to make exactly this distinction above. What I was trying to say above is: some disaster relief is obligatory; 50% of GDP on disaster relief is supererogatory.

            You seem to be saying: if I claim some interventions are obligatory, I must claim that it’s obligatory to spend maximal effort on interventions. No one believes that (maybe Peter Singer does?) and no one has argued for it in this thread.

            I’m putting forth what I think is a common-sense position: some interventions are obligatory, but complete self-abnegation is supererogatory. Your obligation to intervene increases the more good you can do and the less it costs you. I think this is a consistent position and close to what most people believe.

            If you agree that some interventions are obligatory, like saving a drowning child by extending your arm, then maybe everyone agrees at some level? Are we just haggling over which particular interventions are obligatory?

          • Jiro says:

            How about “being obligatory is a matter of degree”? Saving a child by doing nothing but getting wet would rank high on the scale.

            You seem to be saying: if I claim some interventions are obligatory, I must claim that it’s obligatory to spend maximal effort on interventions. No one believes that (maybe Peter Singer does?) and no one has argued for it in this thread.

            Nobody claims to believe it, but it may be a logical consequence of some people’s principles.

          • Urstoff says:

            If there is someone in the world who could unambiguously benefit by you buying them antibiotics and you do not buy them antibiotics even though you could afford to, as evidenced by the fact you have a cell phone and tv, are you evil?

            It’s not me buying them antibiotics. It’s me refusing to sell them antibiotics. If a doctor from some third-world country came to me and asked to purchase antibiotics at market price, and I refused them because even though selling them would greatly reduce suffering, then I would be doing something immoral. It’s not about a positive duty on me to give them antibiotics; it’s that I’m actively denying them something that they would legitimately like to purchase, and that purchase would greatly increase the welfare of lots of people.

          • onyomi says:

            “It’s me refusing to sell them antibiotics.”

            You don’t have a duty to sell anything to anyone if you don’t want to.

          • Urstoff says:

            You don’t have a duty to sell anything to anyone if you don’t want to.

            For consequentialist reasons, you need a pretty good reason justifying your refusal to sell given that you freely sell to other people. If you don’t think consequentialist reasons can ever override a duty, then this argument won’t be persuasive. I don’t think that’s a reasonable position to hold, though.

          • onyomi says:

            I’m not a consequentialist, but the consequences of accepting a principle that society gets to ethically judge whether or not people can refuse to sell their own property seem pretty bad.

          • Urstoff says:

            Society already judges the morality of plenty of actions; I’m not sure why selling would be off limits. If you refuse to sell someone something that would save thousands or millions of lives, I think you have done something immoral. Likewise, even if taxes are theft, they may still be justified for certain things. Principles are defeasible, and consequences are sometimes the defeaters.

            There is, of course, a distinction between something being immoral and something being a reason for coercion. Maybe the Space Republicans are evil for not selling their magic medical machines that could save millions of lives on earth, but I suppose you could hold that they shouldn’t be coerced to do it. I think coercion is justified in this case (but not for gay wedding cakes).

          • John Schilling says:

            Society already judges the morality of plenty of actions; I’m not sure why selling would be off limits.

            Onyomi isn’t talking about judging the morality of actions in general or of selling specifically. He is taking issue with judging the morality of inaction.

            That’s fundamentally different. If I can say “action X is immoral” and make it stick, you still get to chose between all of the actions that aren’t X, and doing nothing at all. Unless X is something huge, I have decreased your freedom of choice by an infinitesimal amount. If I can say “inaction not-X is immoral” and make it stick, I can command you to do X and you don’t have any freedom of choice until you are done with the task I have set for you.

            You can see how some people might have problems with that.

          • Jill says:

            Urstoof, Ayn Randians believe that the greatest virtue is selfishness. So from that point of view, the rich people should NEVER give the magic medical technologies to poor people– unless, for some selfish reason, the rich people really wanted to do it and would benefit greatly from it.

            Perhaps they could demand that they receive all the remaining money in the universe and that even more money be printed up for them, and/or that the poor people and their descendants will be the slaves of the rich medical technology owners in perpetuity? Sort of like the problem we have in society right now with medically caused bankruptcies, but somewhat worse than that.

            Just trying to carry this point of view out to its logical conclusion here.

          • Urstoff says:

            Onyomi isn’t talking about judging the morality of actions in general or of selling specifically. He is taking issue with judging the morality of inaction.

            I don’t think the line is very clear between what constitutes an action and inaction. If someone comes into your store and asks to buy something and you say “no”, is that inaction? I guess, of a sort. Likewise, I don’t see the distinction between commanding someone to do X and commanding someone to not do Y as entirely clear or morally significant. What category does paying taxes fall into? Requiring a drivers license to drive?

            I have a problem with coercion in general, whether it’s coercing a person to do something or coercing them to not do something. My point is that the principle of non-coercion, like most (maybe all) moral principles, is defeasible, and it seems to me, in this particular example, that the consequences are a defeater of the principle.

          • Urstoff says:

            @Jill

            That’s a bad caricature of Randian philosophy, as far as I can tell.

            http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ayn-rand/#VirtViceEgoi

            However, some absolute principle of non-coercion does come out of Randian philosophy, it seems. So it’s probably wrong to say that, according to Rand, the rich should never give to the poor. Rather, it’s wrong to force the rich to give to the poor.

            From that article:

            Indeed, people who are “totally indifferent to anything living and would not lift a finger to help a man or a dog left mangled by a hit-and-run driver” are “psychopaths” (1963c: 43–45) Rand makes even more concessions to “common sense morality” when she states that it’s good to help a neighbor going through a hard time till he can get back on his own feet, if we can afford to and if we have no reason to think that he is undeserving. Charity understood thus is a virtue because it is an expression of the generalized good will and respect that all normal people have towards others as creatures who share with them the capacity to value.

          • Nornagest says:

            Ayn Randians believe that the greatest virtue is selfishness.

            I am not a Randian, but the Randian view of selfishness and altruism is really easy to misinterpret, not least because she was optimizing at least partly for shock value. It’s less about feeling free to enrich yourself by any means at the expense of others (a lot of Rand villains do this, one way or another), and more about entitlements: selfishness as in the-virtue-of is about creating as much value as you can, while altruism as in the-vice-of is about destroying value by feeling obliged to squander it, or, worse, to organize negative-sum transfers by coercive means. (If this sounds strange, remember that she grew up in Soviet Russia.) I don’t remember her talking about cartels, but I get the impression she’d be against them; she generally didn’t like rent-seeking.

            There are things you could object to in this worldview; it doesn’t deal well with externalities or asymmetrical information, for example, and I don’t think it’s really equipped to handle intellectual property past the “lone heroic inventor” trope she liked. But it’s far from the yay-robber-barons, boo-teh-poors caricature it’s often reduced to.

          • Vox Imperatoris says:

            I agree with Urstoff in this case.

            You’re not obligated to do something for the poor that’s really burdensome. But if you could sell all the antibiotics people need for effectively no net cost to you, then I think it would be evil not to do it.

          • blacktrance says:

            I think the difference between action and inaction is generally clear. Refusing to serve someone you haven’t committed to serve is inaction. Commanding someone to pay taxes is action. Requiring someone to have a driver’s license to drive on public roads is inaction (because the government owns the roads), but also requiring it on private property is action.

            There is, of course, a distinction between something being immoral and something being a reason for coercion. Maybe the Space Republicans are evil for not selling their magic medical machines that could save millions of lives on earth, but I suppose you could hold that they shouldn’t be coerced to do it. I think coercion is justified in this case (but not for gay wedding cakes).

            There’s a further distinction to be made between agents from whom coercion is justifiable. If I really need the medicine, I ought to steal it or otherwise use force to obtain it if there’s no other way. If I’m the owner of the medicine, I should resist the theft. And if I’m a neutral third party, I should side with the owner of the medicine and punish the thief.

            (I’m a consequentialist but I don’t think you’re obligated to sell to anyone you don’t want to. The benefits of others by themselves aren’t the right kind of consequence to outweigh my own interests.)

          • “Just trying to carry this point of view out to its logical conclusion here.”

            To do that you first have to understand it. I’m not an Objectivist, but having spent lots of time arguing with them I can assure you that what you are carrying out is a parody of Rand’s view.

            What Ayn Rand books have you read?

        • multiheaded says:

          Hope you invest in point defense systems then.

          • onyomi says:

            I don’t see what you’re getting at.

          • suntzuanime says:

            Watching the movie I really felt like the first draft of it was more sympathetic to the bad guy fat cats, and it got changed in order to not confuse the political message. Like the only reason any of this was a problem in the movie was that the bad guy fat cats found that using their point defense systems on unarmed refugees offended their liberal sensibilities.

          • multiheaded says:

            Eventually they’d send warheads in place of unarmed boats then. (Also, hell, this was in Diamond Age.)

        • Jill says:

          Interesting. Except for 1 person on earth, everyone is less productive than someone. Are you not entitled to participate in an economy with people more productive than you? I’m not meaning to be rude here. Just trying to understand the Libertarian views that are so prevalent on the board here.

          • onyomi says:

            No, I don’t think I’m entitled to enjoy the benefits of living in an economy with Bill Gates or any other particular person.

            For sake of argument, let’s say Bill Gates is the most productive person in the world. Imagine he decides to go live in a log cabin in the woods and never work again. Is he harming the rest of us? I mean, he’s depriving us of the full potential of his productivity, but he doesn’t owe it to us to keep working if he’d rather live in a cabin in the woods, right?

          • Jill says:

            I see what you mean, if you are talking about one individual. But with a larger group, it might be a disaster. E.g. if the top 10% of productive people in the U.S. decided to go off by themselves and form their own economy, then that would be a serious brain drain on the country. I can’t imagine that that would literally happen though– because they would want servants waiting on them, and less intelligent people producing various objects they need.

            In a non-literal sense though– in the sense of the rich living in a different “world” due to what they can afford to do– perhaps it has already happened. And that’s why the middle class is shrinking and the lower class is traumatized. But it’s not the most productive people. It’s the richest people– many of whom inherited their wealth– and a lot of whom are unnecessary middle men like in health insurance or on Wall Street who do nonproductive and unnecessary”work.” Thus, in our current society, many people live high on the hog while being totally non-productive.

          • onyomi says:

            “if you are talking about one individual. But with a larger group, it might be a disaster.”

            If it’s not immoral or unreasonable for Bill Gates to live alone in a log cabin when the rest of the world would be better off if he worked long hours, how many Bill Gateses does it take before it becomes so?

            “But it’s not the most productive people.”

            The rich do work more hours, on average, than the poor or the middle class; though what work actually needs doing is, of course, debatable.

          • Jill says:

            another viewpoint on this issue

            The Rich Aren’t Rich Because They Work Harder. They Work Harder Because They’re Rich!

            http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anthony-w-orlando/the-rich-arent-rich-becau_b_4791626.html

          • Jill says:

            Urstoff, quoting Rand is a little like quoting the Bible. Her followers haven’t read her works in years, often decades. The utility of Randian philosophy, at least on Internet boards, seems to be to justify any selfish behavior imaginable, even ones that Rand herself might consider to be psychopathically selfish.

            And if you just focus on her statements about selfishness being the greatest virtue, as people often do, then that indeed is what you come up with. Randians do often approve of charity– as long as someone else does it, and does so voluntarily. And although not a lot of people call themselves Randians, a lot of people do act as though they are, in this respect, as you can see by looking at how strapped for money many charities are that are trying to help the poor.

        • Jill says:

          When I see Randian ideas put into practice, it does tend to be quite different than an objective analysis of what Rand said. The utility of Randian and Libertarian ideas in the world– the way they are most often used, in huge world affecting ways– is robber baron-ish, given who the most powerful Libertarians in the world are.

          The same with Christianity. As strange as it may seem, it’s become similar to Randian philosophy in practice, in terms of its effects on politics. And this has been so since the 1940s. See article below.

          How Corporate America Invented Christian America
          Inside one reverend’s big business-backed 1940s crusade to make the country conservative again.

          http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/04/corporate-america-invented-religious-right-conservative-roosevelt-princeton-117030

          • John Schilling says:

            Where do you see “Randian ideas” put into practice, and more to the point, how do you know? There aren’t very many explicit Randians in positions of real power that I know of, and I don’t think anyone is orating on the Senate floor about the glories of Ayn Rand and why we should vote for this bill or against that one because She said so.

            If you were to see someone implementing an idea that was very much in line with what Rand said or wrote, you could reasonably infer that it was a “Randian idea” even though the person just called himself a Republican or whatnot.

            But if you’re seeing something that even you acknowledge isn’t what Rand said or wrote, like plain old robber-baron industrialism, and the person doing it isn’t calling himself a Randian, how do you know it’s a (misinterpretation of) a Randian idea? As opposed to, say, a plain old apolitical robber baron practicing robber-barony in the way that people were doing for at least half a century before Ayn Rand was born?

      • Jill says:

        Regarding depression, it’s bizarre how people can get depressed, and they really need an anti-depressant, and/or psychotherapy, and/or a light box if their problem is Seasonal Affective Disorder. And yet no one can convince them of that. Because the’re absolutely sure that if they could make more money/have more friends/get people to leave then alone/find a partner/get a divorce/lose weight– whatever– then their life would be coming up roses. And sometimes that would help. And sometimes it wouldn’t.

        In our money focused culture, money is the big wish there that people most often think will solve all their problems– despite the fact that research shows that, beyond a certain not very large amount of money, getting additional money doesn’t improve one’s happiness that much.

        It’s our national religion to worship money. So a lot of people are working their buns off to get additional money that will not improve their lives much, if at all. Many of them are doing jobs they hate to obtain more money. And they are very sure that they should never have to pay a penny of taxes, and give up part of the meaning and value of their lives that they believe money is.

        If there were some way to get the richer people to stop being so neurotically obsessed with money, that might help the poor, and the whole of our society, a lot. Money is a measure of value. When the numbers become the primary value– the only way to value people, art, experiences etc., that’s neurotic. Utility, aesthetics etc. are all thrown out the window by both individuals and society.

        BTW, this professor gave 2 fascinating lectures on Money in American culture, on You Tube. Money 2 is the more interesting one.

        Myths of the American Mind: Money Part II

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9mbzn904o0

        • piercedmind says:

          I mostly agree with you, but I don’t think we are a money worshipping culture (i.e. the West), and even if we were, we would not even be the worst (just look at China). Most people I knowat least strive for work-life balance, and this is *not* just a bubble thing, surveys consistently show that among young people meaningful work and a healthy balance between work and other stuff is more important than financial compensation.

          More importantly, as you said yourself, it’s not just money or material goods we mistakenly chase, but also social status or sex. And we do so, even if it doesn’t make us as happy as merely spending time with friends or kids, for example.

          However, I have grown very skeptical of the claim that our culture is to blaim. Even though my system 2 is pretty convinced that material stuff and social status is not too important, my system 1 could not disagree more. Just imagining in my mind that I could suddenly become more attractive to many high status members of the opposite sex produces an adrenaline rush in my brain, while imagining myself with a nice girlfriend does not. All those material or superficial things deliver an instant reward, which makes it great for conditioning, while manufactured happiness on account of living your life well is a terrible conditioning tool, which makes sense from an evolutionary perspective.

          It’s similar to how most people are completely aware that exercise is good for them, but just don’t muster the necessary 3*30 minutes a weak. The immediate effect of exercise is unnecessary pain and discomfort, so obviously our system 1 rejects the thought.
          Now, the majority does not exercise regularly, although they are aware that it will make them better off in the long term, and despite cultural pressure to look in shape. I fear that expecting people to make choices that will make them happier when they very often don’t even know that these decisions lead to greater happiness is unrealistic.

    • Swami says:

      Hmmm…. Does this imply that people are not in part responsible for their relative poverty?

      I think BIG is a terrible idea, but I am all for a controlled test of it.

      • Jill says:

        Of course, they are sometimes responsible in part. And sometimes not at all. When someone goes bankrupt due to unexpected illness and medical expenses, do you blame them for that? That’s one problem that ObamaCare was instituted to solve– especially the pre-existing condition issue that kept so many people from being able to buy medical insurance.

      • Corey says:

        GiveDirectly is starting one in Kenya as we type.

    • orangecat says:

      It’s odd that while liberals supposedly oppose our massive defense budget and the trillions we’re spending turning the Middle East into even more of a hellhole, they seem to be way more interested in raising taxes than reallocating existing funds.

      And some of us occasionally are rational and objective. But mostly, we are rather selfishly focused on our emotional needs.

      Emotional needs such as supporting feel-good programs like Head Start, regardless of the actual benefits or lack thereof?

      As a selfish libertarian I’m in favor of a UBI, or at least a controlled experiment. But a major factor that gives me pause is the expectation that the left will try very hard to keep both a UBI and the existing welfare bureaucracy, in support of what seems to be a terminal goal of increasing government size and power.

      • Corey says:

        I see this assertion a lot (liberals value big government for its own sake), but can’t figure out where it comes from. I can understand the converse (conservatives value small government for its own sake, to reduce the distortionary effects of taxes, or better align with the Invisible Hand, etc).

        Is it your impression that it’s all about personal power gain? If so, how would such gain come about? Or is it a subconscious assumption of symmetry (liberals must be the opposite of conservatives in every way)? Evil mutant-ing? I’m not trying to lead anywhere; I want to understand.

        • orangecat says:

          I actually don’t know. When I say “it’s odd”, that’s not a rhetorical device. Given the stated preferences of most liberals, it seems that they should strictly prefer cutting defense spending or corporate welfare by $100 billion to fund their desired programs rather than raising taxes. Not only would that prevent some of the alleged damage that the spending causes, it might get support (or at least less opposition) from libertarians and fiscal conservatives. But instead raising taxes is almost always step 0 in their plans, which really makes it look like a goal in and of itself.

          • Anonymous says:

            Cutting military spending is more unpopular than raising taxes, especially if you can sell the raising taxes as closing loopholes. You certainly aren’t going to get any kind of conservative, nominally fiscal or otherwise, on board and you will be extremely vulnerable to the “support the troops” attack vis a vis moderates.

            Corporate welfare–like waste, fraud, and abuse–is one of those things that everyone is all for cutting until the details come out and then you have knockdown dragout, dirty fight with people very very interested in those specific details. Just try mobilizing public interest in the details of the Fisheries Finance Program. Good luck!

            Libertarians like to think that there are a lot of them out there, but they are an insignificant factor on the national political stage. Sure, every gun toting, tax hating Republican likes to say he’s got libertarian leanings, but when push comes to shove and there’s a split between conservatives and libertarians he’s going to vote with the conservatives.

          • Luke the CIA stooge says:

            I kinda suspect your on to something.
            Think of liberals who say “I enjoy paying my taxes” or “taxes are the dues we pay for society” or just “tax the rich” without mentioning anything those taxes are paying for.

            It would seem once you get so far left the common sense view, that taxes are a necessary evil which funds goods we hope will exceed the evil , breaks down and taxes become thought of as a good in and of itself.

            Think of the liberal who says “I enjoy paying my taxes” if he held the common sense view then, in order to make that statement, he would have to believe that his tax dollars are spent so efficiently that for each dollar of evil (money lost) inflicted on him, an amount greater is created benefiting others.

            And yet we know that beyond the core competencies of government (military defence, maintaining law and order, (both of which the left is ambivalent about) large infrastructure, and to a lesser extent collective insurance schemes) this is simply not the case. The vast majority of government programs produce little result and (at least theoretically) should have a hard time doing so, since all gov programs require massive administration and oversight costs, meaning that any marginal benefit produced has to be pretty significant to overcome the amount of wealth that is necessarily destroyed by having a government program at all.

            And all this is assuming that governments are efficient and concerned about not wasting money, and are making cost benefit analyses as to whether applying the money to this social program will produce benefits to justify taxing it away from you (something no government actually does).
            And all of this is before making any libertarian or conservative assumption that maybe taking people’s money from them without there freely giving it isn’t a neutral act, that maybe taking $50 from Paul and giving $50 to John wouldn’t be neutral because the taking itself inflicts some damage beyond the money lost (disincentive to work, loss of liberty, punishing success, etc.).

            So given all of this a liberal would have to be pretty ambivalent about taxes. Sure a good chunk is necessary and another is benefitial but
            Another big chunk is just waste and evil and opacity (liberals admit this think of how they react to corporate welfare, or excess military spending, or the cost of mass incarceration or this or that program a Republican anounced).

            But then they want more spending on the poor and universal health care and universal higher ed. And god dammit those rich bastards don’t I hate them!!! (As opposed to right wingers who tend to congratulate the rich as paragons).

            So for political and moral expediency they have to make taxes goods in themselves, and Dedicate significant rhetoric to doing so. Put simply the idea that most of our taxes are wasted and the idea that we need more spending and thus more taxes, while not technically contradictory are morally contradictory, it just doesn’t feel right to hold both ideas. So one had to go or (if the idea that government is inefficient is merely too obvious to go) the tone of conversation has to be distorted considerably.

            And this is the difference between the really statist person who enjoys paying their taxes and the protestor screaming tax the rich. The first has convinced them self that their taxes are efficiently spent through some magic means (thus taxes are good in themself, since almost definitionally for this group they are well spent) and the second is convinced that all the taxes will only fall on the wicked rich people thus making tax a good in itself, even if the money is burned, because the rich won’t have it.

            Sorry if the above is really really strawmany, the point isn’t that anyone actually believes the above explicitly but that years of partisanship have twisted their moral instincts into something approaching the above, libertarians have the opposite instinct that spending, any spending, even the spending that produces crazy multipliers is necessarily evil. Because that money has to be taxed and taxes destroy freedom far in advance of the money actually taken, and it creates market destroying incentives and the multipliers are a lie!!!

            Ultimately it you want consensus you essentially need a master of both ideologies to talk the partisans down from their default moral position by aussuaging their concerns.
            As is its just to easy for a liberal to assume their opponent doesn’t care, a libertarian to assume their opponents to doesn’t understand basic economics and a conservative to assume their opponent is openly hostile social capital producing traditions and institutions, because more often than not that’s the case.

          • Corey says:

            @Luke the CIA stooge:

            The vast majority of government programs produce little result and (at least theoretically) should have a hard time doing so, since all gov programs require massive administration and oversight costs, meaning that any marginal benefit produced has to be pretty significant to overcome the amount of wealth that is necessarily destroyed by having a government program at all.

            And all this is assuming that governments are efficient and concerned about not wasting money, and are making cost benefit analyses as to whether applying the money to this social program will produce benefits to justify taxing it away from you (something no government actually does).
            And all of this is before making any libertarian or conservative assumption

            FYI: All of those things are libertarian/conservative assumptions (they may seem blindingly obvious to you, and/or be conventional wisdom, but that doesn’t make them true or applicable).

            That’s something else I’m trying to understand about the conservative mind in another sub-thread: how “governmenty” an expense has to be before it’s inherently Bad (HOA hiring landscapers? National government paying disability insurance?) and also where the voluntary/involuntary expense line lies that makes spending Bad (everyone’s quick to say taxes are “involuntarily” collected despite ~0 blog commenters living in dictatorships).

          • Psmith says:

            how “governmenty” an expense has to be before it’s inherently Bad

            if libertarians approve of such institutions when they are called condominium associations or proprietary communities, why do we disapprove of them when they are called governments?

            The answer will shock you!

    • Walter says:

      I see this a lot. I’ve invented a rule (probably someone else invented it), that the left can only see the right as a defective left. (The right, by contrast, sees the left as an anti-right).

      Divide all humans int 2 camps, useful and useless.

      The left is, at it’s core, composed of the people who think the useful folks have an obligation to help out the useless. The right is, again deep down, composed of the people who think that no such duty exists. The left continually mistakes the right as being composed of people who want to help the useless, but are crummy at it. The right continually mistakes the left as being composed of people who want to hurt the useful.

      So, the right-as-defective-left wants to help the poor, but it tricks itself into thinking that the best way to do that is to do nothing, or let private charity take care of it. This is what you are positing, but it’s all in your mind.

      The actual right doesn’t care about the useless. At all. It’s not that we think that they require no help, its that we don’t think about them. To make it sound as bad as possible, we only notice them when they track mud on our stuff.

      We aren’t assuming that they can pull themselves up by their bootstraps. We aren’t making some sort of principled decision that the best help is no help because it builds work ethic or whatever. We are indifferent to their continued existence. Some of us help out (because we enjoy that), others don’t (because they don’t, or can’t). Neither is evil in our eyes. There exists no duty to help out useless folks (or, indeed, anyone).

      • TheAncientGeek says:

        Seems correct to me. Trickle Down and Charity, the rights usual answers, are only token gestures….conservatives don’t see them as robust solutions…..you can tell because they don’t make a serious effort to defend them.

        • Anonymous says:

          Doesn’t really account for the magic of the free market theme, which if not dominant is at least a significant part of American conservatism.

          Take the minimum wage for example, the argument is never that these people don’t deserve any help, it’s that a minimum wage is counterproductive.

          • William Newman says:

            “the argument is never that these people don’t deserve any help, it’s that a minimum wage is counterproductive”

            The argument is that a minimum wage tends to keep low-wage competition out. Whether that’s considered productive or counterproductive public policy tends to depend somewhat on whether you’ve dehumanized the competition in question, dunnit?

            “Of course, having on the market a rather large source of cheap labor depresses wages outside of that group, too – the wages of the white worker who has to compete. And when an employer can substitute a colored worker at a lower wage – and there are, as you pointed out, these hundreds of thousands looking for decent work – it affects the whole wage structure of an area, doesn’t it?” (http://cafehayek.com/2012/11/some-history-of-minimum-wage-legislation-in-america.html)

            (Also check out https://www.princeton.edu/~tleonard/papers/Eugenics.pdf if you’re suffering from stubborn sweeping good-feeling about human nature and human institutions that just won’t go away.)

            Nonleftists seeing exactly the same solution proposed for an ostensibly new problem … of helping the people that, back in the day, it was supposed to hurt … supported by substantially the same people that can continue to reasonably expect to benefit from how it excludes competition … sometimes … suffer … credulity … fatigue.

            Observations suggest that by taking shelter in bubbles sufficiently hardcore that we don’t need to consider discreditably right-wing sources like
            http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/12/los-angeles-15-dollar-minimum-wage-unions
            credulity can be preserved, but not all of us have the intellectual discipline to do this.

          • Anonymous says:

            Substantially the same people? Just how many people that were advocating any sort of public policies in 1957 do you think are still on the public stage today?

      • Luke the CIA stooge says:

        Your completely mistaken.

        The right, on the whole doesn’t think an assumption of material equality exists, or is a duty. But the right does believe In helping the poor, to the point that it is a duty (right wingers spend a hell of a lot on charity (Romney spent 10% annually)) in as far as the resources spent in such a way that is undeniably better for the poor than the loss is for the taxed (food and shelter to keep you alive yes, head-start, other nebulous education programs and lifestyle subsidies no).
        But more than that the right does genuinely believe in the liberation story of capitalism and in the power of people to bootstrap their way up. The problem as they see it is that welfare and other subsidies create disincentive to work and deny people the suffering that would motivate them towards signifigant lifestyle. Simply put if there is no risk of real suffering, most people (those who don’t have crazy middle class parents enforcing high standards) won’t endure the pain necessary to build a better life for themselves. Given the option between moving cross country to a city you’ve never been too and taking a community college course while working evening, or just taking disability/social assistance and staying in your home town, most of the poor will pick the later. Deny them the Second option however and you’ll be amazed the effort and creativity they put in. Remember America was built by people who didn’t have the second option

        • TheAncientGeek says:

          America was built by th e survivors of the people who didn’t had the second option. And they dd have the option of actual homesteading.

          • Luke the CIA stooge says:

            Everyone has the option of homesteading, just slip of into one of the underpopulated stretches of land that are found all over the world, disappear into the mountains and live all hills have eyes, disappear into the Canadian forest and make yourself a nice cabin.
            Hell study how Inuits used to live and then disappear into the arctic, no ones going to stop you, no ones going to follow you up and drag you back
            You have a better chance than the pioneers since you can save up and buy some modern supplies before going, and then you can make a clean break.
            But alas most people don’t want to do this because it would suck. Most people want the benefit that comes from being tapped into the international economy and that means having something to trade for modern goods and services.
            Trust me, i score like a 0 on Jonathan Haidt’s “Care” foundation, i wish the poor and disadvantaged would just go all survivor out in the wilderness, they might even find some interesting rocks or pelts to sell back in civilization. But alas none of them are taking the offer.

            (speaking of, are there any other self identified assholes that kinda want to start a charity to outfit the poor and grumpy with camping equipment, and then ditch them a thousand miles from civilization (consentually of course) i mean 10000 dollars in camping/settler equipment vs the lifetime cost of a welfare recipient, seems like a solid trade-off)

  92. Subbak says:

    So… Is industrializing Third World countries even a good thing though? As you point out, you think you’d rather be a poor person in 1900 than a poor person today. By that same token, wouldn’t poor people in a Third World country prefer to stay poor in the country as is than being poor after the American companies have come (and gone)?

    Sure locally each person will appreciate having suddenly more money from American companies moving in, but that might come with increased cost of living, increased pollution (remember, companies are also moving in because there are no strong environmental regulations) and so on. This does not necessarily seem like a great bargain. iPhones are probably still the same price, so they can afford them, but they still have to live in shantytowns.

    OTOH, you can argue that since this is more or less already happening everywhere and ruining everybody’s life, we might as well finish the job and bring every country to the Western “standards” of “living”.
    This does beg the question of who’s going to work the sweatshops afterwards though.

  93. Scott, I am in the process of researching friendly societies. I think this could be a way up/out for the poor.

    Somehow we’ve gotten it into our heads that
    a) collectivism is on the country level or not at all
    b) it’s all or nothing
    c) the only thing groups are good for is leveraging their bargaining power against their employers

    Co-ops—especially of buyers — are overlooked. My intuition (meaning: I have nothing to back this up except my gut) is that the primary obstacle is the prisoner’s dilemma.

    • Urstoff says:

      Disappointed that this was not about Quakers.

    • Jill says:

      I don’t see what the prisoner’s dilemma has to do with it. The PD wasn’t about voluntary associations initiated by free individuals. The main obstacle is that the poor generally do not have the resources or knowledge to do this. So it would take money and resources and organizational work from the outside, from people who have more resources, stability etc. in their lives, who could provide some boots to the poor.

      People are constantly telling the poor to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps when they are barefoot, so to speak.

      • Anonymous says:

        If you aren’t familiar with it, I suggest you look up MLK’s bootstrap quote. Very pithy.

        • Jill says:

          Yes, it’s very good. Thanks for reminding me. Couldn’t remember who said it originally.

    • Corey says:

      I like credit unions (=co-op banks) for both ideological and practical reasons related to this. In a credit union, there’s no incentive to screw over depositors for the benefit of shareholders, because they’re the same people. I’ve neither theoretical nor practical experience with other kinds of co-ops so I don’t know about them, but credit unions work very well in my experience.

  94. vV_Vv says:

    Obviously invent genetic engineering and create a post-scarcity society, but until then we have to deal with this stuff.

    Genetic engineering doesn’t necessarily involve hi-tech DNA editing techniques. Good ole eugenics is also a form of population-level genetic engineering. And in principle developed countries could do it in a way that is not so much politically unacceptable by applying it on the immigrants. You don’t even have to directly test for genes, just test for things that are known to be quite heritable, such as IQ or similar.

    Certainly this in incompatible with an open border policy, though, and it creates the ethical issue that if developed countries are taking in all the best people from the shitty countries, then only the worst people will remain there, making the shitty countries even shittier.

    But anyway, this is never going to happen, isn’t? (Did anybody say H-1B visa?)

  95. PGD says:

    From OP — The exploitation narrative seems fundamentally wrong to me – I’m not saying exploitation doesn’t happen, nor even that it isn’t common, just that isn’t not the major factor causing poverty and social decay.

    It all depends on how you define exploitation. All production is necessarily communal, involving the contributions of numerous different people. Capitalist property rights select out a few people, a tiny minority of all who played some contributing role, and gives them a vastly, enormously disproportionate share of the wealth resulting from production. Even if you think the few people selected out for such wealth are productive, hard working people, and you also think that everyone else who works hard will get at least something out of the system, that doesn’t mean that exploitation is not happening.

  96. Eli says:

    So, hold on, I want to ask a couple questions about how you claim not to believe in exploitation.

    1) If you don’t believe in exploitation, what do you think is going to happen with #FightFor15 and other efforts to organize workers and raise wages among the so-called “precariat”? If you really don’t believe in exploitation (in the sense of a person deliberately trying to make someone else work without their fair share of the gains, not in the orthodox Marxist sense that generalizes it), shouldn’t Fighting For “$15 and a union” lead directly to unemployment?

    2) If we admit the existence of some form of exploitation, shouldn’t we quantify it in order to figure out how to reason about the “unnecessariat”? I mean, the biggest nastiest fact about this whole travesty is that unemployment rates really are low and dropping. This means people really are actually working, right? And if they’re working, and it’s not just their employer’s fault for exploiting them by paying unlivably low wages, then it must be the lack of capital in the supply chain, they must be performing some 21st-century equivalent of dirt-farming: lots of work for very little useful value (for anyone at all, not just the worker).

    My closest and honest best hypothesis for all this is that in the process of deliberately suppressing the price of labor to glorify “entrepreneurs”, neoliberalism has ended up providing a “Food Stamps subsidy” to loads and loads of shitty business models that don’t add much real value to the economy. Like asset bubbles, app startups, and frozen-yogurt cafes: we might like these things when we’re enjoying them, but if we actually had to pay enough for them to really keep the whole thing running, would we really want to keep buying?

    (And I really do like frozen-yogurt shops. I just wonder how something that amounts to a few soft-serve machines and bowls of candy can constitute a value-generating business with a completely separate niche from fuller-service ice-cream stores. What’s the game?)

    • suntzuanime says:

      1) It seems plausible that a $15 minimum wage would lead to more unemployment, or at least less employment (see below). I expect it might do so, in the medium term, in parts of the country with a low cost of living. But it’s worth remembering that there are a lot of non-wage aspects to a job that cost employers money, that workers seek out, and that employers can cut back on. Things like climate control and comfortable work environments are the most obvious, but employers can also vary the level of whip-cracking they do. A man who likes to slack a little might be worth employing at somewhat indifferent level of work-ethic at $10 an hour, but if the minimum wage is $15 he’s going to have to work at a level he finds highly unpleasant if he wants to be employed at all. (This case is rarely made, because it’s so hard for people to find compassion in their hearts for the lazy.)

      2) Unemployment is calculated in a particular way, which many people feel does not fully capture whether people “really are actually working”. My understanding is that the employment/population ratio looks a lot less rosy than the calculated statistic we call “unemployment”.

    • satanistgoblin says:

      “in the sense of a person deliberately trying to make someone else work without their fair share of the gains”

      Who defines what is the fair share? ???

      “My closest and honest best hypothesis for all this is that in the process of deliberately suppressing the price of labor to glorify “entrepreneurs””

      Who is doing that and how?

      ” neoliberalism has ended up providing a “Food Stamps subsidy” to loads and loads of shitty business models that don’t add much real value to the economy. Like asset bubbles, app startups, and frozen-yogurt cafes: we might like these things when we’re enjoying them, but if we actually had to pay enough for them to really keep the whole thing running, would we really want to keep buying?”

      Please elaborate?

    • Jill says:

      Some statistics on CEO pay compared to average worker pay. Somehow Wal-Mart can’t afford to pay low level workers enough to live on. But they can afford to pay Walmart chief Doug McMillon $25.6 million per year, about 1,133 times the median employee’s $22,591.

      http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/ceo-worker-pay-gap_us_55ddc3c7e4b0a40aa3acd1c9

      Somehow, in American culture, people just accept that McMillon’s work is somehow objectively worth 1,133 times the median Wal-Mart employee’s salary.

      Yeah, I know, it is, because the “invisible hand of the free market” determined it that way. But in reality, CEOs wrap company board members around their little fingers and get paid tons more than they are worth to the company. And one reason the company can afford to pay them that is that they don’t pay their lower level workers enough to live on.

      In reality, people who are able to grab a lot of power, whether in industry or in government, will “tilt the game board” of government, or their company, or whatever else they are involved in, so that huge outsized rewards will fall into their laps– rewards that are much larger than what anyone sane could consider them to have “earned” in the “free market.”

      That’s the problem with capitalism and free markets. It may start out somewhat fair. But once you have monopolies and oligopolies and various people accumulating and concentrating huge amounts of money and power, the rule is “Them that has, gits.” Which is hugely unfair to them that don’t have. And if it is “free”, it sure is a heck of a lot freer for the folks on the top rungs of the ladder than it is for anyone else.

      Libertarians assume that dangerous harmful accumulations and concentrations of money and power always take place only within government. But many multi-national corporations are much more wealthy and powerful than almost any country on earth. So obviously there can be dangerous harmful accumulations and concentrations of money and power in companies, not just in government.

      • Eli says:

        I agree with everything you said, but you don’t seem to have said anything particularly novel or useful about the specific points under discussion.

      • meyerkev248 says:

        Walmart has 1.8 Million employees. $25 Million/1.8 Million is $14.

        So congrats, you’re making… 7/10ths of a cent more per hour (On the admittedly dubious assumption the average worker works full time).

        The people who really, really make bank? They create many-to-one relationships.

        Why was Steve Jobs rich? Because he made $1 for every iPhone sold.
        Why is AC/DC rich? Because they got 30,000 middle-aged people to pay $200/seat to come see them last night. And the night before. And the night before.
        Why is…

        If every single person on the planet gave me a penny, I’d never work again.

      • Nornagest says:

        Wikipedia lists Walmart as having 2.2 million employees worldwide. I figure most of them are part-timers, probably at around 35 hours a week each since you minimize employee-related expenses by giving part-time workers as many hours as you can get away with before the government considers them full-time. (This would not apply identically to non-US employees, but most are in the US.) That works out to 2,200,000 * 35 * 52 = 4,004,000,000 man-hours of work across Walmart per year.

        If Walmart paid its CEO zero dollars a year, that would allow each of those other employees to be paid 25,600,000 / 4,004,000,000 = 0.006 dollars an hour, or a bit more than half a cent. I rather doubt that’ll make or break a living wage.

        • Jill says:

          Well, the rest of the upper level management is probably almost as overpaid as the CEO. If so, you’d be able to add a good bit more than half a cent to each person’s pay check.

          In any case, I can’t see any reason why the chief of Wal-Mart could possibly be worth that amount of money to the business. I think there are tons of people you could put in charge and pay a whole lot less, and they’d do just as well. I don’t know whether he’s a family friend of the Waltons or what. But that salary is not the result of the “free market” of supply and demand.

          • suntzuanime says:

            You’re a very unimaginative person.

          • Nornagest says:

            Sure! You might even be able to add five cents.

            In any case Wal-Mart’s board of directors — or whoever sets CEO salaries — disagrees about the value of the position, and I think they’re in a better position to say what it’s worth to Wal-Mart than you are. They do have an incentive to get their best value for CEO pay, you know; even if the Waltons wanted to make a family friend rich, they’d be better off giving them some stock and then hiring the best CEO they could, given that a bad one could easily damage stock prices to the tune of way more than $25 million a year.

          • meyerkev248 says:

            Who’s more important, the individual soldier in the trenches or the general who decides where the attack goes in and arranges for air support?

            In practice, I wish the guys who fail didn’t make quite as much money, but does anyone really want to say that Steve Jobs wasn’t actually worth at least a billion dollars?

          • Jill says:

            Nornagest, boards of directors — or whoever sets CEO salaries — is not necessarily in a better position to say what a CEO is worth to the company than I am. We just have a custom in the U.S. of over-rewarding CEOs. That doesn’t make them worth what they are paid.

            A lot of things are done because they’ve always been done that way for years, decades, or centuries. That doesn’t necessarily mean that doing those things makes any sense at all. For centuries people were ruled by kings. Did that make that system the best one? Some people with guillotines ultimately decided No.

            The Pitchforks Are Coming… For Us Plutocrats

            http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchforks-are-coming-for-us-plutocrats-108014

          • The Nybbler says:

            So far, no pitchforks. The people supporting socialism (or at least Sanders) are the intelligentsia, not the proletariat. The working classes are lining up behind a plutocrat, giving him adulation rather than pitchforks. And the underclass… eh, they’ll vote for the Democrat like they always do, and if they get too riled up they’ll burn their own houses down. No pitchforks.

          • onyomi says:

            The amount of money potentially gained or lost by having a competent or incompetent CEO at the head of Wal Mart is much, much more than $25 million.

          • Chalid says:

            We all understand that a “normal” worker typically gets paid a lot less than the value they produce, and indeed that their pay can have very little connection to that value. But when it comes to debating CEO pay everyone rushes to point to the value they produce or fail to produce, (depending on what side you’re on).

            I do think it’s very hard to look at the actual ways CEO pay is decided and conclude that the process is a good one. The board of directors that generally decides CEO pay is usually far from independent of the CEO himself, and shareholders have difficulty coordinating enough to oppose abuses.

            (Does not apply as much to the specific case of Walmart, I think, since it is majority-owned by the Waltons.)

          • Nornagest says:

            I’m not actually that confident that CEO pay is in the optimal range; I seem to recall that it’s highly variable, and that it’s recently spiked, neither of which inspire confidence in me. It’s plausible that there’s a strong signaling component to it.

            But I do feel confident in saying, first, that the leadership of a company is in a much better position to make these decisions than random Internet commentators are, and if they want to waste their money, that’s their business; and second, that it’s totally irrelevant to issues of fair pay at the rank-and-file level (there just aren’t enough CEOs for it to matter).

            If you want to use it as an object lesson in inequality, fine (though I don’t care much about inequality per se), but even there you should be aware that way, way more people get rich off equity, one way or another, than do through their nominal salary.

          • Chalid says:

            But I do feel confident in saying, first, that the leadership of a company is in a much better position to make these decisions than random Internet commentators are, and if they want to waste their money, that’s their business

            Dunno, how do you decide when ignorance better than bias? And they’re wasting someone else’s money, which as we all know is very easy to do.

            Totally agreed on your second point.

          • onyomi says:

            “We all understand that a “normal” worker typically gets paid a lot less than the value they produce, and indeed that their pay can have very little connection to that value. But when it comes to debating CEO pay everyone rushes to point to the value they produce or fail to produce…”

            Wait, what? I don’t understand that worker pay has little connection to the value they produce, nor do I fail to discuss worker productivity when discussing worker compensation…

          • Corey says:

            @onyomi: worker compensation would equal their contributions to the company in a perfectly efficient job market. The actually existing job market barely even approximates a market.

          • Chalid says:

            If we had a good labor market, you’d be paid based on how much it will take to convince you to do the work, and on how much it would cost to replace you. These don’t map precisely onto “value you create” for a variety of reasons.

            But it’s even worse than that – in real-life the relevant variable to career advancement is closely related to your value to your *manager,* not your value to the company; these can be very different things, as “value to manager” includes things like “laughs at the manager’s crappy jokes” and “pretends to be interested in stories about the manager’s kids.”

            I’ve got to go and create value for my manager now but there is lots more that can be written about this.

          • onyomi says:

            @Corey

            Are you claiming there’s little or no connection between worker productivity and compensation?

          • “@onyomi: worker compensation would equal their contributions to the company in a perfectly efficient job market.”

            And in an imperfect job market, it is sometimes less and sometimes more.

            But if it is always much less, as at least one person in this thread seems to believe, then it should be easy to get rich by hiring people. The more you hire, the richer you get. Hard to see why, in that world, there would be any unemployment.

          • Anonymous says:

            @Jill

            Nobody ever makes this argument about highly-paid entertainers. Nobody every says, “Jon Stewart was overpaid. We should have taken a bunch of money from him and paid his studio cleaning crew a little more.” Nobody ever says, “Aaron Rodgers is overpaid. We should take a bunch of money from him and pay the waterboys a little more. In those cases, most people in the general public see how that person’s talents affect them. They know that they value watching Jon Stewart on TV or rooting for Aaron Rodgers to throw another touchdown.

            Now the thing is… you’re not the intended audience for the talents of Wal-Mart’s CEO. You don’t see the benefits that said CEO brings to the people who hire/pay said CEO. Of course you think the CEO is overpaid! From your perspective, the CEO isn’t worth more than minimum wage, because you don’t see the benefits.

            Similarly, someone who never watches TV and generally despises the whole endeavor would ask you, “Don’t you think Jon Stewart was overpaid?!” …and the only thing you could possibly respond with is, “Uh… but I like watching him.” You’d be equally powerless to respond to their (similarly ridiculous) claim.

          • Corey says:

            @onyomi: My (mostly intuitive) sense is that there’s a relationship between employee production and compensation, but not a strong one.

            The value the business thinks the employee brings puts an upper bound on their compensation. (Various factors can make this different than the actual value brought, since All Metrics Suck). The lower bound is set by fiat. Within that range it’s purely a matter of supply and demand, only loosely related to characteristics of the individual employer and employee.

          • Chalid says:

            @David Friedman

            The existence of profits is largely from employees producing more value than they capture as wages. Aggregate profits are almost always positive. Therefore, on average, employees produce more value than they capture as wages, no?

            I don’t remember my GDP accounting well, but very crudely, wages are ~55% of GDP, corporate profits are ~15-20% of GDP (from here), so from that alone you get about a 20/(55+20)~25% of the value produced not being captured by the workers. I’m not sure how much of that 55% goes to nonprofit/government workers but correcting for that would lower the denominator quite a bit.

            Your “if employees did not capture their value as wages on average, companies would just hire more workers” argument mixes up the average and marginal value, and also assumes the characteristics of employed and unemployed people are the same.

          • Subbak says:

            Nobody ever makes this argument about highly-paid entertainers. Nobody every says, “Jon Stewart was overpaid. We should have taken a bunch of money from him and paid his studio cleaning crew a little more.” Nobody ever says, “Aaron Rodgers is overpaid. We should take a bunch of money from him and pay the waterboys a little more. In those cases, most people in the general public see how that person’s talents affect them. They know that they value watching Jon Stewart on TV or rooting for Aaron Rodgers to throw another touchdown.

            Actually, people do say those things. There are plenty of articles about how the money paid to footballers is indecent. Type “overpaid footballer” into Google and see plenty of articles and opinion pieces cropping up. The same thing happens with comedians.

          • alaska3636 says:

            @chalid
            “The existence of profits is largely from employees producing more value than they capture as wages. Aggregate profits are almost always positive. Therefore, on average, employees produce more value than they capture as wages, no?”

            No. This is a persistent erroneous view of value and of profits with a basis in a labor theory of value.

            Basic labor and raw material are lower order goods. Their relative scarcity roughly predicts the amount of other goods people are willing to trade for them.

            Higher order goods take longer to bring to the point of trade like skilled labor or aluminum sheeting. Again, the relative scarcity of these things and the demand for them drive their prices higher than lower order goods.

            The highest order goods like individual homes and Iphones require time, risk and capital to bring to market. The more time, risk and capital require greater profit margins to incentivize business people to take their capital and make those risks.

            Another way to think about wages is that they represent a discount on the risk foregone to be paid after the products they help make are sold. That risk is absorbed by partners who invest the capital to pay the wages and reap both profit and loss at the time those goods go to market.

            Value is subjective; it is not based on labor.

            Here is Menger, one of the father’s of marginal utility, on the value of higher order goods.
            https://mises.org/library/value-goods-higher-order

          • Anonymous says:

            Type “overpaid footballer” into Google and see plenty of articles and opinion pieces cropping up.

            These tend to be more the type of, “He’s a 7mil/year QB, not a 10mil/year QB.” It assumes that there is such a thing as a 10mil/year QB, and it’s jut that that particular player isn’t performing sufficiently. Almost nobody comes out and says, “We need to reduce the salary cap so that we can reduce all QB pay so that we can distribute that money to water boys.”

            Most people will agree with the players’ union that the players deserve a major chunk of the league’s revenue… which means the salary cap for the players isn’t going to drop like a rock. They’ll instead try to interject, “But the league actually pays people for performance! It’s much more competitive! CEOs are just a good-ol’ boys club!” Nevermind that we can google (in the way you suggest) hundreds of examples of players who are paid in excess of their performance (because no matter what straw man you like to beat up on, competitive markets often don’t have perfect predictive capabilities).

            The difference is that people play Madden. It has a franchise mode. They can imagine themselves signing players that sometimes don’t work out. They’ve come to grips with the idea that the competitive market demands high compensation for elite QBs. Pretty much no one plays a Corporate Board version of Madden.

          • Subbak says:

            @Anonymous above: Literally the first result I get when I do this is
            http://www.debate.org/opinions/are-football-players-paid-too-much

            It disgusts me! People that run around the pitch kicking a pointless ball get paid £2,000,000 a week on the other hand Doctors ONLY and I repeat only get paid £4250, this statistics just suggest that stupid footballers are getting a amazing amount for money for kicking a ball, where’s the logic! This is disgraceful.

            Obviously this isn’t the best way to express this idea, and this does not contain that much in the way of arguments. My point is that this is not an alien thought that doesn’t cross people’s mind. It’s not just less-than-articulate angry people on the internet either:
            – First in the link I posted apparently about two thirds of people agreed with the OP despite the poor argumentation. I don’t know how much and which kind of traffic that site gets though. It was, as I said, the first Google result.
            – Second, you can also find plenty of opinion pieces in respectable news sites saying the same sort of thing. 2 seconds of Googling get me this for example: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/jul/08/justify-footballers-wages-moral-outcry

            Now I’m not trying an argument of authority and saying “because these people say footballers are overpaid, they are overpaid”. I’m just pointing out that the debate on overpaying doesn’t strangely stop at professional sports like you claim it does. You were, if I understand correctly, going for a “this proves too much” argument, but for many people it does not prove too much.

            Now you might say I haven’t said anything on the matter of whether I myself actually believe that footballers are overpaid. I do believe it, for the exact same reason I believe CEOs are overpaid:
            – One, it is extremely hard to believe that their intrinsic value is really tens of thousands times more than ordinary people,
            -Two, inequality has direct negative effects in that knowing people have it so incredibly better than you leads to a decreased happiness(*).

            Now of course the counterarguments that works better for footballers than CEOs is “but people pay to see them! Don’t they deserve that money?” The thing is, teams shouldn’t have so much money to pay for footballers in the first place. It’s very common, in every country in the world, to have cities pay for a stadium and teams use it for free, even though the city has very little oversight on what the team does (a lot less than it normally would on anything it subsidies so heavily). John Oliver even did a piece on teams threatening to leave if city officials don’t give them more money. Them leaving would probably not affect the city much economically, but it would make voters angry, so no mayor is going to take that risk.

            *: I don’t have a handy meta-analysis for this. If you want a source for this claim I can cite this, which does note that the effect is more pronounced in Europe than in the US, but it’s only one study and we all know what to think about one study. If someone has a reference for something better, I’ll take it. I know this is a thing that gets thrown around a lot, so it’s not just ONE study, and Christine Lagarde, head of the IMF and member of the French right-wing party, hardly susceptible of being a lefty loony, also believes in cutting down inequality according to this, although apparently this has more to do with equality being harmful for growth than with unhappiness. I remember an interview where she mentioned unhappiness, but can’t find it again.

          • Anonymous says:

            It disgusts me! People that run around the pitch kicking a pointless ball

            In my comment above, I said:

            Similarly, someone who never watches TV and generally despises the whole endeavor would ask you, “Don’t you think Jon Stewart was overpaid?!” …and the only thing you could possibly respond with is, “Uh… but I like watching him.” You’d be equally powerless to respond to their (similarly ridiculous) claim.

            We can say the exact same thing here. This person thinks the entire endeavor of football is pointless. They don’t see the value at all. This is what most people sound like when they’re decrying CEO pay.

            it is extremely hard to believe that their intrinsic value is really tens of thousands times more than ordinary people

            What do you mean by “intrinsic value”? If you’re referring to something like moral worth, then literally no one disagrees with you. You’re just talking about something different than compensation for services rendered.

            inequality has direct negative effects in that knowing people have it so incredibly better than you leads to a decreased happiness

            So the crazy right-wingers were right when they said that you were just jelly? Lemme ask, if I could increase your real income by 10x, but I’d only do it in combination with increasing Aaron Rodgers’ real income by 1000x, would you go for it?

            The thing is, teams shouldn’t have so much money to pay for footballers in the first place.

            Bickering over stadiums bores me, and it doesn’t have nearly the effect that you think it does. The most expensive new stadiums cost about a billion, about half of which may be provided by the city/state. The median stadium age right now is around 20 years, with at least four teams in approximately that period being new stadiums because they were brand new expansion teams. The NFL’s revenue is close to 10bil/year. Ok, sure, bickering over stadiums can move some numbers around a bit… but we’re not talking about making them cut Aaron Rodger’s contract from 22mil/year down to even the average CEO pay in order to pay water boys more. You’re going to have to do a whole lot more work. Primarily, you’re going to need to either (1) Just change the demand function of the general public to make them not want to give the NFL money, or (2) argue that the salary cap shouldn’t be set so that 54% of league revenue goes to the players. Good luck.

            (But yea, I was being hyperbolic when I said “nobody” in my original comment. That was pretty obvious since I proceeded to explain the conditions under which some people do make the argument… and how it’s due to the exact same mental failure as the people who tend to decry CEO pay.)

          • Subbak says:

            We can say the exact same thing here. This person thinks the entire endeavor of football is pointless. They don’t see the value at all. This is what most people sound like when they’re decrying CEO pay.

            Okay, I guess you have a point here, I did misunderstand your original comment (in hindsight, I shouldn’t have, it seems obvious now), and didn’t provide appropriate examples.
            I still do think you can appreciate sport entertainment, or movies, or talk-shows, and still think in general players/actors/anchors are overpaid. I would definitely say the last two are true for me, but I have very little appreciation for the first. However you are unlikely to openly admit that someone you appreciate is overpaid. Similarly to how I think it would be better if succession taxes were close to 100%, even if I don’t like admitting that means I would never be able to afford my parent’s house after they die.

            Also, you can both enjoy something, be ready to pay money to enjoy it, and be infuriated that the money you are paying goes to people who are way past needing it. And yet you pay because you enjoy. If this wasn’t the case, every time someone declared a boycott on some brand (which is stronger than “they don’t need our money”, it’s “they don’t deserve money because they do such and such immoral thing”, it would be a success bringing that brand to its knees). It almost never works.

            What do you mean by “intrinsic value”? If you’re referring to something like moral worth, then literally no one disagrees with you. You’re just talking about something different than compensation for services rendered.

            Okay but then how do you measure the fair compensation for service rendered? If you choose the replacement value, you haven’t answered the question, you’re just saying that people should be paid what other people doing the same job are already paid. If you compare to what people could stand to gain if they sold their skills elsewhere, you might have a point in some cases (like why economics professor are often paid much more than other professors), but what other lucrative careers do professional athletes have, apart from maybe model (would not be that lucrative for most if they weren’t also a famous athlete)? And if you look at the value created, well as people already said without people filming them, tending to the grass in the stadium, checking the spectators’ tickets, and so on, they wouldn’t create nearly as much value.

            So the crazy right-wingers were right when they said that you were just jelly? Lemme ask, if I could increase your real income by 10x, but I’d only do it in combination with increasing Aaron Rodgers’ real income by 1000x, would you go for it?

            I don’t know what you mean by that first sentence.

            In your hypothetical, I wouldn’t, but it is likely that it says more about me than about what we’re tlaking about. I also very likely wouldn’t take the 10x salary increase, because of personal issues I’d rather not talk about anymore.

            Bickering over stadiums bores me, and it doesn’t have nearly the effect that you think it does. The most expensive new stadiums cost about a billion, about half of which may be provided by the city/state. The median stadium age right now is around 20 years, with at least four teams in approximately that period being new stadiums because they were brand new expansion teams. The NFL’s revenue is close to 10bil/year. Ok, sure, bickering over stadiums can move some numbers around a bit… but we’re not talking about making them cut Aaron Rodger’s contract from 22mil/year down to even the average CEO pay in order to pay water boys more. You’re going to have to do a whole lot more work. Primarily, you’re going to need to either (1) Just change the demand function of the general public to make them not want to give the NFL money, or (2) argue that the salary cap shouldn’t be set so that 54% of league revenue goes to the players. Good luck.

            I don’t know how many teams are in the NFL, but fine I beleive you if you say the effect from the team’s point of view is not so big. Obviously it’s much bigger from the city’s point of view, which is the problem John Oliver was talking about in the first place, and I shouldn’t have assumed it worked the other way as well.

          • Anonymous says:

            how do you measure the fair compensation for service rendered?

            Generally, the same way we measure whether you paying $X to Starbucks is fair compensation for the product/service you received – you decided that it was worth it to you. As much as people want to focus on, “Businesses will set prices as high as they can (given competitive forces and such),” they usually forget that if it wasn’t still a net positive transaction for you, you wouldn’t do it. I personally think that Starbucks’ prices are too high for the product/service they sell… so I don’t buy it. I don’t have to go prevent other people from buying it in order to protect them from what I think doesn’t give them enough value.

            If you choose the replacement value, you haven’t answered the question, you’re just saying that people should be paid what other people doing the same job are already paid.

            Replacement value is part of the story, but it’s not just “What other people doing the same job are already paid”. It’s what you will have to pay in order to replace the same capabilities. Unique capabilities demand a premium. When you’re hiring for Aaron Rodgers’ replacement, it’s nearly impossible to replace those capabilities. This percolates out toward the population that is able to provide roughly similar capabilities. In this thinking, it is then a conclusion that people working the same job end up getting paid about the same, not a premise.

            I’ll note that there are some time-dependencies available here and probably not a One True Equilibrium Price. A coach realizes, “Wow, I can get a surprisingly different amount of value out of similarly-priced running backs.” So, he exploits a market inefficiency, using cheap running backs to give him an advantage. Those backs stand out; everyone notices. More kids grow up trying to build the same skill set; more teams try to design schemes to exploit those skills. The prices goes up/down depending upon the time history of those factors. We had no way of calculating The One True Intrinsic Value at either of these points in time, either. Anyone searching for a method to compute The One True Intrinsic Value will be searching for an extremely long time.

            If you compare to what people could stand to gain if they sold their skills elsewhere, you might have a point in some cases (like why economics professor are often paid much more than other professors), but what other lucrative careers do professional athletes have, apart from maybe model (would not be that lucrative for most if they weren’t also a famous athlete)?

            Only if you flatly banned all professional sports (or, again, magically changed the nation’s demand function for them). Otherwise, the alternate for most athletes isn’t modeling… it’s going and playing for a different league. Remember to apply the same reasoning to show business. What could Jon Stewart do if comedy/acting/show business (however you want to conceptualize his skill) was just banned? Do we really think that this is a good argument for how his pay should be set? I have a reasonably lucrative STEM PhD. Should my pay be determined by a hypothetical where my entire field is just banned?!

            Clearly, we have to consider alternatives somewhat (as your example of econ profs shows), but we have to consider intrafield competition as a part of this unless we’re banning entire fields. Part of why Aaron Rodgers makes so much is because if the Packers didn’t pay him $22M, he might be tempted by a high-dollar offer by the Cowboys.

            if you look at the value created, well as people already said without people filming them, tending to the grass in the stadium, checking the spectators’ tickets, and so on, they wouldn’t create nearly as much value.

            Right. No one thinks that all of those people don’t generate value. Obviously they do (otherwise, they wouldn’t be hired!). But how big of a difference do you think there would be in the value created by the enterprise if they had hired Joe instead of Jim to run the camera? Do you think it’s remotely similar to the value produced by Aaron Rodgers over the available replacements?

      • Corey says:

        My pet theory on astronomical CEO compensation is that it’s mostly Lake Wobegon effect. That is, every company wants above-average leadership, so they offer above-average comp packages. But once enough do this, the above-average comp packages become average, so now everyone’s offering more than that. Repeat enough and you get a big upward spiral.

        This doesn’t happen to “ordinary” workers because (approximately) nobody wants to pay above average.

        Not that there’s not capture effects and path dependency going on; interlocking boards and old-boy networks help perpetuate that system. And as people are posting about Wal-Mart in particular, the amount “wasted”, amortized over a large company, rounds down to zero; everyone knows of a boondoggle at their jobs that has worse cost/benefit ratio than, say, paying Carly Fiorina to leave.

        In all this I’m talking about hired-in executives/CEOs; founders with equity are a different animal, because they have skin and sweat in the game. AFAIK nobody but hardcore commies object to founders reaping huge rewards.

        • Anonymous says:

          Is there any reason to believe that it’s not just simple competition? CEOs have high-visibility. Company X decides, “We’re not going to pay obscene amounts for a CEO like other companies do. Instead, we’ll promote someone from inside and give them a small raise.”

          Two years goes by. Companies Y, Z, and Q all notice that Company X is doing pretty good. They all know that CEO X gets paid less than their CEOs. “Well, she clearly has the experience of running a large company successfully. Let’s see if we can poach her.” So they offer her a bunch more money than she was getting at Company X. Sure, she came up in the culture of Company X and she likes it there… but doze Tubmans, dough.

          …Company X learns their lesson. If they’re going to be able to retain a CEO for more than a couple years, they need to be competitive with other companies. This could just be direct compensation… or it could include just trying to make that job suck enough less than being CEO Y/Z/Q to make up for whatever pay differential they settle on.

          We saw this type of poaching competition drive up tech salaries for a while (and then saw collusion scandals for anti-poaching agreements). Without anti-CEO-poaching agreements, Company X won’t be making the “easy” choice of just not playing Lake Wobegon. They’ll have the hard choice of, “Well, do we want to pay more money than we’d really like… or do we want to promote a new CEO every two years…”

    • Luke the CIA stooge says:

      Does anyone here have a economic, cost/benefits, argument that CEOS are overpaid in that they take in more money on average than their value added. Because I’ve never really seen that.

      I know Paul Graham has argued that, if anything, CEO’S are underpaid, looking at one data point alone, Steve JOBS, you can see that he took a company that in the late nineties was worthless/100% going to fail (every commentator agreed) and then turned it around and made it worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Even if no other CEO adds value that alone might be a larger amount of wealth created than total CEO compensation in America.

      This should make sense these are individuals who gave worked in a very complex field all there life, had to wear multiple, take great amounts of risk, in terms of their reputation, and just work insane hours in general (read somewhere Bill Gates was working 80 hours a week after he became a billionaire.

      Once a doctor completes residency they can go into private practice and lead a relatively relaxed life by 32. A CEO hasn’t even gotten to the hard part of their career by that point. And on top of all that they don’t get the social respect doctors get. A child who wants to be a CEO isn’t going to get the admiration and moral reinforcement of a child who wants to become a doctor.
      No one treats CEO’S like great philanthropists or paragon of what makes society best (even republicans save their praise for small business owners).
      So you have a shit job, where you get little respect relative to your peers (Rockstar surgeons, terre one politicians, actual rockstars, celebrities, top researchers) you have to work rediculously lousy hours at stuff even academics consider boring, people are going question your moral character for doing it and the marginal difference between you being #67 in the world vs. #82 is a matter of thousands of jobs and millions if not billions of dollars. And it’s all really stressful and the average exec has enough saved up they could just retire early instead.

      Again does anyone have an economic argument that they’re overpaid. An argument not driven by moral outrage or reference to the sixties (when business was simpler and you could treat the company coffers like a slush account).
      Why is this particular item of corporate spending inefficient, because this seems an unusually specific expense for the left to latch onto so viciously as a source of inefficiency, when they don’t seem to give a damn about wasteful spending by the government.
      That is unless their jealous.

      • Corey says:

        There are some common-sense econ arguments, e.g. golden parachutes and “performance-based” pay that has little relation to performance ($20M for running the company into the ground vs. $22M for becoming a monopoly; admittedly this is probably mostly a tax-avoidance strategy). You do raise interesting questions about why anyone wants to do it from a pure labor-econ point of view. And of course jealousy plays a part; I remember the big bank executive bonuses in 2008 post-crash being defended as “contractually obligated” where no mortal’s employer is contractually obligated to give them anything.

        There’s also (I don’t think anyone in this thread is doing this) lots of conflation of founders with equity vs. hired-in CEOs (the latter haven’t taken any personal risks in the way the former have).

        Conservatives tend to interpret disagreements about what’s wasteful as liberals not caring that government expenses aren’t wasteful.

        In the end, anyone’s salary (whether low-end or executive) is upper-bounded at *perceived* value to the business, not actual (calculating actual value is probably intractable though). You’d think that market competition would drive the perceived-actual difference to 0, but anyone who has worked in the private sector can name 5 negative-value boondoggles that their employer is currently participating in.

        • Jill says:

          “anyone who has worked in the private sector can name 5 negative-value boondoggles that their employer is currently participating in.”

          LOL, excellent point there. True, ‘dat.

          • TcrJuVjmSG says:

            LOL, excellent point there. True, ‘dat.

            First, the semantic content of this is nothing more than a “like” which we don’t have here for good and sufficient reasons. Second, it is filled with nonsense words.

            Please post better in the future.

          • Jill says:

            No. If Scott has a problem, okay, I’ll post differently. But, contrary to your beliefs you are not the boss of this board, much less of the world, and I am not here to please you. I don’t mind pleasing people, but I prefer to please people who are cooperative, and/or who please me or others.

          • houseboatonstyxb says:

            @ Jill
            No. If Scott has a problem, okay, I’ll post differently.

            Scott has to spend too much time moderating already. A good middle way, would be to ignore rude criticism but give consideration to polite information about local customs.

  97. Jill says:

    If you don’t believe that the lower classes are exploited, then read this book by the late Joe Bageant, a redneck who left his hometown, got educated and became a journalist, and then came back to interview the people of the redneck town he grew up in and explain the conditions of their lives to readers. The guy was brilliant. Wished he hadn’t passed away so soon.

    Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War by Joe Bageant

    http://www.amazon.com/Deer-Hunting-Jesus-Dispatches-Americas/dp/0307339378/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1464131811&sr=1-1&keywords=Deer+hunting+with+Jesus

    • ADifferentAnonymous says:

      Can you summarize the argument regarding exploitation? The description seems to speak to a generally low quality of life but not really the ‘useless vs. exploited’ thing.

  98. Duncan Bayne says:

    FWIW, you’ve conflated “society” with “the State” in your stated reason for excluding Libertarians. I don’t personally know any Libertarian who are against helping the poor; we just don’t think that’s a job for the State.

    • Jill says:

      So who is it that is falling down on the job of helping the poor, since the poor have gotten so much worse off in recent decades? Who is it who should have been keeping this from happening, if not the state?

      Or are you saying you believe, in theory, that helping the poor is good? But if the poor all get worse and worse off and suffer miserably in every way– well, if no one feels like helping them, then no problem?

      • Skivverus says:

        The standard libertarian belief is that helping “the poor” – helping anyone, really – is something best done without resorting to coercion, and that government is inherently coercive. You have an obligation not to run over the beggar in the street, but not to hand him a $20, and certainly not to order someone else to hand him a $20.

        A further, darker implication is that if someone has no friends, that might well be because no one they’ve met thinks they’re worth keeping around (i.e.: they’ve been outgroup’ed). This inference works better – if it works at all, and it might, at that – with smaller communities that can track the finer details of their inhabitants’ reputations.

        This in turn means that government welfare, if it is utterly dispassionate, will go in greater proportions to people the local community finds distasteful than that same community would – and there’s no universal answer to whether the government or the community is in the right.

        • Jill says:

          Yes, I am aware of how distasteful the poor are to some people.

          What about the government having laws that companies and individuals abide by their written contracts? That’s coercion. Shall we stop doing that?

          • Skivverus says:

            At a guess, “the poor” are distasteful to those people because the phrase conjures a different mental image for them than it does for you – of “trust-fund babies enabled by taxpayers’ money rather than their parents'”, rather than “people down on their luck”.
            To convince those people, or perhaps in an attempt to sift the former from the latter, increasing numbers of checks and conditions get loaded onto any governmental aid – they’ve got just as much a vote as you do, after all – until the bureaucracy turns welfare collection into a job in its own right: “proving to strangers that you’re more unlucky than lazy, by standing in line and filling out forms”.

            As for your second point, that’s the difference (as I understand it) between the libertarian and the anarchist: the former concedes that sometimes coercion is the lesser of two evils… though again, in persistent communities (such as this one), reputation becomes an enforcement mechanism in its own right.

          • You… haven’t talked this through with any libertarians or anarchists, have you? I don’t think either of your statements could sneak past a blind man looking for grass-based humanoids nor would they succeed at an ideological turing test for what libertarians actually believe.

            Libertarians are against the initiation of force and coercion at the very most basic. Under that rule, you cannot morally threaten someone with a gun or lie to defraud them of money but you can certainly do those things to stop coercion and fraud.
            The ideas of how to do this proportionally really clicked for me after reading about the principle of estoppel, which you can read a nice essay, if interested, here:
            https://mises.org/library/punishment-and-proportionality-estoppel-approach-0
            EDIT: Estoppel summary: Estoppel is the idea that somehow who both makes a claim and also takes an action towards that claim is prevented from in the future saying they are against that claim. A person can’t claim a moral imperative against someone starting a fight with them if they themselves have started a fight. Thieves can’t complain about having their property confiscated to pay back their victims because they’ve proven they don’t believe in a right not to be stolen from.

          • Jill says:

            Dice, yes I’ve talked with Libertarians. But I find them to be inconsistent in approving of some forms of coercion but not others.

        • Jack Hunter says:

          Well… you somehow forgot:

          If said poor people would get some money, they might actually turn back into normal people.

          Poverty is something you can slide into blazingly fast – and its not something easily climbed out of. What certainly does not help climbing out of poverty is a lack of money to maintain a small lifestyle, to get cleaned up and start trying to broaden ones skill set.

      • “since the poor have gotten so much worse off in recent decades?”

        Evidence?

      • alaska3636 says:

        The people worst effected by government spending are the poor and middle class. Government spending ultimately causes monetary inflation (i.e. the devaluation of each individual unit of currency relative to each new unit of currency added.)

        Government control over the currency spigot – to pay for war, benefits, welfare, infrastructure – hurt savers who see the value of their savings decline in a greater proportion to the rising costs of living caused by inflation. The people who benefit most are those rich and connected people who benefit by government contracts (Lockheed) and by asset inflation (Lehman).

        I have simplified, for sure, a complex phenomena of transferring wealth from the poorest to the wealthiest, but you can not analyze the increasing gap between wealthy and the middle class without understanding the monetary system in place.

  99. Jill says:

    This cartoon explains how the rich got rich and the poor got poor.

    Here is a great list of graphics that illustrates well a lot of facts about income and socioeconomic class, such as what percent of the income of various classes comes from investments they own vs. their work. And how badly the lower classes have gotten squeezed financially in recent decades.

    http://www.vox.com/2016/5/23/11704246/wealth-inequality-cartoon

    • meyerkev248 says:

      And… saving those for the next time I hear someone complaining about how we have a regressive tax system in this country.

      /And I love the “We’ve never taxed capital gains lower” chart.

      • Jill says:

        Yeah, that’s how this board is. Link to an article with 27 points in it, and most people here will fish out the 1 or 2 points that can be used, or at least interpreted, to support a hard core Libertarian screw-over-the-poor-with no-regrets point of view. Am getting used to that now.

        • E. Harding says:

          What’s your bigger problem? Poverty or inequality?

          • Anonymous says:

            This is actually a great question for a lot of people. “Let’s say I could increase your real income by 10x, but it would correspond with an increase of real income of 1000x going to some random rich person. Would you go for it?”

          • keranih says:

            I think both the two cows economics lecture and The Iron Lady need to be mentioned here.

            (My answer is that I can’t see how making a rich person more rich impacts me at all. Except that if I knew who they were I could go lobby them for more money to my pet causes.)

          • jaimeastorga2000 says:

            @Anonymous: One random person 1000x richer? Absolutely. Everyone else 1000x richer? No way.

          • Randy M says:

            I have Jaime’s response too, but only due to the practical effects of what that would do to my buying power after inflation, etc.

          • meyerkev248 says:

            Positional goods.

            If a rich person owns TEN cars, no skin off my back, when he’s outbidding me for the limited supply of housing and I have to leave and move to ??? driving me away from friends and family, very much skin off my back.

            There’s a reason places with lots of positional goods get really concerned about income inequality, and places without don’t.

          • Anonymous says:

            the practical effects of what that would do to my buying power after inflation

            The qualifier real income obviates this concern.

    • alaska3636 says:

      Many people fail to consider the flow of capital as a result of monetary inflation, which by and large, tends to benefit the wealthy at the expense of the middle class and poor. Regulatory capture also allows the wealthy to, if not completely control the direction of government, steer the government towards policies favorable to them as a class.

  100. Jules Morrison says:

    Throwing money at the problem of poverty, ironically, is actually being treated as a serious answer by international NGOs these days, where for ages people tried everything else on the assumption that the feckless poor would spend it on drink. Build infrastructure for them, food aid, subsidized goods, food stamps, workfare, every which way but “here have some cash”. But when they actually tried the cash, it worked. That’s one reason I’m optimistic about a basic income. Another, is that I feel that a whole lot of creativity has been stomped flat by, basically, living one paycheck from the street. With an inflation-pegged basic income that’s enough to subsist on, and protected against creditors, effectively that fear would be gone. Bad news for employers wanting cheap poor people to do awful jobs. Good news, for all those individual people. I have a feeling they’d rebuild their local economy. I have a feeling, too, a lot of people stuck in the city by the necessity of the next paycheck, would move out and join them.

    • Corey says:

      Cash-based poverty aid has a market-based logic to it that you’d think libertarians would appreciate. Rather than provide, say, $1000 worth of food, housing, or whatever to a poor person, you provide them with $1000 of whatever they need most (as determined by the person best situated to make that determination – themselves).

      An argument can be made for paternalism when helping the poor (as in the “they’ll just spend it on drink” conventional wisdom you mention), but since lots of people are poor, that’s also an argument that markets don’t work. (Which might not be crazy – anything advertised on daytime TV is a terrible deal for whoever’s buying it, for example).

      • Jiro says:

        “They’ll just spend it on drink” is a subcase of a more general case: the point of providing things to the poor isn’t to increase their utility. The point is to ensure that they have food, housing, etc. Just because a poor person gets more utility from alcohol than food and housing doesn’t mean that we want to provide him with it.

        (Of course, it’s only a matter of semantics whether you say “I don’t want to provide them what they need” or “I want to provide them with what they need, but increasing utility is not what I mean by need”.)

        • Jules Morrison says:

          It’s a very reductionist approach to the problem. They don’t have a house, make sure they have a house. They don’t have food, make sure they have food. Even in the best case, it ends up creating warehouses of fed, fed-up people. Human life exists for more reason than to have a continuing heartbeat. Houses, food, and so forth are the basic security necessities for reaching higher on the Maslow pyramid, and you’re not really living a human, humane life until you can reach all the way up to the top, self actualization, living your vocation.

          It’s stupid, IMO, to ignore the utility of poor people. That utility is exactly what guides them to climb the pyramid. A person who is no longer in pain abandons palliatives.

          • Jiro says:

            Just like nobody is interested in giving poor people booze, and nobody is interested in increasing poor people’s utility, nobody is interested in paying to move them all the way up to the top of the Maslow pyramid. Furthermore, a poor person who “needs” booze more than he needs food and housing is, by your own standards, not following the Maslow pyramid anyway.

            In fact, I’d say that that’s why we don’t want to give him booze. We are interested in moving people so that they are at least at a certain distance from the bottom of the Maslow pyramid (but not on the top). Making sure the poor person has food helps accomplish that; making sure the poor person has booze, even if he prefers booze to food, does not, because access to booze doesn’t move him up.

          • Dahlen says:

            @Jiro: “Nobody” being who?

          • Jiro says:

            “Nobody” means “very few people and certainly very few of the people we’re talking about here”. Pointing out that there’s probably someone somewhere who wants it so it isn’t literally nobody is needless Internet pedantry.

        • John Schilling says:

          …the point of providing things to the poor isn’t to increase their utility. The point is to ensure that they have food, housing, etc

          I think the actual point of providing things to the poor is mostly that we feel bad when we see some squalid person lying in the gutter and/or on TV with Sally Struthers narrating, and if we provide them with a certain sort of things then we don’t have to see that any more. But if they take the things we provide them and trade them for booze and drugs, then even if they perceive the greatest possible improvement in their condition given the available resources, we see a squalid drunken bum lying in the gutter. Mission Not Accomplished.

          • multiheaded says:

            I, for one, recognize the hypocrisy here, and am happier to see a rowdy/drunk-but-not-miserable underclass person than a quietly miserable one. Of course, sadly, the former is often just a temporary reprieve from the latter.

        • houseboatonstyx says:

          @ Jiro
          “They’ll just spend it on drink” is a subcase of a more general case: the point of providing things to the poor isn’t to increase their utility. The point is to ensure that they have food, housing, etc.

          What I see most often mentioned are

          1. the proposed simple cash for everyone, or
          2. the current special programs (food stamps etc) for those who can qualify by going through hoops that are expensive for the government to maintain.

          What about keeping the dedicated help (food stamps etc) but getting rid of the hoops? Food stamps for everyone; Medicare for everyone (no co-pays).

          (Food bank privileges for everyone, like free bus tokens for everyone, are self-limiting: rich people won’t use them anyway. Rent vouchers would probably be unworkable.)

          • Corey says:

            That’s a pretty good idea! At a first pass I think we could replace housing vouchers with free dorms but there are probably lots of details to work out.

          • Anonymous says:

            They are called projects and it turned out to be a terrible idea. It’s fine for the housing to be undesirable because it is small or lacks amenities, but you don’t want it to be crime ridden or to require enormous resources to prevent it from being crime ridden.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            I called for an experiment for universal food stamps elsewhere in this thread.

            In that comment, I talked about the work of getting two families I know on food stamps. Since that comment, I’ve come to find out another family I know spent their food stamp money on drugs. This makes me slightly more skeptical, but I still want to try it.

          • houseboatonstyxb says:

            @ Edward S.
            I talked about the work of getting two families I know on food stamps. Since that comment, I’ve come to find out another family I know spent their food stamp money on drugs. This makes me slightly more skeptical, but I still want to try it.

            There are (at least) two ways to approach that problem.

            1. Do a lot of expensive screening of applicants to make sure no/few drug users get any food stamps.

            2. Tweak the redemption rules on food stamps so they can’t be used for toilet paper and cat food (done I think) — or for drugs. IE, close whatever loophole is the mechanism for getting drugs by foodstamps.

          • keranih says:

            Those steps won’t prevent the most common fraud, which is where I sell my FS card to Pete for 50 cents on the dollar cash, and Pete sells the card to someone else – like a restaraunt or a food supplier or another small business – for 75 cents on the dollar.

            This is actually how the fraud works.

          • brad says:

            You trade food stamps for money either by finding a corrupt grocer or by buying food and then reselling it. Either way usually results in a big loss over face value.

            Universal food stamps strikes me as a fairly gentle introduction to the concept of UBI, but I don’t think the politics of it are particularly favorable.

          • Jill says:

            If trading food stamps for money, for a big loss over face value, is the most common fraud, then so what? If the person is legitimately eligible for FS, then let them do whatever they want with the card, no matter how stupid it is. Or let that be illegal, but don’t put any extra resources into tracking it down.

            I don’t see why this is a concern at all. It’s stupid, but it does not cause the recipient to receive anything they are not eligible for.

          • suntzuanime says:

            Instead of giving some money to the citizen and some money to the corrupt merchant, why not give all the money to the citizen? Corrupt merchants are not a class we want to subsidize.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            In this specific case, the person gave her EBT card to the drug dealer, who went and bought $200 worth of groceries, and then gave her $100 worth of drugs.

            Like I said, it makes me more skeptical, but I still want to see the effects of trying it out. Maybe the fraud is so small we just ignore it. Maybe it isn’t. Maybe it doesn’t work because kids still starve due to the parent spending EBT money on drugs. But if we can’t manage the small step of universal food stamps, then we know that universal basic income will never happen.

          • Jill says:

            Some people are very obsessed with fraud in programs for the poor, even in programs where it almost never happens.

            There’s always some specific case to talk about. One case. Or a few cases. Maybe not much more than that.

          • Anonymous says:

            Almost no one starves in the US. Instead we get to hear all about “food insecurity” which is basically people trying to borrow the negative emotional associations we have for people starving for some other barely related phenomenon.

            How much of that massive victory in the war on poverty can be laid at the feet of food stamps vs charity vs food just being so cheap that you can feed yourself on on collecting soda cans, I’m not sure.

          • keranih says:

            It should be noted that FS are a way to help poor people who can’t afford food for themselves and their kids.

            In the USA, most people object to people starving or kids going to school hungry. It’s fairly commonly accepted that even if the parents are idiots, or so lazy they get fired from their jobs, that kids should have food. Even heartless types with no sympathy for adults will agree to tax dollars being spent on feeding kids.

            An adult who takes the foodstamps given to them so that their kids will have food to eat and sells the card for drugs is not only stealing from the taxpayer, they are also stealing from their own childern.

            And that is why UBI is never going to work – because we are never going to let kids starve because the parents spent the whole UBI on drugs/alcohol/tobacco/whores/lottery tickets/anything else. And we are never going to be without parents who will spend UBI on those things unless we institute draconian measures to take kids away from parents who can’t provide for them.

            And that’s another tool I don’t want my government to have.

            Edit: And regarding the idea that this kind of fs fraud is “rare” or just one or two cases…ya’ll really need to get out more, and interact with poor people.

          • Anonymous says:

            And we are never going to be without parents who will spend UBI on those things unless we institute draconian measures to take kids away from parents who can’t provide for them.

            And that’s another tool I don’t want my government to have.

            It’s not can’t, it’s won’t. And the government already has that tool. Governments have had it in what’s now the US since before there was a US.

          • JBeshir says:

            Other countries use cash-based benefit systems, rather than food-restricted stuff, and haven’t had their systems collapse for want of political support in the face of starving children. Mostly it seems to behave exactly the same as the US system, except minus a bunch of bureaucracy and inefficiency as people buy food they don’t need instead of tools they do.

            This is another of those “it’s helpful to check if anyone has actually tried to enact it and what happened” things. I think cash-based benefits might actually be the more internationally common thing.

            The process for dealing with parents who don’t feed their children is the same one you use for parents who beat their children: You take the children away.

            In practice, threat of this seems to be enough.

          • John Schilling says:

            And that is why UBI is never going to work – because we are never going to let kids starve because the parents spent the whole UBI on drugs/alcohol/tobacco/whores/lottery tickets/anything else. And we are never going to be without parents who will spend UBI on those things unless we institute draconian measures to take kids away from parents who can’t provide for them

            And that is why “jobs” are never going to work – because we are never going to let kids starve because the parents spent their whole “wages” on drugs/alcohol/tobacco/whores/lottery tickets/anything else. And we are never going to be without parents who will spend “wages” on those things unless we institute draconian measures to take kids away from parents who can’t provide for them.

            I’m not seeing the difference. Whatever solution we feel is appropriate for the latter case, ought to apply just as well to the former.

          • Jiro says:

            Other countries probably have a smaller base level of drug addicts and other people with similar attitudes.

          • Corey says:

            @whole thread: Maybe we have to treat or cure drug addiction, then. OTOH other behavior-mod technologies will arise, and this presents thorny philosophical problems (drug addiction is a special case thereof).

            In any event if drug addiction or other irrational behavior-mod techniques are that widespread, then markets don’t work and everything we know about econ goes out the window.

  101. LPSP says:

    The southest quadrant is the opposite of gloomy. It is stark, and searingly bright, and it scares people like the indiluted light of God. People like gloom and doom because it’s vaguery and that provides cover, at least, for them to retreat. The southest quadrant opposes this instinct most of all; it seeks to drive people from denial and make them confront the realities of our situation. No cheap revolutionist jingo, no tribalism, no happy-clappy free milk, just designing a system that incentivises efficient, consistent productivity sans neglect.

  102. 27chaos says:

    While real wages have decoupled from real GDP in the past forty years, if you look at real total compensation, including things like healthcare insurance etc, it has only decoupled in the past five to ten years, possibly due to the recession.

  103. Bram Cohen says:

    On the cost of living going up: So much of that is rent that aggressively building more housing in densely populated urban areas would go a really long way to fixing the problem.

    On labor moving overseas: That is certainly a major driver, if not the major driver, of slowed economic growth among poor people in the United States. But poor people here are still much better off than the average person in China, even after all of their economic growth. Eventually we’ll have dragged up enough of the world that there’s nowhere else left to turn. There’s still Africa though, so this trend might continue for a while.

    I too am in favor of guaranteed income. And open borders. And acknowledge that the two don’t work so well together. But until either of them has a realistic chance of happening the conflict doesn’t bother me.

    • Corey says:

      I actually think the damage from US trade with China is a one-off. China is slowing down / imploding right now. There are other, poorer countries, but they’re not China (neither in sheer numbers, nor the political will to undervalue currency and drive exports by fiat at domestic expense).

      (Disclaimer: I thought India would eat all knowledge work years ago, and lost a decade of career to that belief, so I’m heavily invested in Krugman’s New Trade Theory as a counteracting belief).

  104. Jack Hunter says:

    So what happens to money you “give” to people?

    They spend it. Spending money means taxes. If everyone would actually pay their taxes and not fake out of it via shemes, it would create a nice little circle of consumerism, not an overblown perpetual one but one that is there. People who have money can spend money. Money that is being activly reached around is good money. Money that sits in depots and phantasy finacial constructs of make believe profit is doing noone any good.

    Why did the Barber close shop? Because there was noone who could afford paying him to cut hair and trim beards. Its cheaper to do a halfassed job yoruself. With shrinking incomes, the amount of money that coudl be spend on “trivial” things shrinks too. Getting a haircut is such a thing.
    Same for all small businesses – they cannot go as cheap as large, strangleholding companys and as such disapear because noon can affort “wasting” money by buying in a small shop. There is a factual limit as to how many jobs big companys can create, so with the deletion of all the small shops and services, a lot of people are now jobless.
    Jobless people spend no money, no money spend means that even more people will lose their jobs. Its a snowball effect.

    Where there is no money, no money can be spend. No money changing hands no taxes, to jobs and no future.

    There is a fantastic amount of money, lying in the constructs and bubbles of wallstreet and cohorts and it DOES NOTHING.

    Schools crumble down, states are out of money to maintain the infrastructure. And yet, there is all that money, locked away in the pockets of the 1%.

    There is no point in being the country with the top 50 richest people in the world.

    If you give people money, they will spend it. Money that changes hands is good. Money must flow. Siphoning it off from the many to the few does nothing positive.

    Those few reach their consumerism limit fast and after that, its off to wall street bubbles with the money.

    Give people money, take it from the vast reserves circulating the banking dream wonderland. There is no downside. Because funnily enough: That money will return to there, it will only make some detours and do a lot of good in the meantime…

    • The Nybbler says:

      Every dollar of money you took to give to people, you took from someone else so THEY couldn’t spend it. This is just broken window economics.

      • Corey says:

        Every dollar given to Google was taken from someone else (their advertisers), so THEY couldn’t spend it. Therefore Google creates no wealth. (And in fact wealth creation is impossible). Thanks for proving that!

        • Civilis says:

          Every dollar given to Google was freely given by their advertisers, not taken.

          There’s a mistake in thinking all government spending is equal, which the ‘the government should spend money to put money in peoples hands’ logic requires. If you’re spending money on something for yourself, presumably you get more in value than what you spent. What you received is worth more than what you paid, or else you wouldn’t have made the transaction. If you’re not spending your money, that cost/benefit analysis doesn’t hold.

          If I have and spend a million dollars, I’m doing so because the value of what I receive, be it material goods or just goodwill from charity, is worth more to me than the million dollars I spend. When the government takes tax dollars, first, there’s the deadweight loss associated with the tax collection process and the deadweight loss associated with the process of figuring out where to spend the money. So if I pay a million in taxes, we’ve lost money before it gets spent or redistributed. If the government’s spending that money, we then run into the fact that the government doesn’t care to make sure they get as much value as they can for the money they give away because the politicians and bureaucrats spending the money aren’t spending their own money.

          • Corey says:

            Google’s bureaucrats and executives aren’t spending their own money either, and they have nontrivial bureaucracy, as any organization of nontrivial size does. Likewise there is “loss” involved in paying Google’s administrative overhead of employing managers, HR, legal, etc.

            Are you evil-mutant-ing the government here? Because they’re elected? Or because to disassociate yourself you need to sleep each night outside of a particular patch of land?

          • The Nybbler says:

            The point is that you can’t create wealth through zero-sum transactions. If you take a dollar from Peter (providing him nothing in return) and give it to Paul (taking nothing from him for it), you can’t validly say this is good because now Paul will spend his dollar in the larger economy.

          • Civilis says:

            Google’s employees have a rational limit on the spending they can do, and the company has checks on how money is spent. Companies have support staff, HR, Finance, janitors, etc., for one of two reasons: because the company believes that they add value (it’s better to hire someone to do the hiring than relying on production staff such as Google’s programming team to do the hiring and their normal jobs), or because they are required by laws or regulations. Having staff doing work, like making sure that all the myriad HR regulations are applied, that doesn’t add value proportionate to its cost is a waste, and that waste comes from the government.

            Are you evil-mutant-ing the government here? Because they’re elected? Or because to disassociate yourself you need to sleep each night outside of a particular patch of land?

            I don’t get your insults here. I recognize that there are collective action problems that are difficult if not impossible without coercive government, and that makes government likely necessary. It also should be obvious that government has a monopoly on force, meaning that it alone has the power to take things from you involuntarily (even if it does occasionally proxy that out, the power comes from the government). You’re the one that implied that Google somehow has the power to force people to spend money to advertise with them.

            Wealth is created by the voluntary exchange of goods and services. If people are voluntarily exchanging goods and services with Google, it creates wealth. The root posts mistake is in not acknowledging the destruction of wealth involved in the first part of his poorly thought out plan, as The Nybbler pointed out, or the inefficiencies and losses associated with carrying out the plan.

          • Corey says:

            @The Nybbler: The “nothing in return” and “taking nothing from him” are why I think there’s special-case evil-mutant-ing of governments in these discussions.

            @Civilis: What I don’t get is the sense that government taxation and spending is philosophically involuntary. Maybe it’s because I run a polling place, so I’m somewhat invested in believing that citizens have nonzero influence on their governments. Nor is emigration necessarily more difficult than advertising online without using Google (and as network effects create more natural monopolies the distinction will only get blurrier).

            So, for a concrete example, if the Federal government takes a trillion or so dollars from us all this year, that’s because we 300 million citizens, via our elected representatives, have decided that what we get in return (an army and navy, Medicaid, weather forecasts, Section 8 housing, etc.) are as or more valuable than that.

          • The Nybbler says:

            @Corey
            That’s not “evil mutanting”. That’s an ideal redistributive program. I don’t think this thread is about the government taking from some people in order to spend on infrastructure or defense or scientific research or weather forecasts; it’s about the government giving to some people for no return at all and no reason other than those people fit some criteria of need.

            It doesn’t matter that it’s the government doing it, except that no one else can because the government would stop them. If there were some thief very effectively evading the government and siphoning money from some people’s bank accounts and giving that money to other people, that, too, would create no wealth.

          • Civilis says:

            Of the trillion dollars the government is spending, how much is necessary? Any dollar that the government spends which is not necessary is waste.

            We can debate a bit over what’s necessary. At some level, there is tacit acknowledgement among many that there are some collective problems that only the government can handle, therefore spending tax dollars on those problems is, while not perfect, a necessary waste. Further, money that the government forces other people to spend that is not necessary is likewise waste.

            Take the most efficient, effective and altrusitic charitable cause you can think of, like a charitable program that spends 100% of donations on medical aid response to natural disasters in the third world. For every government program, imagine the government taking away the money you were going to donate to that maximally charitable cause and giving it to that government program. Is that rock climbing wall at the state college or that study on how feminism impacts climatology or the artwork for the walls of the sixth new headquarters of that government agency in the past decade a better use of your money than those disease-suffering third world villagers? On the other hand, we know your dinner out, or new clothes, or new TV is a better use of your money because that’s what you chose to do with your money. (If there is anything the government needs to do, it’s things which allow you to determine what you do with your property, like maintain a functioning legal system and national defense).

            What the root post of this thread lacks is any understanding that what the poster is calling for is the government to waste resources that could be used productively (the money spent to administer the program) for the benefit of some citizens at the expense of others. It’s spending some money from other people to take other money from other people and give to different people.

          • Corey says:

            @The Nybbler: But the government is us (admittedly an imperfect representation of our collective will). Why is “the government” deciding to give money to people philosophically different than me buying a USB cable? (The electorate/me) decides that (Social Security/a USB cable) is a better use of (a few hundred million/5) dollars than other alternative uses. Maybe it’s objectively a bad deal from a gods-eye view (perhaps I already have plenty of USB cables under my bed) but that’s a different problem.

        • Tracy W says:

          Wealth creation comes from figuring out how to do things better and cheaper (eg the “spinning jenny” for cloth, Google for Internet search).

          Money helps lubricate wealth creation (like many other things such as freedom of speech and double-entry bookkeeping), but what you are talking about above (the circulation of money) is not the same as wealth creation. Societies without money can have wealth creation.

          • Corey says:

            Nowadays food-allergy and diet-restriction concerns have taken away the best tool ever for schoolchildren to learn this: lunch-table trading.

    • Urstoff says:

      The 1% don’t store their wealth under their bed.

      Addendum: “1% don’t” or “1% doesn’t”?

      • Corey says:

        “The 1%” is plural, for now.

        Actually in recent decades most (in the US) do; hence the market for T-Bills at ridiculously low rates. Probably because most new industries in the US don’t need lots of capital, so there’s a shortage of useful things to invest in even at zero savings rates.

        The theory that wealth can’t be “parked”, only invested, assumes full employment. Macrofoundations!

        • Tracy W says:

          T-billa are not storing money under the bed. They are lendiing money to the government, which the government then spends.

          If people’s desire to store money under the bed was increasing, T-bill rates would have to rise to provide more incentive to overcome people’s increasing reluctance to invest their money.

          Your evidence points to exactly the opposite of your claim.

          • Corey says:

            No, T-Bills have a fixed supply (fixed by the amount of budget deficits) and so their price (which is inversely proportional to their rate of return) is determined by demand.

            They’re a benchmark because they’re the baseline safe asset – it has the least chance of not getting paid back of anything on Earth (various recent political debt-ceiling clusterfucks notwithstanding). As such they offer the lowest rates of return (offered rates are more or less proportional to risk, everywhere).

            For various reasons (depending on which macroeconomist you ask), nothing’s arising that can offer the market better risk-adjusted return than approximately zero. Or rich people/companies are just leaving lots of money on the table by investing in Treasuries instead of something better, in which case everything we know about economics is wrong and we don’t have any idea what could help.

          • Tracy W says:

            May I remind you that you started off by claiming that “in recent decades most (in the US) do [want to store their money under the bed.]”.

            If that hypothesis was correct then why would ‘investors’ care about other money-making opportunities relative to T-bill rates? If your assertion was true, about the only thing that could drive down t-Bill rates would be a shortage of beds to stash the cash under.

            In other words, your own argument here believes even you don’t believe your own claim.

          • Corey says:

            @Tracy W: No, I must be being unclear, so I’ll try to explicate what I’m *trying* to claim, and you can tell me where I’m wrong 🙂

            There’s a prevalent econ-101ist view that wealth concentration can never be a problem, because wealth that isn’t spent is necessarily invested, and investment helps the economy (usually with dismissive remarks about Scrooge McDuck-style vaults). I believe this to not be true in today’s USA (though it has been true before).

            The model that the savings=investment result comes from depends on, maong other things, full employment (so there is no shortage of real ventures into which to invest).

            My assertion is that, today, a significant amount of wealth is in fact “parked” Scrooge McDuck-style. The evidence for this is a shortage of safe assets, and the evidence for *that* is robust demand for T-Bills at zero-ish rates.

            I’m not saying that investors *want* to store money under the bed instead of investing it, because that violates a core assumption of capitalism (that people like making money). Anytime someone actually does put money under a mattress, or in T-Bills at zero rates, they’re saying, via revealed preference, that there’s nothing they can invest in that returns more than zero, that fits their risk/liquidity/other preferences.

            Maybe the rich all have the opposite of irrational exuberance and are irrationally missing out on money-making opportunities (markets can stay irrational longer than any person can stay solvent, after all). But no matter the cause, the result is that, today, there is nontrivial wealth that is not doing anything but sitting around.

          • Tracy W says:

            @Corey: but you haven’t supplied any evidence that there is wealth sitting around.

            As I observed before, T-bills are spent by the government be that on consumption or investment. T-bills are not wealth sitting around. That people can’t find higher interest (risk-adjusted) investments than T-bills may say serious things about the health of the economy. But it does nothing to support your claim that people are leaving money sitting around.

            (And what does saving->investment have to do with full employment? You seem to be touching on Keynesian economics here but I’ve never heard any Keynesian claim that people are more likely to invest their savings under full employment. And what does full employment have to do with opportunities to invest? Skill mis-match theory anyone?)

          • Corey says:

            @Tracy W: T-Bills are spent, but the supply is *fixed* by purely political factors. There’s some long-term feedback (if we can’t borrow at less than 10% it will probably put a damper on deficits) but it’s not symmetric; when the market rate was negative the government did *not* do the econ-rational thing of stopping tax collection and borrowing everything.

            As for more-direct evidence: Apple. 8 figures of cash on hand, not being returned to investors nor invested into new ventures. And a good portion of that is already domestic (hoarding cash overseas as tax avoidance is understandable and a different phenomenon). Apple can’t figure out what to do with tens of billions of USD short of zero-return savings vehicles.

    • Jill says:

      Excellent points, Jack. If only our REAL Overton window (rather than our imaginary one) didn’t say that “It’s very hard to help poor people. Let’s spend our money on killing people with drones, and on middle men who add nothing of value to our society (like Wall Street and private medical insurers) instead.

      All we need to do is expand that Overton window full of Military Industrial complex interests, medical insurance interests, Wall Streeters etc.– to include the disadvantaged poor kid’s interests, and we’re good. But oh wait… where is the poor kid’s lobbyist to Congress? I can’t seem to locate such people in our “best system money can buy.”

      You see, we have a free market in Congress members, who bought and sold on the open market, to Special Interests. Getting help for a poor kid seems to be outside the limits of our “free market” in Congress members.

      • Civilis says:

        National security (dismissed as ‘killing people with drones’) is a massive collective action problem, and one most people believe is best handled by the government (and those that don’t generally think nothing should be handled by the government).

        People choose to give money to private insurers and financiers, so they add something of value to someone. Until the recent legislation, you weren’t forced by law to do business with an insurance company. On the other hand, who would voluntarily spend money to comply with the ever increasing bevy of regulations that plague businesses both large and small if it didn’t mean the survival of your business? People buy congressmen and lobbyists because they have to to survive the regulatory and bureaucratic powers of the government, and giving the government more power just makes the ability to influence congress more valuable.

        • Jill says:

          There’s not much of a “choice” of whether to give money to insurers, when insurance companies have contracted rates with hospitals and clinics, such that people without insurance pay sky high prices. Without private insurance, we would all pay less. Bailing out Wall Street in 2008 was something our government did without asking citizens whether we wanted that.

          I am aware of the Libertarian assumptions that
          1) all businesses are as pure and benevolent as the driven snow, and that they only buy Congress members because they have to, to survive regulations and bureaucracy from the always evil government.
          and 2) giving the government more power just makes the ability to influence congress more valuable, so apparently campaign finance reform is supposed to be impossible.

          But I just don’t buy those assumptions.

          • Civilis says:

            Insurance is, fundamentally, a collective action issue itself. Medical care is expensive, more expensive than most people can afford straight up, so they pool their resources to hedge bets against emergencies. This incurs some costs to handle the pooling, but it’s a situation where there are no perfect options. The more people pooled, the larger the waste and the bigger the disconnect between the people paying in and the overall money available in the pool. Without insurance pools, we’d pay less on average, but those that suffer from a medical emergency would still be unable to afford the charges.

            As far as bailing out Wall Street, I thought the government was ‘us’? (admittedly, that’s specifically Corey’s argument). I don’t think anyone on the libertarian side believes business owners and people in finance are any better than politicians (or union leaders, celebrities, or bureaucrats), that is, some are good and some are bad, and it’s hard to tell which are which, and we might not even agree on what makes one good or bad. People with the right combination of intelligence / drive / charisma / luck will always be at the top; the only way to limit the damage they can do if bad, especially if we can’t agree on what bad is, is to decentralize power as much as possible.

            I haven’t seen a single campaign finance reform proposed that wasn’t a transparent attempt to merely move power from one of the groups that already have power to another. For example, the media and celebrities like campaign finance reform, because it benefits them: [celebrity] or [news source] endorses [candidate] is more valuable than [celebrity] or [news source owner] donates money to [candidate], therefore, [candidate] has an incentive to make nice to [celebrity] and [news source owner]; the public doesn’t have any more influence in politics, but celebrities and media owners do. In all cases, politicians make loopholes for their friends, because politicians aren’t going to reduce their own power.

          • Corey says:

            @Civilis: Besides the traditional insurance function of risk pooling, US health insurance also protects against many market failures, some general to healthcare, some specific to the US.

            The big one is price control – prices are totally opaque in US healthcare (so much for any kind of meaningful competition or market), and insurer PPO price negotiation provides the only legal or logical limit on charges. (Never ever go out-of-network for anything unless immediate death is the consequence; the balance-bill will make you wish for death).

            There are certainly better solutions, but for now that’s what we’re stuck with.

          • Civilis says:

            One of those risks is the risk to the health care provider. Because, like college, you can’t return the health care provided if people fail to pay for it later, there’s a risk in providing service to someone that isn’t covered by insurance that needs to be priced in to the cost. On the other hand, even if an individual with insurance never comes back to the provider, their insurance carrier will likely be back, so the insurance carrier has a reason to pay, and the provider has a reason to negotiate down the price so the insurance carrier doesn’t choose a different provider.

            Health care is a serious problem with no good solutions because people and their health care problems aren’t interchangeable and have a unique value. I can shop around for services for my car (emergency repairs, routine maintenance and insurance) because my car is mass produced, so the parts and services needed can be standardized, and the damage that can be done is limited to the car itself, with a fixed upper bound. The guy that does the oil change doesn’t need more than standard business insurance and a quick training in the procedure for the car.

          • John Schilling says:

            Health insurance also protects against [risks such as] price control – prices are totally opaque in US healthcare

            Prices are generally quite transparent in US dentistry, optometry including laser eye surgery, and cosmetic surgery. Also OTC drug prices. Transparent, and within the means of middle-class families.

            Not coincidentally, these are the segments of the American health care industry that are generally not covered by insurance. Insurance doesn’t protect against price opacity, it causes price opacity. Coarsely speaking, providers want to negotiate the best deal with each new insurer no matter how much the last one beat them down to, insurers don’t want anyone else to free-ride on their negotiating efforts, and people paying cash are too small a market to bother with.

          • Bruce Beegle says:

            @Jill:

            I am aware of the Libertarian assumptions that
            1) all businesses are as pure and benevolent as the driven snow, and that they only buy Congress members because they have to, to survive regulations and bureaucracy from the always evil government.
            and 2) giving the government more power just makes the ability to influence congress more valuable, so apparently campaign finance reform is supposed to be impossible.

            But I just don’t buy those assumptions.

            I don’t buy your assumption #1 either. I am a libertarian.

            Over the years, I’ve talked with several dozen libertarians well enough to know how they would respond to those assumptions. Not one would agree with the first part of your assumption #1. Not one would agree with the second part of your assumption #1.

            Perhaps you’ve gotten to know a lot more libertarians than I have. I suppose among them might have been a few that would agree with your assumption #1, but I doubt very much that it was a significant fraction.

            The first part of your assumption #2 is obviously correct. Whether that makes “campaign finance reform” impossible depends on what you mean by “campaign finance reform”. Bills called “campaign finance reform” (that makes it harder to defeat an incumbent) have passed.

        • Jill says:

          Interesting, Bruce. I am getting these ideas from articles and books I have read by Libertarians. Some of these writings are written for the purpose of business propaganda, as many articles and books are today. So that may be the reason for the attitude that businesses are as pure as the driven snow. I have found these sorts of ideas to often be argued in articles and books.

          There’s kind of a disconnect between earnest people following a philosophy vs. the people who write about it for money. Propaganda writing pays better than attempting to write objectively. So lots of writers have found a job in that area. And we are pretty well immersed in, and highly influenced by, propaganda

          • Bruce Beegle says:

            Could you give us a quote from one of those articles or books supporting your libertarian assumption #1?

            I guess I don’t read the right articles or books. The libertarian authors I’ve read have been pro-free-market, which is very very different from being pro-business.

    • Tracy W says:

      Your analysis is based on the assumption that Wall Street takes large swathes of money and does nothing with it, presumably because they believe they have enough profits already.

      • Corey says:

        Both of the following cannot simultaneously be true:
        – The US financial system approximates an efficient market
        – Financial intermediation is 8% of GDP (true)

        To be fair, a lot of that 8% seems to come from hedge fund clients paying 2-and-20 despite such funds neither hedging nor outperforming indexes. Though that in itself is a serious EMH violation (or an assumption that hedge fund clients believe they have enough money already)

        • Urstoff says:

          Why can both of those not simultaneously be true? What would the size of the financial industry be if markets were efficient?

          • Corey says:

            In an efficient market profits are competed away to zero. In the hedge fund example, no regulation requires them to charge 2-and-20, but nobody seems to have started one that charged 1.5-and-15 (which would make a *huge* difference over any nontrivial time scale), or if they did they didn’t eat the industry for unknown reasons. And hedge funds are pretty lightly regulated.

            Your local libertarian will reply “Government Regulations(tm) are setting the barriers to entry such that this much profit is there to be made” but there’s no particular evidence for that.

            In retail banking the answer is clearly oligopoly (lack of competition). In insurance, it’s probably lack of market efficiency from barriers to entry, because it’s impossible to have useful insurance without scads of regulation. For other parts of FIRE, you have a point, I have no idea what the “efficient” size would be.

          • Anonymous says:

            There’s fee competition in the hedge fund world. Two and twenty is far from a hard and fast rule. The big reason it doesn’t get too hot is because the perceived best hedge funds have would-be investors begging them to invest. They aren’t considered very fungible.

  105. Michael Vassar says:

    Can I hang in the lower left quadrant while agreeing that all the problems your discussing in the lower right are real and huge, just somewhat less pressing than the fact that there is an oven window at all and that it forces people (those who think at all) to pretend were in the upper right quadrant?

  106. Jill says:

    I don’t see this Overton window at all, unless you mean it’s a window about public discourse that almost NEVER sees any action or follow through– at least in recent decades. The kind of “discourse” that people mean when they say “Talk is cheap.”

    Our nation’s actions in recent decades show clearly– that in terms of discourse that is serious enough for us to follow it up with action in the real world– that most of us think as Scott does, that “helping poor people is very hard”– and too expensive. We also think that doing regime change & reworking the entire Middle East in the image of what we would like it to be, so that “freedom is on the march”, is comparatively easy and quite affordable.

    Also, if that pre-schooler doesn’t get immediate and long lasting results from Head Start, without our having to continue to provide good teachers or extra services in the early grade school years too, well he’s someone we should give up on right away.

    OTOH, we have literally decades of patience for expensive military failures in the Middle East, because we’re going to “stay the course.” Perhaps the course we are staying though, is to funnel huge amounts of cash to the crony capitalist welfare queens in our military industrial complex. THOSE welfare recipients NEVER go without having their needs or desires fulfilled.

    Actions of a nation speak louder than words.

    • keranih says:

      @ Jill –

      People talked to you about the difference between positions that can impact one person and positions that can impact many people. The difference between (and tension among) policies which cost some people a lot and many a little, or benefit some a lot and cost others a little is a common theme in economics.

      IMO, if (and yes, that is is a huge if) the US interventions in the Middle East had brought Afghanistan (as a whole, not just Kabul) into the equivalent of Victorian London, or had helped form – at the end of 15 years engagement – an Iraqi secular national identity that superseded ethnic and religious divisions and set Iraq on the path of becoming the model for the rest of the region in emphasis on economic activity and reputation of corruption and family favoritism…

      If either of those had occurred, then 1) the outcome would have been cheap at twice the price in blood and dollars and 2) it would have so far overshadowed any domestic US policy – in terms of creating prosperity and respect for human worth – dating back to the American Civil War and quite possibly beyond.

      Equating the outcome of interventions on the part of an individual poorly educated child of poorly educated parents in the richest and most free nation on the planet against the destiny of an entire region is a bit rich, imo.

      • Anonymous says:

        They would have been even more worth it if they had permanently cured all disease. That was about as likely an outcome.

      • Jill says:

        “Equating the outcome of interventions on the part of an individual poorly educated child of poorly educated parents in the richest and most free nation on the planet against the destiny of an entire region is a bit rich, imo.”

        This seems like nit picking to me. But, okay, let’s assume that the intervention to fight poverty is done for a large number of disadvantaged children, as it actually would be– and that we are giving up on the education of this large number of children– and instead we are focusing on military interventions in the Middle East.

        The overall point here though is that we have a choice of what to spend tax money on. And we have decided who/what we value and believe in, and thus are willing to spend money on. And that our decision is absurd.

  107. The cost of housing is driven by building codes that keep getting more restrictive and expensive. We can build houses for $20,000, but the cost of regulations adds $70,000 to the price of the average single-family detached him. So low-end housing is basically illegal, and developers just keep building more high-end stuff in the exurbs.

    Also the cost of living is majorly driven by the cost of driving and commutes. Since the above-mentioned building codes often require a minimum lot-size and impose maximum density, the only way cities can grow is “out”, not “up”, and so commuting costs (both time and gas) just keep rising.

    The good news is that both of those are fixable.

    I’m generally with Scott though. Culture doesn’t change, and you can measure (for instance) how differences in culture in Northwest vs. Southeast Europe persist over centuries despite multiple World Wars and Soviet occupation. If those sorts of exogenous shocks cannot change the culture, what can?

    • Jill says:

      Trump very quickly changed the policies that a Republican candidate can propose, and still remain popular with Republican voters. And it was a rather remarkable shift. Pundits did not predict that shift because it “couldn’t happen.”

      Advertisers and political propagandists frequently change people’s opinions and beliefs. Happens all the time.

    • meyerkev248 says:

      Though to be fair, if you’re building *enough* housing, then the new poor people can just inherit the 30-year-old fixer-uppers from the rich people who bought them new. Rich people aren’t living in century-old brownstones because they have a choice, they’re living in century-old brownstones because that’s the only way to get to work in under 90 minutes.

      It’d be like the used car market in that respect. I run 5-10 years behind the guys with BMW’s until the tech trickles down low, and the guys buying my used cars run 5-10 years behind me.

      /Except s/5-10/20-30.

    • Anonymous says:

      The order you put those two things in is odd. Anti-density rules are a much bigger problem than rules about the type of wiring or lumber that can be used in new construction.

    • Psmith says:

      The good news is that both of those are fixable.

      I don’t think this is true, at least in the absence of some mighty aggressive resettlement. Do away with zoning laws and communities will pass them again. Do away with democracy and you’ll have private HOAs with restrictive covenants. Do away with freedom of association and the cure is worse than the disease.

      The Bay Area is zoned for something like 150,000 new units of housing this year. It’s not going to get built, even though the law as written permits it. (And Houston, which has a good deal less zoning than pretty much every other first-world city, still doesn’t build arcologies.).

      • Anonymous says:

        As I understand it Houston doesn’t have zoning per se, but they have equivalents like lot size and parking rules.

  108. Jill says:

    I just read this Moloch thing and it’s fascinating. It occurs to me that there could be a Moloch trap or Moloch excuse. Moloch seems to overlap partially with the Invisible Hand of the Free Market, as Scott mentions.

    FDR could have looked at poor old people and said “Well, the Invisible Hand of the Free Market made them poor, or Moloch made them poor. What can I do about it?” He didn’t do that. He got Social Security started, and now there is tons less poverty among older people in the U.S. than there was before he did that.

    It also occurs to me that a lot of the Invisible Hands of the Free Market, the culture, or the political system are not invisible at all. E.g. most of us can clearly see that our political system needs campaign finance reform– and we know who’s been keeping that from happening. Maybe one day we’ll make that more of a priority than we’ve been making it so far.

    • Anonymous says:

      We have fewer poor old people, but we are also saddled with a program we can never get rid of that transfers enormous amounts of money every year from the less well off to the more well off. I wouldn’t call that a shining successes.

      • Jill says:

        “transfers enormous amounts of money every year from the less well off to the more well off’

        Specifically, what are you referring to here?

        • Nornagest says:

          Probably Social Security. It’s billed as a savings/investment vehicle, but it’s actually structured in terms of transfer payments from workers to retirees, scaled according to the latter’s contributions during their working life. The latter are wealthier on average, though not necessarily wealthier individually.

          On the other hand, that’s equivalent to a savings model in its inputs and outputs unless the system breaks down in certain ways, so whether or not you should care probably depends on how likely you think that is.

          • Jill says:

            Well, income or asset limits on people being eligible to receive Social Security could be implemented, if that’s a concern.

          • Nornagest says:

            It’ll still end up being a regressive transfer below the cutoff, and since it’s been billed as a savings vehicle, you’re going to have a lot of unhappy retirees on your hands above it. They will be wrong, in some sense, but they’re not likely to care.

            There is already a cap on the absolute value of pay that can go into Social Security hands, which is about the least-bad way you can structure a program like this. Its problems really come out of transferring from the young to the old, not from the fact that some of the old happen to also be rich.

          • Anonymous says:

            @Jill
            One could do that, but FDR et al didn’t. The system we have doesn’t deserve the praise you are heaping on it, even if a somewhat different one might.

          • Jill says:

            I do agree that Social Security has its problems that might be dealt with. But there are still a lot fewer impoverished older people because of it. To a non-Libertarian like me– i.e. someone who does not disapprove on principle of every government intervention ever done or possible– that’s a reasonably good outcome.

          • Anonymous says:

            I’m not a libertarian. If I were the regressive nature of social security — on both the tax and spend side — wouldn’t matter much to me. It’s the liberal in me that objects to a program that takes from poorer cohorts to give to richer ones.

    • Urstoff says:

      most of us can clearly see that our political system needs campaign finance reform

      I don’t see that at all. I tend to think that people who think Citizens United was decided incorrectly have never actually read the case or that they simply don’t value freedom of association that much.

    • Winter Shaker says:

      I just read this Moloch thing and it’s fascinating. It occurs to me that there could be a Moloch trap or Moloch excuse.

      The hazing is complete. Welcome in 😛

      But to your point – I think a lot of the idea of that post is that we can and should fight Moloch, it’s just that it’s difficult, requires coordination, and constant maintenance of that coordination, because vast, formless things like that cannot die. But if you conceptualise an abstract, structural problem as if it were a sentient, malevolent agent, it can make it a little easier to motivate people to fight it. You might also enjoy Jai Dhyani’s related blogpost Foes Without Faces, which applies the same idea to other problems.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      Social Security is a transfer program – ie southeast quadrant. It’s basic income for old people. It works, but that doesn’t mean things other than basic income work.

  109. Justin says:

    I was reading through this and as soon as you started to describe the southeast corner, I knew that was my quadrant, though I’m a bit more pessimistic in the sense that I don’t think a basic income is feasible, at least not yet. There are just too many competing considerations.

    1. What level do we set the basic income at? If it is fairly low (say, $7,500) a lot of people will remain in poverty. If we set it very high (say $20,000), a lot of people who could work productively (and who we still need to work for the time being) quit, and yet in places like San Francisco and Manhattan we could conceivably still have people who can’t meet their basic needs.

    2. Do undocumented immigrants receive a basic income? If not, we will likely still see a lot of poverty in that group. If they do, won’t that be a colossal incentive for future waves of illegal immigration (not to mention put the whole basic income program in political peril)?

    3. Do kids receive benefits? If not then certain families might still fall below the poverty line, but if they do, then the cost goes up and there might be an incentive for people to have lots of children to maximize their income grant.

    4. Does the basic income program replace or supplement the existing welfare state? If it replaces it, then benefits will need to be set extraordinarily high so that the people under the existing system aren’t materially worse off. Between Social Security and Medicare, a typical elderly person living alone might receive something like $25,000/yr in government benefits, and a poor mother with 3 kids on Medicaid might well receive a similar amount, but giving all adults $25,000/yr pushes the total cost of the program to an eye watering $6 trillion and runs into the incentive problem discussed earlier. But if (at the very least) the poor, disabled and elderly aren’t taken care of, you’ll never get the political support to get basic income off the ground. Also, individual needs vary greatly (in large part though not exclusively due to medical costs), which can be more easily accommodated through inkind benefits. However, if the basic income is a supplement which leaves the existing welfare state more or less intact, then we still face the issues of a complex welfare state and very high total costs.

    5. What about long term effects? Say I’m 18 and we set the basic income to $18,000/yr. I might rather prefer to get a roommate and play video games and drink beer for a few years rather than go and start college/career. But it’s a lot harder to change one’s direction in life at age 28 after a decade of drifting than to start out on a good path while young. You’ll also have kids who grow up in communities where work just really isn’t a thing, and while they could offer their productivity to society, culturally they won’t be well placed for the working world.

    Now maybe if GDP per capita was twice as high, and employment rates were falling even as GDP was rising, a basic income would make sense. Lately, though, what we’ve seen is the opposite of technological job loss – over the past 6 years we’ve seen high job growth and middling GDP growth, meaning essentially no productivity growth. There might be a day when a basic income makes sense, but somehow I feel it is still at least 10 to 20 years away.

    • meyerkev248 says:

      1) I pay you to go be poor somewhere else, and move in a stockbroker making a quarter mill a year, paying ~6 figures in taxes to cover paying you to be poor somewhere else.

      Keep in mind that that’s what’s happening NOW TODAY in 2016, before we add in a bunch of people barely getting paid enough to not starve (by 21st-century Western standards, which as mentioned are quite high. But it will not be 18 thousand). Rich people force poor people out.

      Alternatively, you can… build more housing.

      2) Hopefully not. You cannot have open borders and a functional welfare state.

      3) Possibly. Feel free to play games with your assumptions here, and what that does to affordability. In practice, probably.

      4) Generally, I see it in the context of largely replaces. I’d want to keep Medicaid around, but other than that… we spend a lot of money on welfare as-is.

      5) The upper-middle class kids will go on to be upper-middle class. This is what they do. The lower-middle-class has already fallen into drugs and decay, and would be pretty boned anyways.

      On the margin? Sure.
      To a degree that matters? Maybe not.

      And even then, as long as you don’t get arrested for anything, you’re probably good. Those UMC kids take gap years. And now you can too.

      5b) Making GDP/capita twice as high might not fix the problem. Positional goods and rising standards of poverty after all.

    • The Nybbler says:

      #4 is a big problem. Most proponents say replace… at which point I laugh. Another set says we’ll pay for it by reducing other spending they don’t like (usually defense), at which point I laugh even harder. I see basic income as just another redistributive program, and when it doesn’t work (the poor will always be with us), there will be calls both to raise it and for more welfare programs to supplement it (won’t someone thing of the children/elderly/ill/handicapped)

  110. Bernd Lauert says:

    This wall of text and not one word of it reads ‘birth control’.
    You are avoiding the elephant in the room, just like everyone else.

    • meyerkev248 says:

      Does birth control matter enough?

      If the endgame here is preventing large numbers of slightly below-average Hispanics from having oodles and oodles of expensive children right in the middle of the Baby Boomer Bubble, kicking 11 Million Hispanics (and any future ones) who average 3 kids apiece out of the country matters. (And below average is actually a problem because the only quintile who net-pay-in are the 5th).

      And yes, it’d be ideal if they could have above-average kids, but in practice, we don’t know how to make that happen.

      Beyond that, if we’re still using these bodies in 2100, something has gone horribly wrong.

      So if they’re having 2.2 kids and the suburban professionals are having 1.8, eh… not really sure it matters to a degree that I care about.

      • Dahlen says:

        And yes, it’d be ideal if they could have above-average kids, but in practice, we don’t know how to make that happen.

        Move to Lake Wobegon. Duh.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      Yes, you’re right. If I put that in, everyone would focus on it and there would be a lot of drama and none of my other points would get through at all.

  111. Dahlen says:

    Random thoughts.

    1) What you call “a competitive view of poverty” is called in academia “conflict theory”, while the “cooperative view” seems to be dubbed “structural functionalism”. Maybe you knew already, maybe not. Just stuff I’ve found out while taking one of my regular wiki walks. Not trying to shame you into using mainstream academic terms or whatever. Not a postmodernist scholar. All other disclaimers apply.

    2) No idea how you come to treat anarcho-capitalism and “Full Communism” as interchangeable manifestations of the southwestern quadrant, because they’re both proposals of radical system change or whatever. I’m not even sure anarcho-capitalists are included in the category of people for whom the graph applies, that of people who have reducing poverty as a priority.

    3) It’s kind of horrendous how half the comment section immediately proceeded to propose various ideas on how to (and not why) sterilize poor people, assume a whole bunch of unflattering things about how poor people are like (lazy, dumb, impulsive, irredeemably flawed, going all the way to all-around yucky, and one extremist commenter even called them “the enemy”), and approach the whole discussion as if they were the overlords of poor people, here to decide their fates. Y’all have a lot of moral blind spots. I know I keep harping on and on about it, but for a bunch of people who is supposed to be scrupulous, well-read in matters of ethics, and interested in topics such as effective altruism, the general display is one of over-the-top, cackling-villain callousness. Seriously. Go outside your bubble, learn some compassion for your fellow man, try to meet some of those unicorns smart conscientious poor people, and maybe in the future refrain from treating their reproductive rights as dismissable and the number of their offspring a mere variable to be decided upon by rulers. Either you do that or your lose your moral license to call anything “authoritarianism” or “tyranny”.

    • Anonymous says:

      Yes, it’s true that the worst of the SSC comments are “kind of horrendous”, and it’s true too that horrendous comments are not few in number.

      But on the other hand, the best of the SSC comments are really excellent (as was Scott Alexander’s original post), and by “really excellent” I mean “these people’s reflections made me smile and helped me think with reason and compassion.”

      Overall, my hopes for humanity have increased. But as a prophylactic measure, I’ve decided to write-in “Al Franken” for (USA) President, on the grounds that Senator Franken would be an assuredly human presidential candidate … perhaps the only one? 🙂

      • houseboatonstyx says:

        /removing duplicate/

      • Dahlen says:

        Okay. What does that have to do with my point?

        • Jill says:

          You made some good points, Dahleen.

          It seems like a large percentage of people here are Ayn Rand hard core Libertarian types. You know– “Selfishness is the greatest virtue.” Scott says that he himself could be described as a Libertarian– but not a hard core one. Hard core Libertarians are not interested in effective (or ineffective) altruism except to rail against it being immoral, as Ayn Rand told them they should.

          Here is a FAQ about hard core Libertarians, which may help you to understand them better. Of course, that doesn’t change the fact that your characterization of their positions is quite accurate.

          http://raikoth.net/libertarian.html

          • The Nybbler says:

            The non-Libertarian FAQ? Oh, that’s too much… you really are running a long troll, right?

          • Jill says:

            Nybbler, this helped me to understand some of the people on this board. I thought it might help Dahlen too, if he/she is not Libertarian. Libertarians are difficult to understand if you are not one.

          • multiheaded says:

            Jill, that FAQ’s author is, in fact, our sometimes-gracious host.

          • Anonymous says:

            Barry Deutsch’s humorous-yet-thoughtfull cartoons on topics like “libertarianism” and “anti-feminism” serve to classify, reasonably accurately, some of the less attractive cognitive traits that are evident in a considerable portion of the SSC commentariat.

            Deutsch’s cartoons are recommended solely to SSC readers who are possessed of at least a moderate sense of humor

            “There,” says he [Twain’s character ‘The Duke’], “if that line don’t fetch them, I don’t know Arkansaw!”

          • Nornagest says:

            If you’re interested in understanding the libertarian-leaning people on this board, you’re better off talking to the libertarian-leaning people on this board. Scott’s Non-Libertarian FAQ is a more sympathetic take than average, but it’s still basically an outsider perspective: anytime you start trying to understand people by talking to their opponents, you’re bound to miss all sorts of important stuff about their assumptions and priorities. It’s perniciously easy to round off to your own worldview, and even a writer as talented and as compassionate as Scott can’t quite avoid this.

            And Barry Deutsch, incidentally, is no Scott.

          • Jill says:

            Thanks, Anonymous. Funny cartoons there.

            Nornagest, I’ve been talking to the Libertarians on this board too. But the viewpoint from someone outside them who knows them well, like Scott, is helpful too. How a group looks from the inside is very different from how it looks on the outside.

            You can’t see something completely clearly if you are inside it.

            Multiheaded, that’s great that our host wrote that. He’s a talented writer & intellectual.

          • Anonymous says:

            But don’t many people find, Nornagest, that as libertarian practices are distilled into broader-and-broader principles, and simpler-and-simpler social narratives, that Barry Deutch’s caricatures seem (to plenty of folks) to become more-and-more accurate?

            Is “empathic libertarianism” a thing? If not, why not? If so, where does it reside? And what are its principles?

          • Nornagest says:

            Though I don’t think libertarian theory or practice is any simpler today than it was in the Seventies, Deutsch’s caricatures do look on point to a lot of people; but that doesn’t make them, or him, right. In any case I think you’re always better off not reading political comics; there are ways to get your humor on that don’t make you dumber and more cruel.

            As to your second question: if you’re just asking if there are people who have empathic reasons for their libertarianism, then the answer is obviously yes. There are a few people who favor policies they don’t think will lead to better lives for most people, but they’re a lot rarer than you’d think from the rhetoric floating around.

            If you’re looking for specific strains of libertarianism with particular emphasis on empathy, the answer is still yes: “bleeding-heart libertarian” is a good search term to start with.

          • Anonymous says:

            Thank you, Nornagest: the website Bleeding Heart Libertarians provides plenty of well-considered empathy-relevant material.

            As yet, there’s not much material there relating to medical issues — where transformational changes are underway (as its seems to me) — but hey, give these bleeding heart folks time!

            Also, the sobriquet “bleeding heart libertarian” is irrationally self-deprecating, isn’t it? A more vigorous, historically grounded, foreward-looking slogan would be “Say it loud!  We’re empathic libertarians, and we’re proud!” 🙂

          • Jill says:

            Nornagest, that is a problem with political comics– that they are often only funny to people of the particular in group.

            Wow, I didn’t know there were bleeding heart Libertarians. Interesting. Thanks for that info, Nornagest, and for the web sites, Anonymous.

          • Randy M says:

            Star Slate Codex commenters might consider whether there is some utility in “owning-insult.” Perhaps there is some cache in the phrase which will psychologically strengthen their cause?

            Perhaps even to overcome the machinations of their more empathy-deprived brethren such as paleocons and libertarians? One can hope!

          • Anonymous says:

            Jill observes (correctly) “That is a problem with political comics — that they are often only funny to people of the particular in-group.”

            At their best, Barry Deutsch’s works seek to expand the “in-group” to include everyone (see for example Deutsch’s recent meditation on the subject of “Neckbeards“).

            That is why, in the event that “empathic / bleeding-heart libertarianism” gathers strength as a coherent philosophy / social movement, it would be unsurprising (to me at least) for self-proclaimed “lefties” like Deutsch to make common-cause with them. This would be fun! 🙂

            And thank you again, Nornagest, for a really good comment.

          • Jill says:

            Yes, I do hope that empathic Libertarianism expands. A lot of groups would find common cause with them.

            I do think that responsibility is an important issue too, and I understand why people have concerns about it. We don’t want to reward people for being irresponsible. OTOH, we don’t want to be so obsessed with responsibility that we’re thinking it’s a big issue where it isn’t e.g. passing voter ID laws to stop voter fraud that is so infrequent an occurrence that it’s almost non-existent.

            I hope to see more place for pragmatism and for evaluation of the facts of various situations without trying to force them into a certain ideological framework.

          • Nornagest says:

            @Randy — I see what you’re doing there. 95% that you’re right, and now I feel kind of dumb for not picking up on it earlier. The empathy thing should have been a tell.

          • Winter Shaker says:

            Jill:

            Wow, I didn’t know there were bleeding heart Libertarians.

            I don’t know if you are systematically binge-reading the archives here, in which case you’ll come across this eventually anyway, but you might be interested to read our host’s own endorsement of that sort of political philosophy.

    • Nita says:

      I think the scrupulous folks and the sterilization-happy folks are two distinct groups. (Also, some of us are neither.)

      But, yeah. Some commenters here have remarked that poor people in the USA can have a better quality of life than medieval kings, implying that the only problem left is irrational status envy. Not sure how irrational it is when apparently being low-status means that people treat your existence as a problem to be solved.

    • Sir Gawain says:

      3) It’s kind of horrendous how half the comment section immediately proceeded to propose various ideas on how to (and not why) sterilize poor people, assume a whole bunch of unflattering things about how poor people are like (lazy, dumb, impulsive, irredeemably flawed, going all the way to all-around yucky, and one extremist commenter even called them “the enemy”), and approach the whole discussion as if they were the overlords of poor people, here to decide their fates.

      Not defending this view, so much as playing devil’s advocate, but I think what a proponent of it might say is that:

      1) As long as we live in a society with a tax-funded social safety net, the people paying more in taxes than they consume in benefits have some non-zero legitimate interest in the traits and behavior of those who consume more in benefits than they pay in taxes. This is of course not an absolute interest, but nonetheless one that can be reasonably balanced against others (including the moral obligations society has towards the recipients of public benefits.)

      2) It is reasonable for citizens concerned about the future of our society to examine the composition of the future population of that society. (Demography is destiny.) The fact that, globally and domestically, the poorest, least educated, most violent, etc. regions are expanding in population at a considerably faster rate than the wealthiest, most educated, least violent etc. regions is quite potentially a cause for concern. If I were a European, I’d be real concerned about the possibility that the Middle East/North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa will have >replacement fertility rates for the next few decades while most West/North European countries have <replacement ones. Imagine a migrant crisis with 2-4x as many migrants as today in 2050.

      • Anonymous says:

        Isn’t it objectively true, that in pretty much any society, at pretty much all all social levels, more than one-half of the children descent from less than one-quarter of the women and men? So aren’t genetic selection mechanisms — which of course are biologically necessary — already humanely and effectively well-accounted?

        Rationally speaking, isn’t it good policy to ensure that globally there’s plenty of intermarriage across all races and all cultures, so as to ensure that women and men have plenty of partner-choice? And isn’t a crucial bonus of this genetic mixing, that the concomitant societal mixing substantially diminishes the incentives to warfare?

        With intermarriage rates increasing monotonically, isn’t it evident that humanity is entering a golden era of highly efficient genetic selection from the largest feasible genetic pool? And thanks to widspread immigration and intermarriage, aren’t the next 2000 years of human social and genetic evolution likely to prove even more vital than the last 2,000 years?

        Rationally and scientifically — and practically and morally too — aren’t SSC readers well-placed to contribute to humanity’s emerging reproductive utopia, by dating and marrying across the broadest range of partners feasible?

        From a rational perspective, aren’t the common-sense answers to these questions simply “yes”? And in the romantic words of James T. Kirk: doesn’t maximal social interchange, cross-cultural dating, and intermarriage “sound like fun“? 🙂

        • Sir Gawain says:

          Isn’t it true, that in pretty much any society, at pretty much all all social levels, more than one-half of the children descent from less than one-quarter of the women and men? So aren’t genetic selection pressures — which of course are biologically necessary — already humanely well-accounted?

          I don’t claim to know enough about genetics to evaluate the second sentence, and I’ll take your word for the truth of the first sentence. But my (devil’s advocate) argument wasn’t about the origins of behavioral differences across populations (which I personally suspect are largely the result of differences in socialization and political institutions). As long as those differences still exist in 2050, which doesn’t seem terribly unlikely, they’re important objects of policy and study. (Though I agree that genetics intersects with these questions in really important ways.)

          Rationally speaking, it is good policy to ensure that globally there’s plenty of intermarriage across all races and all cultures, so as to ensure that women and men have plenty of partner-choice. And isn’t a crucial bonus of this genetic mixing, that the concomitant societal mixing substantially diminishes the incentives to warfare?

          Sure, though it seems to me intermarriage follows rather than causes assimilation (due to assortative mating). The significance being that policy to equalize group outcomes seems more likely to lead to intermarriage than vice versa. Also, I don’t think it’s unreasonable for people to want their children to have certain physical features, as long as they do that voluntarily without lobbying for use of state coercion.

          With intermarriage rates increasing monotonically, isn’t it evident that humanity is entering a golden era of highly efficient genetic selection from the largest feasible genetic pool?

          Are intermarriage rates really increasing? Here’s Tyler Cowen on the subject: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/27/upshot/marriages-of-power-couples-reinforce-income-inequality.html

          It seems like, on the contrary, marriage (like other aspects of American social life) is becoming more and more stratified by class/IQ/education. (Which is related to the problem I described in the original comment.)

          Rationally and scientifically speaking — as well as practically and morally speaking too — aren’t SSC readers well-placed to contribute to humanity’s emerging reproductive utopia, by dating and marrying across the broadest range of partners feasible?

          It seems like the kind of people who read SSC are the kind of people who will marry high-IQ, well educated, >=middle class, people from a small set of European, Anglosphere or East Asian countries. As opposed to, say, marrying poor subsistence farmers from Sub-Saharan Africa. Given the relevant geographic, cultural, linguistic, economic, educational, etc. differences, I’m not sure how much opprobrium one can really attach to that.

          I think it’s really, really important to improve the lot of the global poor (and disadvantaged groups within industrialized societies), but I think the solution is going to be a lot more complex than encouraging intermarriage.

          • Anonymous says:

            To the degree that a sensor of humor is heritable, and intermarriage requires a sense of humor, shouldn’t that count that as one more reason — an exceptionally good reason — to encourage intermarriage?

            Because wouldn’t more abundant, more effective, more empathic expressions of good humor be welcomed by many, both broadly in global societies, and specifically here on SSC, and especially among marriage-minded folks?

            Folks who imagine that the practice of humor is trivial or easy, are invited to leaven both their SSC comments and their dating / marital / parenting practices with it! 🙂

          • Sir Gawain says:

            I’ll have you know that my sense of humor was surgically removed as a child :^)

          • Anonymous says:

            Sir Gawain says “The kind of people who read SSC are the kind of people who [don’t marry] poor subsistence farmers from Sub-Saharan Africa.”

            Well, there’s your problem right there!

          • Sir Gawain says:

            Breaking news!!! Must credit SSC comments section!!! Man bites dog!!!

          • Anonymous says:

            SSC receives credit (from me) for exposing its readers to the hermetic bubble of quasi-rational paleoconservative cognition (e.g., the Unz Review, VDARE, American Conservative, etc.) Many folks don’t even realize that these forums exist, do they?

            Perhaps this paleoisolation arises of cognitive necessity? In that the paleocommunity doesn’t have answers — rational or otherwise — to the empathy-centric “James T Kirk” points raised above, do they? Points that for many folks are plain common sense?

            Because human reproductive preferences value empathy highly, it’s unsurprising — isn’t it? — that paleoconservative cognition is (apparently) slated for slow cultural and even slower genomic extinction by evolutionary antiselection?

            Don’t the global exchange of ideas via the internet, and the global exchange of genes by immigration and intermarriage, act as ratchets that are inexorably strengthening antipaleoselection?

            Isn’t Trumpism driven, very largely, by a desire to deny these (scary) social and cognitive realities?

            So doesn’t the paleoblogosphere amount to an isolated social and cognitive ecosystem, in which endangered paleocommunities are taking refuge, from a world that decreasingly values paleocognition?

          • Randy M says:

            This anon does an excellent John Sidles impersonation.

          • Anonymous says:

            Needs more boldface.

          • hlynkacg says:

            Need’s more random text formatting, and off-topic linking. I give him 3.5/5

    • Corey says:

      This particular “marketplace of ideas” is more open than most, and I think it’s a net positive. The eugenicists / racialists / Randians / etc. here tend to know their assumptions, and argue in good faith, which I think is better than the more-typical responses of just talking past each other or chasing such people away.

      There are also lots of people, I think, who believe rationality is incompatible with empathy.

      • Urstoff says:

        I agree. I’d rather have a big tent than a slow slide into ossified dogma.

      • multiheaded says:

        I can like the (relative[1]) openness as such without having to smile and nod and let slide any particular awful/evil thing here.

        [1] any straight-up Maoists here, ever? Even once? Not half-hearted revisionists like me, or even bolder ones like Oligopsony, but at a rate at least 1/10th that of the n*r*ct*n*ries/alt-r*ght? Okay, don’t bother answering, but observe your reaction of contempt/incredulity.

        • suntzuanime says:

          Finding a straight-up Maoist would be like finding a straight-up Nazi. The http://pastebin.com/kfFYyQXF (who I’ll note have mostly been purged from this comments section in favor of tedious libertarians) are much more analogous to your sort of commie, the sort of commie who recognizes that the worst atrocities probably weren’t a good idea and wants to get the valuable parts of the ideology without dipping over into crazy-town.

          Honestly I think you have beef with the tedious libertarians more than the actual http://pastebin.com/kfFYyQXF. The orthodox http://pastebin.com/QAEdnYwK position is that the US government has an obligation to care for the poor; it’s part of Moldbug’s formalist analysis of the US.

        • Jill says:

          I think Maoists in the U.S. exist mainly in certain people’s imaginations, as straw men to argue against. Have you actually ever met one?

          • uxp100 says:

            Are RevComs straight up Maoists? I think they at least say Mao was right for China, even if for the US to embrace communism, they will have to be open to US style freedom of speech (except slander of Bob Avakian of course) for one example. But I’m really not sure of the details of their beliefs.

            Cause I run into them flyering now and then.

          • Nornagest says:

            Are we talking orthodox Maoists, in the sense of their ideas having a tangible close relationship to the Chairman’s, or would you be cool with anyone that calls themselves Maoist? Because I’ve met the latter (in academia, and in urban activist circles).

            It’s almost a shame; Mao was clearly a bright guy, and he — at least in his earlier phase — had a degree of self-awareness that I don’t usually associate with revolutionaries. Of course, there is that killing-forty-million-people thing.

        • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

          any straight-up Maoists here, ever?

          As far as the internet goes, most of them are smug assholes that don’t want anything to do with >us.

          Even if they did, they’d probably get banned for acting like smug assholes, so there’s that. If you have some to recommend, I’m sure people here would be more than glad to have them around.

          • multiheaded says:

            “As far as the internet goes, most of them are smug assholes that don’t want anything to do with >us.”

            I have met quite a few on facebook. This describes them well, but they also could argue semi-respectfully among themselves/bring up interesting points/generally were above the bar for “worthwhile contrarianism” that this comment section sets for the far right. I couldn’t stand most of them, mind; I’m just pointing out how skewed SSC ~contrarianism~ really is.

        • Dahlen says:

          But Multi, it’s statistically improbable for there to be Maoists on SSC; maybe the hardcore lefties identify as something else! The left is very ideologically diverse.

          • Jill says:

            Maybe everyone to the Left of Attila the Hun seems Maoist to extreme Right Wingers. Wherever you are standing yourself makes a difference.

          • Nornagest says:

            If someone’s right-wing enough to have that kind of perspective and unsophisticated enough to actually do it, they won’t distinguish between Maoism and other flavors of far leftism. They may still call stuff Maoist, but they’ll also call it Stalinist and whatever else sounds bad to them.

            Not that it matters, since no one here has actually claimed to find Maoists in these comments.

          • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

            I don’t think “extreme right wingers” (another really diverse group, by the way) make a distinction between Maoists and other kind of commies.

            EDIT: Ninja’d

          • Jill says:

            My point is that Extreme Right Wingers make no distinction between Maoists and people who are slightly Left of Center.

          • Nornagest says:

            Where are you going with this?

          • Anonymous says:

            My point is that Extreme Right Wingers make no distinction between Maoists and people who are slightly Left of Center.

            Example? Pretty sure I’ve seen far-right-authored cladistics of the left that didn’t imply homogeneity.

          • “My point is that Extreme Right Wingers make no distinction between Maoists and people who are slightly Left of Center.”

            Does anarcho-capitalist qualify as extreme right wing? I not only distinguish Maoists, I’ve argued with Maoists (long ago in college).

            It looks to me as though you are taking the most unreasonable people you can find who hold a position (Randian for one example, “extreme right wing” for another) and then projecting them onto everyone with that position. There are unreasonable people in pretty nearly every part of the political spectrum.

            I was earlier struck by the fact that you express general statements about libertarians, but were sufficiently unfamiliar with the movement not to know that Bleeding Heart Libertarians existed–and have been part of a live controversy for a while. See, for example, a Cato Unbound discussion from a few years back.

    • Randy M says:

      As perhaps the author of some of those posts you are referring to, I’d like to point out that saying “If you do X, you may need to do Y as well” is not an endorsement of either.

    • houseboatonstyx says:

      @ Dahlen
      3) It’s kind of horrendous how half the comment section immediately proceeded to propose various ideas on how to (and not why) sterilize poor people

      I wish we could taboo the word ‘sterilize’ — because it suggests permanence. Even vasectomy can usually be reversed. Female long-term contraception does wear off after some months (or possibly a few years), or most forms can be removed upon request.

      • keranih says:

        Even vasectomy can usually be reversed.

        Vasectomies done more than 10 years later (say, perhaps, at age 26 after a procedure at 16 years old) result in a pregnancy less than 30% of the time. Vasectomy is a permanent sterilization technique and saying otherwise does not match the data.

        Female long-term contraception does wear off after some months (or possibly a few years), or most forms can be removed upon request.

        Norplant’s effectiveness was generally beyond 5 years, and involved a painful outpatient procedure to reverse. Which is why it is off the market.

        Again, as previously mentioned, women are designed to have kids in teens and twenties. Delaying this increases the health risk to both mother and child. If we are deliberately putting those decades off limits for childbearing, we need to acknowledge this.

        • houseboatonstyxb says:

          @ Keranih

          I’ll try to dig out my cites from previous threads and put them all somewhere handy (like my own LJ). In the meantime, could you please somewhat clarify your overall position, which is apparently two-era, now vs decade/s later?

          I don’t think you want 16 year old low income girls having babies now. For a low income girl today (probably unmarried), what would you think is a good age? And how many babies do you want her to have, spaced how far apart?

          For the future decade when you would want them to start at 16 (or at what age?), what social and economic changes would be necessary between now and then to make that comfortable?

          • keranih says:

            @houseboatonstyx –

            I’m going to answer your specific questions, because I’m not sure what you mean by “clarify my overall position.”

            I don’t think you want 16 year old low income girls having babies now.

            With the exception of the top of the top of the 1%, all 16 year olds are low income. I think you mean the daughters of poor people, and I think they – and all humans – should not have kids until they are married, and I think that if they get pregnant they should marry.

            I think that we have attempted to separate sex from reproduction, which is akin to separating speaking from breathing, and to separate sex from marriage. The result has been to separate reproduction from marriage, which I think more and more people are seeing as Not Great.

            It’s part of the conflict between short term and long term payoffs, and between individual good outcomes and social good outcomes. I think part of the path to finding an acceptable solution will be to acknowledge that we do have to make trade-offs.

          • houseboatonstyxb says:

            In haste, going out.

            all humans – should not have kids until they are married, and I think that if they get pregnant they should marry.

            Right now … if two 16 year olds get married, how does this make them able to support a baby?

            (Aside from getting higher on Deiseach’s housing list etc.) If subsiding unwed teen babies is bad, is subsidising married teen babies okay? When I hear ‘get married’, sure it calls a picture of the old idea that marriage means a house with a picket fence to carry the bride across and the groom having a good job to support a family with. But that’s not real life now — unless they’ve waited till they’ve earned the house and job, by which time they’re no longer teens, and have missed your ideal health window for babies.

          • Randy M says:

            Having a married couple raising a child is dramatically better than doing so alone, all other things being equal.
            Having children younger (than the current norm of late 20’s to early 40’s) brings numerous advantages, all other things being equal.
            However, due to things like technological progress, increased labor competition (including the 2/4/5/6 years of college required signalling spiral that came with those), increased isolation, and increased consumer aspirations, there isn’t a lot of chance for a young man to support a family.

            Presumably someone with Keranih’s position will want to reverse some of those trends as well. In the meantime (or even then) it’s all about trade-offs and individual optimums.

          • John Schilling says:

            Right now … if two 16 year olds get married, how does this make them able to support a baby?

            It enables them to (probably) apply a full-time caregiver and a full-time minimum wage paycheck to the task, doubles the number of grandparents who can be hit up for assistance, and makes the whole enterprise somewhat more sympathetic to charitably-minded outsiders.

            This is probably enough to support a baby to minimally acceptable standards. Barely. It is certainly much better than trying to do the job with half the resources. Under almost all circumstances not involving e.g. the father being a rapist, the child’s outlook is much better if the parents are married. What have you got against that, to counter keranih’s traditional “now get married already” prescription?

          • Anonymous says:

            How about abortion. Not-father and not-mother move on with their lives, go to college, have careers, marry other people in their late 20s and have a kids in their early 30s. Sure the resulting kids might not be as “healthy” as the aborted one would have been but they are their parents will have better, more fuffiling lives. But maybe keranih doesn’t care about that.

          • houseboatonstyxb says:

            @ John Schilling
            >>Right now … if two 16 year olds get married, how does this make them able to support a baby?

            >It enables them to (probably) apply a full-time caregiver and a full-time minimum wage paycheck to the task,

            Why? How does this suddenly give him a job? A job that can support three?

            > doubles the number of grandparents who can be hit up for assistance,

            Depends on how the grandparents feel and how much money they have. Some grandparents do not like the prospect of supporting teenage school drop out parents indefinitely. (And/or would not want them to be parents at all.)

            > and makes the whole enterprise somewhat more sympathetic to charitably-minded outsiders.

            How much more? Which outsiders? ‘Single mom’ draws default sympathy that ‘kid who got his girlfriend pregnant’ does not. “She’s got a husband, let him take care of her.”

            >What have you got against that, to counter keranih’s traditional “now get married already” prescription?

            The responsible thing: abort or adopt. Better: use contraceptives.

          • houseboatonstyxb says:

            @ Anonymous
            cc: Keranih

            How about abortion. Not-father and not-mother move on with their lives, go to college, have careers, marry other people in their late 20s and have a kids in their early 30s.

            Or adoption. Have the baby, then sell/give it to some woman in her 30s who has got her life together ready for a baby, and would like a more healthy one, that she doesn’t have to produce herself.

            Goto: Not-father and not-mother move on with their lives, go to college, have careers … and when ready, adopt some other teen mother’s healthy baby.

            Win/win/win, win/win/win.

          • John Schilling says:

            Or adoption. Have the baby, then sell/give it to some woman in her 30s who has got her life together ready for a baby, and would like a more healthy one, that she doesn’t have to produce herself…. win/win/win

            That turns out to have been the usual practice for about thirty years. Turns out it was more often lose/win/win, or even lose/lose/win, on account of human brains not actually being wired to treat babies and parental love as fungible commodities.

            But it’s definitely a winner if you’re a middle-aged woman who ran out the biological clock building your career, or a moralist who’d rather lecture pregnant teenagers than actually help them.

          • John Schilling says:

            Why? How does this suddenly give him a job? A job that can support three?

            I did say “probably”. But I believe most teenagers can swing a minimum-wage job if they need to, and minimum wage can in most places be stretched to support three people at social-services-won’t-take-the-baby levels.

            More generally, this specific teenage boy can clearly afford dinner and a movie or the local equivalent. Whatever revenue stream is keeping him somewhere above starvation poor, can be added to the household that includes his baby. Economies of scale suggest that this will almost always be an improvement for the baby, and likely for the father.

            Depends on how the grandparents feel and how much money they have. Some grandparents do not like the prospect of supporting teenage school drop out parents indefinitely

            Hence the phrasing, “can be hit up for assistance”, rather than “will reliably provide assistance”. But the paternal grandparents are almost always going to be relatively more generous to their legitimate grandchild, than to their son’s ex-girlfriend’s baby.

            The claim isn’t so much that marriage is a guaranteed happy ending, than that it is an improvement. And if the child isn’t going to be aborted or put up for adoption – which might happen but which anyone around here certainly ought to understand can’t be counted on – then marriage almost always increases the support available for the mother and child.

            The exceptions are mostly cases where marriage should be rendered moot by e.g. the father’s being locked up for rape or abuse before the child is even born.

          • Anonymous says:

            Turns out it was more often lose/win/win, or even lose/lose/win,

            Care to quantify, or at least substantiate, this?

            The claim isn’t so much that marriage is a guaranteed happy ending, than that it is an improvement. And if the child isn’t going to be aborted or put up for adoption – which might happen but which anyone around here certainly ought to understand can’t be counted on – then marriage almost always increases the support available for the mother and child.

            The question isn’t what the second or third best choice is. We have someone advocating that the best choice is early marriage and reproduction.

          • Nita says:

            a moralist who’d rather lecture pregnant teenagers than actually help them

            Wait, what’s the substantial difference between “give it up for adoption” lecturing and “marry that unemployed teenage boy” lecturing?

          • Anonymous says:

            Or “this one centimeter in diameter fetus is a baby with a soul, you despicable murderer”?

        • Tracy W says:

          If women are ‘designed’ to have kids in their teens and twenties, why does menopause kick in in our forties?

          • Anonymous says:

            Having 10 children was considered normal in the past.

            10/(40-20), one child per two years, sounds about right.

          • Anonymous says:

            @Tracy

            Childbearing delays menopause. If a woman has a kid every one or two years, then supposing she doesn’t die to some freak pregnancy complication, she might well continue to have children in her fifties.

            Additionally, historically, a middle-aged woman had a good chance of dying due to a pregnancy (hell, even young mothers did). It was probably only of very marginal fitness that menopause came very late (since those women probably wouldn’t survive more kids anyway).

    • Scott Alexander says:

      I have the opposite experience from you. It’s easy to cheer on “reproductive rights” in the abstract. But I do some free clinic work in inner city Detroit, and I’m constantly talking to people who – well, last week I met somebody whose father tried to kill her and her entire family when she was like five, and then ended up in a mental hospital for his entire life, and this had been super predictable ever since the father was a teenager because he’d always been doing this sort of thing. I’ve talked to people who were beaten every single day of their childhood, whose parents set them on fire, whose parents had nine or ten kids, never took care of any of them, just kept popping out kids and leaving them alone to rot until Child Protective Services would take each one away in turn. And if you think reproductive rights are more important than basic human compassion, I want you to look all of these people in the eye and tell them so.

      Obviously this is really different than “sterilize all the poor right now”, but I blame the sort of people who start calling “Nazi” if anyone even discusses how some people shouldn’t be having children for all of the horrible stories of child abuse I have to listen to every day. And I have a really low threshold for being willing to put up with this kind of thing. I’d be willing to give out a lot of free birth control to prevent one childhood of constant daily sexual abuse.

      • keranih says:

        And if you think reproductive rights are more important than basic human compassion, I want you to look all of these people in the eye and tell them so.

        Eh. I think this is getting back into positive vs negative rights. And I don’t think you’d find many people who said that children should be abused. Just that solution XYZ to children being abused is going to lead to worse consequences.

        I’d be willing to give out a lot of free birth control to prevent one childhood of constant daily sexual abuse.

        …including that you give to a girl, whose father is making her go on the pill, so she won’t get pregnant from him?

        And yes, that is an extreme edge case, but we’ve already gone in depths over how lack of “free birth control” isn’t the issue stopping people we don’t want to have babies from having babies. They’re all edge cases.

        If we really want “low income 16 year old girls” from having babies – and their 26 year old sisters as well – we’ll have to take stronger steps. And that’s not a tool I want in my government’s hands.

        • drethelin says:

          To answer your rhetorical question, YES OBVIOUSLY. That situation is NOT made better by her having kids.

      • Nita says:

        That sounds like a case for sterilizing shitty parents. Or, alternatively, sterilizing everyone and de-sterilizing potentially good parents. But first you’ll have to convince a lot of people that beating children is wrong.

        IMO, the same ‘we feed them, we own them’ attitude seems to underlie both some of the ‘poor people management’ proposals and some of the bad parenting practices.

      • Jill says:

        Well, at the very least, people who want access to birth control should have access. Many states are going backwards in this area, which is unconscionable.

        • keranih says:

          Many states are going backwards in this area, which is unconscionable.

          Examples, please, of how some states are making it illegal to buy or sell OTC birth control.

          • Jill says:

            Many states are shutting down women’s clinics all over the place.

          • keranih says:

            Yes, Jill, the number of abortion clinics is falling across the USA, including places like California, New York State, and Mass. The primary driver appears to be lack of demand.

            This is related to being able to buy or sell a $9 pack of birth control pills how?

          • John Schilling says:

            Many (well, some) states are shutting down women’s abortion clinics. If those clinics happen to also sell contraceptives, I don’t see anyone stopping them from staying open as pure contraceptive suppliers.

            If Joe-Bob’s Self-Defense Emporium offers martial arts training, pepper spray, and belt-fed heavy machine guns, lots of states states are going to shut them down, and if they don’t the BATF is going to take a very close look at the paperwork and probably still shut them down. This does not mean that they are engaged in an unconscionable effort to deny people the means of self-defense and leave them at the mercy of violent criminals, and it would be disingenuous to claim so.

            Around here we call that a Motte-and-Bailey argument. The highly defensible Motte: “Everyone has the right to contraception and/or self-defense”, nobody argues with that. The weak Bailey: “We want abortion on demand and/or machine guns for everyone”; lots of good, decent, intelligent people are going to mobilize against you. If you shift between the two positions faster than they can pin you down, that’s an effective debating tactic.

            One that usually doesn’t work here.

          • Jill says:

            Sometimes the teenage girl did not forsee that she was going to be raped and so did not go out and buy birth control ahead of time.

            And how many states have OTC birth control pills available? One or two?

          • John Schilling says:

            Sometimes the teenage girl did not forsee that she was going to be raped and so did not go out and buy birth control ahead of time.

            That is a very good argument for making abortion readily available, at least to rape victims. One that most people agree with, including myself.

            It does not make it any less dishonest to point to the people shutting down abortion clinics because of the abortions (however motivated), and denounce them for “denying access to birth control”. If the NRA denounced restrictions on private ownership of belt-fed heavy machine guns as “denying the right of self-defense”, would you not see that as slightly dishonest?

          • Jill says:

            Your OTC birth control pills do not even exist except in a very few states. And shutting down clinics deprives women of inexpensive medical assistance and advice that they would otherwise have.

          • John Schilling says:

            And shutting down clinics deprives women of inexpensive medical assistance and advice that they would otherwise have

            Which is not the same thing as depriving them of birth control, as “birth control” and “inexpensive medical assistance” are not synonyms. Any more evasions you’d like to try?

      • Dahlen says:

        I understand where you’re coming from. But… these are two discussions that very nearly run parallel to each other, only intersecting insofar as we can all agree that such parents, whatever their income levels, are very shitty people who must be prevented from causing further damage to any actual or hypothetical children. The range of people whose fertility must be lowered from the point of view of many of the folks here is much wider than people who abuse their children. There’s this mentality going around that “poor”, “low-IQ”, “unproductive”, “lacking in conscientiousness”, “all-around inferior human being” can be treated as interchangeable for the purposes of this discussion, and the natural conclusion is that we should give basic income or welfare in exchange for wombs or something. Only a fraction of these people, in the actual world, are that terrible to those around them.

        Typically, the Child Protection Services are there to help however they can in such cases without anybody calling “Nazi”. The really dark implications start coming in once people start suspecting that those who are now victims of their parents are genetically fated/predisposed to become, in turn, aggressors of their children, and that they were better off not existing for non-sympathetic as well as sympathetic reasons. Maybe there’s a point in there. Maybe not. In any case, it should not be associated this tightly with the problem of poverty in people’s minds, because they aren’t this tightly associated in real life, and to mistake this is to open the door to all sorts of shady assumptions about people who already have it pretty hard. Even from around here, I know what inner city Detroit means, I can imagine the horribleness of the cases you’ve seen, but this is not the main face of poverty by a long shot. The situation you’re presenting is the motte to hardline eugenicists’ bailey, and, for anyone who was paying attention, not what I was arguing against.

        What I see here, instead, is people having a rudimentary understanding of the link between poverty and IQ, between parents’ and children’s IQ, between IQ and criminality, between average population IQ and GDP, between IQ and, well, virtue; an even worse understanding of variability and genetic recombination, and how sometimes unexceptional parents can have bright children; and a lack of sympathy for what it’s like to be subject to population control policies, on grounds as shoddy as being poor and/or lower-class. And putting all of it together in policies that sound a lot like the top-down version of class warfare.

        If you were expecting someone who holds reproductive rights as paramount, above any other consideration however humane, sorry to disappoint. But I do think that reproductive rights have primacy over policy goals in the particular situation of whether to attempt to solve poverty by decreeing the next generation of poor people out of existence.

        As for the situation you’re talking about, I can’t claim to know of any good solution out of it. There’s no sort of authority out there for handing out free parenting lessons to potential future parents, for nipping such cases of abuse in the bud, for forbidding marriage and reproduction between people who can’t even be responsible for themselves. And I can’t think of any such thing that wouldn’t be Orwellian. Maybe a church of sorts, but this is the wrong era for that.

        • Jill says:

          Free access to voluntary birth control for people who don’t want to have kids would be good, and not Orwellian at all.

          • Randy M says:

            Jill, did you take away anything from the recent discussions at you regarding whether the poor actually want children (they often do, even in difficult circumstances) and how this therefore may not have a significant impact on poverty or abuse?

          • Dahlen says:

            It’s not that easy. Birth control pills require some degree of conscientiousness to take, can be rendered ineffective by vomiting or diarrhea through lack of absorption (which is not so fun given that they induce nausea), and may or may not interact with or be inactivated by some other medications (don’t remember), not to mention unrelated unpleasantries such as increased risk of thrombosis, and lowered sex drive as a common side-effect (in an ironic twist of fate), which may put some women off the idea of using them. Condom use requires the compliance of the male partner (who’s not always on board with the idea and would rather just… outsource the risk of pregnancy). Other methods require surgical interventions. Etc.

            Yes, in theory it’s nice and easy, free birth control for anyone who wants it, but there’s a whole chunk of people who don’t follow through with that, and who rely on abortions as their primary method of birth control.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            Would we see differences if birth-control was opt-out?

            Say in 100 years every baby gets an injection rendering them sterile, but when they want to have kids each parent goes to a doctor for a quick un-sterile pill. (If you want to derail by saying your political and cultural enemies would hate this, please stop.)

          • brad says:

            Certainly we’d see different outcomes from opt-in vs opt-out. I’d be hard pressed to think of any human activity that is so inelastic that you wouldn’t see differences. Heck even breathing is opt-out.

        • Jill says:

          If it wouldn’t have any significant impact, then I don’t see why so many states have recently rushed to shut down family planning clinics.

          And at least it’s a start– to have access to family planning if a family desires it. We’re going backward there.

          Another issue is that poorer less educated people do want to have more kids. And when they become less poor and more educated they have fewer kids. So why not also help them to become less poor and more educated? That could be an added benefit to assistance to the poor.

          • Randy M says:

            If it wouldn’t have any significant impact, then I don’t see why so many states have recently rushed to shut down family planning clinics.

            As it is arranged, your reply indicates you believe that your political opponents are intentionally optimizing for poverty and abuse.

            Is this an honest if quite naive failure of modeling, or a rhetorical device?

          • Jill says:

            No failure here. It’s just the case that poor ignorant people are easy to persuade to vote GOP. Why wouldn’t Fox News, Right Wing radio networks etc. want to keep people “barefoot and pregnant?” The GOP thrives on a culture of crisis and ignorance.

            Books have been written about this. Here is one, which discusses, among other topics, the Right Wing child psychologist who advises parents to hit their kids. He is so popular that he has his own zip code. The subtitle of the book was erroneous. It didn’t shatter the party. It shattered the nation.

            Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party Paperback – July 13, 2010
            by Max Blumenthal

            http://www.amazon.com/Republican-Gomorrah-Inside-Movement-Shattered/dp/1568584172/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1464306471&sr=8-1&keywords=Republican+Gomorrah

          • Corey says:

            I actually think the shutdowns are simpler to explain: people who actually believe abortion is murder are gaining political power. E.g. Todd “legitimate rape” Akin is part of the transition from anti-abortion-as-punishment-for-sex to actually-anti-abortion.

            Also, improvements in IUD technology (and, in the US, coverage for them, thanks Obama) are actually proving effective (there are other explanations/reasons for the big plunge in teen births, and it’s not clear which are correct)

          • Jiro says:

            “Legitimate rape” in context means “something that really is rape”. It does not mean “rape is okay”. Granted, he was still speaking nonsense even considering this, but this is a classic example of a quote out of context that gets spread because it confirms what the blues think about the reds.

          • Nita says:

            @ Jiro

            No one claimed that he meant “rape is okay”. “Legitimate rape” is just a shorthand phrase to refer to the incident. On the other hand, there’s something of a history of people saying unfortunate things from a position of ignorance while using euphemisms for “really rape” — e.g., Whoopi Goldberg’s “rape-rape” moment.

          • Corey says:

            @Jiro, @Nira: I don’t focus on the distinction between “legitimate” and “other” rape, sorry for the distraction, I just mentioned it because that’s why he’s famous.

            AFAIK Akin’s properly-contextualized position was that pregnancies by rape are rare to nonexistent (not actually true), so we need not allow rape victims to abort their babies. This brings his position (for the “wrong” reasons) into line with that of people who actually believe abortion is murder.

            Historically, anti-abortion activism in the US focused on ideas consistent with punishing sexual availability rather than protecting fetuses as persons. The best example of this was widespread support for allowing abortion in cases of rape/incest. On one hand nobody wants to force a woman to have a biological reminder of her rape and contact with the rapist (via parental rights). On the other hand, those are significantly lesser sins than murder, and if abortion is murder, the circumstances of the conception don’t make it less murder-y.

            My bigger point is that anti-abortion activism is shifting more towards total outright bans (or at least as close as one can get given SCOTUS precedent) and my theory is that, because yesterday’s voting base are tomorrow’s politicians, we’re actually seeing politicians who take the “abortion=murder” position to heart.

          • Randy M says:

            The best example of this was widespread support for allowing abortion in cases of rape/incest.

            Do you think this is an ideological or tactical change? Is it a result of a change in assumptions, or of a working out of inconsistencies that were there all along?

            From my perspective, pro-lifers have always been rather conflicted about the edge cases.

            For another angle on the question of whether they actually believe that abortion is murder, look at the reaction to Trump suggesting that the ex-mother might actually bear some legal culpability. Again, though, that’s largely tactical, imo, and otherwise probably unprincipled exceptions.

            Jill, one of these days you might want to check out some of the posts on “Principle of charity.”

          • Corey says:

            @Randy M: Good point, it may be a belief-in-belief thing, so maybe pro-lifers are getting better at de-compartmentalizing.

            Trump’s gaffe came I think from a lack of familiarity with traditional pro-life ideology. He says if abortion is illegal of course the mother should be punished, by definition of what it means for something to be illegal. But the pro-life stance was always that the mother should not be punished, and squared the circle by assuming that mothers are usually “tricked” into abortions (I wish I was making that up).

            Reading through all this it seems the most charitable assumption was that the pro-lifers’ OLD ideology was adopted tactically (if you tried to put moms in jail or force rape babies to be born, that’s horribly unpopular and people will settle on abortion-on-demand instead), and that now that they have more political power they can drop these tactical bits.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            It reminds me of Michael Dukakis not knowing the stock answer of how to deal with “your wife has been raped and murdered, don’t you want the death penalty?”

            Of course, Dukakis had over 20 years of political experience, so I don’t know what his excuse was.

          • Jill says:

            Randy, thanks for telling me about Principle of Charity. I looked up posts on that. Very interesting.

            I remember reading the NYT article that Scott cited when it first came out. I remember thinking that the main reason Republicans are more “charitable” is that they are more likely to be fundamentalist. Which means that their “charitable” tithing of 15% of their income is not really voluntary. They seriously believe that they are going to burn in hell if they don’t contribute.

            I haven’t read all the principle of charity stuff yet but intend to finish it in the future. Good stuff.

          • Jill says:

            Scizorhands, what is the stock answer to that question? I know of answers one can give, but don’t know which one you are thinking of.

            BTW I think Dukakis did have an excuse probably, even though he had over 20 years of political experience. Everybody– even everybody in one field like politics– acquires different knowledge, even different standard basic type knowledge. Then people gets to run around accusing people of being ignorant, when they are really not.

            There is no standard text of how to be a politician that has the answer to that question. It’s not like chemistry where everyone knows the same basic material from their Chemistry 1 class in college.

            I notice SunTzu laughing below, I can only guess because he knows the answer to this one and I don’t. If I were a fan of this game, I would laugh back at him when the time comes, probably quite soon, that I know some fact that he doesn’t know. But I am not a fan of this game.

          • Loquat says:

            Jill,

            I’m not Scizorhands, but I can read the wikipedia page on Michael Dukakis, particularly the section on crime as an issue in the 1988 election. One of Bush’s major criticisms of Dukakis was that he was soft on crime, and the Bush campaign made a particular issue of Willie Horton, the convicted murderer who committed rape after being furloughed from prison. So in the context of “my opponent is going around saying I coddle criminals and don’t care about the suffering of their victims”, a good response would have been to show some emotion about the prospect of his spouse being murdered, and maybe admit he’d feel personal animosity towards the murderer – but instead, he just dispassionately explained his stance on the death penalty.

          • Jill says:

            Thanks much, Loquat. I didn’t think that the particular incident would be on his wikipedia page, so didn’t think to look there.

        • Corey says:

          One failure case I see is that everyone seems to agree that people who “can’t afford kids” shouldn’t have them. While there are obvious cases, like Scott’s patient population, it seems to me that the precariat is only going to get bigger, so we can expect the number of people who can be expected to have a secure means of support to continually decrease. Think lawyers, or British junior doctors, for in-our-lifetimes examples. (In the technological-unemployment scenario the number of people with secure means of support approaches zero).

          • Anonymous says:

            I think a more important issue with that line of thought is that regardless of whether they should or shouldn’t have the kids, they will have them unless you go full China on them, and probably even then.

            If people love breaking their legs, saying that people shouldn’t break their legs does nothing by itself.

  112. Sir Gawain says:

    1. It seems like this discussion would benefit from some cross-country comparisons. Other Anglosphere countries, Scandinavian countries, continental European countries, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan all face the political-economic challenges of poverty and inequality and often deal with them differently/more aggressively than the U.S. Which industrialized nation does the best job of reducing the material/psychological burdens of poverty? What aspects of the social safety net in other countries work better/worse than their equivalents in the U.S.? Are there compelling reasons that the specific public policies of non-U.S. governments couldn’t be replicated in the U.S.?

    2. Scott, could you write a post on your thoughts about Charles’ Murray’s work? Incidentally, my (perhaps incorrect) understanding is that he doesn’t see UBI as a solution to the problem of poverty—he sees it as a solution to the problem of the welfare state. (Much like Milton Friedman saw the negative income tax.) Murray’s preferred solution, at least as I exegete it from Coming Apart, is an elite-driven shift in cultural norms surrounding work, family, faith and community. (In addition to general libertarian political economy stuff like school vouchers and eliminating the minimum wage.)

    3. Speaking of tangential post requests (because I’m sure Mr. Alexander has absolutely copious free time), a comprehensive one on the black-white achievement gap (broadly defined) would be awesome. It seems to me at least that racial inequality is a much more serious problem for American democracy than economic inequality, though obviously dealing with one doesn’t preclude dealing with the other. One would think it should be an obvious, explicit, basic goal of U.S. society to bring African-American median IQ, per capita income, crime perpetration/victimization rates, education levels, etc. to the rate of native-born whites. But, as far as I’m aware, no one really has very good ideas about how to do this, or why it didn’t happen naturally after the removal of de jure legal barriers in the 1960s.

    • Corey says:

      You could get a long way there with explicit reparations (and Ta-Nehisi Coates has already addressed everyone’s first-pass objections, like “how do we determine who’s eligible?”).

      I liked the now-obsolete idea Matt Yglesias had, back when TNC’s “The Case for Reparations” came out. At the time the Fed was doing a big QE program, creating money and buying bonds with it. The amounts involved were such that, if they’d have mailed checks to black Americans instead, they could have erased the black/white wealth gap in a few months, at no incremental cost. (That would have required Congressional approval, and at the time Congress couldn’t so much as name a post office, so so much for that idea, and now QE’s done, so there would be incremental cost).

      • keranih says:

        The amounts involved were such that, if they’d have mailed checks to black Americans instead, they could have erased the black/white wealth gap in a few months, at no incremental cost.

        Except…that would have left Hispanic Americans, and Indians, out in the cold. And increased the intra-nation racial tensions.

        It might have resulted in a better world. I’m not convinced.

        • Corey says:

          Native Americans (I assume you meant this; I’m a programmer so Indian has a salient meaning to me) are a whole nother case, true.

          Hispanic-Americans don’t have the kind of strong case for reparations that blacks do; our exploitation of them was much more subtle.

          TNC thinks it would *help* black/white racial tensions but I’m skeptical that anything can, and it might well make white resentment of blacks (already a powerful force) significantly worse.

          • Jaskologist says:

            It would make it worse. Demands for reparations are seen simply as another demand piled on top of the rest, and one that will simply be repeated if acceded to.

            For reparations to improve interracial relations, they would need to be as part of a package that included “ok, we are now even-stevens on the whole slavery and Jim Crow thing. All whites are absolved of any associated blood-guilt from this day forward.” I don’t see that happening, and I can’t think of anyone who could even credibly offer it.

      • John Schilling says:

        What makes you think that this idea won’t fall foul of the lottery-winner problem?

        • Corey says:

          Above we were attributing lottery-winner problems to family/social-network drain. Since these tend to be monoracial, a racial reparations scheme would be also benefitting one’s family and social network simultaneously.

          • John Schilling says:

            I don’t believe anyone was attributing lottery-winner problems entirely to social-network drain, and if they were I do believe they are wrong.

            Would be an interesting experiment, but also a damned expensive one to try on a national scale. What have you got for a proof-of-concept that doesn’t cost trillions of dollars, and what are the success criteria?

      • Sir Gawain says:

        I think there are a lot of problems with the idea of reparations, from political, distributive justice and efficiency standpoints, but it would take too long to lay them out in detail here, so suffice it to observe:

        Note first that closing the wealth gap (as Yglesias himself noted in the relevant article, I believe) isn’t enough. The wealth gap comes from the income gap, and the income gap comes from the human capital gap.

        So your contention as to the cause of the various black-white gaps is that it results from differences in starting endowments, and it would be fixed with cash transfers of sufficient magnitude to African-American households? How do you reconcile that with the fact that for nearly 200 years immigrant groups to the U.S. with extremely low starting endowments (the Irish, Germans, Italians, Scandinavians, Jews, Japanese, Chinese and Koreans, for example) have managed to approximately match, and sometimes exceed, the socio-economic outcomes of the native-born white population after a comparable length of time? Note that I’m not (necessarily) saying this gap in convergence is due to cultural/genetic factors as opposed to structural factors like various levels of discrimination and selective immigration, but rather disputing the idea that household wealth mechanically generates good socio-economic outcomes as opposed to vice versa.

        Additionally, consider that non-trivial racial gaps in crime rates and standardized achievement tests persist for households at a wide range of income levels. (For example, the median Hispanic income, household wealth, etc. are very, very similar to their African-American equivalents, but the Hispanic crime rate is somewhere between 1/4-1/2 the African-American crime rate IIRC.)

        These are genuine questions, not gotchas; I’d like to hear a good explanation of how mechanically these unconditional cash transfers will lead to higher achievement as opposed to already existing cash transfers.

        Don’t get me started on Yggy’s “accomplish x through MOAR Q.E.” ideas. Suffice it to say, once you’ve used Q.E. to abolish the white-black household wealth gap, maybe you can use it to abolish the Bill Gates-everyone else wealth gap…

        • Corey says:

          TNC covers this as “housing segregation”. Control for neighborhood and black-white differences at the same income level tend to melt away. E.g. the average neighborhood a black family with $100000/year income lives in is SES-equivalent to the average neighborhood a white family with $30000/year income. To be fair, this may be another way of saying “culture”. In fact he proposes people who lost out to “contract buying” etc. as the first easily-identifiable group to be reparated.

          Since housing is a major builder of wealth and the wealth gap is mostly the answer to Why Don’t the “Good” Blacks Just Move Someplace Better, closing the wealth gap would definitely help this. And housing discrimination is more recent than we think – de jure banned in the 1970s, banks have lost redlining suits in the 2000s, and subprime mortgages (not that much less exploitative than contract lending) was pushed *hard* in the black community. The *existence* of Ferguson, MO and all the too-small-to-survive-on-tax-base burgs around St. Louis is an explicit attempt to keep the coloreds out via zoning, after de-jure bans on housing discrimination.

          IIRC Matty’s QE link was existing QE we were already doing for macro reasons, not *more* QE, but admittedly my memory’s crappy.

          I would think that if actually existing cash transfers were sufficient to close/significantly narrow the wealth gap then they would be fine. Explicit reparations would have a major psychological component that would be missing, but *shrug*.

          As for immigrants who start with nothing: the conventional explanation is that immigrants are selected for people with the “grit” to move to a new country in search of a better life and try to achieve it, whereas native-born citizens are not. The relevant data there would be how well immigrants with dark skin and wide noses do (and I am totally unfamiliar with that data).

          • eponymous says:

            I doubt neighborhood effects explain much of the black-white wealth gap. Studies that try to estimate the causal effect of changing neighborhoods tend to find tiny results. This is why the Chetty study got so much attention, since it found a significant effect. But even it doesn’t change the overall picture that much.

            And I’m not sure why housing is such a great way to build wealth relative to other forms of saving. Except for preferential tax treatment I guess. But how much difference does that make?

            Basically your views are heavily in the northeast quadrant, where poor blacks are caught in a “poverty trap”, where they have low wealth due to past discrimination, and they need a minimum amount of wealth to jump start the human capital machine (due to borrowing constraints).

            This is possible, but it’s far from certain, particularly since this view underlies decades of interventions across many countries that have generally produced dismal results.

          • The Nybbler says:

            Given the effective segregation in most parts of the country, I think controlling for neighborhood is controlling for a good proxy for race, which gives you meaningless results if you’re looking for racial differences.

            Differences between black immigrants, children of black immigrants, and US-born blacks (3rd generation or more) would be interesting; I don’t have any good links, though a quick search seems to point in the direction of the immigrants doing significantly better economically.

          • keranih says:

            And I’m not sure why housing is such a great way to build wealth relative to other forms of saving. Except for preferential tax treatment I guess. But how much difference does that make?

            It’s not the tax treatment. It’s forced savings that can not be easily liquidated and can be readily borrowed against. (And which (almost always) stays stable in value, and which frequently goes up in value.)

            The ability to borrow against ones home is how a large number of small businesses get bankrolled. The lack of access to this funding source is, for me, one of the most persuasive arguments against unwarranted-by-financial-status racial bias in housing.

          • eponymous says:

            @keranih

            What do you mean by “forced savings”? Are you making a behavioral argument?

            I disagree that houses are particularly safe assets. The first principle of investing is diversification, and a house is a pretty undiversified investment. Lots of people get in financial trouble when something bad happens to their home.

            Besides, any safety or expected appreciation should be priced in.

            You’re probably right about collateral value, but somehow I don’t think that was what the original comment was referring to.

          • keranih says:

            “Forced savings” – yes. Most people will not put a housepayment into a savings account month after month.

            The first principle of investing is diversification, and a house is a pretty undiversified investment.

            Agreed – in an ideal world (and to some degree, in the past) housepayments would be balanced by other more stable investments.

            Lots of people get in financial trouble when something bad happens to their home.

            Even more people fall into worse finanicial trouble without house equity to fall back on.

            I think it’s important to remember that we’re talking about averages, lifetime outcomes, and relative distances between homeowners and non-home owners. And that our perception of housing as a risky investment has been deeply colored by the 2008 crash, which was driven by what can best be described as unwise investment activity.

            Besides, any safety or expected appreciation should be priced in.

          • Sir Gawain says:

            TNC covers this as “housing segregation”. Control for neighborhood and black-white differences at the same income level tend to melt away. E.g. the average neighborhood a black family with $100000/year income lives in is SES-equivalent to the average neighborhood a white family with $30000/year income. To be fair, this may be another way of saying “culture”. In fact he proposes people who lost out to “contract buying” etc. as the first easily-identifiable group to be reparated.

            First, see: https://randomcriticalanalysis.wordpress.com/2015/05/16/on-concentrated-poverty-and-its-effects-on-academic-outcomes/

            I’ve always been skeptical of this “housing segregation” argument. Again, let’s draw this out mechanically: housing segregation means that instead of living next to whites, blacks live next to blacks. Why exactly does living next to other African-Americans make African-Americans have lower IQs, higher propensities to commit violent crime, reduced educational achievement, etc.? Every immigrant group has (initially) clustered away from the native-born white population, in conditions frequently more impoverished, overcrowded and unsanitary (though probably generally less violent) as African-American neighborhoods today. Somehow, despite that, they were able to hold down jobs, have stable families, ensure that that their kids got good educations and maintain safety and order in their neighborhoods.

            Additionally, consider that this process seems to be reversing with gentrification. But it seems like the people who are strongly against gentrification are also people who think white flight is responsible for the poor socio-economic outcomes of African-Americans. If housing segregation causes the problem, shouldn’t gentrification close the black-white achievement gap in the urban areas where it occurs?

            Since housing is a major builder of wealth and the wealth gap is mostly the answer to Why Don’t the “Good” Blacks Just Move Someplace Better, closing the wealth gap would definitely help this. And housing discrimination is more recent than we think – de jure banned in the 1970s, banks have lost redlining suits in the 2000s, and subprime mortgages (not that much less exploitative than contract lending) was pushed *hard* in the black community. The *existence* of Ferguson, MO and all the too-small-to-survive-on-tax-base burgs around St. Louis is an explicit attempt to keep the coloreds out via zoning, after de-jure bans on housing discrimination.

            I was under the impression that after the 1960s, middle-class blacks did move out of African-American neighborhoods, but I might well be wrong about that. Again, how mechanically does housing build wealth? The overcrowded, completely devoid of amenities, segregated tenements in early 20th century NYC were hardly optimal environments, and yet somehow the immigrant groups living in them managed to succeed. Also, consider the weak effects shown in the Moving to Opportunity study and the project demolitions in Chicago. (This is Justin Wolfers’ optimistic take: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/27/upshot/growing-up-in-a-bad-neighborhood-does-more-harm-than-we-thought.html?_r=0
            http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/05/upshot/why-the-new-research-on-mobility-matters-an-economists-view.html?version=meter+at+0&module=meter-Links&pgtype=article&contentId=&mediaId=&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F&priority=true&action=click&contentCollection=meter-links-click)

            As for immigrants who start with nothing: the conventional explanation is that immigrants are selected for people with the “grit” to move to a new country in search of a better life and try to achieve it, whereas native-born citizens are not. The relevant data there would be how well immigrants with dark skin and wide noses do (and I am totally unfamiliar with that data).

            I’ve always found this an unsatisfying explanation. The U.S. had completely open borders with Europe up until 1924; how strong can the self-selection effects for huge ginormous waves of immigrants when there were basically zero legal barriers to entry really be? Likewise, though we are far from open borders with Mexico today, there’s not really a ton of legal oversight of people crossing the border illegally. It also doesn’t really explain well why different groups of immigrants and their descendants have different socio-economic outcomes, despite facing seemingly very similar barriers to entry.

            Regarding dark skinned immigrants, my understanding is that both African and Afro-Caribbean immigrants do quite well. (At least the economic migrants; refugee groups may be different.)

          • Jaskologist says:

            The other aspect of “housing as investment” is that you are going to be paying for housing regardless. If you are renting, that is money you simply lose. If you own the property, you can probably get a good chunk of that money back when you sell it, and maybe even turn a profit. Either way, you have to live somewhere.

            If we had a way to reconstitute our food after we’d eaten it and sell that off, we’d talk about investing in your diet. Space just happens to be one of the few things that we constantly consume which remains perfectly usable once we’re done with it.

          • Anonymous says:

            The folksy wisdom about renting being tantamount to throwing money away and buying always being the virtuous grasshopper thing to do has a kernel of truth. In the last 70 years governments at all levels have exerted their not inconsiderable powers to ensure to the maximum extent possible that home prices never fall and where ever possible they increase faster than the rate of general inflation. In such an environment the folksy wisdom is good advice. It bears keeping in mind though, that you are making decisions on the basis of the expectation of ever more heroic government interventions on your behalf. Given that homeowners are an even more powerful group than retirees, that’s not a bad bet, but no exponential process can last forever.

          • Jiro says:

            If you are renting, that is money you simply lose. If you own the property, you can probably get a good chunk of that money back when you sell it, and maybe even turn a profit.

            In a free market, if the landlord doesn’t reduce the rent to make up for the fact that his property will bring future returnse, that is equivalent to the landlord just charging a high rent because he really likes money. He’ll be outcompeted by other landlords who charge a little less and know that because of the future returns, they can still make a profit. The market will cause the future returns to the landlord to be passed along to the renters in reduced rent price, at which point the renters can save it in the bank just like the homeowners have it saved in their house.

          • Nornagest says:

            TL;DR of this is pretty simple: if you rent, you’re renting a dwelling. If you buy, you’re renting a pile of money from the bank that you use to pay for your dwelling. Which one is a better idea depends on the lending terms you can get, on your planning horizon (mortgage payments are weighted towards interest early in the loan), and on what you expect to happen to the market.

            Home ownership is heavily subsidized, so it’s often a good move if you can make it work, but not always. I wouldn’t, for example, buy a house in the SF Bay Area right now.

          • The Nybbler says:

            Jiro, I don’t think that’s true. It appears to be an application of the zero-profit theorem, and the conditions for that don’t exist in the real-estate market.

        • Jill says:

          Reparations seems like a very unlikely idea to be carried out, when you consider that right now, we can’t seem to stop police from frequently killing unarmed black men who are not threatening anyone.

          I’m in favor of dealing with the clearest simplest issues first.

          • keranih says:

            @ Jill

            we can’t seem to stop police from frequently killing unarmed black men who are not threatening anyone.

            Care to put a number on that “frequently”?

          • E. Harding says:

            “we can’t seem to stop police from frequently killing unarmed black men who are not threatening anyone”

            https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/25/race-and-justice-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/

            https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/01/06/guns-and-states/

          • Jill says:

            Thanks for those posts, E. Harding. It looks like the data from overall statistics are more mixed than I thought they were. But still it doesn’t show that there is no problem here.

            “It would be nice to say that this shows the criminal justice system is not disproportionately harming blacks, but unfortunately it doesn’t come anywhere close to showing anything of the sort.”

            And we have a number of videotapes of police shooting unarmed black people. That’s good if it is not the standard operating procedure in every police department. But it still is a problem.

          • John Schilling says:

            If the problem is that police are shooting unarmed poor people, and you think that the problem is police shooting unarmed black people, your solutions are never going to be more than halfway effective. But you probably won’t notice that, and will likely wind up at odds with the people who are trying to solve the real problem.

          • suntzuanime says:

            You’re going to have trouble breaking 25% effective – the majority of the poor in the US are white.

            I suppose it’s possible there’s an armedness discrepancy that makes up the difference, I haven’t seen statistics on that.

          • Jill says:

            I don’t know if the problem is police killing unarmed poor people in general. The videos that keep turning up seem to show them killing poor black people. However, if that’s the problem, then I certainly don’t want police killing unarmed non-threatening poor people, no matter what the victim’s race is.

            So let’s solve the problem, whether through better police training, better selection processes for hiring police, or whatever else might help.

          • Jiro says:

            The videos that keep turning up seem to show them killing poor black people.

            And of course, the videos that you get to see are a representative sample.

          • John Schilling says:

            I don’t know if the problem is police killing unarmed poor people in general. The videos that keep turning up seem to show them killing poor black people.

            The problem is, one, the police kind of like to kill poor people and are accustomed to getting away with it and, two, the media knows that (thanks to the tastes of the sort of people on your social media feeds) videos of police killing poor black people get lots of clicks in ways that videos with poor white people don’t.

            So let’s solve the problem, whether through better police training, better selection processes for hiring police, or whatever else might help.

            The way this works is, the diversity training coordinator sets up a bunch of extra lessons that nobody actually pays attention to – seriously, have you ever had to sit through mandatory diversity training? – but being Not Stupid they learn the real lesson. Which is, if you’re a cop so pissed off that you need to kill someone, make sure it’s a poor white person, otherwise you’ll have to sit through more lame diversity training. Problem solved!

            Until poor white people start to realize, through word of mouth, that lots of their friends are getting shot and nobody seems to care. So they all vote for Donald Trump, and then the police get new training that says they’re supposed to be shooting at poor Mexicans.

            I certainly don’t want police killing unarmed non-threatening poor people, no matter what the victim’s race is

            Is there any real difference between “I don’t want this” and “I don’t want to know about this”? Because if you don’t know about it, you’ll be happy. And for the person in charge of finding a “solution”, arranging for you to not know about it may be easier than arranging for it to not happen.

            If there is a solution to this problem that doesn’t involve just reshuffling which group of poor people gets shot this year, it has to start with people who don’t form their understanding of the problem from videos in the media.

            Be part of the solution.

    • Psmith says:

      to bring African-American median IQ, per capita income, crime perpetration/victimization rates, education levels, etc. to the rate of native-born whites…. no one really has very good ideas … why it didn’t happen naturally after the removal of de jure legal barriers in the 1960s.

      https://jaymans.wordpress.com/jaymans-race-inheritance-and-iq-f-a-q-f-r-b/
      https://jaymans.wordpress.com/hbd-fundamentals/

    • The Nybbler says:

      One would think it should be an obvious, explicit, basic goal of U.S. society to bring African-American median IQ, per capita income, crime perpetration/victimization rates, education levels, etc. to the rate of native-born whites.

      One might think that. Another one (like, say, me) might not think that. Anyway, how do you raise IQ? If you can’t figure that out, you probably can’t equalize income and education levels (both of which depend on IQ, and the latter is likely to lose its value if you somehow decouple it from IQ).

      • NN says:

        Anyway, how do you raise IQ?

        No one knows for sure, but we’ve been raising IQ without even trying for the past century or so (see the Flynn effect), so we know that it is possible.

      • Sir Gawain says:

        Let me rephrase: one would think that given the assumption that these differences result from some sort of socialization, if there exist highly negative inter-group differences, it is important for society to address them. I’m willing to hear that assumption challenged (though I personally don’t think HBD is the most convincing explanation for these differences), but at least in public it’s an unquestionable assumption in media/academia/politics—fields which are concerned with the question of racial inequalities. So it’s odd that given that this assumption is unquestioned it isn’t an obvious, basic, etc. goal.

        And mostly agreed regarding IQ.

        • The Nybbler says:

          So it’s odd that given that this assumption is unquestioned it isn’t an obvious, basic, etc. goal.

          The assumption that the differences aren’t genetic is unquestionable, but that doesn’t mean that it’s actually believed.

          The main two speakable viewpoints on the subject seem to be that it’s due to poor values among a large part of the black community, and that it’s due to continued discrimination. The latter group IS making it a priority to reduce the differences, but given (IMO) that they’re just plain wrong and as a result their remedies cannot possibly work, they’re not getting very far. Most of those in the former group see it as a problem which can only be solved within the black communities, not by society at large; one cannot impose good values on a community. Others in the first group would like to do something about it, but in general any ideas end up getting buried in cries of racism.

          • Jill says:

            Some black intellectuals, writing or speaking about their childhoods, do say that their peers put them down for “acting white” because they studied hard, and that this was a problem for them.

            Certainly white people can be active in helping to end racism, e.g. ending racist behaviors by police, and ending imprisonment for nonviolent drug offenses. Blacks have similar rates of offenses of that type to whites, but blacks are far more likely to be imprisoned for them. It’s likely that getting imprisoned, or having one’s father or other relatives imprisoned, for the same offenses white people don’t get imprisoned for, affects a child’s or adolescent’s life badly.

            But it will take black communities themselves to change things like attitudes toward school work.

          • Sir Gawain says:

            Certainly white people can be active in helping to end racism, e.g. ending racist behaviors by police, and ending imprisonment for nonviolent drug offenses. Blacks have similar rates of offenses of that type to whites, but blacks are far more likely to be imprisoned for them. It’s likely that getting imprisoned, or having one’s father or other relatives imprisoned, for the same offenses white people don’t get imprisoned for, affects a child’s or adolescent’s life badly.

            Can you give some citations for this? I hear the vague claim that “blacks and whites commit drug offenses at the same rate but blacks are imprisoned at a much higher rate for these offenses” very often, but very rarely do I hear the claim “blacks and whites sell the same drugs in the same quantities at the same locations with the same frequency and with the same criminal records, but blacks are imprisoned at a much higher rate for these offenses”.

            Then there’s the fact that drug offenders of all kinds make up ~22% of the total prison population. (Not all of whom are black and not all of whom are low-level offenders.) That’s not nothing, but you could release literally every low-level, non-violent drug offense convicted African-American from prison tomorrow (which may or may not be a good idea) and you’d make a very small dent in the total U.S. and African-American incarceration rate.

            I find the ways that the progressive narrative on criminal justice has shifted, in large part thanks to Michelle Alexander’s the New Jim Crow, unsettling. Lefties used to recognize that African-Americans committed crimes at higher rates than whites, but argued (in my view correctly) that structural factors caused these disparities, and by fixing “root causes” crime rates would fall. Michelle Alexander very explicitly rejects this in NJC, and shifts the narrative to: blacks and whites behave about the same on average, but the criminal justice system unfairly targets blacks. (With the corollary that the War on Drugs is primarily responsible for mass incarceration.)

            As Scott argues here, if there is bias, it’s earlier in the causal chain than the criminal justice system.

            Regarding imprisonment and families, sure. But it seems to me that there are two ways to deal with the problem of mass incarceration:

            1) Stop punishing criminal behavior, so people who commit crimes don’t get incarcerated.

            2) Stop people from committing crimes in the first place, so people don’t get incarcerated.

            On the whole, I think the second strategy is better. (I’m not necessarily against well designed “supply side” criminal justice reform, but I think the highest return would come from reducing crime.)

          • Corey says:

            The usual liberal response to “it’s culture” is that culture doesn’t form in a vacuum but responds to incentives.

            For example, the terribly destructive black norm of meeting slights with violence is adaptive in violent environments. (Not that I have any good ideas for breaking that cycle).

            Black people tend to find the attitude from whites of “why haven’t you fixed yourselves yet?” equivalent to “I stopped stabbing you an hour ago; what’s wrong with you that you’re still bleeding?” and I don’t blame them.

          • Jill says:

            Gawain, I am more in favor of 1) Stop punishing criminal behavior, so people who commit crimes don’t get incarcerated, in the particular case of nonviolent drug crimes. Because we have already long ago done this for white people. So it’s only fair to do this for all races.

            Not everything to help blacks has to be done by whites, of course. But I agree with Corey that when blacks are discriminated against so severely– to the point of getting often killed by police when they are not armed and not threatening anyone– whites and the overall society certainly are in that position– of saying “I stopped stabbing you an hour ago; what’s wrong with you that you’re still bleeding?”

          • Sir Gawain says:

            Corey says:
            May 26, 2016 at 10:32 am ~new~
            The usual liberal response to “it’s culture” is that culture doesn’t form in a vacuum but responds to incentives.

            For example, the terribly destructive black norm of meeting slights with violence is adaptive in violent environments. (Not that I have any good ideas for breaking that cycle).

            Strongly agreed. I think ending the War on Drugs through legalization would do a lot to reduce the incentives to use violence. (Because drugs are sold in a stateless environment without a government with a monopoly on force operating a dispute-adjudicating legal system, it’s no surprise that the black market is violent.) If you haven’t read it already, Steven Pinker’s the Better Angels of our Natureis excellent on this.

            Jill says:
            May 26, 2016 at 11:01 am ~new~
            Gawain, I am more in favor of 1) Stop punishing criminal behavior, so people who commit crimes don’t get incarcerated, in the particular case of nonviolent drug crimes. Because we have already long ago done this for white people. So it’s only fair to do this for all races.

            Not everything to help blacks has to be done by whites, of course. But I agree with Corey that when blacks are discriminated against so severely– to the point of getting often killed by police when they are not armed and not threatening anyone– whites and the overall society certainly are in that position– of saying “I stopped stabbing you an hour ago; what’s wrong with you that you’re still bleeding?”

            Regarding drug crime, I agree and I’d even go a few steps further and say controlled legalization is the best policy. But like I said, the low level non violent drug crimes you’re referring to are a very small share of the total prison population, and the extent to which the discrepancy between blacks and whites in them is a result of pure arbitrary enforcement bias is at a minimum highly debatable. For crimes like homicide (where the black rate is consistently 7-8x the white rate), the difference in incarceration rates almost entirely reflect differences in crime rates. Seems to me that reducing the black homicide rate to the white homicide rate is a better long-term strategy than not punishing homicide.

            Regarding the “bloody knife” thing, yeah agreed; I want it to be clear I don’t think African-American communities are somehow morally “worse” than other communities. I think the people in them, like people everywhere else, respond rationally to their incentives, and changing their incentives would result in better outcomes.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            (can you edit this post to get rid of the ∾new∾ labels? they throw off people searching for ∾new∾ posts)

          • Dahlen says:

            @Edward Scizorhands: Seconded. Only sane way of making sense of this beast of a comments section, and we occasionally get this.

  113. TrivialGravitas says:

    “The exploitation narrative seems fundamentally wrong to me – I’m not saying exploitation doesn’t happen, nor even that it isn’t common, just that isn’t not the major factor causing poverty and social decay.”

    As used by the people you’re critiquing exploitation is not paying a living wage when it’s an option to do so. Wal-Mart could pay>30k a year without raising prices, so could McDonalds (individual stores may not be so profitable). As far as I can tell all large employers make enough profit per employee to pay every employee a decent if not stellar wage, it’s just nobody (except Ford) ever does that in a capitalist system short of the government forcing them to.

    • Jill says:

      True, ‘dat.

    • Heresiarch says:

      Wal-Mart could not do so, because if they did, their profitability would plunge, they’d be much more vulnerable to competitors, lenders would require much higher interest rates to lend to them, and investors would flee, starving them of capital. In which case, Wal-Mart’s place would be taken by smaller retailers with much less of an ability to bargain hard with manufacturers, resulting in higher prices. McDonald’s is a different matter anyway, as most of their franchises are not owned or operated by them, but by small businesspeople trying to make it. McDonald’s business is mostly to own the buildings themselves and manage the menu, advertising, supply chain, et cetera to keep the value of that real estate up.

      In any case, even if they could pay more, they shouldn’t, because economic policies passed for emotional reasons just about never work out well. “Living wage” has basically no non-emotional meaning. The places with such policies (and others beloved of workers), like Japan or Greece, are some of the most economically sclerotic. “Living wage” is a coded demand for price-fixing of the price of labor.

      Companies aren’t required to pay anything more than the minimum they need to in order to get workers skilled enough to do the job. Sometimes, as with Ford, Costco (and Wal-Mart, now) they choose to, in order to attract better workers. (Ford was not being generous, despite the fact that he took enormous credit for being so. He just wanted to reduce the turnover in his plants, which was staggeringly high, so that he didn’t have to spend so much constantly retraining new people to do the incredibly boring jobs they did.) It’s certainly not Wal-Mart’s fault that their employees have no particular skills or ability to save money, such as would make them better able to be choosier about employer or compensation.

      • Jill says:

        There’s still the issue that taxpayers are subsidizing a highly profitable enterprise like Wal-Mart because their workers make so little that they are eligible for public assistance.

        • Heresiarch says:

          They aren’t. It’s just not the case that if a plan affects the bargaining position of the people it’s trying to help, other people or entities have some sort of duty to validate the planners’ assumptions by not adjusting their behavior accordingly.

          If the employer is offering less money and people are taking it because they’re getting this other help, you could say that the government is in effect handing Wal-Mart money, but it would not be accurate to say that the government is subsidizing them. Wal-Mart owes the government nothing for doing that. If the government wants to take it away and Wal-Mart is facing having to pay more money in wages, and Wal-Mart wants to bargain with the government to continue it, then it owes the government something.

          Not until then, though.

    • Edward Scizorhands says:

      Wal-Mart could pay>30k a year without raising prices,

      This is plain silly. Walmart has thin profit margins. Even if they magically converted to a non-profit and had all profits were distributed evenly to employees, this wouldn’t be enough to raise the average pay from 15K to 30K.

      I know to some people, “WalMart” is this magic pinata that we just need to hit to get more money out. But there’s not as much there as you imagine, especially when you divide it over the massive scale of the company’s million-plus employees. The retail industry is competitive and consumers have captured what might otherwise be retailer surplus.

  114. Albatross says:

    Nixon, who was apparently a time traveler from the future, had it right. Give the poor GNI and Medicare and rely on greed to get them to work beyond that.

    I too find myself in the ??? Quadrant a lot. I do push optimism when people want to cut EITC, a precursor to GNI, but when people rip Hillary Clinton or Paul Ryan for not having a great poverty fighting plan I sympathize with leaders who realize that $15 min wage is a band aid on a broken leg.

  115. eponymous says:

    Here’s a question I’ve been thinking about lately: what are the moral implications of the southeastern quadrant for having kids?

    I’ll assume here that a national eugenics policy is immoral. I’m thinking of the personal side. Suppose that one is intelligent, well-educated, from a high-achieving culture, non-criminal, etc. Does this person have a moral obligation to have kids? To have *lots* of kids?

    • Jill says:

      I wouldn’t think so. People having kids that they don’t want, or more kids than they want, is already a cause of a lot of the problems and trauma in the world. Birth control and family planning are great gifts for those who have access to them.

      • eponymous says:

        Those seem like arguments that wouldn’t be made by someone in the southeastern quadrant.

        I’m not talking about having unwanted kids anyway. I’m talking about including additional moral considerations in the decision leading one to decide to have kids.

        By analogy, I don’t want to have less money, but I could still be persuaded to give money to charity on the grounds that it is moral to do so.

    • Anonymous says:

      It depends on whether or not you buy into the whole weird “rationalist” no time discounting thing. Most people privilege the present over the far future in terms of their moral concerns.

  116. Jill says:

    Now that I am starting to understand the board better, here are some books people here might like.

    Here is one that hard core Libertarians love. And a lot of it is interesting for other people too, as long as they aren’t expecting it to be a book without political bias. I think he is partially correct that language, culture, technology etc. emerge to a large degree from the bottom up, not from the top down– by human action but not by human design.

    The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge Hardcover – October 27, 2015
    by Matt Ridley

    http://www.amazon.com/Evolution-Everything-How-Ideas-Emerge/dp/0062296000/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1464279817&sr=1-1&keywords=the+evolution+of+everything

    An alternate title for the book might have been The Bright Side of Moloch.

    I just loved Scott’s post about Moloch. Fascinating stuff. I think the concept could really help humanity to get past the stage of “I have a brilliant idea. Throw garlands of roses in front of me. This problem would be solved, if only people would ____________ (do something good for the system, even though they are punished for doing so as an individual, and incentivized heavily to do the opposite.)” I see a lot of time wasted on such discussions.

    Here’s another book.

    The R_t_y Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin Reprint Edition
    by Corey Robin

    I abbreviated the 2nd word, in case this may be a banned word here. I guess I won’t put the url in because the word is in the url also.

    Anyway, these 2 books seem made for this audience.

    Now, if any Libertarian here wants to expand their horizons, this one below would be the one to read.

    Someone asked me earlier in the thread how the lower classes are exploited. They have a hard time getting a job that pays enough to live on, and they can be pretty abused at their jobs, by landlords etc. Also, because of few economic alternatives, many of them ended up fighting in our Middle Eastern wars, Vietnam etc. Many ending up sacrificing their lives for the military industrial complex, while too ignorant and young to know what they were doing.

    Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War Paperback – June 24, 2008
    by Joe Bageant

    http://www.amazon.com/Deer-Hunting-Jesus-Dispatches-Americas/dp/0307339378/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1464280436&sr=1-1&keywords=deer+hunting+with+jesus

    • Murphy says:

      On the note of libertarianism there’s a variant which I find quite charming : Geolibertarianism, summary and tag line: “You have the right to the fruits of your labor but your labor didn’t make the land”

      It’s a variant which discards the convenient assumption that simply by hammering some fence posts into the corners of a chunk of land that you magically make all the mineral reserves underneath it part of the “fruits of your labor”

      I don’t think the georgism/geoism involved is actually terribly workable as a real political system but it does leave a space for the state and in such a system welfare(ish) payments aren’t an allowance or charity granted by the rich but instead are simply the fraction of income from renting out access to land/resources that belong to you as a person with as much right to them as anyone else.

      As you’d imagine it’s spectacularly unpopular with many of the traditional libertarian types who like the get-what-you-grab approach.

      It’s also quite charming that it ticks various communist boxes and makes me wonder if there might be something to horseshoe theory.

      • Jill says:

        Thanks, Murphy. I am looking up Geolibertarianism now to learn even more about it. This web site is doing wonders for my vocabulary.

        I always wonder what the effect of self interest is on political viewpoints. Of course we know what that is for people like the Koch brothers. But for others, we don’t know– unless the person becomes an author or a public figure, like the author Matt Ridley, above. People dug into Ridley’s background and found that he is a member of the House of Lords and so likely has a great deal of inherited wealth, and that he also gets considerable revenues from oil and gas investments, as well as from coal mining on property he owns.

        England is not blind to class distinctions, as the U.S. is, so sometimes it’s easier to find such information there, because there is not as much attempt to hide it or be blind to it.

        Of course, there are many people whose political orientation may be directly opposed to their individual economic self interests, sometimes due to their ignorance and vulnerability to propaganda. It’s the big players/campaign contributors who are most likely to be aiming directly to put more money in their own pockets, either by feeding at the public trough or else by making it legal for them to pollute and destroy the commons (water, air, food supply and farm land) without having to pay to clean it up.

        But then some big players do seem to sincerely want a better world for all and feel no need to keep neurotically accumulating more money than they and their descendants could ever spend, even if it destroys the earth to do so. They pull their heads out of the sand, and see their self interest differently than those who continue trying to prove themselves in a competition, even after they are billionaires.

        • keranih says:

          I always wonder what the effect of self interest is on political viewpoints. Of course we know what that is for people like the Koch brothers.

          Do we? What is the effect of self interest at play there?

          Of course, there are many people whose political orientation may be directly opposed to their individual economic self interests, sometimes due to their ignorance and vulnerability to propaganda. It’s the big players/campaign contributors who are most likely to be aiming directly to put more money in their own pockets,

          What about small players who want more money in their pockets? Or people who could benefit from a redistribution scheme, but vote against it because they feel it is unethical?

          • Jill says:

            Yes, small and large players vote various ways for various reasons. Some of it is covered up though, due to American blindness to class.

            However, much of the underclass doesn’t vote.

  117. Heresiarch says:

    I would argue that a UBI is a ridiculous idea on at least two counts. First, as has been pointed out by many people, income just isn’t a substitute for a job. You won’t starve, but you won’t develop skills, you won’t get out of the house, you won’t feel like a part of something, and you won’t feel useful. A UBI might even trap some people into it, rather the way Social Security Disability rules tend to do. We even have had forms of the same idea behind UBI– for example, in the form of Social Security and welfare, both of which have metastasized enormously from their minor origins, sometimes to unaffordable degrees– and poor people have, as Mr. Murray pointed out in Coming Apart, if anything gotten even more screwed up.

    Second, I would argue that injecting money into a system frequently doesn’t alter its economics, just as making homeownership more affordable with low-cost home loans contributed to the housing bubble (we can argue about how much it contributed, but it seems clear to me that it did have some effect) without necessarily making poor people richer overall. With the link between creditworthiness rates and homeownership rates broken, people began bidding more and more on the same houses. Some version of that would likely follow a UBI. Inject X amount of money into paying to meet basic needs, and the profitability of the companies that provide those goods rises, enriching the companies’ owners. And with UBI money to bid on the same houses and apartments, their prices will rise.

    I guess what I’m saying is that these things being offered as solutions will only change the terms upon which people compete without affecting the spread of the spectrum of results.

    The solution I would propose is a difficult, and (fatally) politically unprofitable one. Force people to save money, not for retirement or education or whatever, but in index-fund investment accounts which can’t be withdrawn from except under extreme circumstances, but the dividends from which can be spent on living expenses. Make ’em tax-free in those accounts, if you want, for people in the bottom two tax brackets. No, the dividends won’t cover living expenses, but they’ll sure help, and they’ll help give people a sense of ownership of America’s economy the way citizenship and government transfers do not.

    • Jill says:

      How do you force people to save money who have not been able to get a job? Or whose job does not cover their living expenses?

      • Tom Womack says:

        By arranging that any employer registered with the IRS must pay some proportion of any salary paid into the employee’s forced-savings fund: arrange that the people never get the choice of what to do with the money.

        Lots of people do this automatically anyway – first of the month, my mortgage payment goes to the bank and about the same amount goes into savings, so I never notice it in the account.

        • Heresiarch says:

          Right, and the same sort of dynamic– preventing people from ruining it by panicking at the wrong time– is why I suggested that it should be an index fund.

          • brad says:

            It’s a bad idea for the government to define something like “index fund” and then use it as the basis of other laws and regulations. Just witness all the problems that have arisen from the Nationally Recognized Statistical Rating Organizations and regulations thereof.

          • Heresiarch says:

            Brad, I don’t see how the problems at Moody’s, Fitch and S&P have anything to do with it. An index fund has a very, very simple definition– it owns a cross section of stocks in the index– and it does not seem to me to be very subject to manipulation.

          • John Schilling says:

            Which stocks are in the index again, when do we decide that e.g. buggy-whip makers don’t belong any more, and if the person responsible makes the “wrong” decision, does he get a fiscal colonoscopy from the IRS every year for the remainder of the current Presidential term?

            You’re basically dictating that some significant fraction of the GDP be invested in a particular set of designated Superior Corporations, at a specific distribution, and you don’t think the selection of these investment targets will be politically gamed?

          • Heresiarch says:

            John, I think that they’re not subject to political control. Also, there are so many regular index fund investors that any attempt to play games would be met with a large amount of pushback by powerful people in Wall Street, Vanguard, Morningstar, et cetera. (Sort of like a Wall Street civil war.) Checks and balances aren’t just for the Constitution.

            I also think that stocks aren’t easy to manipulate, that it’s frequently illegal to do so, that if one could manipulate them it would be a.) very crude and ineffective and b.) really obvious.

            Finally, there are plenty of folks like Warren Buffett who are honest and interested in creative poverty-fighting solutions, who could, if you were that concerned about corruption, come up with their own list for an index. Certainly I think this idea has fewer flaws than the ancient old tax-and-redistribute model, which is so subject to political risk.

          • John Schilling says:

            John, I think that they’re not subject to political control

            Everything is subject to political control. I think you are saying that political control is not presently exercised over stock indexes, which is a different and weaker thing. You are proposing a massive shift in the relevant incentives.

            Also, there are so many regular index fund investors

            And you’re proposing a massive shift here as well. If a significant portion of everyone’s paycheck is being sent straight to the index funds at the direction of the IRS, then the “regular index fund investors” are suddenly the small fry.

          • Heresiarch says:

            John, whether or not something can be brought under political control, I think you’re ignoring the fact that other strong pressures within Wall Street would make playing games with the composition of index funds very difficult, especially relative to the likely effectiveness (low) of such manipulations.

            I think you have some sort of emotional reaction to my suggestion that is making you cast about yourself to find things to cavil about.

          • brad says:

            John elaborates the concern I had well — which index, using which metrics, decided by who? In the case of NRSRO not only were the ratings manipulated so as to make them counter-productive for the regulatory purposes to which they were put, but by using them in regulations they also ceased to be useful for their original purpose.

            If you want to do something like this, do it something like the 401k rule — require someone with a fiduciary duty to offer one or more investment options. Yes it means higher expenses but it’s worth it to avoid the entanglement that the other method would cause.

          • John Schilling says:

            I think you’re ignoring the fact that other strong pressures within Wall Street would make playing games with the composition of index funds very difficult

            That is an assertion, not a fact, and one that I dispute. For starters, I do not believe that Wall Street is more powerful than the United States Government. If it occasionally wins political battles, it is because they are over issues more important to Wall Street than to the Feds. You propose to make the composition of index funds a matter of critical Federal policy. This will greatly change the balance of power in ways I do not think you have accounted for.

            But more importantly, I think you are grossly and laughably overestimating the integrity of Wall Street. They’re in it for the money, full stop. You propose to firehose on the order of a trillion dollars a year into Wall Street according to a formula that’s going to give maybe ten billion dollars to every company on the Dow(*), and a billion to everyone on the S&P 500, and you think their response is going to be “We insist on the independence, impartiality, and moral purity of our Holy Indices”? Hell, no. Their response is going to be “GimmeGimmeGimmeThat’sMineNotYoursMineMineMineAllMine!”. And the politicians in charge will be happy to steer it to whoever best serves their particular interests.

            This is a recipe for regulatory capture on a grand scale.

            especially relative to the likely effectiveness (low) of such manipulations.

            That makes it worse, not better. The likely effectiveness of market manipulation may be low, but the expected effectiveness as perceived by the people just given a fun new tool to manipulate, will be unrealistically high. They’ll manipulate, Oh yes they will, when have politicians ever not?, and it won’t work like they want it to, so they’ll manipulate some more. When have they ever not?

            I think you have some sort of emotional reaction to my suggestion that is making you cast about yourself to find things to cavil about

            That is false, irrelevant, and needlessly insulting. As would be an accurate description of my present emotions.

            * Or the investors therein, depending on whether the company issues a new offering – another decision that will not be made with dispassionate nonpartisan independence.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_law

            See also Lucas Critique or Goodhardt’s Law.

            John Schilling is doing the long-form explanation about why you can’t put powerful things in the control of simple measures.

          • Heresiarch says:

            John, you’re coming at the whole thing wrong. You appear to me to be imagining that what I’ve proposed is a specific, controlled system. What I’ve proposed is much more like Adam Smith’s “invisible hand”. You can dispute the counterpressures in Wall Street to mass market manipulation all you like, but you can’t argue that I’m overestimating the integrity of Wall Street, because you’ve missed that I’m entirely ignoring it. One cannot overestimate, or even estimate, what one is ignoring. It’s all of their self-interests pulling in different directions on the overall market that makes it damn near impossible to manipulate, particularly over the long term. (It’s for the exact same reason that it’s difficult to regulate, too.)

            “You propose to make the composition of index funds a matter of critical Federal policy.”

            Are you using a Quick-Quotes Quill, or something? I said nothing of the sort.

            My overarching (and final) point is, this sort of thing would be far more difficult to manipulate than you imagine. You seem to think Wall Street can do anything. It can’t. And for actual investors– that is, people who keep their money in for years and decades– all the day-by-day manipulative stuff is irrelevant. Buffett’s mentor Benjamin Graham said, “In the short term the market is a voting machine, but in the long term it’s a weighing machine.” Talk about voting fraud all you want. It won’t change the returns to investors of the long-term business results of American industry.

        • Jill says:

          This would be an extra hardship on people whose salaries do not cover their living expenses, and no benefit at all to the unemployed.

          Have you folks ever even met anyone who was poor?

          • ReluctantEngineer says:

            What Tom Womack proposes is almost exactly the same as the U.S.’s existing social security program. The only difference is that in his proposal, the money is sent to a private account belonging to the employee (something like an IRA I imagine), whereas with social security the money is sent to the federal government (which promises to give the employee some money back when he or she turns 65).

          • brad says:

            If the payor keeps title that’s a huge difference. Among other things it means if he dies before collecting his heirs get the money.

            Social security is not and has never been a savings program.

          • ReluctantEngineer says:

            Sure, but from the perspective of “people whose salaries do not cover their living expenses”, it’s the same — some portion of their pay is being diverted, whether they like it or not, and this makes it harder for them to cover their living expenses.

            Edit: My point was less, “we already have this, it’s called Social Security” and more “this same objection applies equally to Social Security”.

    • John Schilling says:

      @Heresiarch: I’m definitely hoping for some better option than a UBI myself, but want to keep it on the table as a least-bad fallback option for mass technological unemployment. But how do you get to this?

      A UBI might even trap some people into it, rather the way Social Security Disability rules tend to do.

      The essence of a UBI is that everyone gets it, whether they need it or not. Hence the ‘U’. There’s no means-testing, no eligibility-testing, no way to lose your UBI by getting a job or recovering from your disability. So where are you seeing a trap?

      • Heresiarch says:

        The effect is even more so if everyone gets it. Imagine that everyone in the world suddenly, poof, has $1 million more than they did. Would poor people become wealthier, or would it simply devalue what a dollar can buy tremendously? In other words, if your competitors for goods, such as a nice apartment, also have UBI, how does it advantage you? I don’t think a lack of consumer goods is the main problem in most poor people’s lives, judging by trash day in their neighborhoods.

        I’m seeing a trap in dependence, in deciding that this lazy ol’ UBI life is actually pretty good, and not trying any more. (Looking at the SSD example now, with fresh eyes, it doesn’t seem as good a comparison as it did before, though a UBI even for the worst people kind of leaves a bad taste in my mouth.)

    • JBeshir says:

      It’s an error to think that adding money doesn’t lose some of its returns to shift in prices, but it’s also an error to think that the loss is 100%. Markets don’t permit you to simply up prices to capture all your customer’s additional available money. You just get complicated effects where the number of people who will buy at various points changes that let you capture some of it.

      This is akin to how, e.g. food stamps haven’t caused hyperinflation to the point that food stamps are worthless. Their existence probably does increase the price at which basics are best sold- but not by nearly enough to make them useless for feeding people.

      Housing is relatively competitive and supply-limited, and university subsidies would have a high rate of effective loss, but it’s unlikely that people on the poverty line are going to be sufficiently competitive about housing for it to eat all their money, or to spend all their money on university.

      • Heresiarch says:

        Thanks for the reply. I think your food stamps example is not a great one. First, yes, food can be mass-produced. It costs little more to make extra. But so long as the list of things people need include things with a heavy labor component, like housing, medical care and education, those are going to be the holes the UBI money flows out of. Second, food stamps are not universal, going to only about 14% of the country. By contrast, a UBI of, say, $10,000 per person per year would be $3.25 trillion per year– which would, I hope you agree, affect markets rather more than $75 billion or so annually in food stamps. (That even a relatively minor UBI like that would cost the equivalent of 85% or so of the entire Federal budget is yet another argument against it.)

        I wish the poor would spend their money on university. The failure of the poor to spend their money on university, or really on anything even arguable to make them more money in turn, is kind of what I’m talking about. The rich won’t need the UBI and will spend it on income-producing assets– including rental housing in poor neighborhoods. Over time, the extra cash flow will simply be absorbed into asset values, and the differing competition for them between rich and poor will mean that it’s just one more component in the definition of wealth and poverty.

        More money flowing through the lives of the poor will not help them (not least since America never puts one party in power that long, and the Republicans have at minimum no commitment to wealth redistribution, and usually a commitment the other way). What will help poor people is more money sticking in their lives. To get that to happen, government wealth redistribution has to be at most a minority of the whole thing, like the EITC. If people could get those index-fund accounts I was mentioning and have their EITC go directly into it and begin generating passive income, I firmly believe things would begin to turn around. (And a mere three years’ worth of $2000 annual EITC would be generating like $25 a month– a whole water bill, some places– in passive income at 5%.)

    • Corey says:

      A big problem with trying to force savings is that one person’s savings must be another person’s liability (across a closed economy, the world economy if nothing else).

      That is, if a group wants to defer, say, $1 trillion of consumption for a year, then that needs to be balanced by another group who wants to pull $1 trillion of consumption from next year to this one.

      Usually this market clears via discount/interest rates, but (at least the US) is hitting a zero lower bound there, where putting money under a mattress (if you have one large and secure enough) is a viable option.

  118. Graeme says:

    Posting this as late as I am, I suspect this will get lost in the noise, but I’ll try to make the point regardless. Here’s the thing: helping the poor, long term, is very hard. I’m right there with Scott, and I’m not sure that free lunches is going to solve the problem, because the fundamental problem seems to be one of limited hardware.

    The comment that an opiate addicted Kentucky trucker won’t (and can’t) learn to code is absolutely true. Ditto with all his friends and family (to near statistical certainty). But then, most of the posters here are pretty smart and come from pretty smart families and it’s hard to sympathise. Hands up everyone who is on the cutting edge of computer hardware and completely understands every aspect of building an i7 processor, and also has a good knowledge of molecular biology, chemical engineering, and a working understanding of corporate/copywrite law (to the level expected of a typical corperate lawyer)? No takers? Right. So what happens when the minimum baseline for employability is someone who DOES?

    Because at some point the requirement for continued growth in the economy is going to bump up against the limits of hardware; the Flynn effect is all well and good, but outside of IQ tests I don’t see people getting smarter so much as being more specialized. And the really successful are the ones who do many things well (Elon Musk, looking at you buddy).

    There is no hope for our opiate addicted Kentuckian; and if the heritability of intelligence indicates anything, there’s precious little for his kids or kin. So when we’re talking about poverty, understand that we are talking a losing battle with an expanding pool of impoverished, because once we finish industrializing the third world how exactly does anyone in the west expect to make money without having capital or brilliance? And if you only have the former, someone with both will drive you out of business.

    And the weird part is, this is *fine*, for the most part, because quality of life makes up for quite a lot of disenfranchisement. Scott says ignoring technology, he’d rather be a farmer in the 1900s than a kid in the projects, but that is ignoring a *lot*. Especially if “technology” includes “cheaply made consumer goods and food that can be afforded even on a pittance out of the public purse”. A purse which incidentally did not exist in 1900 because there wasn’t enough productive capacity to support it. Societies tend to the morality they can afford, after all.

    But the point of this losing battle is that it is a rearguard action. We cannot, as we are now, survive indefinitely. It isn’t clear whether humanity in it’s current form would lose first to nuclear war or rogue asteroid, but at some point it *will* lose. What appears clear to me is that those who lack the ability to participate in the benefits of a civilization typically end up trying to annihilate them. In a globalized economy with nuclear weapons, this strikes me as a pretty dire concern.

    Yes, helping the poor and disenfranchised is hard, and statistics suggest that the overwhelming majority will not stop being poor and disenfranchised in the long run, and that more people will join them every generation. I suggest we adopt whatever means necessary to ensure they don’t annihilate civilization before a better long term solution is found.

    • Anonymous says:

      I don’t think saying 1900> Projects is “ignoring a lot”. Quite the opposite, believing that tech can somehow make up for all that was sacrificed is naive and fetishistic. It might if you are wealthy and you value “comfort” and security over other things, even then some people are going to argue that view is pathologic.

      • JayT says:

        For one thing, it’s ignoring the fact that there would be something like a one in three chance that he wouldn’t have made it past the age of one. I would guess that the vast majority of people would prefer to be alive in the projects rather than dead on a 1900s farm.

        • Loquat says:

          And on the flip side of that, most people who want to become parents at some point in their lives would vastly prefer the scenario where any potential baby has a >95% chance of surviving to adulthood to the one where every family is expected to lose a few.

    • Psmith says:

      once we finish industrializing the third world how exactly does anyone in the west expect to make money without having capital or brilliance?

      The industrialized Third Worlders exchange their newfound riches for Western goods and services, presumably.
      I can see worrying about automation. Bots don’t buy boats. And I can see worrying about trade wars too, for that matter. But an industrialized Third World as such doesn’t strike me as bad news.

      • Anonymous says:

        Must be fun always being on the consuming side of industrialization. It looks pretty much inverse from the other side.

    • Jill says:

      People over 65 suddenly stopped being so poor when FDR got Social Security started and the group as a whole still is better off to this day. We could come up with a program that would help younger disadvantaged people too– maybe something like the WPA.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_Progress_Administration

      We need to repair our crumbling infrastructure anyway.

      http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/

      The only reason that helping the poor is hard is the political reason. The population has been propagandized to believe that government spending is a fate worse than death– unless the spending IS on death, and war. Someone like FDR could not win the presidency in current times– someone who knows that helping the poor is quite possible, once one sets their mind to it.

      He knew that we had nothing to fear but fear itself. And he wasn’t afraid.

      • Anonymous says:

        Supposing that one largely agrees what Jill said (as I do), and agrees too with Graeme’s original comment (as I do) to the effect that

        Graeme says “Yes, helping the poor and disenfranchised is hard.”

        then one rational course of action for libertarians who are empathic yet government-opposing is to volunteer for foster-care; a role for which volunteers are in desperately short supply in every US state.

        What’s that? You’re among the people who adamantly oppose empathic government roles (aka Rawlsian roles) *and* you prefer to decline personal responsibility for sustaining at least a modicum of communal empathy?

        Especially for children whose inborn cognitive capacity is (as you conceive these things) inherently inferior to your own?

        Then please reflect that if empathy-nonparticipators (like you) become a majority of the global polity, on a planet with 7-10 billion people on it, then Graeme’s dystopian prophesy assuredly will be fulfilled: “We cannot survive indefinitely.”

        That’s what some folks think, anyway.

      • Anonymous says:

        Man I’m surprised the world is so simple, we just have a bunch of evil politicians stopping us from ending poverty once and for all. Once they die of old age and a brave fearless dude takes over, that problem will finally be solved for good.

        I was starting to think it’s a complex issue that can’t be solved even with everyone doing their best, it was scary. Glad to know it’s just a matter of electing the right leaders.

        • Jill says:

          I didn’t say evil politicians. Yes, the people could elect other leaders, but we’re don’t. It’s the citizenry that’s choosing not to help the poor much.
          If that’s doing their best, well, I guess you are right that it’s hard. Helping the poor is as hard as we make it.

      • Heresiarch says:

        I suspect people over 65 weren’t that poor to begin with in the 1930s, because they’d been saving on the assumption that they alone were going to be responsible for their retirement.

        The country could do what it did because medicine was such that 65 was then like 75 or 80 is now, because our economy was very different in the industrial age, and because they had way over 100 workers for every retiree back then. They’re still better off because a.) goods have gotten way cheaper and b.) they’ve been pushing off the bill for their generous benefits onto Gen X and Millennials.

        There isn’t much of a basis for comparison between then and now, even with a pollyannaish attitude.

      • JayT says:

        You’re assuming that the poor people of today could be used to rebuild the infrastructure, and I’m not so sure that’s the case. Construction isn’t just about having a strong back anymore, many parts of it now require extensive training. What would you do with the people that fail at that training, which would probably be a significant number?

    • Ruprect says:

      Run society as a confederation of neo-paternalist dining clubs.

      Those who aren’t especially witty can play ping-pong.

  119. Beelzebob says:

    I still do not understand why people are sceptical that ongoing automation is a problem. Even if certain most jobs are not entirely replaced for now, every bit of technology that “saves time” shortens the time an employee is needed, i.e. less employees will be needed. This affects all levels of qualifications and almost every job. An increase in production is also not really feasible since we are already a tad generous with the natural resources we have at hand. I also do not buy into the argument that we will just come up with enough entirely new job concepts to counter this effect (except for bullshit jobs of course, you can have as many as you want of those, but they do not make anyone happy/feel fulfilled). The only solution I can think of is a basic income for everyone. This would also solve the problem, that we otherwise run out of people who can afford anything.
    We should all find a hobby to keep us busy and sane. This hobby might as well be something that was part of an automated job.

    • Corey says:

      There’s an econ-101ist argument that there will always be enough jobs to go around, because aggregate demand will always rise to provide enough work for everyone. It obviously fails in the case of human-level AI (unless the human-level AIs are also consumers and have human-level rights, but that’s a whole nother discussion) and fails in other cases (distributional issues, bad macro policy hurting AD, technology moving faster than humans can learn new careers, etc.)

      • Vox Imperatoris says:

        There’s an econ-101ist argument that there will always be enough jobs to go around, because aggregate demand will always rise to provide enough work for everyone. It obviously fails in the case of human-level AI (unless the human-level AIs are also consumers and have human-level rights, but that’s a whole nother discussion)

        That’s nonsense. Along with the idea that we “run out of people who can afford anything.”

        The economy has no “need” for additional consumers. It only has need for producers. In other words, the number of consumers is not a constraint on economic growth; the less we consume, the faster the economy is able to grow. Even one individual’s potential demand is infinite; the only thing constraining it is the wealth available to him, which is determined by the supply of wealth.

        It may be true that in the short run, Say’s Law does not apply. Since economic equilibrium is not achieved immediately, if there is a drop in consumer demand, it may be some time before the labor and capital is redirected into an equivalent rise in demand for capital goods.

        But in the long run, it does apply. “Supply creates its own demand”: there is no point where we have “enough” wealth and any further increase in wealth is “too much” and therefore goes unbought, causing the economy to be in a state of “general overproduction”. Any finite amount of wealth is not enough to meet the infinite desires even of one individual.

        The demand is constrained by and equivalent to the supply. If the demand for one thing goes down, the demand for something else goes up. If consumption goes down, then production is redirected toward capital goods, increasing growth and lowering the cost of consumption in the future until it is judged to be worthwhile.

        And yet you hear this fallacy all the time, that countries somehow benefit from “expanding markets”—not for the purpose of acquiring productive resources, which would make sense—but explicitly for the purpose of finding “buyers” for their manufactured goods. Implying that the greatest form of benefit would be sending them the goods for free—or simply destroying them—without getting anything in return.

        ***

        This is separate from the question of whether automation can cause the value of human labor to go down. I don’t think this will happen either, but the only possible route for this is essentially the Malthusian situation.

        The Malthusian problem in regard to population is supposed to be that population grows more quickly than the means for sustaining it, causing numbers to level off at the level where they can be sustained at subsistence only.

        In regard to machinery / AI, it’s really no different. If the machines can reproduce themselves faster than they can expand the quantity of available resources, then the value of any labor capable of being done by machines will fall to the cost of that machine’s “subsistence” (below which no more machines will be produced).

        This, first of all, assumes that there is no labor incapable of being done by machines. Including even ceremonial/sentimental labor.

        But even if this is so and there is nothing capital-owning humans are interested in purchasing that machines can’t produce for far less (again, this seems to me a very implausible assumption given that people often prefer “handmade” products even when they are functionally inferior to those made by machines), the very fact that there is such a virtually limitless supply of machine labor must mean that even a tiny amount of capital would be capable of keeping people in luxury for a very long time. So far from there being some essential need to institute a government-run basic income system, it would be the case under this scenario person who had amassed any quantity of savings would be able to provide the indefinite subsistence of all the people who (for whatever reason) had no savings at all.

        • Corey says:

          Of course a world of abundant labor allows everyone to survive and even thrive, with no changes to today’s economic system, if we assume away distributional issues!

    • NN says:

      1). Because technology eliminating the need for vast numbers of jobs has already happened multiple times (for the most obvious example, before the Industrial Revolution 90% of the population worked in agriculture, now in the West less than 2% of the population is directly employed in agriculture) and people have been predicting that this will lead to mass unemployment for literally centuries now, and every single time these predictions have been proven false. That alone should be enough to make anyone skeptical of these claims, in the same way that we should be skeptical of claims that the world will end due to the countless failed apocalyptic predictions that have come before.

      2). As far as we can tell, today’s automation isn’t leading to a net loss of jobs. In fact, some professions that have had some of their tasks automated, such as bank tellers, paralegals and checkout clerks, have seen an increase in the number of jobs, and in general fields that involve more computer use have seen larger growth than jobs involving less computer use.

      3). I have yet to find a single trained economist who does not think that these automation apocalypse predictions are a load of hooey. So if you are arguing for these theories, then you are effectively arguing for a field-wide science failure in the same way that global warming skeptics are.

      • Psmith says:

        every single time these predictions have been proven false.

        http://www.g w e r n.net/Mistakes#neo-luddism

        The rest of my comment keeps getting filtered, but I’ll just add that quite a few trained economists take the possibility of technological unemployment seriously–see G w e r n’s citations, or the link in your own Atlantic piece.

      • Saint Fiasco says:

        I live in a third world country that is just beginning to move from subsistence-agriculture to industrialized-agriculture. Traditional farmers are not learning new skills or anything. Mostly they complain that nobody wants to buy their products anymore and request more subsidies and protectionism. A terrorist group is now finding recruits among the traditional former-peasants.

        I expect the population will adapt eventually, just like they did in other countries. In the meantime people are literally dying, though.

    • Anonymous says:

      I still do not understand why people are sceptical that ongoing automation is a problem.

      Scoreboard.
      https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/fredgraph.png?g=4zD0

  120. Inachodladh says:

    Government spending is growing faster than GDP. The world’s population is growing. The people who are the least useful are having the most kids. I think you see where this is going. Let’s admit its not sustainable. This whole ideology of “we have to take care of everyone” is going to have to go away eventually, it’s just a matter of whether we want to do it in an orderly market based end welfare and promote abortion way, or a chaotic fascist genocide way. The choice is yours, humanist.

    • Anonymous says:

      Inachodladh proclaims: “I think you see where this is going.”

      Yes, in plenty of respects it’s a beneficent direction that gratifies the growing, thoughtful cohort of empathic libertarians! 🙂

      • Anonymous says:

        You seem to think that calling someone immoral invalidates their argument?

        • Anonymous says:

          It was the mathematician / philosopher Alfred North Whitehead who presciently foresaw (in 1925):

          “It is the business of the future to be dangerous; and it is among the merits of science that it equips the future for its duties.”

          Whitehead’s essay appears in Richard Rhodes’ well-selected (as it seems to me) anthology Visions of Technology: A Century of Vital Debate About Machines, Systems, and the Human World (2012).

          One point is that Inachodladh is not the first person to peer into a cloudy crystal ball and proclaim that dystopia is inevitable. Rhodes provides multiple examples, and indeed Whitehead himself goes on to say:

          Middle class pessimism over the future of the world comes from a confusion between civilization and security.

          From Whitehead’s perspective, an essential, and gravely corrosive, aspect of underclass-membership is frustration of the shared opportunity, and the shared responsibility, and the shared hope, of creatively shaping our dangerous future.

          If at its best, libertarianism manifests itself as an empathic libertarianism that embraces, and seeks to shape, “our dangerous future” (in Whitehead’s phrase), then at its worst, doesn’t libertarianism all-too-commonly manifest itself as a self-justifying, and threfore self-sustaining, embitterment disorder that is associated to a (real or perceived) Shayvian moral injury?

          An embitterment disorder that perceives not the hopes of the future, but only the dangers? Surely libertarianism can do better than that! 🙂

          • Anonymous says:

            He says that population is growing faster than GDP, and that the least productive people are having the most children. You respond by calling him immoral. I ask you if you think that’s the way to engage an argument, and your response is to double down and say he has an embitterment disorder?

            Oh nvm, you also added that because pessimists were wrong in the past, present pessimists are wrong as well. I see..

          • Anonymous says:

            A pretty fair number of comments on this thread use the word “immoral”, but the comment complained-of is not one of them.

            Perhaps there is a perceived association to (for example) the explicit critique of libertarian immorality by “Jill”? Or our host’s provocative endorsement of “bleeding heart libertarianism” (as pointed out in a cogent comment by WinterSoldier)?

            For a growing cohort (me included), the notion of “moral injury” — which is finding increasingly many psychometric applications outside of military psychology — lends itself to public discourse and scientific inquiry better than the notion of “immorality”, which is so commonly perceived as pejorative.

            As the scientific literature on moral injury increases, perhaps the time has arrived for the libertarian community to engage with it, without being accused of it?

            Gives me the goose-bumps! 🙂

          • Jiro says:

            “It’s okay for me to call him immoral because I didn’t use the exact word “immoral”” isn’t and shouldn’t be very convincing.

          • Anonymous says:

            Jiro, your comment inspired me to search Jonathan Shay’s major works — Dr. Shay is a much-honored MD/PhD psychiatrist — in regard to the relative usage of “immoral’ versus ‘moral’.

            Achilles in Vietnam (1994) 
                ‘immoral’ used one time, ‘moral’ used 53 times

            Odysseus in America (2002)
                ‘immoral’ used zero times, ‘moral’ used 47 times

            The Shayvian Ratio (as we will call it) of hundred-to-one weighting of ‘morality’-versus-‘immorality’ struck me (at least) like a thunderbolt, as while reading Shay’s works, I had been entirely unconscious of it.

            For inspiring this insight, I sincerely (albeit anonymously) thank you, Jiro.

            From a Shayvian perspective, if libertarian ideals do not reduce the incidence and prevalence of moral injury (in practice as opposed to theory), and are not conducive to the healing of moral injuries (again in practice as opposed to theory), then aren’t we justified in tackling the tough question: Of what practical good are libertarian ideals?

            More broadly, perhaps discourse among the SSC commentariat would be concretely improved, if there were fewer mentions of ‘immorality’, and more discussion of the causes of ‘moral injury’ and the methods of remediating it?

            Aren’t these amply good reasons for moral discourse to respect the Shayvian Ratio, and more generally, to respect the Shayvian focus upon moral injury and its remediation, as contrasted with immoral behavior and its punishment?

          • Randy M says:

            Aren’t these amply good reasons for moral discourse to respect the Shayvian Ratio,

            Aren’t what? The ability to question libertarianism and “perhaps” a concrete improvement in discourse on the site? I don’t see why they would be, even in the unlikely event we can’t work around a euphemism treadmill.

            Furthermore, is that really what you were objecting to? Couldn’t you have mentally rephrased the question as “You seem to think that calling someone “not facilitating moral healing” invalidates their argument?”

            Perhaps a concrete improvement in commentating around here could be achieved by prioritizing clarity over novel lexigraphical innovations for reasons of pretension empathy?

          • Anonymous says:

            My objection to the parent comment chiefly originated in the unsupported postulate

            “The people who are the least useful are having the most kids.

            followed by the inference

            I think you see where this is going. Let’s admit its not sustainable.

            Isn’t the postulate flatly contradicted by science? And isn’t the inference based upon the most unempathic (hence sterile) variants of fundamentalist libertarianism, namely, the variants that stipulate coercive economic punishments to citizens who dissent from reductionist libertarian rationalism?

            In contrast, aren’t the most empathic (bleeding-heart) varieties of libertarianism naturally compatible with a Shayvian focus upon moral injury and its remediation, as grounded nonreductively in Brain, mind, society, culture — each other’s environments with equal ontologic standing?

            For an increasing cohort of people (including me), and within increasingly influential institutions, this natural and nonreductive compatibility between empathic libertarianism and Shayvian moral action amounts to plain common sense, and provides a viable alternative to the dystopian visions that have become so regrettably prevalent among fundamentalist libertarians.

    • anonymous poster says:

      Why does everyone always suggest ending welfare as a way to get rid of superfluous poor people? Superfluous poor people predate the invention of welfare by thousands of years.

      • Corey says:

        Likewise, eliminating Social Security doesn’t cause old people to just start working or starving. For those who have families, some family member will take them in, possibly reducing their ability to work. For those who don’t have families and can’t work, they do indeed starve, but people rarely starve quietly.

        • John Schilling says:

          And when you take that one step further, proposing to eliminate Social Security causes tens of millions of registered voters to think, “wait, what, this means my mother-in-law is going to have to move in with me?”, and vote for Hell No We’re Not Doing That.

          The End.

      • Jill says:

        Many people suppose that if welfare is ended, jobs for unskilled people will magically appear. And then the supposer will end up paying less in taxes too. A win-win.

        The theory is that poor people are lazy and are sitting in front of the TV eating bon bons bought with food stamps, unwilling to apply for all the many living wage jobs somewhere right outside their door. End welfare and food stamps and the problem is (supposedly) solved.

        Theoretically, no social services are needed to prepare them for work, to help them to apply for jobs, to treat their medical or psychological or substance abuse issues etc. Because that would cost money. And in the U.S., money is to be spent on wars.

        • Anonymous says:

          What’s a living wage? Does that mean if you make less than that you drop dead (presumably from starvation)?

          There are still hundreds of millions of people on this planet living on $1.25 at PPP a day or less. So I fail to see how the “living wage” can be higher than that.

          Maybe pick a less bombastic term?

          • Jill says:

            The cost of food, lodging etc. is higher in the U.S. than in the countries where people live on $1.25 a day.

            Just because the term sounds bombastic to you doesn’t mean it does to me or anyone else.

          • Anonymous says:

            I suggest you look up PPP (purchasing power parity).

          • Jill says:

            You should have spelled it out beforehand. I do know what it is. I just don’t use abbreviations for everything, as some here do.

            If one looks up just ppp, they get all kinds of things e.g. piss poor planning.

            Talking about what it’s like to be poor from a theoretical standpoints, with no skin in the game, and having perhaps never even known anyone with skin in the game, has its limits.

            Here is a book by someone who tried to live on tiny amounts of money, describing what it was like.

            Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America Paperback – August 2, 2011
            by Barbara Ehrenreich

            http://www.amazon.com/Nickel-Dimed-Not-Getting-America/dp/0312626681/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1464368532&sr=1-2&keywords=barbara+ehrenreich+books

          • Anonymous says:

            Now that we are clear on PPP, would you like to revise your response regarding what a “living wage” is and whether or not the term is bombastic?

          • Saint Fiasco says:

            Those people live in places where food is much cheaper. Otherwise they really would starve to death.

          • Anonymous says:

            @Saint Fiasco
            See the third post above yours.

            @Jill

            Talking about what it’s like to be poor from a theoretical standpoints, with no skin in the game, and having perhaps never even known anyone with skin in the game, has its limits.

            What’s your point exactly? Is or is not one penny below a living wage fatal? If not, what is the word “living” doing in there? Other than serving as bombast that is.

            I thought you were opposed to propagandistic manipulation?

            FYI: my sister’s only sources of income are SSI & food stamps.

          • Jill says:

            No. I don’t find it bombastic. People have to have some way to get their basic survival needs met. Or if they don’t, it’s silly to pretend that they do have that.

            Why do you find the term bombastic? What terms do you prefer to describe poverty? Or do you prefer to think that it doesn’t exist or should not be anyone’s concern but the person who is poor?

            What is YOUR point here? My (and others’ though I haven’t noticed you demanding anything of others here who use the term) use of the term living wage is a problem for you. Why?

          • suntzuanime says:

            The term “living wage” could in theory mean something, but to the extent that it means something, it is illegal to work in the US except for amounts vastly greater than the living wage. I would suggest that this is one of those cases where the left has refused to change their rhetoric to acknowledge their victories, but honestly it seems difficult for me to believe that working for less than a living wage was ever particularly common. It would seem like it would only take a month or so for all the remaining workers to be earning a living wage.

          • Jill says:

            So, Suntzuanime, what is your preferred term here? We’re talking about the poor. That’s what the post is on. What term do you use to distinguish someone who is poor and perhaps in need of help from society vs. someone who isn’t? Or do you just believe that no one ought to get help from government or society, no matter what?

          • suntzuanime says:

            Give me a break.

          • Anonymous says:

            Many people suppose that if welfare is ended, jobs for unskilled people will magically appear. And then the supposer will end up paying less in taxes too. A win-win.

            The theory is that poor people are lazy and are sitting in front of the TV eating bon bons bought with food stamps, unwilling to apply for all the many living wage jobs somewhere right outside their door. End welfare and food stamps and the problem is (supposedly) solved.

            Theoretically, no social services are needed to prepare them for work, to help them to apply for jobs, to treat their medical or psychological or substance abuse issues etc. Because that would cost money. And in the U.S., money is to be spent on wars.

            For deciding how little poor people should have before you and others in society can feel fine about ignoring them entirely, regardless of their other cicumstances?

            Or do you just believe that no one ought to get help from government or society, no matter what?

            Or do you prefer to think that it doesn’t exist or should not be anyone’s concern but the person who is poor?

            Maybe strawman should be the next thing you look up.

          • Saint Fiasco says:

            That $1.25 figure already accounted for the differences in purchasing power?

            I honestly don’t believe you. Doesn’t that mean it should be possible for me to find enough to eat, drink and have shelter for a day with $1.25?

            I live in Paraguay, and even here $1.25 a day is considered extreme poverty. As in, if they are alive, they are probably getting more money that the statistics don’t account for (crime?), or are being helped by someone.

            Edit: Forgot to mention that in Paraguay minimum wage is about $11 a day. That is admittedly more than living wage, but $1.25 is definitely less than living wage.

          • Jill says:

            Saint Fiasco, thank you for some information from the real world. So good to see that up in the nether world of abstractions.

          • Anonymous says:

            Apparently Africa isn’t a part of the real world. Data is meaningless. The only thing that matters are anecdotes offered by articulate English speaking people with access to the Internet or better yet prestigious NY publishers of light non-fiction for newsweekly crowd.

          • Anonymous says:

            @Saint Fiasco
            Do people in your country rarely, sometimes, or often eat bush meat? How about in urban areas (rats, pigeons, squirrels, feral dogs and cats, etc.)?

          • Saint Fiasco says:

            @Anonymous
            Birds are eaten sometimes. Never cats and dogs, because they are pets. And rats are icky.

            But in that case, shouldn’t the price of the bird be included in how much they “earn” per day? Just because hunting, gathering and scavenging isn’t a “real” job doesn’t mean the “income” isn’t real.

            So if the person earns $1 a day, and the bird is worth $0.50, then they really are earning 1.50$ a day. One dollar from their day job, one half for hunting.

          • Anonymous says:

            In a countries where bush meat is commonly eaten it has a market price and is included in consumption. In richer countries even poor people have better options and there’s not much of a market for it. If you had to survive on $1.25 a day at PPP the lack of competition for rats and feral cats and the like would a major advantage versus someone that had to go to market for it or range further afield. There’s a similar story for clean water.

            It turns out that human beings are pretty tough and can LIVE in fairly terrible circumstances.

        • Jill says:

          Well, then perhaps you should ask your sister how much it costs her to live per month, in her area, including all money and goods she receives from family. And maybe you can ask her how much money she needs to keep from starving to death, because you need that figure for what? For deciding how little poor people should have before you and others in society can feel fine about ignoring them entirely, regardless of their other cicumstances?

          Living wage is a common term, used by many here. What term would you prefer, to differentiate between the amount of money it costs for food, lodging and other necessary expenses vs. an amount of money below that?

          • suntzuanime says:

            Nobody advocating for a “living wage” is advocating for the amount of money it costs for food, lodging and other necessary expenses. They’d be fighting to reduce the minimum wage, in that case. (Barring a few pathological urban areas.)

          • Anonymous says:

            I’m familiar with how much it costs her to live, and it is well below the number cited as the “living wage” for our area.

            My problem with the term living wage is that it is dishonest propaganda. What advocates mean is that it is in some way undignified or “not right” for a person to to earn less than a certain amount per hour, not that it is impossible to live on a particular income.

            That may well be a good argument, I’d like to see it made openly and honestly so I can evaluate it.

          • Saint Fiasco says:

            Upon introspection, I think “living wage” refers to the wage where you can live without major nutritional deficiencies. Where I live, ‘very poor’ kids are anemic, underweight, shorter and less intelligent than ‘normal poor’ kids. By less intelligent I mean they can’t focus well in school and often fall asleep in class.

            They don’t die, usually, but they don’t fully live either.

            I understand that kind of poverty is uncommon in developed countries, and it’s conceivable that a reduction in minimum wages will move many people from ‘very poor’ to ‘normal poor’.

          • Good Burning Plastic says:

            without major nutritional deficiencies

            You can probably achieve that with one multivitamin plus 2000-3000 kcal’s worth of rice and beans per day.

        • Jill says:

          Anonymous, so if that’s a straw man, then what is the real man? What do you actually believe about the poor and their needs and helping them or not helping them? Or do you only criticize others ideas, rather than being clear about your own?

          Are you saying that if someone has $1.25 per day, we should all forget about them. Poor problem solved?

          BTW, a working individual needs work clothes, transportation costs etc. that your sister does not need if she doesn’t work.

          • Anonymous says:

            Is generating strawman some kind of addiction? Your middle paragraph fits right in with all the other quotes.

        • Jill says:

          So you are unconcerned about poverty in the U.S. Why use Africa as your standard? Are you saying that no one here in the U.S. is poor enough to be deserving of assistance?

          • Jill says:

            Anonymous, you keep accusing me of generating a straw man, but you won’t answer questions from me, and refuse to be clear about what your own position actually is.

            I’m giving up on guessing what you believe and think about poverty, since you refuse to be clear on that. And since every time I ask you to be, you use your straw man accusation on me.

          • Anonymous says:

            Oh I could tell you why the ocean’s near the shore. I’d be thinkin thoughts I’d never thought before. Then I’d stop and think some more. I would not be just a nothin, my head all full of stuffin, my heart of pain!

          • Jill says:

            I will learn from this experience. Never seriously try to have a conversation with someone who actually believes that someone in the U.S. could live on $1.25 per day. They are too far out of touch with reality to have a conversation with.

            Also, I need to stop sooner any conversations with people who demand lots of things from me, but never answer my questions or go to any trouble whatsoever to be clear about what they are saying. And to stop conversations with people whose favorite conversational habit is making accusations about straw men etc.

          • houseboatonstyxb says:

            @ Jill
            Also, I need to stop sooner any conversations with people who demand lots of things from me, but never answer my questions or go to any trouble whatsoever to be clear about what they are saying. And to stop conversations with people whose favorite conversational habit is making accusations about straw men etc.

            Jill, I think that’s a very wise decision, and I think you should also apply it to people who seem rude to you in any way. (Remember that a lot of people here don’t know when they’re sounding rude to outsiders; see ‘lack of social skills’, autism etc. But still, dropping such conversations is wise.)

            There are so many worthwhile comments these days, that by the time I’ve caught up reading them all, either someone else has already made the point I would make, or said something so clearly and politely that I can answer theirs without problems.

          • Jill says:

            Thanks, Houseboat.

          • Anonymous says:

            Jill, people will stop accusing you of strawmanning when you stop assuming that Republicans only donate to charity because they fear hell and that the person you’re arguing with wants the American poor to live like Africans (just your two most recent examples). Do finish that reading about the principle of charity.

            In this particular chain, you weren’t rude to a specific person, you just implied that anyone opposing welfare believes a bunch of outrageous things, and then waited for either the claim to go unopposed or for someone to come argue in favor of welfare..in the frame that you’ve already established, as a person who believes that “jobs will magically appear” and “money is to be spent on wars, not poor people”.

            You’ve done this multiple times, and sometimes you get called out, and you never learn the lesson. I have tried spelling it out for you, take it or assume I’m yet another rude person, I’ll keep enjoying your posts either way.

          • workedness says:

            Best not, Jill. You can say anything terrible about liberals. There’s really no ceiling for how outrageously unfair a remark about liberals may be on SSC.

            But it doesnt work the other way at all.

            To see the problem in full check out the reaction to Scott’s “republican debate questions” post.

            https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/11/16/hardball-questions-for-the-next-debate/

          • Deiseach says:

            Republicans only donate to charity because they fear hell

            As a Republican, the only charity I donate to is the Easter Lily collection*.

            Oh – not the kind of Republican meant in this context? 🙂

            *As a child, I mortified my mother one Easter when we were in town by putting money into the collection tin and proudly wearing my Easter Lily sticker on my lapel, because I was unaware of the political connotations and thought it was simply for Easter 🙂

          • Deiseach says:

            There’s really no ceiling for how outrageously unfair a remark about liberals may be on SSC.

            Let me test that one out, workedness.

            The Baby-Eating Bishop of Bath and Wells is a liberal!

            Let’s see if that gets me banned or not. If not, you are completely correct and we are a nest of crypto-fascists on here.

          • Jill says:

            Thanks again, workedness. Interesting post and reaction there.

          • Jill says:

            Deiseach, I expect workedness was referring to the types of reactions one gets from board participants after stating certain views or facts– not Scott’s banning policies.

          • houseboatonstyxb says:

            @ workedness
            You can say anything terrible about liberals. There’s really no ceiling for how outrageously unfair a remark about liberals may be on SSC.
            But it doesnt work the other way at all.

            Jill, I’m too much of an outsider here to properly understand where this de facto double standard comes from. But I think it’s not because of a real, single but nuanced position Scott holds on the issues. He has one (which I applaud as far as I understand it) but that’s not exactly reflected in how the comments here line up.

            If someone wanted to figure out what’s going on with the double standard and how it developed, I’d say read ssc from its beginning, and read some of Scott’s posts on his other social medias; tumblr etc. There’s a ‘ssc-sketchpad’ (which may be some of what critics here refer to as “Scott’s commie friends on tumblr”) and I don’t know what all else.

            My vague impression here, is that ssc began non-political, sort of taking up where Less Wrong left off. Then rightwingers started coming in with harsh political comments. So there went the neighborhood. So a lot of liberals made a Polite Flight to other (maybe less political) places. Scott has made some purges of especially harsh rightwingers, but new ones come in, so the comments here keep skewing hostile to liberal people and liberal policies.

          • k says:

            @workedness
            Most people here are liberals, so that is a really weird comment. If you are particularly hurt by the five or so Nrctnries we have, then I’m sorry.

          • Dahlen says:

            @houseboatonstyxb:

            LessWrong was never non-political. There was always this undercurrent of pent-up obsession with political topics that resurfaced with every opportunity, as evidenced by the threads of hundreds and hundreds of comments that resulted every time someone started a vaguely political or controversial discussion. I once wandered obliviously into a huge trainwreck of a political thread (might’ve been gender issues, and the year might’ve been 2013) and asked, “what are all y’all getting so worked up about?”, and got downvoted into the negatives.

            A lot of the overt and accepted political discussion was also absorbed by the sister site of OB, and that was also one big source of right-wing users, because it looks like the whole of George Mason University is ideologically libertarian — albeit not far-right, but in an academia rumoured to be mostly left-wing, these types fraternise more easily than it would happen across the left-right ideological border.

            What happened on SSC was that Scott carried over the previous tendency of the community to judge issues impartially into the political realm, which effectively created a bi-partisan space or, shall I say, omni-partisan, and when certain political factions meet, sparks fly. The moderation was aimed mostly at containing, or minimising the damage of the sparks. (I wrote more here, but it was mostly Recent History of SSC that all of us already know, plus potentially controversial claims that I don’t have the time to defend now.)

            Anyway, it’s not what it used to be, as evidenced by the fact that we can have this discussion with minimal to no amounts of dogpiling. (Then again, it’s an old thread already.)

          • houseboatonstyxb says:

            @ k

            It’s not the number of commentors, it’s the length and number of insults (toward liberals in general; very few are toward me). Which have seemed to slack off in some recent shorter threads.

            @ dahlen

            Thanks for the background. It was reading ssc that sent me looking at LW, so I only saw the last of LW, and never OB.

        • “Theoretically, no social services are needed to prepare them for work,”

          You might find Murray’s Losing Ground relevant for its description of the failed attempt to use government programs to prepare people for work. That was part of the original theory of the War on Poverty. The fact that it turned out not to work was part of the reason the War on Poverty shifted from getting people out of poverty to making it more tolerable to be in poverty.

    • Ruprect says:

      Capital can’t talk. The extent to which capitalism is voluntary is the extent to which people accept the legal/political institutions relating to capital.
      What is the purpose of our social systems? What is the justification for our current rules?
      As the productive capacity of society increases, you would expect that the contribution made to production by individual talent or work would decrease. We’re not 100 times richer than the romans because we work 100 times harder or are a 100 times more intelligent. Where the justification for differences in wealth is differences in effort/talent, you would *expect* the legal system to take increasing amounts of production (owing to capital), as the productive machinery of society is developed.

      So, when we talk about equal (or somewhat equal) access to the production being undesirable, or unsustainable, and say that those who receive the least are the least capable, you are also saying that the justifications provided for our legal systems are insufficient, and, perhaps, that the voluntary society itself is undesirable.
      So, what is the basis of the good society? Would the most intelligent man in the world be entitled to all of the produce of a machine if we, as a society, decided that we wanted him to push the start button? When stakes get too high, people stop playing…
      How about if my grandfather built the machine? Or there was some elaborate chain of ownership leading back to the person who first stole it? I’m as much of a fan of inherited wealth as the next man, but there surely has to be a limit?
      The humanist answer – if the only solution to the problem is tyranny/genocide, then the solution is no better than the problem. All we’ll achieve is a quicker hell.

      • Jill says:

        Word.

        “when we talk about equal (or somewhat equal) access to the production being undesirable, or unsustainable, and say that those who receive the least are the least capable” we’re just saying “I richly benefit from the status quo, so the status quo rocks.”

        Throughout history, a lot of people have said or believed this. Like Marie Antoinette, for example.

        • Deiseach says:

          Jill, do you know what Marie Antoinette actually said or did, or are you swallowing the propaganda of the time which has been kept going ever since by pop history?

          I’m not defending the Hapsburgs or the French monarchy, they were out of touch and the economy and the people were suffering, but I’d love to throttle whomever thought that repeating the alleged “Let them eat cake” saying of hers was a bright idea. That’s the level the “let them eat cake” quote is coming from: one of those “somebody said” attributions that get pinned onto various famous people as having uttered it, that was then used as part of the pre-revolutionary anti-monarchial activism and propaganda.

          In case you are unaware, other neat propaganda tricks of the revolutionaries to make sure public support for the execution of the late queen was 100% (some wishy-washy types were a bit queasy about executing her) were to circulate reports that she had been committing incest with the Dauphin, as well as insinuations of adultery, lesbianism and other high-living aristocratic debauchery. This is one account, you can find plenty more to back it up by Googling. And remember that the Dauphin was only eight years old when separated from his mother, put into the care of guards who brutalised him and allegedly made him get drunk, sing dirty songs, and repeat the charges about his mother’s sexual misconduct with him. He died when he was ten. Ah, the pure righteousness of the glorious people’s revolution!

          Marie Antoinette’s personality had been assailed on almost every front – her wild extravagance was well known and unquestioned; her supposedly perverse and numberless sexual proclivities had been the stock in trade of pornographers and gossips for years; and at one and the same time she was dismissed as intellectually vapid and reviled as a cunning, Machiavellian enemy of the revolution. But through all this, one positive light had continued to shine on Marie Antoinette: the glow of motherhood. This aspect of her role was especially important to Marie Antoinette herself; in part because it had taken her so agonisingly long to become pregnant, in part, perhaps, because of the epic example of motherhood provided by her mother the Empress Maria Theresa, and in part simply because of her own naturally maternal personality. The image had been deliberately fostered through public events and in official portraits, especially those of preferred painter Élisabeth-Louise Vigée-Le Brun.

          … If there was one thing Hébert knew it was how to whip up the people, and so he quickly arrived at a plan to destroy the one last vestige of humanity left in the public image of Marie Antoinette, and speed her on her way to the guillotine. At some point, it was mentioned to Hébert that when Louis Charles was frightened Marie Antoinette would comfort him and let him sleep in her bed. This planted the seeds of an idea. Hébert decided to frame a story that Marie Antoinette abused her son sexually, teaching him to masturbate and making him sexually dependant upon her. There has been some speculation that in order to provide this story with a foundation, Hébert ordered Louis Charles’ guard Simon to encourage him to masturbate, and even bring prostitutes into his cell. Certainly, Louis Charles was subject to all manner of physical abuse by his jailers, and there is no way of knowing how far this extended. However, it is clear that Hébert knew better than most men that truth was far less important than what people could be made to believe. He operated in the realm of words rather than action, and would have seen that subjecting the boy to actual sexual abuse was unnecessary for the plan to succeed. Louis Charles was, anyway, a vulnerable and easily-led boy.

          In early October 1793 Hébert visited Louis Charles in the Tuileries, and got him to sign a pre-drafted confession. Most cruelly, Louis Charles was also made to confront his sister and aunt (who had not seen him for 3 months) with the accusations, and they too were then interrogated. Though only 15 years old and unable to understand the full weight of the accusation, Marie-Thérèse knew enough to recognise it as an obscene lie, and was profoundly upset by the incident. Aunt Elisabeth refused even to respond to the questions.

          And this ends today’s History Rant.

        • Jill says:

          Hi, Deiseach. You certainly know a log more about the history of that period than I do. Thanks for sharing all the facts you know about that situation. Are you a historian?

          Although the quote about “Let them eat cake” may be non-factual, it is very true metaphorically speaking. Because the monarchy was very out of touch with the realities of people who did not and could not eat cake.

          The fact that the French monarchy was out of touch and the economy and the people were suffering– that was my main point there. And that defenders of the status quo often think that it’s fine to insulate themselves from other people who are suffering and to ignore them– until suddenly those powerless people get hold of some power and something like the French Revolution occurs.

          That’s the big issue with helping the poor– that it is so easy, and seem so right, to ignore people in dire straits who currently have no power to do anything about their situation or to affect your own life.

          • Jiro says:

            Although the quote about “Let them eat cake” may be non-factual, it is very true metaphorically speaking.

            I believe the term is “fake, but accurate“.

          • Deiseach says:

            Jill, it also is a lie. A propaganda phrase that was useful to give the public a view of the queen (a foreigner, a traitor – she was tried for treason and that was the ostensible excuse for her execution, and thus someone who cared nothing for the French people and was only out to exploit them) and create a negative opinion of her.

            Truthiness of that kind can end up with someone in the libel courts; if you said that I enjoyed boiling puppies alive, I would certainly not take that as a harmless phrase encapsulating the deeper truth that I do not support animal rights in the sense of giving animals equal or even superior moral weight to humans.

            I suppose Hébert was operating on the same principle of “[while] it may be non-factual, it is very true metaphorically speaking” when he created the accusation of the queen sexually abusing her eight year old son?

          • Jill says:

            Hi, Deiseach

            I’m not at all talking about what specific truths of evidence are, in courts of law or in history. I’m simply talking about the general situation of certain people being out of touch with the sort of people who can not and do not “eat cake.” My primary focus is on what’s happening today in the U.S.

            I haven’t uncritically swallowed propaganda here. To say that the French monarchy was out of touch with the needs of the poor is hardly propaganda. That’s all I am saying– and looking at today’s circumstances in light of that.

          • Jill says:

            I would not use the term fake but accurate to describe the French monarchy situation. I would say that they were out of touch with the circumstances of the peasants– which was my main point and which had parallels to today’s circumstances. And that some of the accusations against them were false.

            But I’m not mainly talking about French history here.

            It’s interesting how easy it is to put words into someone else’s mouth when you perceive that you disagree with them in some way– to mistakenly assume that you disagree with them in many huge ways where you actually do not.

        • notes says:

          Indeed, people sometimes do not mean what they say, and sometimes simply say things for the effect on the listener. Or they may speak for self-interested reasons, and may even believe what they say in such cases. Who, looking at the world today, could oppose reform of the status quo? The poor are indeed suffering, and action must be taken, whatever the cost. As a national hero once said, “We must confront the privileged elite who have destroyed a large part of the world.” That particular confrontation has not yet run its course, but it is already a vivid example to those who talk about how ‘equal access’ to production is ‘unsustainable.’

          Part of the duty of confrontation is calling out the propaganda of the privileged elite, whether it comes from a right-wing think tank or a libertarian robber-baron, or even from Reverend Fifield’s corporate-sponsored Christianity. It might be difficult indeed to understand why someone might believe the things that such as they claim they believe, to unravel their proffered reasons and counter their arguments; it is simpler and surer to note their direct or associated self-interest, and confront.

          • Jill says:

            Wow, great to meet you, Notes. Always glad to find someone who is aware of propaganda. We’re pretty well immersed in the stuff. Which is why most people don’t see it. It’s like trying to explain to a fish what water is.

          • Anonymous says:

            Oook my odds of Jill playing the long game just got a lot higher. Although she may looking to cash out already.

          • Anonymous says:

            notes says: “As a national hero once said, ‘We must confront the privileged elite who have destroyed a large part of the world.'”

            Hmmm … was it Jane Goodall? Or maybe Wendell Berry?

            Perhaps the quote is from Berry’s high-profile Jefferson Medal lecture “It All Turns on Affection” (2012)?

            Plenty of folks (well, me at least), and plenty of institutions too, rank citizen-thinkers like Jane Goodall and Wendell Berry among the foremost living spokespersons, either for an empathic brand of libertarianism, or for what empathic libertarianism is evolving to become.

            Note: Jane Goodall is presently 82 years old, and Wendell Berry is presently 86, but neither shows any signs of “cashing out already”.

            We are led to wonder, what do phrases like “cash out already” even mean, to citizen-thinkers like Goodall and Berry?

            Because citizen-thinkers like Jane Goodall and Wendell Berry aren’t “in the game” for any values that are commensurate with “cash”, isn’t that right? 🙂

          • Deiseach says:

            Jill, I wish you’d examine the propaganda you are uncritically regurgitating. You seem like a sincere and well-meaning person but you do operate on the basis of “our guys tell the real if unpleasant facts about the other side, their guys spew out propaganda”.

            Then again, I incline to be a JacobITE, not a JacobIN 🙂

            And I am certainly not defending the French monarchy, it is more that I get offended when lazy “Everybody knows” stories that have been debunked as historically untrue and inventions continue to be repeated and ingrained into pop culture with no hope of them ever being eradicated. You know, “Everybody knows Columbus set sail to prove the world was round, Marie Antoinette said ‘let them eat cake’ and the Catholic Church burned Galileo at the stake” (yes, I’ve seen that last one being used as back-patting self-congratulation by one of the “I fucking love science!!!” types).

          • Anonymous says:

            Deiseach, to echo your own comment, “please examine critically the propaganda you are uncritically regurgitating.” Historian Jonathan Israel can assist this effort (and also, affirm that Jill is right).

            Israel’s Benjamin Franklin Medal lecture “Changing the world: Enlightenment and basic human rights ” (2010) affirms:

            We [moderns] have a very very big problem. The French revolutionaries were very clear: the whole idea of modern human rights comes from philosophy.

            But we don’t understand that. “What the hell does that mean? The whole idea of modern human rights comes from philosophy? Are you kidding?”

            For most people, that is absurd and ridiculous. And most historians just don’t know what to do about this. “What are you talking about?”

            If you read [any] French revoutionary journals from 1789, on almost every page it will say “The world is being totally transformed and the main agent of change is philosophy.”

            And we [moderns] don’t know what that means, we don’t understand that, and we’ve redefined philosophy: “We want to be neutral on important social questions. We want to stay in our corner! We’re philosophers

            And so nowadays we think that’s what philosophy is. Of course, this isn’t the Socratic idea of philosophy; it’s the modern idea of philosophy, that way philosophy was made to be neutral, by governments and states and universities.

            So we absolutely can’t understand what they’re talking about, when they [the 18th century philosophes] say “A new world, modern democracy, basic human rights, comes from philosophy.”

            I think this is a complete mystery to a culture like ours. Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen, for your attention.”

            For Israel, the radical tenets of the Enlightenment are eight in number:

            Radical Enlightenment conceived as a package of basic concepts and values may be summarized in eight cardinal points:

            (1) adoption of philosophical (mathematical-historical) reason as the only and exclusive criterion of what is true;

            (2) rejection of all supernatural agency, magic, disembodied spirits, and divine providence;

            (3) equality of all mankind (racial and sexual);

            (4) secular ‘universalism’ in ethics anchored in equality and chiefly stressing equity, justice, and charity;

            (5) comprehensive toleration and freedom of thought based on independent critical thinking;

            (6) personal liberty of lifestyle and sexual conduct between consenting adults;

            (7) freedom of expression, political criticism, and the press, in the public sphere.

            (8) democratic republicanism as the most legitimate form of politics.

            As for the most toxic forms of libertarianism, which are grounded in prejudicial elitism and faux-scientific cognitive determinism, Israel quotes Carlantonio Pilati:

            Any faith affording such scope for the most bigoted to be hailed as the wisest of men cannot conceivably be the true one.

            It’s my pleasure to verifiably assure history-minded SSC readers that for the past three centuries and more, both the ideas and the ideals of the Enlightenment have been solidly on Jill’s side! 🙂

  121. Jill says:

    We seem to have an issue in the U.S. with charitable foundations not being willing to focus very much on helping the poor in the U.S. They far more often help the poor in other places. Helping the poor seems to have a lot of political and public relations pitfalls and obstacles. I notice in my reading about this, that the Rockefeller Foundation, the Bill Gates Foundation etc. do most of their work in other countries, probably to avoid those obstacles.

    So the U.S. government is into not spending money on the poor currently, or on much of anything except wars and drones. And the charitable foundationsm that people theorize will pick up the slack, do not.

    I guess we are finding what happens in this situation, and will continue to find out more.

    • Anonymous says:

      So you begrudge people living on a dollar a day charitable aid you think it’s better spent on people living on $25/day because the latter fell out of their mothers on the same side of an invisible line as you.

      What a humanitarian you are!

    • Anonymous says:

      It’s more about the lack of demand for malaria nets in the USA.

    • JayT says:

      Or, the reason charitable foundations focus on those other places is because the US poor would be considered quite wealthy, by quality of life, in comparison to the poor of those countries.

      Also, while you could argue that the government should spend more on the poor, you can’t argue that the US Government is not spending money on the poor. it spends billions.

      • Jill says:

        It does spend money on the poor. And there is great resistance by the public to the idea of spending more. And great willingness to spend less.

        I guess the “free market”, such as it is, plus what safety net we do have, is determining how much food, shelter, clothing, medical care etc. each person deserves. And most people in our society and on this board seem satisfied with that.

        I wonder why Scott decided to write a blog post about such a non-issue?

    • Nornagest says:

      or on much of anything except wars and drones

      The DoD received about 17% of total federal spending in 2014 (615 billion out of 3650), the second-largest budget category after Social Security at a cool 900 gigabucks. Other large line items include “income security” at 542 (funds a variety of welfare programs), Medicare at 519, and “health” at 450 (CDC, FDA, etc.); it goes down quickly after that but there’s a long tail. Then there’s state and local spending, which I’m not going to bother finding numbers on but which is even more skewed away from defense. Things may have changed a bit since then, but probably not by much, unless someone hid a major war where I wasn’t looking. (The ongoing ISIS intervention is not a major war.)

      You may have seen infographics floating around which show defense spending of ~60%. These, however, describe discretionary spending only, a budget category that’s mainly of internal significance to the government. It is essentially a historical accident that defense falls into this category, and looking at it alone is liable to shed more heat than light if you’re not deeply familiar with federal budgeting. Not that that’s ever stopped anyone from sharing stuff on Facebook.

      • Jill says:

        Oh, I see. That does look correct. I had indeed been looking at discretionary spending. I do think it’s an important category in that it’s a choice whether to start new wars, and it doesn’t involve defaulting on current obligations incurred, unlike what would be happening if the government stopped paying out Social Security.

        I wonder, when the government takes the Social Security money and spends it on other things, and then has to pay it back, whether the paying back what had been taken is considered an expense or not. People pay in a lot of money to Social Security and some do not even get back all of what they paid in. Perhaps on average they receive more than they put in though.

  122. Jill says:

    I find myself wondering: Just how distasteful are the poor, to the people they are distasteful to? Are the poor so distasteful that most people in the U.S. would not even consider helping the poor in ways that cost no more money?

    E.g. what about using the current government budget for the poor in ways that one might expect to be more effective than what we are doing with that money now? Is even that consideration distasteful? E.g. suppose we use Social Security as a poverty remediation program only. So suppose we make people ineligible to receive Social Security if they have assets beyond a certain level? And then we use the saved money for social services or school lunches for poor children, or substance abuse programs for addicts who can’t afford treatment on their own?

    Or maybe we do some study of what the most pressing needs are, or what poor people think the most pressing needs are, and see whether we want to apply saved resources to whatever the survey said the pressing needs are.

    Are the poor too distasteful to most people, that even possible re-arrangement of services for the poor for purposes of greater efficiency, is not even interesting? Does it not even seem worth focusing on?

    • Anonymous says:

      The Rusanovs [a Communist apparatchik couple] loved the People, their great People. They served the People and were ready to give their lives for the People. But as the years went by they found themselves less and less able to tolerate actual human beings, those obstinate creatures who were always resistant, refusing to do what they were told to and, besides, demanding something for themselves.

      Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward (1966)

      Is unempathic doctrinaire libertarianism all that different, in practice, from unempathic doctrinaire Communism? Not essentially, according to Solzhenitsyn.

      These considerations are what Wendell Berry’s pro-empathy Jefferson Medal lecture “It All Turns on Affection” (2012) is all about.

    • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

      What’s your own experience with the poor?

      • Jill says:

        I grew up in a poor city. Finances were pretty tight for our family growing up. As an adult, I’ve worked in poor public school systems, and also in prisons, and with homeless people.

        I see the biggest problem most poor people have as lack of training, resources and social service kinds of help that could help them to help themselves. Free handouts might not be the right thing, if people would not be doing any constructive activity.

        That’s a big thing– for people to be steered toward constructive activity. Maybe a jobs program like WPA would help. Maybe job training, or cooperative businesses and training in how to work in them.

        I think this below is a good program. I was actually surprised that it is still in existence. At one time it was larger than it is now. It’s for psychiatric diagnosis patients, but perhaps it could be expanded to help other kinds of people who need to learn life and work skills.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairweather_Lodge

        I think helping poor people to help themselves and each other is a good way to go.

        I am actually quite concerned about the issue and would be willing to pay more taxes– or to shift around the federal budget from one place to another.– to do something about this problem.

        Money is an illusion so it is hardly the crux of the issue. The crux of the issue is that you have some people in dire straits, without needed resources that could indeed be bought by money.

        But money wouldn’t be the only way. If they could hunt, they could get food that way. If they knew how to build structures and had some land, they could get shelter that way. They need means to help themselves, and ways to get themselves into constructive activity.

        I think that you can’t really stand still in life. You are either going forward or backward, being constructive or destructive. And many– certainly not all– of the poor are going backward, or downhill, or whatever metaphor one wants to use– but nowhere good. And that’s a problem. As more and more people fall into poverty, we get more and more people going downhill together. If we do nothing, eventually we get some big crisis, I would think.

        If I did not think I was my brother’s keeper, I guess these issues wouldn’t concern to me. And I wouldn’t think of doing anything until/unless these issues affected me personally in some jarring way. It seems like that’s where most other people are on this issue.

    • The Nybbler says:

      Means-test Social Security, and you’ll see support for it evaporate. The whole basis of Social Security’s untouchable status is that it is equivalent to a savings program for retirement. This isn’t actually true, but it is a commonly-shared illusion.

      • Anonymous says:

        I agree. But that’s a good thing as far as I’m concerned. It’s a dumb program.

      • Deiseach says:

        Do you not means test social welfare in the US? Because it is means tested over here.

        There are two classes of pension: contributory (where you’ve been paying in your PRSI from work) which is not means tested but is taxable, and non-contributory (where you don’t have enough payments to qualify for the contributory pension) and which is means tested.

        My late father had an occupational pension (from being in the Army) and was entitled to the contributory pension, which took his army pension into account and taxed him on the state pension. He was not a rich retiree by any means.

      • The Nybbler says:

        Most social welfare programs in the US are means-tested, but Social Security retirement benefits are not. They are contributory; workers pay in through a tax, which is matched by their employers (this being an accounting detail of course), for a total of 12.4% of your nominal salary (or 11.5% of your salary plus the “employer portion” of both that tax and the separate Medicare tax). Benefits are taxable in some circumstances, usually for those with significant other income.

        • Anonymous says:

          It should be noted that the contribution level and the benefits received are connected, but rather loosely. It isn’t a savings account or even an annuitized one.

    • Loquat says:

      helping the poor in ways that cost no more money

      So suppose we make people ineligible to receive Social Security if they have assets beyond a certain level? And then we use the saved money for [x,y,z]

      Diverting money from Social Security to other assistance programs may be budget-neutral as far as the government is concerned, but methinks the retirees facing a sudden cut to their income, and the younger relatives they might then need help from, would have a few things to say about it. Not to mention, workers earning enough income to likely end up above the cutoff post-retirement would then have a much greater incentive to lobby for reduced Social Security taxes.

      • Jill says:

        Good points. I suppose we could make the cutoff rather high, so that only a small number of people would fall into that category– probably many of the same people who’d like to get rid of Social Security already, because they have sizable income or assets from a business, and they want to be able to stop paying the employer’s contribution to it. It shouldn’t be such a low cutoff that the retirees would need help from their younger relatives to get by.

        • ” I suppose we could make the cutoff rather high, so that only a small number of people would fall into that category”

          And your proposal then frees up only a small amount of money.

  123. Jill says:

    Here’s a riddle.

    Q What do you get when most people in your country think the poor are distasteful, and so almost no one pays any attention to them, to their needs, to their fears, or to their desires?

    .
    .
    .
    .
    .
    .

    A: Donald Trump, of course.

    • J says:

      Huh, weird, this guy would have said “liberals, of course”:
      The smug style in American liberalism

      It’s almost as if it’s not a one-sided, black-and-white issue where your guy is the unassailable hero and the other guy is the mustache-twirling villain.

      • Jill says:

        Have you read that article? I have, and the point it makes is that liberals usually express the opposite sentiment of loving the poorly educated.

        • J says:

          You’re referring to the other subthread. Your original post was “What do you get when most people in your country think the poor are distasteful, and so almost no one pays any attention to them, to their needs, to their fears, or to their desires?”

          Your answer was “Trump”, and the popular meme is that he’s popular because we the enlightened didn’t fuss enough with the needs, fears and desires of the poor, and so they’ve turned in their ignorance to this populist monster.

          So I offered the alternate view that maybe the reason Trump is popular is not that we didn’t give *enough* attention to the poor, but that the attention we pay is condescending, and that we’re so full of ourselves that we can’t comprehend that we might not actually be the savior of the poor we imagine ourselves to be.

          • Deiseach says:

            As an outsider I probably have no place proffering an opinion, but I think J is correct in that while the left (defining that in general terms) does like to speak about the poor and helping them, there is also a very specific definition of “poor person” whom they regard as The Deserving Poor: minorities, whether that’s on gender, racial, ethnic or sexual orientation grounds.

            There is also very plainly a class who are The Undeserving Poor.

            Before Trump came along, support for the Republicans amongst the poor or lower classes was categorised as “Why do they vote against their economic interest? Because they’re too stupid and brainwashed to see we are the ones who care about them”.

            Speaking about the perceived support for Trump, it has all been in terms of “those racist hillbilly uneducated homophobic xenophobic misogynistic Bible-bashing gun-clutching white trash” and nobody has demonstrated any signs of caring about lower class whites other than as examples of privilege who are now reaping deserved suffering (“if poor Chinese are getting better lives because of globalisation and outsourcing, everyone should be glad”).

          • Anonymous says:

            It’s easy enough to get that idea from tumblr or tv or whatever. But when you look at what we do as opposed to what we say it’s clear that the deserving / undeserving line is quite different.

            The deserving poor are in order of deservedness the elderly (even if they aren’t poor!), physically disabled vets, mentally disabled vets, children, physically disabled, and parents.

            The underserving poor are non-parent, non-elderly, non-veteran adults without physical disabilities.

          • Jill says:

            Well, that is another way of looking at it that is also true. Few people pay actual genuine attention to the real needs and circumstances of the poor. But a lot of people of all political stripes do pay a sort of condescending attention to them that does not turn out to be constructive at all.

          • Jill says:

            Deisach, thank you for your comments. I welcome anyone to this threat here who has something to say. Yes, I have often read the points of view you are talking about.

            People of all political stripes do find at least certain large swaths of the poor to be “distasteful.” And what you have described is a very common liberal viewpoint.

            I got a group together of mostly progressive people to read Deer Hunting with Jesus by Joe Bageant, about working class white people. Some of the folks had their eyes opened and were amazed at the new information in the book. But some hated the book because they just didn’t want to look at that segment of the population at all.

  124. Jill says:

    And here’s one more riddle. This one is easy. I’m going to give you a quote from Donald Trump and I want you to think about it and come up with the answer to this question: How many times in your entire life have you ever heard anyone say this before?

    The quote is: “I love the poorly educated.”

    • The Nybbler says:

      I don’t think I’ve heard anyone put it quite Trump’s way, but I’m fairly sure P.T. Barnum expressed similar sentiments.

    • J says:

      I hear it all the time from liberals. They love them so much that they can’t stop coming up with paternalistic programs to save them from themselves! See, it works both ways.

      Seriously, though, this isn’t a good place to show us how smart you are by trashing on a candidate that most people here don’t even support. If we wanted to hear about TRUMP GETS DESTROYED BY NEWSCASTER IN 37 SECONDS, we’d spend more time on facebook and not here.

      • Jill says:

        As I mentioned before, and as the article you cited itself points out, most liberals have no more love for the poorly educated than conservatives do.

        I neither trashed on the candidate nor said that many people here support him. I simply pointed out that he speaks to a group that most politicians, and most people, ignore.

        There are certain people here who seem to desire to have an angry argument. I don’t desire that myself.

        I can understand though why you thought I was bashing someone. On Internet comment boards, a not small percentage of comments are ways of bashing people. So if you don’t understand what someone is saying, then “bashing someone” is often a good guess.

        • J says:

          In your original post, you’re not saying anything as straightforward as “he speaks to a group that most politicians, and most people, ignore”.

          When you asked us to consider how many times we’d heard someone say “I love the poorly educated” in our lives, was that because it’s a worthwhile thing to say, and it’s a shame people don’t say it more often? Or were you saying that “I love the poorly educated” is the kind of thing a gloating demagogue says as he takes advantage of rubes? Because the other reply compared it to P.T. Barnum and you didn’t contradict them.

          • Jill says:

            I wasn’t saying either of those things. I was just starting off a train of thought about how people seldom, if ever, say such things. Perhaps P.T. Barnum did say something similar. If so, I would not necessarily think that he said it for the same reason that Trump did.

  125. Jill says:

    It’s amazing how varied human beings are and how we, to some degree, each live in our own worlds. My own focus is on what’s going on today and how and why. To whatever extent I focus on philosophy or ideology, I am interested in it primarily in how it affects current events and circumstances– not in exactly and precisely quoting the “Bibles” of those ideologies.

    E.g. I don’t think I’d be interested in Ayn Rand at all, if not for her strong influence on Alan Greenspan and Paul Ryan. I’m more interested in how their interpretations of Rand influence our economic and political policies, circumstances and conversation today, than in precise quotes from Rand’s books, or figuring out what Rand herself believed.

    I see that some others are more interested in academic philosophy, and I don’t begrudge you that. It’s just not where I’m at. Takes all kinds to make a world.

    Primarily I am concerned with being aware of the propaganda we are immersed in, in the U.S. and where it’s leading us. Because it’s there, it’s working, and it’s leading us to specific places. I know that many people don’t see it at all. But then it wouldn’t be successful propaganda if most people saw it for what it is.

    Part of the propaganda is about the undeserving and distasteful poor. Not that some of them might not be undeserving. But that as a way of categorizing a whole group. I see it as a Divide and Conquer strategy–dividing the 99.99% into groups too small to unite and cooperate for our own best interest. The 2 party system Divide and Conquer strategy.

    Our largest problems, and our so far inability to deal with them, are not all just caused by Moloch.

    Thank the Shining Garden God or whoever you have here, that there are still many people who try to find common ground and/or to learn from one another. Because there are rather huge forces pushing people in the opposite direction.

    • Anonymous says:

      in support of Jill’s many fine comments, the well-respected historian Jonathan Israel has thoroughly and verifiably documented, that for the past three centuries and more, very many agents of the Radical Enlightenment have embraced Jill’s values and objectives (insofar as I appreciate these values and objectives correctly).

      And of course, very many agents of the Moderate and Counter Enlightenments have adamantly and vehemently rejected these same ideas, in every generation including the present one.

      Indeed, these forces commonly seek for radically Enlightened ideas not even to be spoken, much less rationally debated (and Professor Israel’s works scrupulously document these suppressive efforts).

      That’s why it’s no bad thing — is it? — for the SSC commentariat to become more aware, that a great portion of the issues raised here on SSC, have been argued before, across many centuries and many cultures.

      Mainly the Radical Enlightenment has been winning. But its victories, so far, are neither complete, nor completed, nor uncontested. Which if we think about it, is OK. And so the struggles continue (as they should).

      What’s objectively unique in our century, compared to previous centuries, are Enlightened hopes that radical advances in medical science, combined with radically free and universal access to those advances, will radically accelerate the radical agenda of the Radical Enlightenment.

      And doesn’t this rationally explain why the various Counter Enlightenments are united in vehement opposition to universal access to healthcare as a basic human right?

      And isn’t this this radically expanded human right, implemented with the foreseeably radical medical advances of coming decades, foreseeably destined to radically accelerate the achievement of the Enlightenment’s most radically transformational objectives?

      These are rationally good reasons — aren’t they? — why ours is a radically good generation for humanity in general, and young people in particular, to become radically more rationally radical in embracing a transformationally radical 21st century Enlightenment! 🙂

      • Anonymous says:

        ^^
        I’d be interested in your thoughts on the ethics of a banned commentator evading that ban by posting under a pseudonym.

        • Anonymous says:

          Thank you for your interest, “anonymous”.

          Don’t Jonathan Israel’s writings remind us that Tom Paine tried it both ways?

          Common Sense was published anonymously; Paine avoided jail but realized no income. Converse, The Rights of Man was published openly; Paine realized a modest revenue from it, but was exiled from his English birthland:

          The publication of Rights of Man caused a furore in England; Paine was tried in absentia, and convicted for seditious libel against the Crown, but was unavailable for hanging.

          The end result of these difficult choices was that Tom Paine died alone, poor and largely forgotten, with only six persons attendant at his funeral, including one Quaker preacher and two freed slaves.

          Isn’t the crucial fact simply that Paine did think and did wrote — and thereby inspired many others to think and write — not how Paine wrote nor whom Paine pleased? And therefore, isn’t it a net good that SSC accommodates explicitly Paine-style expressions of explicitly Paine-style values? 🙂

          (obligatory xkcd reference)

        • Whatever Happened To Anonymous says:

          You need to frame it in a more SSC way:

          If a banned user uploads their mind to a computer, is the created consciousness still banned?

      • Jill says:

        Thank you for your comments and for those links, Anonymous. I like historian Jonathan Israel.

    • The Nybbler says:

      Propaganda is everywhere. For instance, spreading the idea that anyone who does not support certain policies vis-a-vis poverty finds “the poor” (as a whole) to be undeserving and distasteful, and that such views disqualify them from having their opinions on policies on the poor considered at all, that’s pure propaganda.

  126. YouAreInsane says:

    Anyone who seriously considers adopting a basic universal income necessarily believes that evolution is not a real biological phenomenon.

    • Hume's guillotine says:

      is =/= ought

      Maybe get that as a hand tattoo since it seems you people seem to have a lot of trouble remembering that.

  127. Carl Stoll says:

    The trope of associating any increase in state power with totalitarian communism is based on misunderstandings and propaganda. Give me an example of an elected socialist government that then became a brutal dictatorship. Apart from countries occupied by the Red Army after 1944 there are no instances of such a phenomenon.
    If you cannot provide a single historical example, that means that your theory is worth squat.

    • hlynkacg says:

      Give me an example of an elected socialist government that then became a brutal dictatorship.

      Nazi Germany.

      If Hitler had gotten hit by a bus prior to kicking off the invasion of Poland he would have gone down in history as one of the most popular German politicians of all time, Time magazine’s 1938 “Man of the year”, instead we got Hitler.

    • Edward Scizorhands says:

      Sounds good. Can we also put a stop to the trope where any decrease in state power means Somalia?

  128. Dumky says:

    “It reminds me of the old argument of sweatshop-supporting economists – sure, we’re exploiting you, but you’d miss us if we left.”

    I expected better from you, something like accurate and fair representation of the reasoned arguments economists make.
    I guess I need to lower my expectations (which were high due to your many insightful and intellectually honest essays in the past).