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Above Jill posts a quote from a blog “…What happened here seems to be wholly consistent with one of the continuing messages of this blog – incentives explain everything. For gods sake I wrote about it yesterday! And a month ago! If you tie people’s pay or employment to a given outcome, you’re going to get more of that outcome. Which is fine, but there will be unintended consequences that may or may not be foreseen.”
I agree that monetary compensation for certain acts leads to more of those acts. Tax subsidies are monetary compensation for things such as having buying certain forms of energy, buying a home, or buying health insurance through your employer, and therefore leads to more of them all. That doesn’t seem to me like an appropriate thing for government to engage in with our tax dollars as how do the bureaucrats and legislators know what the optimal amount of production and consumption is of different categories. Shouldn’t we eliminate all tax subsidies?
I certainly agree with you about tax credits. As I’ve said in previous threads, government is so complicated that it is barely a democracy when voters know only a piece of the whole. And tax credits for all sorts of things are much of the complexity.
Of course when I talk about complexity, I mean the USA. Your name seems to imply you live in Ireland (unless it just means you are ethnically Irish). I don’t know how much complexity there is in Ireland, although I think plenty in the tax arena (such as exemplified in the latest Apple scandal). I think all of the West way over-complicates government, because it is to politician’s advantage to know more of what’s going on than the voter (and potential opponents) do. Although I think US politicians have a special competence in this area.
Having power to give specialized tax breaks gives power to lobbyists and politicians who have a cozy relationship with them. Politicians won’t give up tax subsidies without a fight.
I’m ethnically Irish, but was born and live in the U.S.. I actually don’t like my username too much but have kept it since I created and started using it over 10 years ago.
I consider myself a Voluntaryist, which is basically the same thing as an Anarcho-Capitalist. I’ve recently started describing myself this way as opposed to AnCap as I find it’s a better way to connect and describe the moral appeal of its ideas to people unfamiliar with it.
We all understand that we prefer voluntary interactions in our personal lives. We expect this in our interactions with family, friends, businesses, and strangers in all but a few situations. Most people usually only think physical coercion is appropriate with self defense or forcing people of unsound and immature minds (like children) to take certain actions.
Using the word Voluntaryism doesn’t get at the idea of private property rights, what the positives and negatives are of the free market, or fully describing when it’s okay to use force, but it captures the moral aspect of AnCap which I think people with a range of political views would find appealing.
Moloch has been hard at work at Wells Fargo recently.
“I was going to do my regular linkfest today but it occurred to me that there’s nothing else worth talking about in the wake of yesterday’s bombshell reports about Wells Fargo. The recently created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) fined the bank $185 million for a widespread fraud wherein salespeople – thousands and thousands of them – opened around 2 million unnecessary new accounts for its customers in order to meet internal sales targets. Wells Fargo then fired 5300 employees who were involved. Fifty-three-hundred employees.
“…What happened here seems to be wholly consistent with one of the continuing messages of this blog – incentives explain everything. For gods sake I wrote about it yesterday! And a month ago! If you tie people’s pay or employment to a given outcome, you’re going to get more of that outcome. Which is fine, but there will be unintended consequences that may or may not be foreseen. In this case, ruthless new account opening targets led to 2 million fraudulently created accounts. Which is unbelievable, unfathomable. Until you remember that just a decade ago the same thing was happening with lending and mortgages.”
http://thereformedbroker.com/2016/09/09/wtf-wfc/
Since this board is full of Libertarians, will someone tell me how Libertarians explain and justify this “free market” activity by a large well connected banking mega-corporation, where the peons get to be the fall guys who are fired, and the kingpins, who surely knew about it, get to stay and collect multi-million dollar bonuses?
How do you know the kingpins “surely knew about it”? I doubt the kingpins at the corporation I work for are aware of anything I do unless it balloons into a problem for them. At best the peons’ immediate supervisors might know.
Edit: Never mind. If thousands of employees are doing it, it’s probably official policy.
I’m not a libertarian (but I work in the financial industry, so I’m probably already tainted).
It’s utterly nonsensical to demand that upper management be fined or imprisoned for having been defrauded by lower management. Most of these phony accounts weren’t fee-paying and didn’t generate any profit for the bank at all. All they did was help the salespeople hit their quotas without actually selling anything.
Now there were a few cases where innocent bystanders were wrongly charged fees for accounts they never signed up for, but those appear to be a very small percentage of the transactions in question here. The amount of the fine was much larger than the total profit from the illicit fees and the victims will get full restitution. And again, WF management never wanted that to happen, they want people to sign up legitimately and pay the fees out of their own free will.
There are real financial scandals. This isn’t one of them. This is a company that’s lost control of its own employees and is mostly hurting itself.
Jill – You are right that sometimes businesses will take advantage of any power imbalance to screw over people just like some government agencies. Screwing over people isn’t something that happens because of the institution that people are in. It’s because some folks are power hungry and will do anything they can to take advantage.
But the difference between the government screwing over people and a business doing so, is the screwed over folks can leave the business and patronize a different company. If I was one of those screwed over customers I would never use Wells Fargo again. As the other commenters have said, Wells Fargo screwed over themselves more than anyone else.
But if a government agency screws you over, there often isn’t much you can do. Complain to somebody at best. I think that is the basic libertarian view. Of course if the business is a monopoly, then it is effectively in the same position as the government. In this case, the best solution is to find some competition for these businesses (often monopolies exist because of government regulations). If the industry is truly a natural monopoly, then the government probably is a better provider of the good or service than a business.
By the way, Wells Fargo has been my bank for the last two decades or so, and I will not be changing banks based on this story. They have always treated me well.
Is there any post in the archive that summarises diet advice?
I can see reviews of diet books and a long post just about wheat. Anything more general?
I believe you are not frightened by tl;dr as you’re on SSC, so here’s /fit/’s sticky for you
http://liamrosen.com/fitness.html#part3
I’ve seen some discussion online of the controversy over statins, whether their net effect is good or bad. Part of the argument is over evidence, part the claim that the pro-statin researchers are being paid by the pharmaceutical companies and refusing to share their data. Some on the pro-statin side seem to be arguing for keeping the other side out of the journals.
Sounds like just the sort of thing suited to this blog. And, since I’m on a statin, …
I haven’t looked into the matter in-depth, but it’s interesting that statins generally raise the user’s blood sugar levels and risk of diabetes, particularly among women. Not all statins – pravastatin apparently lowers the incidence of diabetes, according to at least one study – but most others raise it, particularly atorvastatin. This study goes into a bit of detail about the effect being dose-dependent, and it seems both insulin sensitivity and insulin production are negatively impacted. This one claims it’s due to a specific immune response which can be counteracted by taking glyburide along with the statin, but further googling doesn’t give any indication that taking glyburide with statins has become at all common or recommended for diabetes-prevention purposes.
Inspired somewhat by “Basketgate,” but also many other such “scandals” and non-scandals:
Though obviously predicting the future is Very Hard in general, are there any general guidelines or precedents which predict whether or not a given scandal or gaffe will “get legs” and really hurt a candidate or politician, or else peter out and be forgotten? Because it seems to be very random.
Trump, obviously, is famous at this point for shrugging off gaffes and insulting statements which would seemingly have ended other candidacies. He finally sort of put his foot in it with the comments about the parents of a deceased veteran, though whether or not that really hurt him long term remains to be seen (though it was undeniably damaging in a way previous insults and gaffes had not been). With Romney, the 47% thing was obviously big watershed moment, though apparently the much odder “binders full of women” comment also hurt him (also sounds kind of like “basket of deplorables”) in a way I might not have predicted. And then, of course, there’s the Howard Dean scream. Who would predict a weird yell would end a candidacy?
The general guidelines I can think of are: insult the opponent, not the voters: this was why 47% hurt and why “basket” might hurt. Related: don’t step on the sacred cows of your tribe: I think Benghazi and the e-mails have not had as much of a negative impact on HRC as Red Tribe voters think it should because those are fundamentally errors in fields which Red Tribe cares more about than Blue Tribe (security, military savvy). Conversely, Red Tribe voters don’t care much about PC sensitivity and so their candidates can get away with saying things that would torpedo a Democrat, not because their supporters are racist, necessarily, but because they don’t care as much about signalling anti-racism, as Democrats don’t care as much about signalling a tough foreign policy stance.
On this account, Trump’s insulting of a war hero makes sense as a bad gaffe for him. This predicts that Hillary saying something plausibly racist, xenophobic, or insensitive to poverty and class issues would be more deadly to her, whereas Trump can say such things, but can’t insult the military or appear weak on defense? Or is it the opposite? Some argue that Dems get a pass on potentially racist, xenophobic, misogynist statements because they’re seen already to be on the right side of the issue and so given the benefit of the doubt? Similarly, Republicans are often presumed to be stronger on defense and so given the benefit of the doubt.
In summary, I have no idea how to predict whether or not a given gaffe or scandal will hurt or be forgotten other than “insult your opponent, don’t insult the voters.”
One thought: scandals seem to stick insofar as they feed confirmation bias for a candidate’s supporters (especially on-the-fence, potential supporters) worst fears about him/her:
Example: poor Republicans’ worst fears about Romney was probably that he was an out-of-touch rich guy who would only represent the interests of “Rockefeller Republicans” and not his rank and file, many of whom were part of that “47%”. Hence, blue collar whites on the fence about Romney stayed home.
On this interpretation probably the death blow for Trump would be a statement which feeds into fears about him being somehow unhinged and/or hateful: maybe a hot mike recording him berating someone or something. This would feed confirmation bias for the doubts about whether he really has the equanimity to be president.
For Clinton (paradoxically for the first major party female nominee), the bias is that she’s cold, calculating, and/or corrupt. Hence, a statement seeming to confirm that will hurt her more than most, whereas moments of tenderness, candor, tears, etc. actually help her (and it’s clear they’ve made a push recently to humanize her for this reason).
For Dean, maybe the fear was that he was kind of loony or not on an even keel, such that the scream hurt him in a way it might not have hurt others.
I’m not sure about why “swiftboating” worked: maybe opposite of Dean, Kerry has a public image of being something of a cold fish: the opposite of the sort of dynamic character you want to be president. Undermining of a key heroic image he had offered to defend against that impression may have allowed the initial bias to reassert itself?
Kerry had also spoken out against the Vietnam war after his tour of duty was over, and there’s still a chunk of the population that disapproves of that sort of thing. So undermining his claim to have served honorably in that same war allowed opponents more room to tar him with the anti-war-hippie-who-hates-soldiers brush.
I think it depends on the context. In an intergroup rivalry (i.e. Trump vs Hillary) I think your “opposite” idea is correct — Hillary would get a pass on racist comments that might bring down Trump and vice versa. In an intragroup rivalry, the opposite happens — any Republican who even hints at breaking one of their taboos has instantly lost the primary.
The case that strikes me is Elizabeth Warren. It is, I think, pretty clear that she self-identified as native American in order to make herself more attractive to potential (law school) employers. Her claimed basis is a family tradition of one Cherokee great great great grandmother. Whether or not it is true is unclear, but even assuming it is that is not much of a qualification for affirmative action benefits. That looks like a blatant violation of progressive norms. Yet Warren remains a leading figure among progressive politicians.
Is it evidence of blatant hypocrisy by her supporters or a case of everyone on her side taking it for granted that the charges are false, the creation of the Great Right Wing Conspiracy?
I think it is more that her side doesn’t have any taboo against exaggerating aspects of one’s identity to appear less privileged. The flak that Rachel Dolezal received was mostly pattern-matched calls of “blackface”; I don’t think there was any general left-wing outcry. So there is no reason that Warren (who lied less, although she might have gained more) would have received much left-wing criticism, even if the issue of defending her from attacks from “the enemy” hadn’t existed.
I never heard much about her until trump started calling her pocahantus. Now she can’t be critiqued.
My personal take on the Warren situation is that she had already become too much of a beloved standard-bearer by the time it came out for her own team to turn on her. If it turns out, while you’re interviewing someone for the role of general, that s/he has done something hypocritical in the past with respect to one’s philosophy, then that may be a good reason not to pick him/her. But once the battle is on, you can’t turn on your general if something unsavory comes out about his/her past. At that point you have to just keep pressing the campaign and not think about it.
Additionally, I notice a general tendency in politics/ideology (another respect in which it is topsy-turvy) where what you proclaim/advocate matters a lot more than what you actually do in your personal life. That is, people are surprisingly tolerant, in general, of hypocrisy in ideological leaders so long as those leaders remain charismatic spokespersons for the cause.
I think it’s evidence that Warren’s hardcore supporters don’t care very much about affirmative action as compared to other issues, and the people who do care about that stuff are voting Democrat anyway. (Especially given that her opponent was Scott Brown, who promptly squandered any advantage the “fake Indian” thing could’ve given him with Native American voters by letting his staffers chant war whoops.)
Warren got elected by promising to be tough on Wall Street, and so far she has been. If she had managed to get involved in a lobbying scandal or something it would utterly demolish her political appeal, but checking Native American on a box doesn’t really undercut it at all.
You’ve brought this up on here half a dozen times. Do you some sort of axe to grind with Elizabeth Warren? Jealous of her success?
I am jealous of neither her success at politics nor her success at fraud, neither being part of my ambition. We compete only as legal academics and, so far as I can tell, she has accomplished nothing in that role that I would be jealous of.
But I am struck by what looks, at first glance, like an extraordinary level of hypocrisy on the part of her supporters. She has done something that, on their stated principles, ought to make her a pariah in their society. Instead they treat her as a heroine.
Though I am surprised it hasn’t hurt her more, it may also be that it hurt her in ways which aren’t obvious: she hasn’t completely dropped out of the public eye, but she also didn’t seriously consider running for the nomination, nor was she likely asked about a VP nod. Though it may look like she’s still a big success, for someone who rose as quickly as she did in the party, maybe her success has actually been significantly tempered relative to what it might have been.
As for her supporters, it may also be that their ardor subtly but significantly cooled as a result, but not to the point they’re going to come out and betray their tribe by denouncing her.
@ David Friedman
nor her success at fraud
Oh, come on! That’s sneaking in as fact an exaggerated version of something that has barely been coherently charged, much less proven (or supported by those closer to the situation). Which is a Dark Arts move.
A similar argument would be, “Democrats are hypocrites for continuing to support Obama after he forged a birth certificate.” Or, “Republicans, to support Bush after his part in the demolition of the Twin Towers.”
This is a type of move often used in the AGW disputes. Find some disagreement with some environmentalist’s statement, accuse zim of dishonesty — then condemn the movement for continuing to respect zim.
What exactly are the stated principles you have in mind?
It’s quite common for Libertarians to argue that there’s nothing inconsistent about claiming Social Security or Medicare benefits because we don’t live in a fully free society and it makes little sense to unilaterally opt out. It seems like you have some conception of Warren’s “supporters” that precludes any rationale along these lines.
If Warren had no reason think she had any Cherokee heritage, then she would be just be lying and that would be clearly objectionable. But whether or not she does your own first link shows that this idea isn’t just her invention — it’s something family members at least discussed. So why doesn’t the question boil down to the criteria for the list she put herself on, or more particularly her understanding of those criteria, which might have been vague?
That is, why are you convinced the reaction should be “That list is not for people who look like Elizabeth Warren!” and not “Well, what were the rules for the list?”
“That’s sneaking in as fact an exaggerated version of something that has barely been coherently charged, much less proven”
Which parts have not been proven? That she listed herself in an online database used in law school hiring as a minority law professor? That two different law schools that employed her listed her as a Native American professor? Those are both matters of public record. As best I can tell she has denied neither of them.
The only dispute, so far as I can tell, is about whether her claim that a distant ancestor was Cherokee is true. She has offered no evidence that it is but that isn’t dispositive, since there is no particular reason why she would have evidence even if it was. So I’m willing to give her the benefit of the doubt.
Do you disagree that describing oneself as a minority law professor and as a Native American professor on the basis of one Cherokee great great grandmother is dishonest? That doing so in order to get employment advantages is fraud?
I’m delighted to find someone apparently willing to defend her, since I have long been puzzled as to how one could do so.
“This is a type of move often used in the AGW disputes. Find some disagreement with some environmentalist’s statement, accuse zim of dishonesty — then condemn the movement for continuing to respect zim.”
You are thinking, perhaps, of Mann’s claim to have won a Nobel prize? I am inclined to take that as evidence not of dishonesty but of a weak hold on reality.
Cook, on the other hand, is demonstrably dishonest. And I am bothered by the unwillingness of those on his side of the climate argument to recognize the fact.
“What exactly are the stated principles you have in mind?”
Loosely speaking, that affirmative action exists to make up for the disadvantages that minorities unfairly suffer under. Warren suffered under no such disabilities yet took advantage of affirmative action.
That’s why systems of affirmative action exist, but whether you are permitted to use a system depends on its rules, not the principle behind it. Social Security surely exists in order to reduce poverty among the elderly, but people who receive benefits while not poor aren’t at fault for doing so.
This is “an extraordinary level of hypocrisy?”
I get the point that it looks bad, but the scenario you’re pushing in which Warren benefited from listing herself this way isn’t all that plausible, and you must know this because you’ve witnessed academic hiring. The system makes so little difference that they didn’t even bother tuning up the requirements. If there were beneficiaries they were the hiring institutions, that got to report slightly inflated numbers.
“I get the point that it looks bad, but the scenario you’re pushing in which Warren benefited from listing herself this way isn’t all that plausible, and you must know this because you’ve witnessed academic hiring.”
I am not only an academic, I am a law professor, and I can assure you that being viewed as a minority is a sizable plus on that market. Why else do you think she listed herself that way? It isn’t as if she presented herself as Cherokee in any other context. I don’t have any experience with Native American candidates in particular, but the fact that two law schools chose to list her as such suggests that they thought it was important.
On your more general point, there is a sizable difference between clearly fitting the requirements for a benefit and taking it even though you aren’t the reason it exists–your social security case–and claiming such a benefit when your have only the vaguest claim to qualify.
Rogues in buckram….
It grows, it grows.
“I am not only an academic, I am a law professor, and I can assure you that being viewed as a minority is a sizable plus on that market.”
Yes, it’s a really great benefit to the department when your preferred candidate can be reported and publicized as a minority. When your not-preferred candidate can be? Meh.
“Why else do you think she listed herself that way? It isn’t as if she presented herself as Cherokee in any other context. I don’t have any experience with Native American candidates in particular, but the fact that two law schools chose to list her as such suggests that they thought it was important.”
Come to think of it, I can completely believe she might have had unrealistic expectations of what the claim might do for her at the start of her career.
“On your more general point, there is a sizable difference between clearly fitting the requirements for a benefit and taking it even though you aren’t the reason it exists–your social security case–and claiming such a benefit when your have only the vaguest claim to qualify.”
I was with you right up to “vaguest claim”. How do you feel about investors in pre-1980 tax shelters? A true American wouldn’t leave an opportunity on the table just because their claim was vague.
This whole non-issue is about the difference in meaning between “Mann shared the Nobel Prize with the IPCC” and “Mann contributed to the reports of the IPCC , which was awarded the Nobel prize”.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/10/14/michael-mann-loses-the-nobel-prize-again/
“Yes, it’s a really great benefit to the department when your preferred candidate can be reported and publicized as a minority. When your not-preferred candidate can be? Meh.”
This ignores that there are usually many qualified applicants for any given academic position. And that hiring committees frequently disagree about the preferred candidate. In such a situation being + for your department and school’s demographic numbers instead of a – is a big advantage that can easily tip the balance.
@David Friedman:
It’s almost not worth arguing with you on these points. You think Mann and Warren are knock down arguments for the hypocrisy of liberals. Or something.
You bring one or the both up frequently, and never bother to search for or employ conservative examples that would match the criteria for inclusion in whatever cohort you have in mind, thus I conclude the cohort has liberal as an explicit or implicit characteristic.
This isn’t a demand for false equivalence or selective rigor. But if you actually wanted to have conversations around the issues you say you want to, you’d find examples that don’t look like you tilting at the outgroup.
I’m not convinced that I can pass an ideological Turing Test for liberalism, but I think they don’t take that sort of edge case seriously because they think affirmative action is very valuable and don’t want a little slippage at the edges to be a major issue. I’m not sure whether this qualifies as hypocrisy.
Similarly, while I’m generally in favor of home schooling, I think it increases the risk to children of extremely abusive parents, and I get the impression that most people who are in favor of home schooling don’t want to hear it.
Some Cherokees who think Warren was wrong to claim Cherokee ancestry.
“This whole non-issue is about the difference in meaning between “Mann shared the Nobel Prize with the IPCC” and “Mann contributed to the reports of the IPCC , which was awarded the Nobel prize”.”
Mann claimed, in legal filings, to be a Nobel prize winner. His university claimed on its web site that he was a Nobel prize winner. His supporters routinely described him as a Nobel prize winning scientist.
There is an enormous difference between getting a Nobel prize and contributing to work for which someone else gets a Nobel.
“But if you actually wanted to have conversations around the issues you say you want to, you’d find examples that don’t look like you tilting at the outgroup.”
Tu Quoque?
I occasionally point out errors by people arguing on my side–indeed just did so on FaceBook. I routinely comment on the fact that people on both sides of the climate debate mostly don’t understand the issues and mostly are in it for the fun of insulting their opponents and puffing up themselves.
But I mostly argue with people who disagree with me. In this case, I want to have a conversation in which somebody who strongly supports affirmative action and Elizabeth Warren can explain why.
@David Friedman:
How is this an example of “Tu Quoque”?
@ David, Nancy
Why people won’t debate about Warren? Briefly, see https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/09/07/open-thread-57-75/#comment-407538
Less briefly, because the charge is nonsense. It would be like accepting an invitation from a Birther or a Truther to public debate. A waste of one’s time, a trip into muddy weeds, a platform for the nuts.
For a person who knows the basics of the charge … leftists will know it’s nonsense, rightists will think it’s gospel, no one will change their minds.
“Less briefly, because the charge is nonsense.”
Nonsense? What do you mean? She doesn’t deny it. The only question is whether it is blameworthy. It is not analogous to the birther and truther claims, which are about basic facts.
@HealBearCub:
I took the point to be that similar hypocrisy existed on the right. That might well be true, but raising it struck me as implying “the other side does it too so why do you complain that my side does it.” Shortened to “Tu Quoque.”
Masquerading as advice on how I ought to investigate the question.
@ onyomi
The only question is whether it is blameworthy.
Sigh. What ‘it’? What is the antecedent of this pronoun? How in your view does what she said in the Globe story, constitute the crime she is being accused of?
I suspect that neither side can move the other because they have very different ways of thinking. A difference which might be worth exploring a little.
Maybe.
I’ll start. I hold to innocent till proved guilty, especially of a thought-crime (ie of having a bad intention). And, a thought-crime is almost impossible to prove, thus not a good stand alone accusation
ETA. From you last comment, it may be that you are a step ahead of me. Does your ‘it’ refer to the physical fact of checking a box, or to a presumed thought-crime of checking it for some bad reason?
“E mail server issue. Something that looks utterly meaningless and petty outside a certain dogmatic and partisan mindset.”
The checking of the box.
That’s why I pointed out how in this case it’s a matter of intention and/or ethical evaluation of an act, not a matter of facts, like where Obama was born. In Warren’s case, the facts are not in question, and they aren’t facts which I think you have to be a right-wing ideologue to say seem suspicious.
The ethical evaluation of her intent and its results are open to question, of course, and I guess the Warren supporter’s view is that she meant no harm and gained no undue advantage. I don’t think she meant any harm, certainly, but if she knew anything about academia when she checked the box (and it’s hard to see how she couldn’t) she would have known it would give her an advantage.
So she checked the box (not in question), knowing it would give her an advantage (seemingly beyond question if she’s not completely stupid, which she is not); the only real question left is: did she deserve that advantage, which was presumably meant to redress past histories of discrimination? I don’t think you have to be a right-wing ideologue to look at Warren’s appearance and bearing and personal history and say “no,” she has probably not been the victim of historical oppression in need of redressing.
If you want to take the most charitable view we can say her intent was not to gain an advantage she didn’t deserve but just to show pride in her (slight) Native American ancestry and/or raise awareness among the faculty. It’s conceivable. All I can say is, any white kid with one black great-great-grandmother who checked the “African American” box on his college applications would not be assumed to just be showing pride in his heritage or raising awareness. The presumption would be that he was trying to unfairly take advantage of quotas meant to redress discrimination he and his parents and grandparents probably never experienced.
@onyomi:
It makes little sense for Warren’s putative Native American heritage to count in affirmative action statistics.
But as a matter of personal biography, it’s well within bounds for her to say that there was a belief in her family that she had Native Americans in her family tree.
The mistake of conflating one with the other, corrected long ago, is a relatively minor issue. This one example of behavior doesn’t disqualify the concept of affirmative action, nor does it make Warren unfit to serve in office.
As near as I can tell, Friedman is making both of the previous claims.
There’s one more angle, and I think it’s in play a *lot* in these controversies.
Even granting that a person did a bad thing, is it bad enough to count as a serious strike against their character?
The key question is: did she list or portray herself as Native American when applying for the jobs at Penn and Harvard, or only afterwards, in the directory, for purposes of meeting other people of Cherokee heritage? If the former, it’s clear she gained an advantage–an advantage she would know about, regardless of what her employers say about it after the fact. If the latter, then Harvard was being a bit deceptive by including her in their “diversity” statistics, but she would seem to be blameless.
I can’t find a clear answer to this through googling. There seem to be quotes of her stating that she listed herself in a faculty directory as Native American for purposes of meeting people of similar heritage, but does not say whether or not she listed or portrayed herself as such when applying for the jobs.
And the difficulty of finding a clear answer about that reminds me of what David correctly, imo, identifies as the confusing nature of this issue:
I am still not even clear what the Warren supporter’s view exactly is: is it that she didn’t list herself officially as a Native American anywhere, only talking about it casually as an old family story? Is it that she did list herself, but didn’t gain or expect to gain any unfair advantage by doing so? Or is it that she did check the box when applying, maybe gained a slight advantage by doing so, but it was a long time ago and she’s clearly qualified for the jobs she held and everyone makes mistakes?
@onyomi:
At the risk of being too blithe, can I just answer “yes”?
Or, slightly less blithely, and pointing at what houseboatonstyxb herself pointed at, what is the precise accusation that her detractors are making?
” it’s well within bounds for her to say that there was a belief in her family that she had Native Americans in her family tree.”
Absolutely, assuming it’s true, which it might well be.
“The mistake of conflating one with the other, corrected long ago,”
Are you suggesting that listing herself as a minority law professor, knowing that doing so made her more employable, was merely a careless mistake? That she corrected the later mistake of telling her employers that she was a Native American on her own initiative?
“is a relatively minor issue. This one example of behavior doesn’t disqualify the concept of affirmative action, nor does it make Warren unfit to serve in office.”
I agree.
“As near as I can tell, Friedman is making both of the previous claims.”
I am making neither of them. The point I thought I had made repeatedly was that her behavior ought to disqualify her as a leader of the progressive wing of the Democratic party, since it was in striking violation of their purported norms.
In terms of my norms, I disapprove of her behavior but I don’t think it demonstrates that she is more dishonest than other candidates for high office. But I’m not part of the movement of which she is a leader.
My point isn’t that Warren is a particularly evil person. It is that her supporters are either hypocrites or willing to ignore very clear evidence of something they don’t want to believe.
To put it more bluntly, I’m not criticizing Warren, I’m criticizing you.
@David Friedman:
Motte and Bailey in the same post. Nice.
She’s not unfit to serve, only unfit to receive votes from people who like her preferred policies.
“At the risk of being too blithe, can I just answer “yes”?”
This sounds to me like “I like her policies, so I actually don’t care what she did (within reason).” I think everyone, to some extent, feels this way. I don’t much care, nor, honestly, really like to think about, exactly how carefully Ron Paul read his offensive newsletters before signing off on them (I’d prefer to think, and have reason to think, not very; but I am also favorably biased towards him for many good things he has done since then).
But let’s be clear about what’s happening: everyone has a tendency to be more forgiving of someone who has done a lot of other things they like or who seems to be on their side, but let’s not always call it a nonsensical witch hunt when those not primed to share our view call something legitimately questionable into question.
It feels sort of like the opposite of the “isolated demands for rigor.” For those whom I’m sympathetic to I’ll apply “isolated vagueness” in deciding how much I care to know or think about.
As for the accusation of her detractors, it’s pretty clear: they are claiming that she intentionally gained an unfair advantage for herself on the academic job market by representing herself as a Native American, even though her claims to such heritage are very flimsy. And that she, in particular, should not take advantage of affirmative action policies designed to help the historically disadvantaged, given that it is usually progressive politicians arguing for these kinds of policies which clearly aren’t meant for her.
(That, to be perfectly clear, is the accusation as I understand it. So can you be clear and explain what your view on it is? That she neither meant to nor enjoyed an unfair advantage? That you think she unintentionally got an unfair advantage? That she intentionally got an unfair advantage but you just don’t think it’s a big deal?)
A meta-comment:
I feel like the *shrug* reaction to accusations of personal misconduct on the part of a representative of one’s tribe/ideology is becoming more common for everyone nowadays. I don’t know if this is a good sign of moving towards caring more about substance instead of personal foibles and long-past history, or just another symptom of increasing partisanship.
@onyomi:
The short answer is that affirmative action needs to be looked at systemically. I don’t think that the system should have recorded Warren as Native American, but I also don’t see a reason to doubt that she thought that the was/is some portion Native American. Did Warren consciously decide “I don’t really qualify as Cherokee, but I’m going to list myself anyway”? I don’t know. But that seems the case you have to make in order to make it more than a mistake (and even then, the kind of thing that world seems to run on, much to my chagrin as a young man). For all I know, Warren got advice from someone that she “should” list herself as minority based on her story.
I have kids in college. They are 1/8th Italian. At some point they might check a box stating they are Italian-American. Are they? Yes. But not in any way that really affects their identity outside of having a funny last name, a Dad with a temper and having a great family recipe for red-sauce.
But should they apply for a scholarship for Italian Americans? The general advice would be to apply for anything you think you might get.
The NFL has the Rooney rule that says every head coaching job search has to interview at least one minority candidate. That meant that for a while Denny Green got trotted out for a lot of bullshit head coaching interviews, sometimes after the next actual head coach was already known. But the policy itself still worked, as we can see by the plethora of black head coaches in the league now. And that is what matters.
I don’t expect politicians to be perfect people. I would be mighty sad if I did. I think you evaluate people on the overall body of work. Her overall body of work seems solid.
> I am still not even clear what the Warren supporter’s view exactly is: is it that she didn’t list herself officially as a Native American anywhere, only talking about it casually as an old family story?
Somewhere in between. Checking a box in a profile questionnaire (or whatever it was) for social reasons is more than talking about it casually as an old family story. But much less than the critics’ versions would suggest.
> Is it that she did list herself, but didn’t
gain orexpect to gain any unfair advantage by doing so?Extremely likely
> Or is it that she did check the box when applying
The box was not in an application; it was in a profile sort of thing for a directory of law professors (which she already was), and apparently largely social.
Minority status was not mentioned in any of the applications for things she did apply for.
“> Is it that she did list herself, but didn’t gain or expect to gain any unfair advantage by doing so?
Extremely likely”
Either you have a very low opinion of her intelligence or a wildly unrealistic view of the academic world or you don’t believe that.
I’m a professor. My school makes no secret of the fact that its admission standards for black applicants are lower than its admission standards for white applicants.
A reasonably prominent economist got a sex change operation. Her account of the reaction of the dean when he told him what he was planning was:
“Wonderful. We get one more woman, one fewer man, and we don’t have to hire anyone.”
Is it your assumption that before her employers listed her as a Native American professor she explained to them that she thought one of her great great grandmothers was Cherokee?
In haste … back to different ways of thinking.
Prior: From my own observation, I think Warren is a very good person, and very unlikely to do the thought-crime she is accused of.
This one example of behavior doesn’t disqualify the concept of affirmative action, nor does it make Warren unfit to serve in office.
Affirmative action refers to a wide range of different actions by different people at different times for different reasons. Even if a Rightwingers’ model of Warren, RW-Warren, had in fact done some bad version of the basic facts, it would not discredit the fact and momentum of the actions referred to as a.a.
Redressing wrongs is not the only purpose of a.a. There’s also bringing diversity into positions of power. Indian is as Indian does. I’d bet Warren’s family really does have some Indian blood, even if they don’t have evidence of it. More certainly, they believed it and were part of the Indian community.
Thus she has the culture and empathy, which is warmer and thicker than blood.
I find I can’t go more into the different ways of thinking, without perhaps insulting Friedman and others. I’ll try again tomorrow.
In haste … back to different ways of thinking.
Prior: From my own observation, I think Warren is a very good person, and very unlikely to do the thought-crime she is accused of.
This one example of behavior doesn’t disqualify the concept of affirmative action, nor does it make Warren unfit to serve in office.
Affirmative action refers to a wide range of different actions by different people at different times for different reasons. Even if a Rightwingers’ model of Warren, RW-Warren, had in fact done some bad version of the basic facts, it would not discredit the fact and momentum of the actions referred to as a.a.
Redressing wrongs is not the only purpose of a.a. There’s also bringing diversity into positions of power. Indian is as Indian does. I’d bet Warren’s family really does have some Indian blood, even if they don’t have evidence of it. More certainly, they believed it and were part of the Indian community.
Thus she has the culture and empathy, which is warmer and thicker than blood.
I find I can’t go more into the different ways of thinking, without perhaps insulting Friedman and others. I’ll try again tomorrow.
“Prior: From my own observation, I think Warren is a very good person, and very unlikely to do the thought-crime she is accused of.”
How can you know that? Is she a personal friend of yours? If not, how can you tell, for her or any other politician, whether she is a good person or just a competent performer?
Wouldn’t it make more sense to base your opinion of her on the evidence we are discussing rather than rejecting the implication of the evidence on the basis of your opinion of her?
“This one example of behavior doesn’t disqualify the concept of affirmative action, nor does it make Warren unfit to serve in office.”
I agree, and have already said so.
“I’d bet Warren’s family really does have some Indian blood, even if they don’t have evidence of it. ”
Certainly possible.
“More certainly, they believed it and were part of the Indian community.”
As best I can tell, they were never part of any Indian community. She did not grow up on a reservation. She does not seem to have grown up associating with Indians. I have not seen any evidence that other members of her family publicly identified as Native Americans.
Do you know of such evidence, or is this merely what you deduce from your confidence that she is a good person and so would not have claimed Indian ancestry merely for personal advantage?
Why, by the way, “thought crime she is accused of.” She isn’t accused of thinking the wrong thing. She is accused of deliberately claiming a benefit she was not entitled to.
The Cherokee Nation has a one-drop rule – anyone descended from a registered Cherokee can register as a member of the tribe. There are almost certainly members of the Cherokee Nation with as little native blood as Warren claims to have. Are they also not Native Americans to you?
Then again, if we’re talking about affirmative action, white Protestants from Oklahoma are also underrepresented on law school faculties.
” Are they also not Native Americans to you?”
They are not native Americans to me. More important, I am pretty sure that a law school would not list such a person as a native American professor if the amount of Cherokee ancestry was publicly known.
I could, of course, be mistaken–I’ve never been a law school dean. Perhaps I should ask someone who has been or is.
[Further edit]
According to an LA Times news story:
“Under the rules of the Cherokee Nation, Vann could become a member only if she was directly descended from someone listed on the 1907 rolls with a fraction to denote the proportion of their blood that came from Cherokee ancestors.”
If that is correct, it’s unlikely that Warren qualifies. I found something similar in a NYT source.
I’ve heard that the “Dean Scream” wasn’t what killed Dean’s campaign. He was already dropping in the polls before the primary, and the scream was just something noticeable that attracted blame.
This FiveThirtyEight article discusses it more: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-howard-dean-can-teach-us-about-2016/
There’s been news about first responders to 9/11 having high levels of throat and blood cancers. I’ve been worried about people who have been living in NYC having similar though smaller risks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_effects_arising_from_the_September_11_attacks
There doesn’t seem to be much done to track what’s been happening to New Yorkers in general.
http://ir.rochelleterman.com/sites/default/files/luttwak%201999.pdf
Argues that the modern practices of trying to defuse small wars actually perpetuates conflict rather than letting matters get settled by definitive victories. I’m not qualified to judge the thesis, but it’s at least interesting.
There’s a section about refugee camps which neglects to mention that the preferable solution of letting refugees settle into new lives somewhere else has been made substantially illegal. It’s possible that the existence of refugee camps contributes to border restrictions, but I don’t think the casuality works that way.
That reminds me of the argument that small fires in a forest are good to clear out undergrowth, and efforts to prevent the small fires make big fires more likely and devastating.
I’m going to read this on transit, but off the top of my head, there’s an argument to be made that people sometimes “war themselves out” and have a few decades plus of peace, and sometimes historians talk about the 30 Years’ War in a way that basically boils down to “well they kind of got major religious war out of their system, y’know”.
As a point of comparison, Boaz Atzili claims that the present norm of fixed borders props up weak states and encourages conflict within and between them (also expanded into a book).
That seems to ignore the possibility that having an external enemy makes it *easier* for a state to attack its internal ones. A despised internal minority makes a great scapegoat for a military loss; look at how Germany after World War I believed it had been stabbed in the back, which gave an extra reason to persecute the Jews.
It also ignores the case where the outside enemy is so strong that even a state that isn’t weak is subject to threats from it.
Limited exposure to war might also remind people of how nasty it is?
The physical health of Americans got worse, but wellbeing got better under Obama, according to a Gallup poll.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/08/us/life-got-better-under-obama-according-to-gallup.html
When applying to grad school, is it a good idea to state in your application “I expect my thesis to argue for position X on the basis of evidence Y”, or will this come across as overly dogmatic?
Is this a scientific thesis? My experience is that graduate applications for scientific programs require you to include a separate research proposal detailing your planned methodology and literature basis.
Of course, it’s typical that your proposed project ends up being completely unrelated to your eventual project, so I wouldn’t necessary be overly concerned.
It’s a history thesis.
Then I’m afraid my advice would be rather useless. Good luck!
You might try asking the folks over at r/badhistory or r/askhistorians.
Thanks, I’ll give those sites a look.
I’m in history, and at the same point as you. I was advised by my master’s program in social science that for history, at least, it is better to discuss a potential research question or two and potential types of sources in your statement of purpose, but to leave it just a bit open-ended, than to seem too dogmatic or to have too narrow a track laid out. In fact, we were specifically told not to use the word “dissertation” in our statement. The idea was that the programs and faculty wanted to have the opportunity to mold you somewhat. Obviously, go in there with a strong background, detailed research interests, some specific questions and types of sources you are hoping to spend your time working with, and most importantly, with detailed knowledge of two specific faculty members’ interests and good reasons as to why they would be good fits for yours. But I wouldn’t necessarily put it in the way you described above–to say precisely what you expect you will discover and be arguing in five or so years (I’m assuming PhD). At least, this is the approach I’m taking. Hope this helps some.
I might be able to relate some more advice if I could know more details about your research interests and your prospective sources, though to be entirely honest I tend to be very bad at following up with SSC discussion threads I’ve commented on. There should be a new one today if you want to continue the discussion, or maybe shoot me an email at joshcoleufl at gmail dot com. I’m always interested in seeing people with a history background around here.
Looking at the question in the slightly different context of faculty hiring …
If someone we are considering is smart and holds views I think mistaken that’s to some degree a plus, since if we hire him I have the opportunity to try to persuade him to change his views. The more smart people with correct views and the fewer with incorrect the better.
I can’t say much about history in particular (I’m in STEM), but I would say that it’s more appropriate if you’re targeting a particular professor as an adviser… especially if you already know him/her and think s/he has interest in that topic.
The hidden secret of grad school admissions is that the college/university generally just check your overall credentials in order to make sure something isn’t *wrong*. Then, it’s up to the department faculty to pick who gets in. They tend to individually pick people who they think are good fits to work with them. If Prof A wants a student, Prof B is unlikely to even look over their credentials. B won’t raise a stink about A’s students; otherwise A might decide to raise a stink about B’s students.
After they’ve all pretty much picked who they want, then it’s down to people who are unknown but generally “good”. At that stage, if you seem to have a strong intent that doesn’t fit with any of the profs, you’re unlikely to garner as much interest.
Physicians overestimate both the benefits and harms of common medical interventions:
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/868079
So, selective schooling. In the UK [EDIT: cripes, I’ll be in trouble. In ENGLAND. Other parts of UK are responsible for their own schools.], the government has just announced that they’ll allow the return of grammar (i.e. academically selective) schools. Currently only a few exist, carried over from the previous system: new ones can’t open.
There seems to be a press etc. consensus that the previous UK system (split based on an exam at 11, single system where 20% or so go to ‘grammar’ schools and the rest to ‘secondary moderns’ many of which were very un-academic.) wasn’t overall good for social mobility (benefitted those who went to the grammars, bad for the rest). But the government is saying it doesn’t want either of these points: it basically wants to allow some schools to be selective, but with more porous boundaries (people joining at different ages) and probably some measures to push for them to not just have middle-class pupils.
Interested for thoughts, including from those with selective schools in their countries. Here, the rhetorical support for grammar schools seems to focus on people at the schools themselves rather than the knock-on impact. The opposition breaks down between
1. Those who don’t like academic separation on principle, on the basis that kids should be educated alongside a broad swathe of their peers
2. Those who think it’s not really on merit but to do with who can afford tutors etc. (Government’s counter to this is that rich people instead just buy houses in good school areas)
3. Those who probably could support them but fear that in practice the non-grammars will not be prioiritised or invested in and kids in them will be seen as failures (this category is important if e.g. in other countries there’s a stronger history of different schools with more parity of esteem)
One of the arguments that is rarely had in detail/explicitly is about the relative weightings that should be given to stretching the top X% and getting as many as possible up to a certain standard. If grammar schools are good for those that get in but bad for the rest, this might be a net social good if you think the country as a whole most benefits from a particularly strong intellectual elite, or bad if you think the most important thing is a higher median level of education.
Even bog standard comprehensives have internal selection – students are normally streamed into somewhere between 3 and 5 sets, so the top 20% of pupils won’t be taking lessons with the worse students anyway.
There are some claims floating around that poorer students do slightly worse in areas where grammars still exist, and that the rich do slightly better. If so, I would suspect that this has less to do with how lessons are provided and more to do with the general ethos of the school. My comprehensive was bad because there was no ethos of excellence in any field (and no discipline).
So, I think grammar schools are good if *all* schools in the system have a clear purpose and strive for excellence (perhaps with less academic and more vocational lessons). Then again, not convinced that the grammars are absolutely necessary to achieving that.
I think that academic education should be provided as widely as possible, and that it would be a good thing for society if everyone had a perfect grasp of high level maths, etc. etc. but, at the same time, if people don’t see the point in it and aren’t very good at it, it isn’t going to happen.
You’d be better off focusing on a more vocational education and leave the higher academic stuff for those who are interested/ have a particular aptitude for it.
I went to a comprehensive and we were streamed for some classes and not others. And of course same tutor groups, being in the same schools for breaks etc.
Yes, I hear you on the ethos of excellence. I actually very briefly taught, in a state grammar and a state secondary modern in the same area. There were good and bad teachers at each school. But I was shocked that when the secondary modern had a ‘what to do for 6th form’ and went through about a dozen options without mentioning the grammar had a 6th form intake.
I guess part of the question is at what age and on what basis do schools/pupils/parents decide their kid should be ‘academic’ or ‘vocational’. And is there any way to stop this meaning ‘basically all middle class parents think their kids must be academic, most working class parents don’t.
I think it is likely that grammar schools will/did increase social mobility in terms of people rising from the bottom to the top. I think they could reduce it in terms of movement from the bottom to the middle.
Personally, I don’t think it would have made much of a difference if I’d gone to a grammar school, rather than a good comprehensive. There wouldn’t have been much of a difference academically, and socially each has a similar balance of benefits and costs. My thoughts might be very different if I’d gone to a worse comprehensive though.
Two points:
1. For reasons that came up in another thread, I think smart kids are better off growing up surrounded by other smart kids, which is one argument for a selective system.
2. We spent a year in England at a point when the old system was in force, and my sister was in the year of schooling just before the 11+ exam. By her account, the year largely consisted of training kids to do well on the exam.
Almost everyone seems to agree with (1). Problem is, people tend to also agree that less smart kids also benefit from presence of the smart kids too.
I don’t either agree or disagree that the less smart kids benefit by the presence of the smart kids. I can see it going either way.
Looking at it as a teacher, my guess is that if a significant fraction of my students are smart I’m likely to slant my teaching towards them, since it’s more fun teaching smart students. If there are no smart students I’m going to do the best I can to teach at a level not-smart students can follow.
I’m definitely opposed to (1), as I think my comments in the CTY thread above should make clear. But (2) is at least potentially a real problem. I think the “right model” would be magnet schools of different types, without any one type being declared higher merit. Thus you could pull the proto-physicists off to the science/engineering magnet, get the artists into the fine art magnet, get the future craftsmen into the shop magnet, and so on, without necessarily having parents hire someone to tutor their kids into the school the parents prefer. I mean, this is always a problem, but if the schools don’t have an explicit merit ranking, you might be able to tone it down a bit. Plus, you would probably do a better job at concentrating the kids into peer groups where they can find people with similar interests and get improved social outcomes as well.
(3) is also pretty likely to be an issue, but unfortunately I don’t have a solution for it other than “don’t do that”.
I was under the impression that magnet schools were really created to try to end segregation. Whether any smart kids benefit from going to the magnet school is entirely secondary.
Porque no los dos?
At least now that we can tell smart kids benefit.
Jill has commented in the past that she thinks the commentariat here is largely libertarian. At one point I suggested that it would be interesting to go through the comments to a post, labeling people by their political stance as revealed in their comments.
I have now done so for the comments here. The surprising thing is how small a fraction of posters make comments that let me identify their politics, which in part reflects the relatively non-political nature of this particular set of discussions.
By my count, 91 people commented. That assumes that everyone posting as “anonymous” is the same person–I didn’t try to keep track of different graphics. Of those, 15 said something that gave me at least a reasonable guess at political orientation. Eight seemed to be libertarian of some sort, including left libertarian. Five appeared to be somewhere left of center, not including left libertarian. Two appeared to be conservative or alt right or something in that general direction.
I will leave it to someone else to repeat the experiment with a more politically loaded post and comments.
Well, there are loads of political surveys. Most are terrible. Doesn’t this site itself have one?
2014 was the last I could find. From it:
This seems kind of off from my perception of the commentariat here, though. Would someone really claim the commentariat leans slightly left? Perhaps the ones most likely to talk politics, or even comment at all, aren’t represented well by the survey (also this was almost two whole years ago). So, in light of that, this part seems relevant:
I don’t really see a lot of meaningful information to glean from that though, at least that won’t be horribly biased by self-selection effects and not knowing the frequency of each political ideology to post in threads (32% of the 649 survey respondents is already > twice the number of unique commenters estimated by David, and I expect the number of commenters has increased over the past two years, at least judging by the total number of comments).
Usually, I think, what happens is a claim is made that the commentariat leans right and/or libertarian. Then someone will bring up this survey (perhaps implicitly) and state we know “the site” leans left. Mostly, it seems people don’t want to agree to any claims made that the commentariat is right/libertarian leaning.
Subjectively, I think if I were to examine the broad scope of the comments for two years, you would see a shifting over the last 3 to 6 months. I’m going to guess that Scott’s well circulated tilts against some feminists pushed the comments rightward. If you went back further than two years, you might see a different mix.
What’s the likelihood of the commentariat leaning leftwards in numbers, but weighted rightwards due to exercising more freedom to spread their ideas or whatever?
I’m thinking it should considered that the actual numbers and perceived numbers can be contradictory and both valid. At least in a personal aesthetic sense, it bothers me when numbers regarding humans are neat and orderly.
Mostly it’s because the left considers any forum in which left ideas can be challenged to be “right-leaning”. (Not including “we need 50 Intersectional Stalins”-style challenges from the left, of course.)
And the defensiveness is mostly from the poor centrists who realize that being called “right-leaning” is a threat to dump them in the Basket of Deplorables outside the realm of acceptable discourse.
I think a lot of people here are pretty politically eccentric compared to the general populace.
I don’t identify as left wing, but I don’t identify as right wing either. Perhaps there’s some objective sense in which I’m one of them, but I just don’t know it.
I support mostly low regulation in markets, cutting red tape, ending much occupational licensing, and loosening zoning laws, so I guess that’s right wing, but I also would support some (credible) sort of tax on pollution and doing something on global warming so I’m left wing. I’m a gun rights extremist so I’m right wing, but I’m kind of neutral on taxes, and support a universal basic income guarantee so I’m left wing. I’m against banning the burqa and mosques, against most terror detention laws, and against most military interventions so I’m left wing, but I’m also firmly for border control, and banning visas from certain middle eastern and African countries, so maybe I’m right wing.
Maybe I’m just insane.
@Tekhno
You sound like a fairly typical libertarian, apart from being neutral on taxes.
Most libertarians aren’t for strong borders and a strong welfare state, or pollution taxes, however.
I think (although I’m not particularly libertarian) that borders and action on global warming are somewhat negotiable. A strong welfare state certainly isn’t libertarian, but a universal basic income can be.
Isn’t a basic income guarantee a strong welfare state by virtue of being universal? It’s a pretty extreme position to give cash money to everyone no questions asked, right?
To the extent that this is true, it’s a universal, not limited to people on “the left”. It’s also one that the comments I see posted fairly frequently here, and then frequently signal boosted. It’s tiresome.
Re. UBI as a “libertarian” idea:
Yes, using the government to redistribute money isn’t very libertarian, but trying to get the government to do the things it does more efficiently and intelligently is something less radical libertarians tend to support.
Milton Friedman, for example, is generally considered to be a libertarian, if less radical than his son, and he supported (invented?) the idea of a “negative income tax,” which is fairly similar to UBI.
One of the most frequent criticisms of Friedman (the elder) I see among libertarians is that, rather than being properly anti-government, he instead excelled at thinking of ways to make government programs work better.
For example, he was a big proponent of school vouchers, which, some libertarians might say, is actually bad, because it takes the idea of government money for education and makes it more efficient and market-based, which may have the effect of delaying peoples’ realization that government is just fundamentally flawed. And then there’s income tax withholding…
This is a mirror of an argument some radical leftists like, I think, Zizek, make, that private charity is actually bad because it delays the collapse of the fundamentally unworkable capitalist system by, in effect, putting a band-aid on it.
I generally can’t get on board with this kind of “worse is better” thinking from either side, because it seems to me the risk is too high that “worse” is only a prelude to “even worse,” not necessarily to “everyone realizes the error of their ways.”
So, even though I’m a pretty radical libertarian/anarchist, I am generally on board with ideas to make the government less bad, since I think, if libertopia is to come about, it will probably be through a gradual rolling back/market replacement of government, not because North Korea finally collapses and the people have had it with government.
So, if someone can come up with a better way to do welfare, then even though it’s not my end goal, I’d generally support it. To paraphrase Rothbard: “I support a tax cut from 38% to 37%. And from 37% to 36%. And…”
“but I also would support some (credible) sort of tax on pollution and doing something on global warming so I’m left wing.”
Centrist at most.
Meh. I guess I am close enough to some variant of being a Green Party fan, though I dislike some of its anti-scientism. Its the only party whose leaders have the balls to mention Malthus every once in a while.
They also are the only party with *real* critiques vs free trade that I know of. I have short-sighted populism on one side, and wishful thinking on some others(sweatshops are bad, but extreme poverty and forced prostitution is worse). The critique that we are basically offloading production to countries that won’t enforce environmental laws like we do is actually valid.
“Its the only party whose leaders have the balls to mention Malthus every once in a while. ”
What do they say about Malthus? What do you think they should say?
He was a co-inventor of the Ricardian theory of rent, which doesn’t get talked about much. He had an ingenious argument to show that the standard of living of the mass of the population could never be much higher for long than it was in his time, a prediction strikingly refuted by the next two centuries of rising real incomes.
What else important did he say?
It’s seeming more and more like Scott was prescient with Post-Partisanship is Hyper-Partisanship. Today Hillary talked about Trump supporters, describing one half as a “basket of deplorables“, and of the other she remarked:
Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz gave a $20 million donation to the Democratic Party, making similar noises about Trumpocalypse while also dropping this ditty:
I think these are examples of exoticization of groups that Clinton and Moskovitz know are no longer threats to the progressive order by themselves, that have made the transition to fargroups, and thus have become safe to talk about in the context of “empathy” and “understanding”. Some part of me feels that this is an uncharitable interpretation, but the general undertone that I get from statements like these is that these groups would best qualify for help from the Democrats if they just stopped believing or valuing the things that they believe and value. It’s all well and good to talk about empathy for the working classes affected by illegal immigration, but your politics and the nature of your coalition mean you’re not going to do anything about illegal immigration, so there’s limited value to that empathy.
So what about “the basket of deplorables”, “the irredeemable”? If you’re one of those deemed to be in that basket, do you feel a Clinton presidency will represent you and your interests?
Was this Hillary trying to distinguish between “some of the Trump support is stupid and evil, some of them are just stupid”?
I know fundraisers are different because you’ve got all your supporters or potential supporters and you have to rah-rah for your side and boo-hiss for the other side, but is calling any segment of the American population “irredeemable” really a good idea if you’re trying to come across as “no, I’m the nice, inclusive candidate”?
Speaking of Trump, any opinions on the Great Prayer Shawl Controversy?
If Trump is appealing to the “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it” crowd, what was he doing at a Black church in Detroit looking for votes (and seemingly getting a warm welcome while he was at it)?
Looking for white, college educated votes.
His campaign understands he can’t afford to lose those votes, and that his more bombastic rhetoric loses some of these votes on the margin. The campaign also understands the phenomenon of confirmation bias. So if you give people who are looking for a reason to vote Republican a reason to disbelieve the thing they think is disqualifying, you can reel those votes back in.
Why wouldn’t he be looking for black votes, aside from “I have a preconception about Trump so he couldn’t possibly be looking for black votes at a black church”? That’s the most obvious interpretation. Did he actually do anything specific which leads you to conclude that the most straightforward explanation couldn’t be true?
(Also, poor blacks may not like immigration any more than poor whites, so it’s not as if he has nothing to appeal to them.)
It’s hard to believe that there’s any particular reason behind anything Donald Trump does.
That aside, there’s a solid motivation for the GOP to pursue black votes in the abstract. The Democratic Party benefits substantially by its 90-10 advantage among blacks. The GOP doesn’t have to win blacks outright, but if they took that down to, say, even 75-25 or so, the Democratic Party would be in real trouble. I’d say the Democrats know this too, which is why the shrieking from the news media gets so loud on the rare occasions a Republican actually makes any effort in that direction.
(Not to mention that majority-black communities have suffered horribly under Democratic rule, so it’s not like there’s nothing to run on here if someone has the guts to really try.)
He started talking (differently) about race mostly in front of essentially all white audiences, and stuck to assertions of how awful things were in the black community. His literal message “What have you got lose (by voting for me)?”
His tweet after Dwayne Wade’s cousin was shot and killed in Chicago: “Dwyane Wade’s cousin was just shot and killed walking her baby in Chicago. Just what I have been saying. African-Americans will VOTE TRUMP!”
This is him showing “concern” about how bad black communities are. It’s kabuki.
And really, the biggest piece of evidence is simply how much work it is to get black voters to change their mind and vote trump vs. how much work it is to get wavering Republican whites back in his camp. The first is hard and targets relatively few votes, the second is much easier and targets comparatively more votes.
I think Trump is looking for black votes and that doing so is a sensible strategy. Blacks vote almost a hundred percent for Democrats. Trump is an able demagogue and there is no reason to expect black voters to be more immune to demagoguery than other people.
If he can persuade ten percent of black voters to switch to voting for him, that’s a big gain.
Ever walked down the street and heard the song “Fuck Donald Trump” amongst people of color?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/black-voters-trump_us_57a4a2a1e4b021fd98784a42
His support amongst women of any color is really really bad too.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/05/31/donald-trump-is-splitting-the-white-vote-in-ways-weve-never-seen-before/
Jiro, it’s just that everyone is pounding the “Trump is a racist” line so hard, that it seems odd he would get a good reception at a Black church. Either a certain segment of African-American voters don’t perceive him as racist, or what he says that is interpreted as anti-Mexican is not perceived by African-Americans as racist (I have no idea if there is a split between African-Americans and Hispanics so I’m prepared to be corrected on this).
It’s simply that the constant iteration that Trump appeals to the racist etc etc etc portion of Americans (Hillary’s “irredeemable”) means that there has to be a contradiction in what is being said and what is happening.
I know that as a politician on the campaign trail he’s going to turn up everywhere to talk to everyone, but if the line about “He’s really Hitler this time, no we mean it” is to be believed, why should a Black church accept his request to come and speak? What are they getting out of it? Does he have more support amongst the traditional Democratic constituencies than is comfortable to contemplate? Time tells us he only has 1% support amongst black voters, surely Time cannot be mistaken!
Yes, that was sarcasm. However, if his figures genuinely are that low, is it even worth it trying to scramble up extra support rather than concentrating on getting votes where he has better chances? Or could that poll be self-delusional wishful thinking and Trump actually does have more support amongst POC than the “91% of black voters are backing Hillary, so no worries!” line?
It’s hard to get any accurate reading, since the assumption on both sides is that the Democrats have minority votes sewn up. Is the line from this comment “Anecdotally speaking, I don’t know a single Black or Hispanic person who supports Trump” going to turn out to be like the infamous “But how did Nixon win, nobody I know voted for him!” (which, upon looking it up, is apparently not what Pauline Kael actually said).
@ Deiseach
There’s definitely a non-zero percentage of blacks in the US who believe immigration has hurt black employment – this 2008 survey found maybe 50% of black respondents saying so. So anti-illegal-immigration rhetoric isn’t necessarily going to be anathema to black voters.
As for the church that invited him, I’ve seen allegations that the bishop who gave him that prayer shawl is in fact trying to build his brand as a Prosperity Gospel preacher, and therefore looking for as much publicity as possible.
@Deiseach:
I can’t speak conclusively for whether there’s a split between blacks and Hispanics on the subject of Trump’s statements, but there are parts of the Southwest where friction between the two communities has led to what is practically ethnic cleansing of black people from whole neighborhoods. I don’t mean that in the demographic displacement sense that some do; I mean Hispanic gangs have literally firebombed housing complexes to drive out black people.
So when Trump says Mexico isn’t sending its best people over, and that a lot of the people Mexico does send over are criminals, I’m sure there’s some subset of black people for whom that strikes a chord.
Trump’s never been caught saying anything racist against blacks to my knowledge (the story about his and his father’s buildings in the 1970s doesn’t seem to have had any legs), so there’s no reason for blacks in particular to dislike him other than that he’s on the Republican ticket.
He’s polling at about 8% among black voters according to NBC, which is not bad at all for a Republican.
I’d been thinking that Trump doesn’t have a special animus against black people– not like what he’s got against Muslims and Mexicans. This is probably true, but he pushed hard to get the Central Park Five executed. They were innocent,
Trump hasn’t backed down on this– he’s attacked the fact that the Central Park Five got a cash settlement.
@Nancy Lebovitz:
Of the rape? Yes. However:
—Wikipedia
Do I approve of the way the police handled the case? No, and not just because it meant the actual rapist, Reyes, was free to continue committing crimes.
But I’m not crying too many tears over those particular individuals spending 13 years behind bars.
It sounds like the evidence of those particular teenagers committing crimes committed by the mob they were in isn’t solid.
“I didn’t do it, I just happened to be in the mob that was doing it” isn’t going to make people more favorably disposed to them.
What happened to the rest of that rioting crowd? Was anyone charged for the injuries it actually caused?
Oh, believe me, there is. Hispanics and blacks do not get along at all.
HeelBearCub, call me cynical, but I think white college-educated voters don’t care a straw about an African-American clergyman’s opinion of Trump (and indeed might be rather embarrassed that he’s not liberal enough) but would instead steadfastly be anti-Trump on the grounds that he’s a racist and they’re trying to be aware of their white privilege and be good allies so they won’t fall for his stunts and won’t be tricked that he’s not a racist.
Understand, I don’t think Trump is going to be your next president or that he’s an overlooked breath of fresh air that is just what the whole system needs to shake it up (The Donald Goes To Washington), but it is interesting to me how he’s gone from “that clown, the joke candidate” to “OMG, how did it come to this?” despite all the pundits telling us it could never ever happen, and then explaining it that his success was (a) unsustainable (b) coming from all the secret KKK members in the Republican party and elsewhere coming out of the woodwork because he was speaking their language.
Plainly there are some African-Americans who don’t think his supporters all dress up in white bedsheets!
There’s a continuum of anti-racist white people, though. Obviously Trump’s not going to get the hardcore SJ types, but a conservative who’s considering Trump yet concerned he’s too racist might be convinced by this sort of thing that he’s not and therefore they’re clear to vote for him. There have been multiple articles in the media arguing that this is the real reason for the church visit, for example this one.
It’s interesting that Trump seems to have allied himself specifically with people who preach the Prosperity Gospel. If he is in fact trying to win black votes, rather than just trying to make himself look non-racist to whites turned off by racism, a congregation full of black people primarily concerned about their economic well-being is probably the best place for him.
I’d be cautious about reading too much into the “warm welcome.” I have a long-standing dislike for Hillary Clinton, but I’d still be polite to her if I met her in person even though there’s zero chance I’ll vote for her.
Watching Tim Kaine’s response to “Basketgate,” I just have to hand it, again, to Scott Adams for calling the “dark” thing right away as a very intentional persuasion ploy and not a coincidence. Kaine described the people Hillary was describing as voting for Trump for “dark” motives. It’s clear somebody called a meeting and said “okay, everybody, every chance you get we want you to describe Trump as ‘dark,'” rather than it just being a coincidence.
Whether or not Adams proves right about anything else, it’s clear campaigns are operating at this level: not just picking general lines of attack, but even thinking of particular words with certain connotations (and not just obvious ones like “racist,” or “unqualified”) which they hope to associate in voters’ minds.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/28/ot44-open-primary/
Just happened to re-read that thread — at least the portions relevant to politics. It was a great discussion, and reflects well on the commentariat here.
No, it’s not shocking disclosures from a dead athlete’s dentist.
Canada offers peek at Gordie Howe bridge work.
Canadian Imperialism alert? Beware of the threat from the Great White North, they are coming, building their bridges to politely invade and conquer? 🙂
That bridge is just desperately needed by BOTH countries.
If you look at a map of North America, you can see how important this particular border crossing is. I don’t remember the exact superlatives, but it’s one of the busiest anywhere.
Currently, there are two ways to cross the border at Detroit: the Detroit-Windsor tunnel and the Ambassador Bridge. Both are antiques.
The Ambassador Bridge is owned by a Detroit billionaire named Matty Maroun. And Mr. Maroun has been absolutely determined to maintain his partial monopoly, in particular, to block the construction of a newer, larger, competing bridge.
Michigan, especially the struggling city of Detroit, would benefit from a new bridge, and an associated trucking terminal, to the tune of billions or maybe trillions of dollars. Our governor, Rick Snyder, understands the benefits a new bridge will bring, and has advocated it all along.
But Maroun’s billions cast a shadow over Michigan politics. There is absolutely no way that any pro-new-bridge legislation could ever pass the Michigan House and Senate.
The national right-wing pressure group Americans for Prosperity (we call them “Americans for Poverty”) weighed in on Maroun’s side to stop a new bridge from being built. I imagine they did things like threaten Republican legislators with primaries and other political punishment if they lent any support to the new bridge.
In the 2012 election, Maroun financed the gathering of signatures to put a proposed constitutional amendment (proposal 6) on the statewide ballot. The amendment was written to make it procedurally difficult to build any new international bridges or tunnels on Michigan’s borders.
Maroun put saturation TV ads on the air, really well-produced ads with actors pretending to be very concerned that their rights would be taken away if Proposal 6 didn’t pass. Other versions had people asking “who’s going to be stuck with the bill for this new bridge?” There was also a barrage of direct mail, radio ads, etc., etc. And on Election Day, there were Maroun-paid people accosting voters in front of literally every polling place in the state.
Of course, there were plenty of people who saw through all this. Both political parties urged a “no” vote, as did every newspaper, every columnist, and so on. Nobody not funded by Maroun stood up to say they supported it. Still, we all worried that people would be fooled into voting for it.
Fortunately, Proposal 6 was rejected by a 60% to 40% margin.
The polling on it was really interesting. Democrats voted overwhelmingly against it. Republicans voted overwhelmingly against it. Independents voted for it.
Anyway, the new bridge will be a huge economic benefit on both sides of the border. So, a way was found to finance the thing without needing the consent of the state legislature: Canada would pay for it, and we would pay them back through tolls.
And somebody who knows branding came up with the idea of naming the bridge for the most famous hockey player of all time.
In the portion you quoted, note the cost of the footprint for the bridge, toll plazas, customs stations, expressway ramps, etc. This is a big piece of ground in what used to be a crowded ethnic neighborhood, first Eastern European, later Hispanic and Arabic. A generation ago, more than a thousand people lived on that land.
Since then, as Detroit has declined, most of the houses have been abandoned, stripped by scavengers, and burned. Now, few people are left, and the whole tract is being picked up for a mere $1.5 million.
A comparable slice of Boston or Chicago or some other city (I mean, a neighborhood that was comparable housing as of 1960 or something) might be worth a thousand times that today.
I’m sorry, Larry, you’ve plainly been corrupted by Canadian coffee and doughnuts inducements to welcome your new Northern Overlords 🙂
(All that you say sounds probable and correct, as is reported in the news; I was fascinated that such a major piece of infrastructure as the old bridge, that is plainly economically vital, was in private hands. Of all the times you’d expect interfering Big Government meddling to step in and say “No monopoly on international access and traffic”, here is one!)
Ah, yes, Tim Hortons! (Speaking of things named for dead hockey players…) But they now belong to a Brazilian company.
Yes, but which Big Government? Surely the United States can’t seize property in Canada, and vice versa. The legal systems are different, so a coordinated effort to get hold of both halves of the bridge at the same time (while fending off the owner’s defensive tactics) would be a nontrivial problem.
That diplomatic energy is better spent building a new bridge than taking over an almost century-old one.
I’m not saying they should seize the old bridge, but if the private owner of the bridge is trying his best to keep his monopoly by blocking any efforts to build bridges elsewhere, surely it would be in the public interest for the national government to intervene here and say “We’re not saying anything about the Canadians and what they decide to do on their side of the river, but on the US side, nobody can blanket-ban the local government from building a bridge, ferry or other crossing means”.
This isn’t just “local town on one side of a river needs someway to cross over to other bank so they can visit big city”, it’s two separate nations with a very important economic link route being held to ransom by a private individual not wanting to lose his monopoly. He can do what he likes with his own property, but by the same token, how can he call on the courts to stop someone five miles downstream from building a ferry on their chunk of the riverbank? I never heard any rule that “there can only be one bridge at a time across a river”!
““We’re not saying anything about the Canadians and what they decide to do on their side of the river, but on the US side, nobody can blanket-ban the local government from building a bridge, ferry or other crossing means”.
Nobody can blanket ban it but the local government can choose not to build it, and anyone can try to persuade the local government to do so. Which seems to be what has been happening, with “persuasion” occurring via the usual mechanisms of political lobbying.
Can anyone recommend a place to find a thorough–and preferably civil–debunking of lots of Holocaust denial/revisionist arguments? (Ideally a place where I can learn both the denialist/revisionist arguments and their counterarguments.)
The canonical place used to be http://www.nizkor.org/. I haven’t visited for 15 years or so, and looking at their What’s New page, they added little material after 2002 or so. A reasonable place to start is the pamphlet.
Accepting rebutters as authorities on their opponents is worse than remaining ignorant. Just don’t bother.
Wouldn’t it be nice if people could come together without getting all emotional to conglomerate all the best data/arguments on this?
No, it wouldn’t be nice. Holocaust denial is generally done in bad faith, and saying “you’re lying about your relatives being murdered” is an inherently emotional subject.
My relatives were murdered in the Holocaust and I’m not emotional about it. That probably makes me a mutant freak to some degree, but I don’t think it’s THAT uncommon.
Bad faith arguments aren’t inherently wrong, they just flag the arguer as requiring some emotional defusing. If the defusing can’t be done, there may still be truth in his argument, it’s just a matter of what kind of abuse you’re willing to put up with to find it. Since this is basically always taking place on the internet using written words, my tolerance is relatively high.
I haven’t looked into Holocaust denial, but I thought there were variants which claimed the Holocaust was smaller and/or less intentional than most people claim rather than that it didn’t happen at all.
@Nancy Lebovitz:
There are some who claim that a few hundred thousand or low millions died due entirely to neglect – no intentional killing. Doesn’t explain mass shootings east of Poland, though, and in general there’s plenty of evidence of intentional killing being done in camps.
dndnrsn, my limited contact with that sort of idea included the implication that the neglect wasn’t especially culpable.
@Nancy Lebovitz:
If they were factually right, that would be an odd understanding of culpability. Putting people behind wire, not feeding them enough, forcing them to work, and crowding them in unsanitary conditions is what happened to Red Army POWs captured en masse in 1941-42 – millions died – and it’s generally agreed that this is a moral stain on Germany and the army, and it was dealt with by war crimes trials after the war.
If anything, the range German crimes during the war isn’t known well enough.
@dndnrsn:
I’ve seen people claim that most of the neglect killings came towards the end of the war, when Germany’s logistics system was breaking down and it was physically impossible to feed all the prisoners. Possibly Nancy was referring to a similar idea.
@The original Mr. X:
It is true that there was a big spike in deaths in the late war, for various reasons. The Germans made some pretty ugly decisions – brutal forced marches in the snow of concentration camp inmates. Food was definitely in crisis mode, but camp prisoners, along with the conscripted labour from the East, were generally not fed enough for the work they were doing. Some had it much harder than others though. However, this was already after the vast majority of the intentional killing had been done. The revisionist position claims that the intentional killing was a later invention.
Plus, there were significant deaths by neglect earlier in the war – especially of Soviet POWs – sometimes they would just fence in crowds of them, provide no shelter, and maybe toss a bit of food in. And, to some extent the extermination of Jews in Poland began because local authorities were getting increasingly worried about disease outbreaks in overcrowded ghettos where people weren’t getting enough food, and saw killing as a way to relieve the pressure.
It’d be nice, but when you have crap like “There were no death camps in Germany, therefore the Holocaust was a lie”, it’s clear there’s no point in responding to them. I think that’s about as far as I got into looking into the revisionists before I dismissed them as dirtbags leading fools.
It’s true there were no death camps within the accepted boundaries of Germany. They were in occupied Poland. It’s also absolutely irrelevant to the question of whether the Holocaust happened, and obviously so. There’s no point in discussing the issue with anyone who makes arguments like that.
See, to me that’s an interesting fact I didn’t know before you wrote it.
When I see “There were no death camps in Germany, therefore the Holocaust was a lie”, I want to know how a sane person came to that conclusion. I know there are sane Holocaust deniers, or sane people who deny key bits of Holocaust history. I want to know why. I want to know how far they’d go in an argument with someone debunking their claims before breaking down and just saying some version of “Look, I hate Jews, just leave me alone so I can go do that.” I’m guessing a substantial portion of them wouldn’t, and of THOSE, I want to know how many actually have the better facts, or at least a better knowledge of where facts are missing.
Come to think of it, I’m interested in criticisms of evolution for the same reason.
On the one hand, lottery of fascinations, but on the other this project seems like a colossal waste of time to me.
Is this some kind of “look how open minded I am” thing?
What Holocaust deniers/revisionists have is a whole bunch of irrelevant quibbles.
Some of it is stuff like the “no death camps in Germany” thing – probably some old source claimed there were death camps in Germany, for instance, or someone described a concentration camp with limited murder facilities (which did exist in Germany) as a death camp mistakenly, or something like that.
Similarly, there were word-of-mouth rumours about death camps that got picked up and reported as fact either during or after the war – I think one was that people were being murdered in chambers where they were suffocated with steam.
Some deniers/revisionists will pick up on stuff like this and basically say “if you can’t trust them on these details, what can you trust them on?”
Likewise, they’ll take the adjusting downwards of originally inflated death counts (the Soviets were prone to giving really high estimates for how many people had died in the camps they were encountering as they pushed the Germans west) to indicate malfeasance.
@Anonymous:
My interest in the unpopular sides of essentially one-sided issues grows out of my belief that rational, intelligent people can disagree on all kinds of things. I sense that this is not a common belief.
I want to know why rational intelligent people arrive at unpopular conclusions. Yes, a lot of the time you dig down and start to realize (or confirm your suspicion) that it’s because there’s a kernel of irrationality or unintelligence there, but if there isn’t I’d want to know before dismissing someone, because two other possibilities remain: there is a disagreement about values, or that person has better information.
Wouldn’t it be nice if people could come together without getting all emotional to conglomerate all the best data/arguments on this?
That attitude probably works better for something like The Great Hunger rather than the Holocaust.
The Famine was a natural disaster aggravated by the political and economic philosophies of the government which was administering what was treated de facto as a colony even if de jure it was part of the main kingdom. It was not deliberate genocide, despite what desperate survivors and generations of mythology dressed up as history-teaching professed.
It’s very hard to be unemotional about it, though. Even if it wasn’t intentionally made worse, there certainly was an attitude in certain quarters that anything that killed off the excess, unproductive populace was beneficial and shouldn’t be interfered with. Couple that with “compassion fatigue” (‘you mean the Irish are still dying of hunger? But we just gave last year!’) and racial attitudes as influenced by half-digested Darwinism, and you get things like Charles Kingsley’s letter to his wife in 1860 about a visit to Ireland:
The Holocaust is completely different because it didn’t just happen, or wasn’t something like “hereditary disease is killing off a large number of Jewish people and the medical establishment decides not to waste resources on researching cures”, it was made to happen. Group A decides to kill off as quickly as possible Group B (before moving on to Groups C and D) and uses the best resources of science and technology of its time to do this in the most efficient manner – it’s hard not to be emotional over “this is despicable and unhuman”.
“Group A decides to kill off as quickly as possible Group B (before moving on to Groups C and D)”
Minor nitpick– a number of groups were targeted at the same time.
Why? Why can’t rebutters be authorities on their opponents?
(I can think of some reasons why, but they don’t seem to apply here, and you haven’t bothered to say what they are.)
I should narrow the claim to mainstream rebutters of the fringe.
Sure, they could know about their opponents, but they don’t, in general, and in the specific case of holocaust denial. Mainly it’s an empirical claim.
But you want a reason? Flip the question: what reason do they have to learn anything about their opponents? That very trust eliminates any such reason. Emphatic told you what he wants: a fairytale. The market for fairytales is much bigger than the market for engagement. Maybe there are good rebutters, but they are swamped by bad rebutters and impossible to find.
Where did I say I wanted a fairytale? See my reply to dndnrsn below.
“Wouldn’t it be nice”
That was in response to what I thought you meant, which was that rebutters are overly emotional and therefore don’t look closely enough at their opponents.
Exactly. That’s why I bailed out of the conversation.
Anatoly is right that Nizkor is a good source for rebuttals of all the classic Holocaust denier arguments.
If you don’t already have an OK background in the history and historiography of the Holocaust that would be a better place to start, because denier arguments and rebuttals tend to focus on the small picture (eg, what was the purpose of a certain building on a certain Auschwitz sub-camp) and ignore the big picture (they have no real alternate explanation for where several million people went, leaving no trace).
Caveat: Holocaust denial is one of the ideas that I have a very hard time taking seriously enough to even engage with. The chances of a conspiracy so vast and so effective are far less than the chances of the historical events in question having taken place. By the arguments Holocaust deniers use, you could deny pretty much any historical or current event.
I’m hoping that by looking into it a bit I could learn “here are the parts where Holocaust history is least clear/where if someone is making an argument about these parts in particular then he shouldn’t be dismissed as quickly” kinda stuff.
Otherwise it’s easy to hear “This guy’s a Holocaust denier, don’t listen to him” and not know whether it’s a fair dismissal.
OK. That’s a fair point.
There are legitimate areas of historical controversy. The big one is probably when the process of mass murder was decided on: was it incremental and improvised in 1941-1942 based on the unfolding of the war in the East, or was it that the implementation of something decided on earlier? Whether there would have been one order at one point in time from Hitler or not is argued over – we have no paper record, and while it is inconceivable Hitler didn’t know what was going on, it is unclear how the decisions were arrived at. None of the people arguing think of themselves as “revisionists” or anything like that.
There are cases where to someone whose exposure to the Holocaust is very “popular” (eg, Schindler’s List plus something they were taught in grade school about Anne Frank, maybe) will react to actual historical scholarship like it’s denial. For instance, arguments about the # of dead. Or, they’ll likely have a very “Auschwitz-centric” understanding of the Holocaust: due to the fact that it was a complex with labour camps and mass-murder facilities, far more people survived Auschwitz than survived Treblinka, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Chelmno (most people don’t know the difference between a concentration camp and an extermination camp, and don’t know that there were dual use camps, etc) or survived mass shootings in the East (more Jews were killed by the Einsatzgruppen than died at Auschwitz). And they’ll react to information about any of this like Auschwitz is being denied, or something.
It’s like saying you want to find out “here’s the parts where flat earthers are least wrong”. All the parts are wrong, except for the parts where they misunderstood or misanalogized something.
Yes, there are legitimate areas of controversy. Yes, there are cases where popular understanding is bad enough that the truth sounds like denial. But there are legitimate areas of controversy that have to do with the shape of the Earth too, and there are truthful things about the shape of the Earth that can be taken as denial (try telling your grandmother that you can always map a coordinate system onto another one where the Earth is flat). But Holocaust deniers aren’t people who happen to randomly be wrong on a historical question. Their denial is motivated.
This is pretty much it.
There are unpopular ideas that are actually right. There are unpopular ideas that aren’t right, but have some useful stuff there. There are unpopular ideas that are justifiably unpopular because there’s nothing useful there. Holocaust denial is this third one. It’s bunk.
I don’t know a whole lot about the Holocaust or the deniers, but such arguments as dndnrsn’s make me suspicious. All I’ve ever heard my entire life is that the Holocaust was a terrible thing and deniers are evil with no facts whatsoever. I am skeptical that there is absolutely nothing there.
When I was a boy in the ’60’s, I remember my questions as to whether God exists were met mostly with “Everyone else believes in God; who are you to know more than them.” Then I found out this was totally mistaken, and there are lots of people who didn’t believe; it was just that these questions never reached the ears of a suburban boy in the ’60’s. As I got older, I have often found that when I hear someone say something to the effect of “There is nothing at all to such and such idea or belief, it isn’t worth your time to even look.” More often than not, if I did look, I usually found there was something of importance there, and the person who told me not to look was just stupid or actively trying to hide something that they didn’t want me to find.
I am not attacking you with this post dndnrsn; I am just explaining my reaction to this kind of comment. And I am trying to reconcile my usual skepticism of any such blanket belief with my knowledge that SSC is full of smart folks who aren’t trying to hide the truth. I have not spent the time to look into the Holocaust, partly because it is unquestionable that some very bad things occurred. The questions are around the edges, such as how many died, how much was purposeful genocide, and how much of it was simply the side effects of war. So my point is that I have much sympathy for Empathic’s quest, and my hope is that some day he can report back with his findings, or better yet, write an objective book about the Holocaust, giving us the real scoop, and the evidence for it, without the emotional underpinnings that make me suspicious.
Do you also think the same about flat-earthers or homeopaths?
This is Internet-Aspergers (no offense to people with actual Aspergers) of the type that leads people to say “Oh, you think my mother is a whore? Well, I know a lot about her life, and there’s no signs of prostitution, but I haven’t accounted for every second, so may be logically possible that my mother is a whore. Let me go ask her.”
Don’t be one of those. (Scott has sometimes fallen victim to this himself.)
@Mark V. Anderson:
I don’t mean to say “Holocaust denial is bunk” in the sense of “don’t even worry your little head about it”. Do some research. But if you have a decent background in the history of the Holocaust and the surrounding world events (there was a war on, or so I’ve been told) you will react like someone with a little knowledge of chemistry or biology or medicine will to researching, as Jiro gives as an example, homeopathy.
It is, in a logical sense, possible that contemporary history is all lies on a factual, material level*, and an enormous historical crime was invented for malicious political purposes, just as it is possible that modern chemistry is a sham and the fact that mixing things that produce symptoms then diluting and shaking them will make them cure illnesses that cause those symptoms has been suppressed. But these scenarios are vastly, vastly less likely than the canonical version you’ll get taught in university.
I guess my reaction to this is different from how I generally react to things I disagree with because it’s so settled. This isn’t something where no evidence is available, or something really hard to measure or quantify.
I don’t think it’s a matter of emotion, either. Thanks to my education I regard history perhaps excessively dispassionately. It’s more that the Holocaust deniers are basically the history department’s version of free energy or perpetual motion or whatever.
*the sorts of “modern history is all lies” people who get liked or tolerated locally usually think the lies are in the interpretation, don’t they?
@Mark V Andersen
Yes, there’s something to holocaust denial. It’s malice. Not all the deniers; some are simply attracted to conspiracy theories, some have been fooled by the other groups. But the groups pushing it are lying and know they’re lying.
My impression is that I met one who was a hard-core anarchist who didn’t want to believe one government was much worse than another.
Maybe I am just being irrational, because it is true I have little interest in many other areas that few believe in, such as UFO’s, perpetual energy, etc. But I think the difference is that so many people use the Holocaust as a just so story to accent their various beliefs, and it is one those areas where any denial of any of the details of the story will get one crucified by public opinion.
I don’t really know a whole lot about this subject, but that’s why I am happy to see someone else who wants to make an objective study. Yes, it is clear that there were camps where prisoners were gassed, so I certainly won’t accept a full denier narrative, but many of the details I do question.
That’s because there’s so much evidence for it that pretty much all denials except those related to Internet-Asperger’s are going to be malicious. So of course they get treated as malicious.
If you go around telling people “your mother is a whore”, you’ll also get crucified, even if you claim that you merely have honest doubts about their mother’s source of income.
@Mark V Anderson:
I would give UFO aficionados far, far more time of day than Holocaust deniers. I would give a higher probability of accuracy to the statement “intelligent alien life exists, has mastered interstellar travel, and has visited earth” than to Holocaust denial arguments. The former is a case where there are few reliable facts, while the latter is a case where the reliable facts are overwhelmingly on one side of the issue.
I don’t think we are going to get any further on this discussion.
But out of curiosity I went to Amazon to see if I could find a book that would explain the facts in one objective package. I did not see one. Instead, they were mostly journalistic type treatments that basically relayed one person’s experiences. If the facts for the Holocaust are so clear, I would think there would be some definitive books that laid out the facts in a scholarly fashion, giving numbers killed, how they were killed, the political mechanism within Nazi Germany to cause these events, etc. Are there such books?
Are there books which explain why your mother isn’t a whore? Or, if you object that nobody would write a book about your mother, are there books which explain why the Pope isn’t a whore? Or to bring it a little closer to not being an analogy at all, are there books which explain why Jews don’t really drink the blood of Christian babies, complete with scholarly references that someone researched in detail the level of baby-eating in medieval Jewish towns?
Mark V Anderson, the scope of holocaust historiography (warning: direct link to large pdf) has expanded enough and gotten into enough detail that books are often a little bit more narrowly tailored. However, a classic single volume is (or at least was) The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War, by Gilbert.
ETA: Jiro, there are in fact a large number of books about the Holocaust. I’m not sure what you’re trying to say. I find it plausible that the scholarly holocaust books are hard to find among the massive amount of fiction and memoirs dealing with it, as the latter genres are much more popular.
@Mark V Anderson:
There are a lot of books like that. The Holocaust is one of those topics that ordinary people actually care about, so it’s one of the scholarly fields where you get popular-targeted or popular-friendly books that are the real deal, along with academics who can write.
The numbers killed and where they were killed would be covered by any good general history of the Holocaust. I know Gilbert has been mentioned.
The issue of the political mechanism by which the process was set into motion and sustained is the big historical controversy right now. I would recommend Kershaw’s Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution which is a collection of essays he’s written over the years. It’s “light” reading insofar as academic work on the murder of several million people is capable of being “light”.
Thanks Montfort, dndnrsn. I really was looking for books on this, not trying to argue more. I will look at the books you two recommended,
I can’t speak directly to Holocaust denial, but I warn you as someone who tried to do this with 9/11 Trutherism (specifically, about claims that the towers were controlled demolition) that you’re likely to be disappointed. All the claims I looked at turned out to be some combination of completely misunderstanding basic principles, picking at little slices of evidence individually with no understanding of how they fit larger narratives, reading single sentences of papers out of context, and outright dishonesty.
Maybe you’ll have better luck on your project, but I suspect it’ll be just as frustrating.
My favorite 9/11 Truther claim is the one about the spire (really an antenna tower) turning to dust. Which it certainly appears to do in some videos. Aside from the obvious complaint “If it was a demolition, why would they rig explosives all over the antenna spire anyway?”, there’s another problem. The Truther claim is the spire was never found.
Oopsie:
http://photoblog.nbcnews.com/_news/2011/09/01/7548090-new-911-exhibit-at-the-newseum-marks-10th-anniversary-of-the-attack
Yeah, the “freefall” claims, “covering the ground with dirt” at the Pentagon, the “round missile hole” thing.
There were two that were the most frustrating for me. One was finding out that a physics professor (can’t remember the name) was making “truther” claims. I was hoping that his at least would be reasonable problems, but they were just a mishmash of the same stupid nonsense you’d get from Rosie O’Donnell. The other one was when somebody started talking about research about the rate of heat evolution showing that temperatures couldn’t have been as high as stated in the NIST NCSTAR report. Then when I asked for the references for these tests, they just stopped talking. I eventually managed to figure out that the small-scale tests done by NIST were mangled in the “conspiracy website telephone” game these people were playing.
A few facts for discussion.
1) There were a LOT of ways to die if you were caught between Hitler and Stalin
2) The post war russian approach to counting casualties was, broadly speaking, to count all the bodies they found between Moscow and Berlin who wasn’t either an ethnic german or wearing a german uniform then say “They were killed by the Germans”
3) This included people that they knew that they had killed, most famously, the Katyn Massacre victims, who were listed as soviet war dead at least through the end of the Soviet Era.
4) Just about all the death factories in the holocaust were located in regions “liberated” by the USSR.
Given these four facts, we should not be surprised at all if the Russians might have added some bodies to the piles to inflate the german totals and reduce their own. They might even have forcibly relocated some people from camps and said they were dead? The holocaust total would still be in the millions, of course, but I’ve never seen a thorough examination of this particular question.
Just off the cuff, if it were a large factor in the death total, I would have expected something about it to have come out after the Soviet archives were opened. Though maybe the archives are less complete, less open, or less studied than I think.
@Cassander/Montfort: Estimates of deaths at particular camps have been argued over by historians though. And the Soviet estimates could be high. For instance. Respectable scholars generally date the number of dead between 5.1 and 6 million, which is a sizable but not massive range.
In any case, a lot of the numbers can be supported based on German documents.
@Montfort
I’m not sure they would, necessarily. For example, lots of partisans got rounded up and shot in the last stages of the war. All it takes is some commissar writing up a report that says “we found X glorious socialist revolutionary partisans shot by the germans” instead of “we shot X counter-revolutionary wreckers” and the truth of the event is forever obscured. Survival in Stalin’s USSR depended on knowing which way the ideological winds were blowing and knowing which report should be written.
@dndnrsn
You’re quite right. What I would want to see is a comprehensive comparison between the number of people the germans think they shipped to camps or had einsatzgruppen take credit for and the numbers the soviets claimed to have found dead in their occupation zones.
@Cassander:
I haven’t read a comprehensive comparison looking at the history of Soviet death estimates etc, which would be interesting, but a bit of poking around and it’s relatively easy to look at it camp by camp. It looks like they were prone to overstating deaths by a large margin, sometimes coming up with numbers 4+x larger than later historians have concluded (which they come to from a variety of means, including some scholars who work mostly from German documents). But this takes the form of just an exaggeration of numbers – rather than, let’s say, the Germans having killed x people and the Soviets sneaking in an extra y bodies, and saying the Germans killed x+y.
The information is probably better for the camps than for the mass shootings. I think the mass shooting numbers are usually taken entirely from German sources – the units reported their killing up the chain of command, and while the Germans during WWII were not the stereotypes of Teutonic efficiency some expect, they did have a rather stereotypical preoccupation with keeping organized records. Any inflation there would be guys angling for promotions saying their men had killed more than they did. While the Soviets publicized the camps they found, I don’t think they publicized the existence of mass shootings to the same degree, besides pinning Katyn on the Germans.
And while the Soviets did go after non-Communist partisans and resistance fighters, they seem to have been pretty happy doing it in the open.
I’m given to understand that a number of commenters on this thread are engaged in intellectual work of one sort or another. I have a question for you – how is an intellectual discovery made in your field?
I’ve never made any significant intellectual discoveries, but I’ve had the experience of realising that some relation might exist between certain facts or ideas. This can be by means of inspiration – I suddenly realise that one thing could be considered to be equivalent to another, or that some causal relation appears to exist between two things. Alternatively, I can realise things by means of thinking procedurally – following some process and finding the result (linking initial conditions to output).
How does increased intelligence help us to make discoveries?
My intuition is that either of these things could be fairly easily automated as long as the language in which (intellectual) discoveries were described was standardised. (I’m guessing that the second sort of algorithmic thinking is what computers already do, but they are not so good at the first. Is there any reason why automatic intuition should be difficult? Is the problem definitions? (Relations between base elements?) )
Why AM and Eurisko Appear to Work (by Doug Lenat and John Seely Brown) talks about an early (1976) system that Lenat wrote that everybody was excited about because it appeared to (re-)make a bunch of mathematical discoveries (AM = Automated Mathematician). It did not have legs.
Thanks!
In more mathematical disciplines, some results are easier to arrive at in one way than in others, but the different methods are often hard (or at least non-trivial) to learn. Richard Feynman describes this in his autobiography as “having a different tool in your toolbox” – in his case, he knew a particular calculus procedure that other physicists mostly didn’t and so was able to reach a novel (well, nearly novel) result. Intelligence helps by increasing the size of your toolbox, so it’s more likely that you have a method that will get you to something new. Also, some part of what people call intelligence is probably “ability to notice non-intuitive consequences” (I think this is what people usually mean by “insight”?), which not everyone has in great measure.
Iterating through consequences is probably easy to automate, but I don’t believe we’ve had great success automating the development of totally new methods of doing things or getting results, or noticing that a particular method might get you something interesting.
Apocalyptic cult that worships cats (allegedly).
Look, this is the kind of weirdness that ends up in my RSS feeds, I’m going to share the love with you lot.
Well, the divil mend it.
I had to look these up because I could not believe they were real but no, apparently mirror spiders do indeed exist in real life.
(a) Evolution, why do you make it so hard to believe in you? I’m supposed to take it on faith that things like this “just happen” at random? No no no, a creator deity as the cause of things like this is much less believeable, right?
(b) If we are looking for evidence we are living in a simulated universe, this might be it. Some sneaky designer is just having a laugh.
That’s amazing. I keep a casual list of natural things which look designed: malachite (though I grant it needs to be polished to look artificial) and polka dot stingrays (I was first exposed to fawn brown stingrays with blue-violet spots, they look weirder but less elegant). I’m adding the mirror spider.
Are you familiar with Peacock Spiders and their mating dances? I particularly recommend the Sparklemuffin Spider at 3:02, which looks for all the world like it’s wearing one of those stripy winter hats with a pompom on top, and I’m not even going to try to describe its dance.
You can see why biologists go really heavy on the materialist atheism scale and why they look wistfully at disciplines like physics and maths.
When you’re trying to do Real Proper Science and you have to deal with things like booty-shaking spiders, what else can you do? If you took the damn thing at face value you’d have to believe “Someone or something made this” and then where would you be? 🙂
Honestly, these are spiders. How big are their brains? What is the point? Dancing and singing keeps you from being eaten, but why does that work on the females in the first place? The females are bigger, they can easily overpower any male and eat it if they’re hungry, so even as a distraction technique it would seem to work only as “keep the female uncertain what I am long enough so I can run away” rather than “hey baby, check out these moves!”
I also want to see the PUA/Redpill guys appeal to nature re: alpha males with this species; yeah, guys, tell me again how you gotta show a chick who’s boss by displaying your dominance because women are designed via evolution to like surrendering to the stronger dominant masculine man who can overpower them? 😀
Humans are not arachnids.
The tumblr commonly called “go home, evolution, you’re drunk”.
Unfortunately it is currently advertising a book, but there is good stuff in the archives.
That blog is fun, and what they say about bats is true – look at Honduran tent bats.
These could not be cuter and more designed to make you go “awww” if they had been created for Pokémon. Tiny white balls of fluff that all cuddle up together under a giant leaf they turn into a ‘tent’ for shelter.
This is not random natural process, this is fourteen-year-old girl scribbling in her unicorn-sticker sketching pad stuff 🙂
Hmm. We’ve had George Burns, Morgan Freeman, and Alanis Morissette. Now you’ve got me wondering who we should get to play Her the next time Hollywood wants the Divine presence in some flick…
https://amp.businessinsider.com/givedirectly-basic-income-experiment-unexpected-trouble-2016-9
Basic income has to be reliable to be of any use.. If you know you always have it available, you could quit your job to learn a skill, then get a better job using the skill. If the basic income is a pilot program that can end at any time, you can’t take the risk.
It also has to be universal. Some of the effect would be the effect on employers–for instance, people would be more willing to leave an employer with bad pay or working conditions if they know that basic income is available, and employers would respond by raising the pay or improving the working conditions. Employers will not respond this way if the number of people with the basic income is small, since the worker receiving the basic income is competing against another worker who does not and the employer could hire that other person.
(Reading this article, it looks like it’s pretty good for “universal”. “Reliable” maybe not so.)
Another case of unintended side effects of legislation that was (probably) intended to help.
http://www.sightline.org/2016/09/06/how-seattle-killed-micro-housing/
What would a city without any zoning laws at all look like? Somewhat related, what major US city has the least strenuous zoning laws?
I imagine zoning serves some purpose over and above social engineering, such as focusing where to build utilities, etc., but I wonder what a completely un-zoned modern city would look like.
People always mention Houston as not having zoning laws, but the standard rebuttal is that they have a lot of laws that look an awful lot like zoning regulations. See e.g. https://urbanedge.blogs.rice.edu/2015/09/08/forget-what-youve-heard-houston-really-does-have-zoning-sort-of/#.V9MMIpgrJpg
Houston. Not an answer to your first question, despite what you hear occasionally, but pretty definitely to your second.
The major city with the least strenuous zoning laws is San Francisco. The purpose of strenuous zoning laws is not to be followed, but to force the builder to ask for a variance, giving the zoning board a veto over the building. But the SF zoning board has formal veto power, so it doesn’t bother with crazy regulations.
Why are there no political doctrines that are absolutely against freedom as a concept?
Everyone except the most radical anarchists wants some restriction of certain abilities, but it seems no one in history has ever expounded a political ideology that dispenses with the abstraction altogether, despite many doing so with the abstraction of equality. Every ideology which is seen as totalitarian and critical of liberal conceptions of freedom, nonetheless has attempted to redefine it. Marxists came out against “bourgeois freedom”, only because they thought it was a lie, and not a true conception of freedom, where autonomy in choice is guaranteed by material factors. Fascists attacked the liberal conception of freedom as well, with Mussolini saying that men were tired of it, but elsewhere he also attempted to redefine freedom so that Fascism was its guarantor rather than its enemy:
“In our state the individual is not deprived of freedom. In fact, he has greater liberty than an isolated man, because the state protects him and he is part of the State. Isolated man is without defence.”
But why? For sheer reasons of historical continuity and pacification probably. The thing is, I don’t perceive that the concept of freedom is at all necessary to guarantee certain capacities to a people. If someone wants to be assured that they can buy and sell property, they do not need an abstract universal concept to be so. What they need is a concrete commitment to use force specifically for those ends.
In this way, it is entirely conceivable to not just attack equality but freedom on the same grounds, replacing both with power, capacity, ability etc. Yet, no political movement in history has done so. Some have walked up to the brink, but they all shrank back, every one of them, Marxist, Fascist and all.
Maybe a desire for freedom is just so inherent to the human psyche that no ideology which openly seeks to do away with it altogether would be able to get enough supporters for us to hear about.
Legalism? Confucianism?
(I don’t know for sure, but they seem like good bets.).
Seconding Legalism.
The Book of Lord Shang is hilarious because it makes Shang Yang come off as an adolescent edgelord.
That’s just a taste. This is a book with chapter titles like “Elimination of Strength” and “Weakening the People.” Shang Yang does not beat around the bush.
天生萬物以養人
人無一善以報天
殺殺殺殺殺殺殺
(Zhang Xianzhong, apocryphal)
Is it a bad thing that I immediately recognized the poem just by the bottom row, speaking no Chinese whatsoever?
Kill kill kill kill kill kill kill
It’s one of those stories you hope is a myth because the alternative is too disturbing.
Wikipedia claims that the first two lines are real, but the last an apocryphal interpolation. (A 17th century stele found in 1934 has it with the last line as “The spirits and gods are knowing, so reflect on this and examine yourselves.”)
I knew the lines (in translation) from Barry Hughart’s excellent Chinese fantasy Bridge of Birds, but didn’t know they had a historical antecedent. (Though I’m not surprised.)
告訴我為什麼！
我不喜歡星期一。
And I started jumping up and down yelling 殺殺殺殺殺殺殺 and the shrink started jumping up and down with me and we was both jumping up and down yelling 殺殺殺殺殺殺殺 and the sergeant come in, pinned a medal on me, and said Kid, you’re our boy.
Freedom as a societal good is the foundation of Western political philosophy. It probably has something to do with the Christian roots of Western politics — Christianity began in defiance of a repressive state. After so many centuries of such influence, it seems impossible to defy that foundation.
The Greeks had a pretty similar concept of political freedom.
Wouldn’t a true monarchy fit this description?
What’s a true monarchy? Catherine of Russia was the head of an absolutist autocracy; she was also one of the great Enlightenment monarchs and expanded the freedoms of her subjects.
I probably should have said “absolute monarchy”. I’m talking about a system where the monarch has full control over their people. Something like the Pharaohs.
I’ve seen it claimed that the Inca was something close to that. It would be interesting to see if the attitude towards freedom was different in a population that had had no contact with Eurasian culture for many thousands of years.
I would imagine it’s because freedom is a state much prized within the realm of civilized society…
Its been tried before and the kings keep getting assassinated.
Freedom, in the post-Enlightenment era at least, is a powerful applause light for almost everyone.
Freedom is also an extremely malleable concept which can be stretched across several independent dimensions – individual vs. collective freedom, positive vs. negative rights, economic vs. political vs. social, etc.
So any ideology that doesn’t tailor a definition of “real freedom” which encompasses its core principles and excludes its main enemies, is an ideology championed by idiots who will probably leave dozens of ideological superweapons lying around unused and so never rise to the level of being noticed by outsiders.
How exactly do you tell your citizens “You are free to buy and sell property as you need” without using the word “free”?
Unless you’re dictating literally every action your citizens take (and we haven’t invented mind control chips yet, so you aren’t), your citizens will have something they’re free to choose. And people generally like freedom, so you should play that up, even if the only thing they’re free to choose is whether they praise the Dear Leader three times a day or four times a day.
Being free to do certain things isn’t the same as the overarching concept of freedom, in the same way that wearing the same hat as somebody else isn’t the same as the overarching concept of equality.
If you say that you are free to do a particular thing then the emphasis is on that specific thing as being positive, whereas if you say that you are in favor of freedom, you are displaying an open ended attitude towards all of life, which is positive in itself, or is supposed to be.
“You are free to buy and sell property as you need” is completely open ended. Exchanging it for “The government will protect and define your property rights so that you can operate effectively as an individual for your material benefit and that of society, and the government will also lay down a small set of rules by which you may exchange said property rights, for the same purpose”, allows the assurance that property exists, may be bought and sold, but avoids invoking this sort of boundless abstraction. People like open endedness, however, even though it results in weird purity spirals.
The rejection of freedom needn’t imply totalitarianism (though it necessarily implies authority). You could have a radically minarchist society in which our political rhetoric to justify it involves enshrining a limited set of rights and duties so as to fulfill consequentialist goals, rather than utilizing a wishy washy tendency like freedom as a primary animating value. Or you could if humans didn’t like that wishy washy stuff.
I’m not seeing any difference in practice, only in how you frame it. “Operate effectively as an individual for your material benefit and that of society” is just an extremely clunky, robotic way of describing what every other society calls “freedom within reasonable limits.”
I don’t think framing it on consequentialist grounds helps. Consequentialism is just another way of saying “Good things happen when you do this,” and the “good things” in this case are various forms of “People are free to do the things they want to the extent it doesn’t harm others.” Which most people would shorten to “freedom.”
So even if you avoided ever using the word “freedom” in your country’s constitution, I’m pretty sure the very first citizen to immigrate to Tekhno-land would say “I like this place because it’s a free country.”
Framing is everything in politics. If people believe that a nation is based on “freedom” in the abstract, rather than a particular set of good material things, then over time people may conclude that the abstract principle isn’t being fulfilled enough. This is what I mean by abstract principles invoking purity spirals.
Abstract principles are always “lies” in that a country can never be 100% free, never be 100% equal, never be 100% pure. If you say that freedom is the highest good, but then people look around and see that the government is taxing people, then they will spot the contradiction and take your professed principle to its logical conclusion (anarcho-capitalism). If you say that equality is the highest good, but then people look around and see all sorts of various inequalities, they will call your bluff (communism/socialism, and social justice). There is probably a similar purity spiral to do with nationalism.
In reality, the government must take away some freedoms to provide others, rendering the idea of a flat abstract concept of freedom impossible. This is true for equality too, since there needs to be some unequal hierarchy to administer the supposed equality.
We can also ask “freedom from what”, and “equal in what way” and get totally different answers, and that is because both things are feel good buzzwords that don’t tell you anything about what is actually going on.
If you tell people that your country is based on freedom, then you are setting yourself up to fail, because you can’t maximize something so abstract, but then the people will notice, and ask why you aren’t maximizing it, and if you do attempt to maximize it, well… that ends in the destruction of your society as the collision of a perfect principle with an imperfect reality subtracts the remainder in human lives. Thankfully, different abstract principles are somewhat at a stalemate, but I think this process is the cause of many of our problems today.
The principles of a nation should always be concrete, not abstract. That’s a very difficult thing to achieve, but achieving it might banish a lot of ghosts from the minds of future generations.
Re-reading a Ray Bradbury story from 1953 (“The Murderer”) and could he foresee our connected, linked-in, always available and contactable 24/7 whether at home, work or on the road, Internet of Things future or what?
Try “The Machine Stops” by E.M. Forster in 1910.
We already did that one.
And the start of the same story when people freak out because the mobile phone transmitter-thing breaks and they can’t reach their spouses on the phone for half an hour. The panic! The pandemonium!
I’ve got a comment and a question (really a set of derivative questions).
I. Comment: the Phenomenon
Consider the phenomenon where there is some controversial issue, with sides A and B arguing against each other. Then something official happens in favor of side A. Afterward, it is increasingly difficult to argue in favor of side B and still be seen as respectable. As a result, B’s supporters abandon position B in order to be seen as respectable.
For example, up until Loving v. Virginia, respectable people could publicly debate interracial marriage. In the years since, it has become increasingly difficult to argue against interracial marriage without people automatically assuming you’re a far right nutjob Klansman or something. There could still be rational, non-malicious arguments against interracial marriage, but most rational non-malicious people wouldn’t want to be caught dead making them.
II. Question: a Particular Implication
The phenomenon above has many implications on stuff that’s gone down in the past few years, but the one I’m thinking about today is the presidential election. Supporting Donald Trump is an edgier thing to do than was supporting Republican nominees in past elections. In some circles it’s downright controversial.
If Trump is defeated in November, could the above phenomenon happen to his ideological supporters (people who are voting for Trump because they want greater restrictions on immigration, a border wall, pulling out of NATO, etc.? I realize that supporting these kinds of things is already something that would make you unpopular on, say, a college campus or in a newsroom, but if Trump loses could it get one put in the “untouchables” category with earnest fascists and holocaust deniers?
>Supporting Donald Trump is an edgier thing to do than was supporting Republican nominees in past elections. In some circles it’s downright controversial.
Is it? Or are the edges just located in different places? I doubt that anyone who wandered onto a college campus wearing a Romney Tshirt in 2012 was treated any better than one who wanders on today wearing a trump shirt, but I definitely don’t doubt who is wearing the shirt has changed.
No, I think a Romney shirt would elicit a far milder response.
People have been mining twitter for “Romney is Hitler” tweets; it seems to me like the volume has changed significantly (which does count as a milder response) but I think it is worth realizing that the tail is there, and the tail is what will stand out to people on the other side of it.
True, but the question here is about a lot more than the tail.
A Romney shirt would definitely be better. In grad school (not in the US) there were a few Romney supporters, quite vocal. Some of them taking it more seriously than others – some of them basically seemed to reason “wouldn’t it be hilarious if we were Republicans? I mean, how crazy is that, future corporate lawyers becoming right-wing!” Nobody gave them anything more than some mild ribbing.
I don’t think a Trump shirt would get only mild ribbing. I don’t remember anyone I knew making comments about Romney being a fascist or whatever, whereas condemnations of Trump are incredibly common.
Identity politics question:
I assume that most Hispanic people in the US are not illegal immigrants. However, it seems like most of them get really upset whenever anyone suggests that we do anything like punishing illegal immigrants or making it harder for more of them to come in. This surprises me. A priori, neither of those things sounds particularly bad to me. Naturally, I expect someone who is an illegal immigrant to be opposed to the idea that they be deported or sent to jail, but opposition to harsher punishments for illegal immigrants seems to far exceed the 10-15% of Hispanic people who are here illegally.
When I talk to white people about immigration, I see the expected partisan lines forming: liberal-types think more immigration is always great, conservative types not so much. But when I talk to Hispanic conservatives, I find that far more of them then I expect seem to think things like deporting more immigrants or building a border wall are bad ideas, even though this seems like it contradicts other conservative principles.
Why is this?
Dang, 10-15% are here illegally?! That’s a HUGE number. Are you sure that’s right?
There are an estimated 11-12 million illegal immigrants in the US, and around 55 million Hispanic people in the US. Wikipedia suggests that around 70% of illegal immigrants are Hispanic, so the 10-15% number looks reasonable.
That means out of all the generations and generations of families who moved here legally from Hispanic countries over the years, there’s still as many illegal immigrants (presumably having arrived within the last 20 years or so?) as 15% of all their living descendants! That’s insane!
I’m not sure there that the “generations and generations of families who moved here from Hispanic countries over the years” actually amount to very many people — Hispanic immigration to the U.S. seems to be a fairly recent phenomenon (according to my second link, around a third of the Hispanic population is foreign-born).
In 1970 (~2 generations ago), the Hispanic population of the United States was 9.1 million out of 205.1 million (4.4%). In other words, the narrative you’ve absorbed about “all the generations and generations of families who moved here legally from Hispanic countries over the years” is false and that absurdly high rate of illegal migration is true.
It looks like the illegal Hispanic population is almost 10 million, out of a total Hispanic population of 55 million. His estimate appears slightly low to reasonable.
But when I talk to Hispanic conservatives, I find that far more of them then I expect seem to think things like deporting more immigrants or building a border wall are bad ideas, even though this seems like it contradicts other conservative principles.
Why is this?
Because when you think of “illegal immigrant”, you think of faceless statistic. They think of their grandfather or uncle or cousin who slipped over the border, worked back-breaking manual labour with no rights and in poor conditions, and sent the money earned home to his family to raise them.
So that they got an education and didn’t have to slip over the border and work back-breaking manual labour with no rights and in poor conditions, but could come in legally and get a “clean indoor job with no heavy lifting” (to quote a Victoria Wood routine).
That’s my paternal grandfather, who worked half the year on building sites in England and sent money home to his family. Not an illegal, but working the same kind of manual jobs to give the ones at home more opportunity. A lot of immigrant nations have the same customs of sending money home; the immigrant Irish in Britain and the USA regularly sent home money that went to the support of the family members left behind, whether their own spouse and children, their younger siblings, or aged parents.
Heck, it’s even mentioned in the chorus of a maudlin (is there any other kind, sez you) ballad, about “send her all (the money you can spare) you can”!
Actually, I was under the impression that there are at least a noticeable number of Hispanics who don’t like illegal immigration (if you waited on line the correct way, you probably won’t like people who cut ahead in the line), but don’t like talking about it with white people for the obvious reasons.
1) Many Hispanic people who are not illegal immigrants may have friends or relatives who are in illegal or semi-legal status. Remember that most people in this situation have not slipped through the border, but have come legally and have overestayed their visa, or are working in a job that their visa doesn’t allow them to, or have some analogous irregular situation. They might see these as minor transgressions that it would be unjust to punish with deportation or prision.
2) Among those Hispanics who have no friends in rule-violating situations, many are legal immigrants or have friends and family who are are. They probably percieve that most people who push for deportations and a wall are mostly not doing it out abstract respect for the rule of law, but out of dislike for Hispanic immigration. This makes it obviously difficult to join a coalition led by them.
In my experience, the most vociferous anti-illegal immigrant people I know are legal immigrants. Granted, my experience is limited and in no way representative, but they seem extremely annoyed by people they view as queue jumpers.
My mother is a legal immigrant and I have noted the same attitude described above; she is a hardline republican and dislikes illegal immigration.
Likewise, I know a very nice man at work who reported the following story to me: He, along with his wife, scrimped and saved and went without to buy a small house and improve on it over several decades, operating within their means so as to ensure they could responsibly pay for it. Then, they (many years later) had a neighbor who brought a larger house (expensive beyond the neighbor’s and his/her spouse’s means) and then received some sort of government aid that enabled them to retain it when they proved unable to keep up with government aid. I”m not the guy or his neighbor; I have no idea what program he’s referring to; take this paragraph above with a grain of salt – but do take seriously my observations that people dislike other people “getting away with” indiscretions with they didn’t or wouldn’t or couldn’t.
(sorta related: I also hate it when I open with defensive 1-base play in starcraft, expecting to be rushed, and instead find my opponent opened fast expansion.)
Thomas Sowell, in Ethnic America, mentions a somewhat parallel situation with legal immigration in the past. You have an established immigrant population that is successful and accepted–Sephardic Jews, Lace Curtain Irish. You then have mass immigration of poor and uneducated people who are, in some sense, of the same ethnicity.
The immigrants pull down the reputation of the ethnicity, which hurts the established group. But, at the same time, the established group identifies with the new migrants (probably more in the Jewish than the Irish case) and wishes them well. I suspect the same may be happening in the Hispanic attitude to illegal Hispanic immigrants.
This doesn’t match my experience. I see a range of views with a fair bit of nuance. Maybe you should be talking to more thoughtful people.
The surveys I’ve seen say that Hispanic citizens have about the same opinion as other citizens, but shifted 10 points: 10 points in favor of Democrats and 10 points in favor of immigration. Maybe your sample is not representative.
The Hispanic immigrants I know, and I know a ton because I live in Miami and I’m born of two myself, have split into two:
1. Legal Immigrants who are now successful and conservative->Trump supporters, mostly. This includes Cubans, Argentinians, and Venezuelans I know. A couple think Trump is mostly an idiot but despise Hillary and Obamacare (esp the doctors, which are a lot of them) so they’ll go for Trump.
2. Formerly Illegal (have gotten green cards through sham marriages or other legal trickery), currently illegal, and lower class Hispanics–> Hillary. Also, anyone who was a liberal before this election is also going for Hillary.
Basically, for all the talk of massive Hispanic turnout that will destroy Trump, I haven’t seen a massive political shift. No Hispanic Republicans that I know are gonna switch to Hillary. Maybe a couple might stay home instead of going for Trump, but I doubt it.
All progressives I know are gonna vote for Hillary– I haven’t met any Bernie or Bust folks in real life, and I’m friends/acquaintances with some peeps who were pretty hardcore for Bernie, campaigned for him, etc.
I’ve heard far more discussion/pillorying of Trump among college-age white people (AKA my demographic) than among Hispanics, honestly. I even had a nice conversation in Spanish with a retired Hispanic military guy who was my Uber driver who said he thought Trump was funny so he was voting for him. This guy had also read the Bell Curve, so maybe he wasn’t a typical Hispanic Uber driver. I get some interesting people as my Uber drivers.
I understand Floridan Hispanics (who are mostly from Cuba) to be quite different from other Hispanics in America (who mostly are not). (If I’m wrong in this, someone please correct me)
Older Cubans are more likely to be Republican because they fled Castro’s socialism. Younger Cubans are more likely than their parents to be Democrats because Castro is ancient history as far as they’re concerned and they’ve assimilated into the rootless anomie of the American mainstream.
Also Cubans get preferential treatment for immigration because of those old Cold War policies, while other Hispanics don’t, which is the cause of some discord.
I think this blog itself may have a relevant musing:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweapons/
Rational Reflection on whether corporal punishment is really less humane than prison.
Peter Moskos’ In Defense of Flogging is an interesting treatment of this issue. Article.
I think it does a better job of demonstrating that long prison sentences are inhumane than that corporal punishment is humane. 10 years in prison is life-ruining; you have to start over from square one when you get out (and with the disadvantage of being a convicted felon).
Any single session of lashing that neither permanently cripples nor kills you is not nearly as bad; you can still maintain some continuity.
Of course, there’s also the question of whether we _want_ to ruin the lives of criminals.
1) People get their jollies out of directly inflicting physical pain, or even in inflicting pain through a chain of command, in a way which they do not from putting people into cells. This leads at a minimum to conflicts of interest.
2) It is hard to ratchet up a jail punishment past some limit. Physical punishments, because they are brief, are easy to ratchet up by repeating them (with a break for healing). Furthermore, to the extent to which you can ratchet up a jail punishment, doing so inherently involves a lot of time, and therefore by that time, the outrage mob that screams for ever increasing severity of punishment has stopped screaming.
3) The fact that jail takes a lot of time means that errors can be reversed before the punishment is a done deal. In theory you could fix this by requiring large enough payments to falsely punished people, but implementing that is really hard, especially since there is no lost income to use as a starting point for the payment size.
4) The fact that it costs the government a lot to punish people is an inherent brake on the severity of punishment. Corporal punishment is too cheap. (And yes, this does apply to fines and confiscation, which can have negative cost to the government, and do indeed go out of control–see civil forfeiture.)
“The fact that it costs the government a lot to punish people is an inherent brake on the severity of punishment.”
For anyone sufficiently interested, I have an old journal article on this subject.
“The fact that jail takes a lot of time means that errors can be reversed before the punishment is a done deal.”
But in practice it almost never happens.
Not really, since you can never get back the time you already spent incarcerated.
You can get back part of the time–the part which has not been spent yet.
Note that I am not asking for any sort of infallibility, like death penalty opponents do. Feel free to argue that the error rate is low enough. Furthermore, I’m not so much talking about reversing random errors as reversing mob rule or media blitzes or other forms of strong, but limited in duration, pressure.
If I had to choose, I’d probably opt for being mistakenly whipped than for being mistakenly incarcerated, even if said incarceration gets cancelled halfway through.
@ Mr. X
As would I.
Do you mean if you considered x amount of whipping and y amount of prison equal as a punishment, you would prefer x amount of mistaken whipping to y amount of mistaken prison? Otherwise you’re just saying “I’d prefer a small amount of whipping to a large amount of prison, regardless of whether it was mistaken or not”. I think that is true for everyone (for varying values of small and large).
If the fact that prison is distributed over time is supposed to be an advantage, perhaps you might consider whipping in installments.
(Epistemic status of sarcasm status: 50%)
In general, I support corporal punishment and public humiliation over long-term incarceration when possible. But this seems like a very weak argument in favor of them.
In particular, the way the author breezes over the question of effectiveness is unsettling. If incarcerating criminals prevents more crimes at a lower cost than other punishments, that is a very important piece of the puzzle. We don’t punish the guilty for their own benefit but for that of the innocent: the well-being of criminals is, at best, a secondary concern. This article reverses that, not seriously considering the suffering inflicted by recidivist criminals on the public but focusing entirely on that of the criminals themselves.
Beyond that, cost is a serious concern. Right now the exorbitant costs of trials and housing inmates are a huge impediment to justice, resulting in lowered sentences via rampant plea bargaining and a general pressure not to overfill the nation’s already crowded jails. A more streamlined system featuring corporal punishment and a simplified trial process could handle the full volume of crime committed in America, providing more credible deterrence and saving money that could otherwise be used for better policing.
This is a feature, not a bug.
Only if you’re a criminal or otherwise expecting to get arrested in the near future. Even then it’s not hard to find examples of plea bargaining and prosecutorial discretion being abused.
If you’re a shop keeper who wants to see something done about shop-lifters it is most certainly “a bug”.
Plea bargaining is abused to convict people, not to reduce sentences and keep people out of jails.
How do you know it’s not the other way around? You’d need to have a good estimate of the base rate of guilt….
Not just that, you’d need a base rate of guilt among those who take plea bargains. Every time an innocent person takes a plea bargain, a guilty person gets away with whatever the underlying crime was (assuming there was an underlying crime). If we just compare the number of plea bargains taken to the number of guilty people in existence, we don’t gain anything.
“is used to convict people” means “is used with the intent of convicting particular people”.
That’s a very comprehensible definition. However, in the comment I replied to, you used the word “abused”. That requires knowing something about the base rate of guilt (among those that take plea bargains, as Gazeboist correctly points out).
“Abused” here means “is used, in a manner not dependent on actual guilt or innocence, and in a way which bypasses the supposed protections in the legal system”. It does not require knowing the base rate of guilt.
With just the “in a manner not dependent on actual guilt or innocence”, that applies to all behavior that every officer in the justice system engages in. An enduring truth for millennia is that we don’t have access to that. That means that when they use their discretion to not prosecute a drug crime and instead direct the accused toward treatment (if such an action is not mandatory), then it would qualify for this portion of your definition of “abused”.
Concerning “in a way which bypasses the supposed protections in the legal system”, you’re really going to have to unpack that. It seems to me that the protections are still pretty much all there. I am protected from illegal search and seizure when the investigators gather evidence for the case. I’m protected from lack of competent legal advice by being provided a lawyer. I’m protected from being forced to incriminate myself. I’m protected from intentional concealing of the truth by the discovery process. The list goes on and on, but we’ll skip to the one that is relevant. I’m protected from baseless accusations by a single branch of government (or even two branches of government!) by a right to choose to have my case heard in front of a jury of my peers. The fact that I can waive that right is no different than the fact that I can consent to a search of my house without probable cause, fire my lawyer, confess my illegal activities, etc.
Regardless, I think this is an absolutely terrible definition for the difference between used/abused. At the very least, I think a distinction implies that the prosecutor is doing something wrong, and that requires some teleology and mens rea. The purpose of plea bargaining is to move high probability of guilt cases through the system quickly (remember, there is no such thing as “certainty”) and with some benefit to the defendant. I could imagine particular cases where there is evidence to show that the prosecutor is abusing the process (knowing that the true probability is low… but that’s also why we appoint defense counsel… to know when the true probability is low), but I would even accept a minimal, somewhat disconnected form of mens rea – knowing that, in the aggregate, plea bargains are actually outstripping the base rate of guilt (or, again, at least some attempt at an independent measure of ‘likelihood’). Without even that, I think the accusation of abuse falls flat on its face.
I think we can steelman that to, “in a manner not dependent on their understanding of actual guilt or innocence”.
“The purpose of plea bargaining is to move high probability of guilt cases through the system quickly”
How do you know? If the probability you will be convicted is .5, the penalty if you are convicted is ten years in prison, and the prosecutor offers you one year, most of it already time served, it may well be in your interest to accept even if you are innocent.
The overwhelming majority of criminal cases end up with plea bargains. What makes you believe they are all high probability of guilt cases?
If a case has a high probability of conviction, wouldn’t you expect the bargain offered to be for a penalty only a little below the penalty on conviction? Is that the pattern we observe?
An interesting old journal article on the parallel between modern plea bargaining and the medieval law of torture.
@John
That leads me right back to mens rea.
@David
Combining Bayes with Blackstone (where I=innocent, C=convicted, A=acquited, G=guilty), we have P(I|C) = P(A|G)P(G)/(10P(C)), so if P(C)=0.5, P(I|C) = P(A|G)P(G)/5. A lot will depend on your estimate of the numerator, but a hard upper bound is 1/5. At this upper bound, it seems like your 10:1 bargain is bad for society. However, I wouldn’t be surprised if the numerator brings this down by a factor of 2 and makes it advantageous.
Defense attorneys know when a case isn’t high probability. Unless we want to postulate that they routinely give terrible advice…
Not really. There are two factors driving in the other direction. First, prosecutors hate losing cases. They absolutely cannot stomach losses on their record, so they’re loath to press anything that’s not high probability. Second, prosecutors are extremely overworked. If they weren’t overworked at all, then it would barely benefit them to get high probability cases off their caseload – they’d just go to trial. They’d have no reason to offer much. Given the high workload, they have a much larger incentive to get it off their caseload. Coupled with the pressure for perfect records, any small amount of imperfection in a case is going to be given a big bargain.
If that’s not clear, I’m postulating that for a fixed amount of uncertainty, a higher workload should correlate with larger differences between bargains and posted sentences. Is that a pattern we observe?
Finally, I should note that I’m the same Anonymous from this thread.
EDIT: I’d also like to extend the question of whether offering settlements in civil trials is abusive (or akin to torture).
“Defense attorneys know when a case isn’t high probability. Unless we want to postulate that they routinely give terrible advice…”
It isn’t bad advice for the reason I already sketched. Settling for a low penalty instead of litigating with the risk of a high penalty may well be sensible even if you have a good chance of acquittal.
It’s true that a prosecutor might prefer a plea bargain for two years to a .9 chance of conviction for ten years, given the constraints on the prosecutor’s time. But why would he have to offer that good a bargain to get a deal?
It is bad advice if you can get a better deal or get them to drop the case. That depends on knowing the dynamics of the prosecutor’s office.
Because the existence of competent public defenders makes the market clear. Again, unless we’re postulating that defense attorneys are consistently just getting smoked and giving bad advice for how good of a deal they can get out of prosecutors, then they’re going to press for more in cases that are above the prosecutors’ decision point and settle cases that are below it. Do we have some reason to believe that prosecutors are consistently outperforming defense attorneys in estimating the marginal cost of trial… across many jurisdictions?
“Because the existence of competent public defenders makes the market clear.”
For felonies, the overwhelming majority of defendants have publicly provided attorneys. Some of them may have an ideological commitment to serving their clients, but they have little or no material incentive to do so. A plea bargain saves them time just as it saves the prosecutor time.
Well, then we have a testable prediction. The plea bargain discount rate should correlate with some ratio of the extent that the prosecutors’ office is overworked to the supply of criminal defense lawyers in the area.
Now, the question is whether we can find appropriate data. I doubt it is already in the public sphere. My line of work won’t really allow me to commission an original study for this collection… but I’d be willing to donate my free time if you’d like to be the PI. 🙂
Anonymous, it seems to me that your argument depends on someone, at some stage of the process, being willing to work on making sure that the evidence against someone is sound.
What’s been shown in the cases of falsely convicted people is that the system is frequently biased against suspects. Jailhouse confessions, coerced confessed, and bad forensics have been routinely accepted as evidence of guilt.
Also, police are permitted to lie to suspects about how much evidence they have quite a bit more.
In the most minimal sense, that’s what defense counsel is for.
“In the most minimal sense, that’s what defense counsel is for.”
And why is it in the interest of a lawyer who has been assigned to the case by a judge to do the best job he can of helping the defendant–at the cost (sometimes) of making the judge’s job harder?
A large majority of felony defendants are indigents with court appointed attorneys or public defenders. Some of the latter may, for ideological or reputational reasons, try to get the best deal they can for their client. Others may not. A plea bargain saves the defense council time as well as the prosecutor.
OK, that’s another pet peeve of mine in discussions like this – the one where you bury the bit about getting rid of some of that pesky “due process” stuff and pretend this is about using corporal punishment to ELIMINATE MASS INCARCERATION!
If you’ve actually got a way to simplify and expedite criminal trials while still fully protecting the rights of the accused, that’s the part you need to be shouting from the rooftops, because that’s hugely valuable even if we only apply it to the people we are planning to throw in jail.
But if you’re burying it in a discussion of corporal punishment, I’m inclined to believe that you don’t really have such a plan, or at least not one you’re inclined to explain and defend. In which case, hell no. If your proposed corporal punishment has the same deterrent effect on criminals as a prison sentence, then it likely has the same adverse effect on the innocent – and less window for reversal. So you’re going to be stuck with the same cumbersome legal protections for the accused.
If this is just the fantasy where we know who the bad guys are and can’t we just beat them up already?, then no, it’s an enjoyable fantasy but we can’t really do that and this probably isn’t the place to talk about it.
I disagree, if anything this is an ideal place to talk about it. It’s all about understanding how to develop intelligent priors from base rates: in other words, basic Bayesian reasoning.
Every police department in the country, probably every one in the world, has their own recognized group of ‘usual suspects.’ Career criminals aren’t exactly tough to identify, especially given that in many communities being one is a point of pride. Deliberately focusing policing on that criminal class and going after them relentlessly on the crimes which are most likely to yield convictions means the city can impose a high cost on being a habitual offender.
You can go too far in that direction, arguably Davao City did, but you don’t really need to. Aggressive policing here by the NYPD, starting under Giuliani, achieved a similar transformation despite being much less heavy-handed. Even now our crime rates are much more reasonable than in most of the country largely due to Commissioner Bratton’s legacy.
Those innovations show the weakpoints in the current criminal justice system. Post-Warren procedural and evidentiary rules, outside of drug crimes, generally make obtaining a conviction in court too risky and expensive for prosecuting them to be worthwhile. Returning to a system lacking those new rules could provide the sort of “speedy and public trial” required by the Sixth Amendment.
When you talk about “most likely to yield convictions”, are you still talking about the “simplified trial process” you mentioned a couple of posts back? Because that’s the part I’m taking issue with here.
And I really don’t know how to interpret what you are saying other than that you expect due process of law, as incorporated in the current non-simplified trial process, should not apply to “the usual suspects” and “the criminal class”. The police should be able to just run Those Sorts Of People past some quick tribunal and beat them up before any namby-pamby civil libertarians can complain about it.
I seem to recall hearing stories about the local police and prosecutors convicting people hereabouts for rape, murder, and other non-drug crimes. Maybe things are different where you live.
But it is now clear. You are unambiguously calling for an end to due process as it is currently understood, for members of the criminal class that you want the police to beat up.
No.
I believe that corporal punishment and other forms of negative reinforcement can be more humane then other forms. We got rid of it in the school system, and we replaced it with ritalin. In the long run is it better or worse? Well, one can *look* inhumane, and there’s lots of money involved in another, so the answer dosen’t matter.
Its the results at the end that matter I believe. I’m pretty sure sending people to prison just ensures that they end up permanently in the prison system or selling drugs since they may not get legal jobs the rest of their life.
I’m interested by the “got rid of it in the school system, and we replaced it with ritalin” claim. Is this really a case of one replacing the other? Or just coinciding ‘fashions’. I went to a school that had neither (possibly very small amounts of early ritalin?)
A psychiatrist posted this piece on the effectiveness of the drugs. While the study that prompted the blog post is positive, he posted 7 other studies and summaries of studies. Its quite contradictory if these meds increase GPA or objective measures of knowledge but they reduce disruptive behavior in the classroom more noticeably and consistently.
AKA, we may have replaced spanking with ritalin to make kids sit down for 7 hours a day.
I mean, I guess these pills would probably be more effective if kids were taught under some korean cram-school style. But forcing kids to learn quickly and efficiently instead of watching movies and coloring half the day is inhumane, I guess.
*and as an aside, I dislike the way us westerners negatively view these as route memorization. All education is is memorization (hard drive storage) and processing and pruning….and yes its more nuanced then that.
But why did you replace it with Ritalin?
Corporal punishment was banned in (I presume) all of Europe too, but it was not replaced with Ritalin or other drugs.
I have read two explanations for it so far
1. Is of course, the larger financial incentives in this countries medical system then socialistic countries leading to more day by day medical corruption.
2. The factors that have lead to the zero tolerance policies make there larger criticisms of some ways to control behavior more critiqued then in other countries.
I want to never ever hear this subject discussed again with anything like “10 years in prison” on one side of the scale.
You want to talk about whether a caning is more or less humane than thirty days in the county jail, fine. Also throw in fines and community service, which make it less than a slam-dunk for caning.
Or if you want to talk about ten years in prison, put torture and mutilation on the other end of the scale. Because a dozen strokes or forty lashes or any other such thing, will not serve as a replacement for ten years in prison. It will not be seen as an effective deterrent for the sort of crimes we presently set ten-year prison sentences for – and with the criminal no longer being isolated from society until he(*) can cool down or age out, you’re critically dependent on deterrence. There’s not much opportunity for rehabilitation in a single caning. We can maybe tolerate “Every time he shoplifts we give him a paddling until he learns better”, but “Every time he rapes someone…”, that really needs to be just the one time. The public demand for justice and/or vengeance, will not be so readily satisfied.
So, yeah, robbers and maybe even just thieves get their right hand amputated. Rapists get something else amputated. That could work. People might accept it, it would probably pose an adequate deterrent, and we can discuss whether it is more or less humane than ten years in prison. Are you up for it?
* I’m not even going to get into the problems that are going to come up when the prisoner isn’t a “he”. Really, they come up even with male prisoners, but most people including the recipients will be strongly conditioned to ignore or deny them.
This might be the typical mind fallacy speaking, but I think most people would go for it if it was a viable option rather than an intellectual stop sign.
Many of us already half-jokingly suggest that prison rape can serve as an additional punishment for serious offenders (see Office Space’s “pound-me-in-the-ass prison”).Others openly advocate that certain categories like sex offenders should be chemically castrated as a condition of release. Roughly half of Americans support torture of suspected terrorists, which while not exactly equivalent is a similar calculus of risk of attack against suffering. Support for the death penalty is remarkably high as well: even with what were, until then, falling crime rates in 2015 more than half of Americans still wanted murderers to face capital punishment.It seems a lot more likely that elite distaste, rather than any squeamishness on the part of the general public, is what causes us to employ prison more than other forms of punishment.
Seriously, prison rape isn’t an additional punishment for serious offenders (with the possible exception of kiddy-diddlers, since other criminals are oh so moral about that).
It’s a way for the government to keep the non-criminal classes in line, just as in Office Space. John “ScaryName” Smith isn’t worrying about prison rape as he’s sentenced to his third term for aggravated assault. Aaron “The Dweeb” Black is, when he’s sentenced for plugging his computer into the wrong network.
Ok, fair point. Strikeout incoming.
I was just going to link “A Date with the Health Inspector” and say “Tom DuBois”, but your explanation is much faster.
So is cutting off a few fingers not mutilation enough for you?
This is why there isn’t any solution to mass incarceration that doesn’t ultimately boil down to, “punish criminals less”.
I have actually talked to people that have spent 30 days in the country jail, paid fines, done community service, and been on probation–my high school cohort got in a lot of trouble–and they unanimously report a preference for canning. Getting canned sucks but those other things fuck up your life for years, in ways that are hard to appreciate. Small sample size is small, but maybe the case is stronger than you suppose?
Long incarceration is for rapists and murderers. The problem is we have ridiculous sentences for other things.
Well, we’re not just interested in the convict’s side here – whatever they prefer, we ought to be at least suspicious of. But yes, I agree that there is a strong (but not slam-dunk obvious) case for caning at the low end and that we’re probably stuck with lengthy incarceration for the serious felonies.
True, although it does help rebut the “But corporal punishment is inhumane” argument that’s frequently deployed on this topic.
What he said.
But the real key is the “hard to appreciate.” The problem with incarceration is that it doesn’t suck. Like, for a bunch of the people I know that have been there, on a day to day basis jail is better than their life was on the outside. The problem is when they are let go again, not only does their standard of living take a dive, but the hard to appreciate consequences of having been in jail make it even worse than it was before. The actual punishment doesn’t start until after you have finished the punishment.
This is a terrible way of doing deterrence.
Like, I don’t think the general public appreciates the consequences, at all, so it is really God damn stupid to expect the impulsive people to be deterred by the consequences that the people making the rules don’t even understand.
Plus, when the public didn’t understand the severity of the punishment, it is hard for them to make an informed decision about whether punishment fits the crime. I think that the fact jail itself doesn’t suck so much has lead to a general tenancy to demand tougher penalties; penalties that don’t actually fit the crime.
The best way to understand imprisonment as the socially approved method of punishment is as a legacy from much different times. Here are several ways in which prison as a Schelling point could have been useful for preserving convicted’s-rights:
– Historically, a mouth to feed is a larger relative burden on the community’s budget. So forcing the convict to be a drain on scarce resources makes the community ask themselves if it’s really worth it to keep the guy locked up?
– Giving the state the power to ceremonial violence tends towards a slippery slope: famous examples are the Taliban’s woman-stoning and thief-hand-cutting-off. Or take the example of lethal injection vs. lynching. The former is so boring and sterile, the latter is downright theatric.
What we did with the imprisonment concept is find one form of punishment that can be adapted to all possible crimes (from “one night in county” all the way to life without parole) and also find a form that resist the bloodthirst and barabarism that surface when an outrageous criminal acts betrays society.
Unfortunately, we’ve now created a secondary punishment system of vigilante justice *inside* the prisons which kind of renders the whole sterile punishment thing irrelevant. But that’s a whole other debate…
Well holy shit did I find that a very popular political testing website clearly and obviously moves its results around so it artificially makes you agree less or more with a candidate.
I used to like the side ISideWith.com , but its algorithm results are more then fishy. The have moved trump from 40 to like 10 percent, without me changing anything.
Maybe it reflects Trump’s views changing? The man is not exactly consistent.
Interestingly, it moved me way up on Johnson (I don’t recall what I was before, but he wasn’t it’s top result for me, and now it is with 80%!)
I would assume they add in new comments made by the candidate. Say you are very anti-immigrant. Six months ago they would have said that you were 100% in line with Trump on immigration. However, now he’s that he’s softened his immigration stance it would make sense for you to align with him less now if you didn’t change any of your answers.
Please don’t conflate legal immigration with illegal immigration. It’s a cheap rhetorical move that’s unfortunately completely overrun all other discussion forums; I’d rather not see it get a foothold here.
(Edited to add: Sorry that sounded like I was intentionally accusing you of a cheap rhetorical move; my guess is you’re more a victim of one.)
Let’s say God exists. Let’s further say God exists self-sufficiently, needing no other thing to support his existence. Would it then follow that God as described would have no “needs”?
If this is so, what incentive or reason would be sufficient for such a being to perform any action?
edit: Or would it be more accurate to say we human beings operate from our nature, where our nature is “satisfy one’s own needs” and thus we seek after our own needs. But perhaps a God with no needs, would operate from a nature which itself would not constitute a need? or to put it more directly, such a God would do things out of his nature but his nature (which a being does not violate by definition) would somehow not constitute a need, or compulsion – or to put it more like this, such a being, since it would have no needs and have nothing in authority above it, which could compel it against its will (for then, that thing would be God), would act according to its nature, freely and without compulsion yet still be without need – and the only way this makes sense without contradiction is if God and his nature are not, as we may think, “separate” (as we often think about human beings and their nature in seeking their needs – we can imagine a human being who does not hunger or thirst, for example) but rather that God and his nature are the same thing, which may be how you get statements like “God is love”.
Does this, uh, make sense? (Deiseach, halp.)
also an edit: I found this.
Interesting post. This has been an issue philosophers/theologians have grapped with. Some have in fact had God not acting as such, and playing a more ‘gravitational’ role whereby the sheer existence of God pulls things into being. There’s definitely a lot of emphasis on God acting freely and explicitly not because of any need in lots of monotheist traditions. In the Bhagavad Gita for instance it’s explicit that everything God (Krishna) does is ‘play’ in that he doesn’t have to do it or have any overarching mission as such).
In the Christian traditon the Trinity is sometimes important for explaining action/relationship for God. In that God is already ‘in relationship’ before creation.
Are you an effective altruist?
(yes, this question is relevant to yours.)
Me, personally?
Probably not, (as I am very selfish and hypocritical) based on what I see of it on wikipedia, although it might help to define the term means, as you use it.
Without getting into the details of it, then, I think most of us distinguish between the good that morality requires and the good that it merely permits. I am not obligated to do absolutely everything I might possibly do to help others. That’s why we call it “charity”- it’s not required that it be given.
So God needs nothing- but he can create for the sake of the beings created. Most of those beings would prefer to exist rather than not exist, and by actualizing their existence he gives them what they would not have had otherwise.
[All that you say above]
Yes? More or less, anyway 🙂
Okay, amateur (very amateur) theology time here!
God is impassible, is the classical theological position. That is to say, God has no passions and is not moved by such as humans are.
Therefore, God acts gratuitously and not from necessity; there is no ‘need’ that creation fills, God does not ‘need’ our love or worship.
The economy of the Trinity is relationship; when we say “God is love”, we do not mean “God loves” or “God is loving” or even “God is loveable”, we mean “God is Love (the abstract made concrete)” – the Holy Spirit, the Third Person of the Trinity, is the love of the Son for the Father and the Father for the Son personified, as in the Nicene Creed:
The Holy Spirit is represented as the dove, the tongues of fire, the mighty rushing wind. To quote from Dante, in the end of the “Paradiso” and his vision of the Trinity:
Thus the old catechism question-and-answer:
We were made out of love, to be loved, and to love. There was no inevitability about creation, no necessity; if Pratchett’s gods (and others in that vein, and it’s a long-running conceit) rely on the worship of humanity for existence – well, that’s only the small gods. God needs nothing from us – not love, not worship, not praise, nothing. It is (or it should be) a free exchange.
This is also why there was a slight ruffling of feathers over an alternate baptismal formula; instead of the orthodox “I baptise N. in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit”, some enlightened ones preferred to use “Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier” (because inclusive language, doncha know, “Father” and “Son” are so terribly, terribly patriarchal and heteronormative and other nasty icky things).
Sorry, no can do, not valid, came the response. Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier are in the context of actions performed by the persons of the Trinity but they do not encompass the entirety of Their Being or describe Them as fully in Their Nature as Father, Son and Spirit. God is Father in a way He is not Creator, since creation (as mentioned) is not a necessary part of His nature**.
*This is where we Don’t Mention The Filioque, one of the sticking points between the Western and Eastern Churches that led to the Great Schism. Eastern Orthodox theology has very well-developed and complicated theologies of Divine Essence and Energies, and I dare not even contemplate sticking my toe in those waters, I have enough to do keeping track of Western Christianity. They were grappling with unique questions dealing with the remnants of the Classical philosophical traditions and how to respond and engage with those (one approach was “Don’t” – “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”) in a way that the Western Church wasn’t and didn’t (more concerned on our side with “Welp, the Empire is finally fallen completely and oh look, here come the Huns for a spot of pillage and rapine”).
In the interests of reconciliation, some Anglicans have proposed dropping the clause from the Creed, to which I reply “Fight me” 🙂
**We are all up to speed on “God is spirit, therefore neither male nor female, so using terms like “He” is descriptive in how we have been taught to address God”, correct? This also, however, means that we can’t decide “Okey-dokey, so I like saying “Mother God”, that’s fine so, I’ll just replace all instances of “Father” with “Mother”!”, we all realise as well? Thank you.
I came to the same conclusion, but with one troubling question afterwards: from whence come the damned?
POSSIBLE ARMINIANIST ANSWER: Free will; they chose their own end, etc. References to Ezekiel 18:23, etc.
POSSIBLE CALVINIST ANSWER: God is his nature, and so if God’s nature is Love, God is love and acts according to love! and God’s nature is also wrath and so if God’s nature is wrath… (Also, lots of
beating the listener over the head withreferences to Isaiah 43:7)The Eastern Orthodox interesting and provocative view is that the fire of Divine Love, which is bliss to the saved, is the fire of hell to the damned.
Both experience the same thing, but for the damned it is pain.
@Deiseach
I’ve heard that theory before and wasn’t fully convinced… but it does, on reflection, remind me of this. and this. and this and this and this and especially this, in particular.
edit: oh, and it also reminds me of being in proximity to that which is Holy, such as God himself, can destroy sinners, ala the ark of the covenant.
That article seems to imply that God’s love is something utterly unlike what the English word love refers to. Which sort of fits an incomprehensible deity I suppose, but calls into question why we call it love to begin with.
Maybe this is a gap in my own experience, but I’ve never felt despair or suffering from being in the presence of someone whose love I didn’t return. If anything, it would seem like the one being tormented is the one whose love is rejected rather than the other way around. Love only burns those who feel it.
So I guess it’s a question of whose love it is?
If God’s love refers to the love people must of necessity have for God, then the torment of hell vaguely makes sense. Although it hardly sounds very loving on God’s part: it rings like Unsong’s “xrrc ubcvat fhpxref!” A way to sadistically draw out anguish by stoking a powerful emotion and simultaneously frustrating it.
If God’s love refers to the love God has for people, then Hell sounds like torment for God himself more than for sinners. Those who reject God likely won’t be pleased to be constantly in his presence, but the experience would doubtlessly be much worse from the perspective of constantly being taunted with those who you love but who refuse to love you back.
@Dr Dealgood
See:
and:
That said…
If I may ask, as Haddaway did: “What is love?” Don’t hurt, me, good doctor.
Sorry if I’m being dim, but that didn’t really shed any light on the issue for me.
I love the reference though. ‘A Night at the Roxbury’ is a guilty pleasure of mine.
That article seems to imply that God’s love is something utterly unlike what the English word love refers to.
Love is not a soft, easy thing. Love is a consuming fire. All I can refer you to is the idea of the burning furnace of charity (as instanced in the prayer of the Litany of the Sacred Heart “Heart of Jesus, burning furnace of charity” and developed here):
the iconography of the Sacred Heart :
and mystic experiences of saints like St Philip Neri (whose imagery includes that of the flaming heart)
and St Teresa of Avila (as in Bernini’s famous sculpture):
And indeed, the late, great Johnny Cash sang it well 🙂
Well, every story needs a villain.
Big news story: Gary Johnson fails key “ability to bullshit when he doesn’t know something 99% of those judging him also did not know but will later pretend they did” test. This actually makes me like him more, because he feels intellectually honest in a way major politicians almost never do. And, as Scott Adams has pointed out: president is not a job that anyone is prepared for, and executive experience is probably not as important as general intelligence, judgment, temperament, ability to pick the right advisors, etc.
I think more relevantly he failed the “basic foreign policy knowledge” test. I’ll give him credit for not bullshitting, but “knowing what Aleppo is” is a pretty basic thing. I guess it’s less important if his foreign policy is “no foreign policy” (is it? I don’t know) but it is quite worrying. Does he literally never read the news? I think that’s the best outcome — the other possibility is that he does, but has no long term memory which doesn’t bode well for his general intelligence.
I don’t plan to vote for Johnson, but if he doesn’t read the news that’s a point in his favor. I don’t know what Aleppo is either, but I’ve seen the word around here and there.
fI want someone who runs for president to care about where/what Aleppo is, and why it is relevant to the running of the US government.
Even if you want us completely out of the region, you should at least who you are going to piss off and why.
Every time I see “Aleppo”, I automatically think of the quote from Macbeth about “Her husband’s to Aleppo gone”. Does that qualify or disqualify me for the American presidency? (Never mind that I’m disqualified on other grounds).
I could excuse him not being up on the whole “what the heck is going on right now in Syria?” thing, but he should at least know that Aleppo is a historically important city. Did he not do geography or history in school?
See now, if he’d studied “Macbeth” in English class, he’d have been spared this embarrassment! See the value of the humanities? 🙂
I read MacBeth, in college no less, I’m considerably younger than Johnson, and I don’t remember the line about Aleppo (or anything else about Aleppo).
Funny thing: The New York Times article razzing him about it has two corrections.
One, they claimed the de facto capital of the Islamic State was Aleppo. (it’s Raqqa).
Two — and this one’s a doozy — “An earlier version of the above correction misidentified the Syrian capital as Aleppo. It is Damascus.”
Glass houses and all that. (And they weren’t on the spot without reference materials the way Johnson was)
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/09/us/politics/gary-johnson-aleppo.html?_r=0
I’m sorry, but that is some seriously funny shit right there.
Also, anyone else think the overall quality of the NYT is taking a serious dive lately?
It was a hard enough task to put out a high quality comprehensive paper everyday. Trying to do it continuously and in real time is well nigh impossible.
If the time from the event to when it has to be online is measured in minutes how much editing is possible?
It’s been going down hill for a while.
but “knowing what Aleppo is” is a pretty basic thing.
Right, like “knowing what the PPACA and the IPCC are” is a pretty basic thing. Knowing the difference between the G7, the G8, and the G20, between Glass-Steagall and Dodd-Frank. Knowing who Merrick Garland, Philando Castille, and Syed Faroush are. Distinguishing between Yanukovych and Yushchencko. Inherent Resolve, Cast Lead, and Golden Dawn.
You read the news, so you’d be comfortable betting your career on being able to speak intelligently about any or all of those, five seconds from right now, no Google, and nothing less than 100% as a passing score, right?
Everybody is going to be ignorant about something that is a “pretty basic thing” to someone else. Typically, politicians are skilled at the art of bluffing their way out of such corners. We can argue whether that’s a good thing or not – I can see reasonable arguments either way. But if you think this is about ignorance, I suspect you’ve been falling for an awful lot of bluffs.
No, those are all much less basic things (at least for me, from the non-American sources I read). Knowing that Aleppo is a Syrian city is equivalent to knowing Erdoğan is the Turkish president. Distinguishing between Yanukovych and Yushchencko is like knowing his middle name is Tayyip and that he was a semi-professional footballer before becoming mayor of Istanbul (to give two things I just learnt from his wikipedia page).
I couldn’t talk intelligently about all of those things, but I’m not trying to become President of the United States (yet). If I were, or even if I were trying to get elected into a much less important position, I would learn a lot about current affairs.
If you hear the word ‘A-lepp-o’ without context, you might not make the quick connection in your brain to the Syrian conflict in real time. Johnson was asked if he was worried about the Nader effect on the race, and after responding to that, the next question was “What would you do if you were elected about Aleppo?”. There was no foreign policy context or Syrian crisis context in the question or preceding questions, so it makes sense that Johnson might not have immediately understood what the questioner was asking, as he was hearing Aleppo out of context. It’s not clear to me that he doesn’t know Aleppo is a city in Syria, just that he didn’t have immediate recognition upon hearing the word out of context.
Watch for yourself and decide: https://youtu.be/u7tH9gUaVOE?t=1m37s
Seriously?
Viktor Yanukovich is the recent Ukranian president who wanted Ukraine to become a Russian client state. Victor Yushchenko was the immediately preceding Ukranian president who wanted Ukraine to join the European Union.
Now, I’d consider the proper names to be among the least significant bits of trivia in this discussion, but the same goes for “Aleppo”. The Ukrainian crisis is of similar geopolitical importance to the Syrian, and it is crucial to understanding that crisis that there was a substantial political dispute, with enough supporters on each side to elect a president, between the join-the-EU faction and the join-the-Russian-empire faction.
This fact you would equate with trivia regarding a Turkish president’s athletic career? If the names matter, if “Aleppo” is a word that any would-be POTUS must know, then so are Yanukovich and Yushchenko.
Pretty much everything on my list is of roughly similar importance, I believe. Almost certainly on the list of things a US President will have to hold and defend an informed opinion on. The only question is whether it is reasonable to expect them to offer each of those opinions immediately on demand, or to recognize every name without references or contextual clues.
John Schilling, yes, seriously. Look at google news – no doubt your own results will differ a little, but to illustrate, I checked the number of results for stories in the last month (Aug. 6 – Sept. 6 for Aleppo, to avoid contaminating it with stories after Johnson’s gaffe):
Yanukovych: ~3500 (and another 1,000-ish under “Yanukovich”)
Yuschenko: ~230
Aleppo: ~4,730,000
Qualitatively, as well, Aleppo gets lots of hits on big western sources like NYT, USA today, WP, etc, the Ukraine coverage is mostly in smaller papers now.
Aleppo is not basic because we require candidates to remember all major sites in ongoing conflicts (no one is going to ask “and what would you do about the Sambisa Forest?” [~1300 results]), it’s basic because many people expect candidates to keep up with mainstream news.
The gotcha moment will be used to relentlessly attack Gary’s foreign policy credibility if he actually becomes a bigger threat to either major candidate. His non-interventionist stance is more important to me than knowing a key city in the conflict in Syria. I thought his response after the interview was on point:
“In a follow up interview just after the show with Bloomberg News’ Mark Halperin, a frequent guest analyst on “Morning Joe,” Johnson said he was “incredibly frustrated” with himsself but admitted he’d been caught flat-footed.
“Not remembering or identifying that that’s Aleppo — guilty,” he said. “I understand the significance. Genuinely — believe me, no one is taking this more seriously than me. I feel horrible.”
He added: “I have to get smarter, and that’s just part of the process.”
Johnson later issued a statement: “As governor, there were many things I didn’t know off the top of my head. But I succeeded by surrounding myself with the right people, getting to the bottom of important issues, and making principled decisions. It worked. That is what a President must do.””
http://www.cnn.com/2016/09/08/politics/gary-johnson-aleppo/index.html
Yes, he also claimed he thought it was acronym, and preceded to talk knowledgeably about the Syrian situation. Assuming he’s telling the truth about the former, it’s the kind of brain fart to which everyone is vulnerable.
Would anyone excuse Trump if he said the same thing – “I thought it was an acronym”? Imagine the reaction that would garner!
If you’re putting yourself out there for the top job, you should demonstrate some grasp of what in my day would have been basic knowledge. It’s like the story I read about Gore Vidal criticising British policy and referring to “M-16”, when someone eventually figured out he meant “MI6“. That kind of mistake makes it look like you have no idea what you’re actually talking about, and thinking “Aleppo must be some kind of acronym” undercuts any “talk(ing) knowledgeably about the Syrian situation” – does he really know anything about it, or is he just reciting a prepared script on the question written up by a handler?
On the other hand, showing ignorance of “all those foreign places out there” may do his chances a power of good amongst the American electorate, who can say?
Trump did do something similar (although there is some doubt to give him the benefit of).
Our current VP provided more extreme demonstrations of not knowing things one would expect any educated person to know–such as who was president at the time of the stock market crash and when television became available.
Not knowing what is in which part of the Constitution is a less striking error, but thinking you do know, and making it part of a mistaken argument about the job you are running for …
David, I think those are more specific than you may realize. I I doubt I could get closer than the right decade for either, and the only thing I recall on the spot is the crash happened on a Thursday, and the earliest broadcast I am aware of involved Hitler for some reason (which wasn’t nearly the actual first).
But this isn’t surprising. I expect any reasonably educated person to understand Cantor’s diagonal argument and know the date Edward abdicated.
It is basically impossible for a reasonably educated person to actually know all the stuff we expect reasonably educated people to know.
The question asked was “What would you do about Aleppo”. In the clips I’ve seen, it doesn’t show what the conversation was about prior to the question, so there might have been no context that he was being asked about Syria or even a foreign policy question. Also, the questioner pronounces it kind of weird, and so without context Gary might not have made the connection to what situation was being referred to.
If that’s the case, it was a bad question and should have been phrased like “With the conflict in Syria, and the crisis going on in Aleppo in particular, how would you handle that as president?” That’s a better framing that creates the right context to understand a foreign city’s name in context.
He might not be briefed well on some foreign policy particulars, and should ensure he gets advisers to keep him more in the loop on these types of specifics. Still, after the context was established he had a coherent response that the situation is a mess where we’re arming people allied with Islamists, and that the mess was caused by a interventionist policy of regime change. It displayed an awareness of the Syrian conflict and good insight about the unintended consequences of intervention abroad.
Biden didn’t miss two trivia items in a quiz show or fail to answer a question correctly. This one was entirely an own goal. He made the specific claim that “When the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the, you know, the princes of greed. He said, ‘Look, here’s what happened.’”
So he was unfavorably comparing current leaders to something that a) itself never happened and b) would have required two counterfactuals to have even been possible (FDR being president at the time of the stock market crash[1], and any president making speeches on television at that point in history). All to back up a claim no one asked him to make. (Versus being put on the spot by a question he wasn’t prepared for.)
There may be a reason we haven’t seen a lot of big Biden speeches in the last eight years.
[1] At the time, there was a somewhat desperate attempt to point out that Roosevelt was making pioneering use of radio as governor of New York in 1929. But even with maximum generosity, Governor Roosevelt did not in fact go on the radio to talk about the stock market crash in its aftermath.
“It is basically impossible for a reasonably educated person to actually know all the stuff we expect reasonably educated people to know.”
Probably true. But people in general, and politicians in particular, pretend to.
On the other hand, the fact that FDR came to power after the crash is something one might expect a politician to know. And while it’s not surprising that he didn’t know what the subject of Article I of the Constitution was–probably most people don’t–it’s a little surprising that he publicly pretended to.
I knew that Aleppo was a city in the Middle East but did not know that it had been the subject of recent news stories having to do with the Syrian civil war.
On the other hand I have at least a reasonable idea who the Alawites are, arguably more important, which I suspect most people commenting on the conflict don’t have. Very likely including both Clinton and Trump.
You can’t always interpret a misstatement of fact as ignorance of fact. I don’t think you can conclude from the Biden quote that he’s definitely ignorant of Depression history – it could well be that “after the stock market crash” is just how he carelessly expressed the concept of “early in the Great Depression” while he was trying to make a completely different point.
As an extreme example, Obama said he’d visited 57 states at one point and only crazy people take that as evidence of actual ignorance (or of something more nefarious).
(The pedant in me insists on pointing out that there was a major stock market crash in 1937 too.)
(Obligatory partisan balance edit: yes liberals were unfair to GW Bush in this way.)
I think Biden thinking FDR was in power during the crash is a fairly reasonable mistake. For a certain definition of “when” (i.e. “after four years of little government action to deal with the after effects of the crash”) his statement is correct. I’m more worried about his lack of constitutional knowledge; although he wasn’t mistaken about something obvious, it was something directly relevant to his job.
@David Friedman
Regarding the Alawites: provided Clinton reads her emails, she is aware of them.
“And after nearly twenty years, his successor made the first presidential speech on television[1], which is practically like Roosevelt doing it in response to the stock market crash”
[1] For completeness, Roosevelt opened the World’s Fair on TV in 1939, but did not address the stock market crash at that time.
The idea that Hoover engaged in “little government action” is also not especially accurate. (Though of course also not attributable to Biden, who evidently thought Roosevelt was already on the job when the market crashed.) Hoover enacted massive public works programs, banking and labor reforms, a moratorium on collecting war debts, nationally coordinated unemployment relief, established the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, etc. (And reluctantly signed the Hawley-Smoot tariff, which was counterproductive but of course wasn’t intended to be.) But nothing was going to save the job of the man who’d been in the hot seat when the economy went to hell.
(As it happens, a couple of weeks ago we were passing through Iowa and stopped at the Hoover Library and Museum. Leaving aside his presidency, he’s a remarkably impressive figure: a globally successful mining engineer who lived on three continents– including China during the Boxer Rebellion– who decided he’d made enough money and threw himself into food relief for Europe in the wake of World War I. Which it turned out he was really good at– enough that Truman called him back after WWII to do the same thing. He then spent the twenties running half the Cabinet, interrupted by coordinating flood relief for one of the biggest disasters of US history, the Mississippi Flood of 1927. If he’d been hit by a meteor in 1928, he’d be remembered as an unquestioned hero of American history.)
I wanted to signal boost IrishDude’s point here, because I haven’t seen an answer yet and the same thing bothered me. “What would you do about Aleppo”, without context, is pure gotcha, and having a brain fart about it is certainly excusable (hell, look what the NYT did. I myself knew that Aleppo is an important city in the Syrian conflict, and would probably remember that out of context, but my snap thought was that it’s the capital of Syria, which it is not).
I don’t know, this feels like a rehash of the Sarah Palin “Bush Doctrine” thing, which was again an out-of-the-blue gotcha (in that case of an ambiguous term not in terribly common use). The ability to ace the pop quiz is much less interesting to me than how they’d handle the situation in the real world, which is in-context with a bunch of advisors and presumably at least access to Google. We’re electing the president, not the next Jeopardy champion
These are valid points.
But, you flat out know, or should know, that you are very likely to get asked about Syria. It’s like the teacher announced “One of the topics on the quiz will be Syria! Don’t forget to study!” and THEN Johnson flubbed it.
If he had flubbed on a question like “What do you think about Duterte?” I would be a whole lot more sympathetic.
Actually, I’ll put out that one of big issues here is that he treated the question as if it WAS a bullshit question. “And what is Aleppo!?” with that uplift basically says “Why the hell should I know what that is.” If he had paused to wait, or said “Aleppo being?” He would have let his brain engage. But that isn’t really the main issue.
“after four years of little government action to deal with the after effects of the crash”
Over the course of Hoover’s presidency, federal spending increased about fifty percent in nominal terms, about a hundred percent in real terms, about two hundred percent as a fraction of GNP.
Makes Obama and Bush look like fiscal conservatives.
“Regarding the Alawites: provided Clinton reads her emails, she is aware of them.”
Aware of the existence of, yes. If she reads and believes her email, she thinks that Alawites are “members of [an] obscure Shiite sect.” Which is about like describing Mormons as members of a Protestant sect, perhaps a little farther off and even less informative.
… Mormons as members of a Protestant sect …
Well, speaking cladistically…
@ David Friedman
If she reads and believes her email, she thinks that Alawites are “members of [an] obscure Shiite sect.”
I think this sentence is missing an ‘only’, or two.
I don’t think it is missing an “only.” I did say “and believes.”
The Alawites currently claim to be Shiites, but that’s more a matter of political convenience than theology. As best I can tell, they are at least as far from conventional Islam, Twelver Shia or Sunni, as the Mormons are from conventional Christianity.
Most Muslims do not, for example, believe in reincarnation (for men but not for women).
My old blog post on the subject.
I don’t think he failed the “ability to bullshit something about foreign policy” test. You have to know something before you can bullshit about it, so he failed the more basic “give some clue that you’re clued-in” test. At the very least, he should know where Aleppo is. From there you can toss in some bullshit like Bernie’s plan to leave all the planning to Muslim leaders who will gleefully use that window to settle old scores or Trump’s plan to untangle his thought process so he can come up with a plan.
At least Hillary’s “let’s bomb people and compare dicks with Russia” plan has the benefit of continuity.
Knowledge of Syrian cities is probably less important for an isolationist like Johnson than it would be for an interventionist. Still, he is running for president, and anyone who is running for president should goddamn know that Aleppo is a city in Syria. It’s bizarre that you would like him more for lacking knowledge of basic foreign policy issues, this sounds like an unhealthy piece of cognitive dissonance on your part.
Johnson isn’t an isolationist, he’s a non-interventionist. He thinks free trade is a good thing, he just believes in using the military to protect the nations borders and reducing our military base footprint around the world.
He should know about Aleppo, and needs better prep from advisers on foreign issues, but it’s not anything that makes him unqualified to run for president.
The reason I like him more is because my prior is that ALL presidential candidates have some holes in their knowledge, especially of the sort which they can quickly talk about on the spot, which, if known, the press and their opponents could use to embarrass them and make a big deal of how supposedly unqualified they are.
My point is that the usual politician’s reaction to being put on the spot like that (and, again, my prior is that they all will be, sooner or later) is to throw up some obfuscatory nonsense sooner than admit ignorance.
Refusal to blandly admit ignorance is one of my pet peeves and is endemic in academia as well as politics, where, as with politics, being seen not to know something “everybody” “should” know can be disastrous. But I believe it is harmful to the goals of academia and contributes also to rampant impostor syndrome and so I try to avoid it insofar as my own pride and fear of looking stupid will allow. Therefore, I respect people who just say “I don’t know what that is? Can you explain?” instead of a bunch of nonsense, which is the usual modus operandi.
Not all knowledge-holes are created equal. Ignorance of a focal point of the civil war in Syria is a much more serious flaw in a presidential candidate than (say) not knowing Mali’s chief export or the identity of the inventor of peanut butter. I am confident that Clinton, at least, is well-informed about the particulars of current events in the middle east.
If someone behaves in a way which is ignorant but honest, it makes sense for this to raise your esteem for him only if you antecedently thought him to be ignorant or dishonest. But I do not believe you previously believed Johnson to be ignorant or dishonest, in fact, I suspect you previously had a fairly high opinion of him. So finding out that he lacks some critical piece of knowledge should lower your esteem for him, even if you continue to appreciate that he lacks some of the typical vices of others politicians.
If it helps, I was a big Sanders supporter during the primary, but his apparent lack of knowledge of or interest in foreign affairs made me continually uneasy. I certainly do not think it means Johnson is “unqualified” to be president– I am not sure I have a good grasp on what it means to be qualified for the presidency any more, in this brave new world that Trump has brought us– but it should, rightly, be at least a little damaging for his campaign.
It’s unclear whether it will be damaging or not. Among his supporters, they’ll give him a pass. Among people that don’t support him, a very large chunk probably don’t even know him. This incident could get his name in the news more, even if it’s in an unflattering context, which could increase name recognition (no press is bad press?).
If it gets people to watch the whole clip where he has a coherent response about how an interventionist regime change policy can have unintended consequences that makes foreign situations worse, then they might come away knowing there’s an alternative foreign policy option in the presidential race. Also, if they see his follow-up response showing humility, they might gain high esteem for him as a contrast to Hilary and Trump’s full-bodied ego. Given this, it’s unclear if he will be net damaged by AleppoGate.
Wow, is Aleppo really something all educated people should know? I have vaguely heard of the city, but couldn’t have placed it in Syria. I think the importance of knowing the name of this city is close to zero. I certainly don’t want my candidates filling up their brain with such esoterica instead of actual policy issues.
This is why Aleppo is important.
It’s been the lynchpin of the Syrian Civil War for about 4 years, and it’s important because it was the largest city, and it’s old city had been very well preserved for centuries.
I had heard of it from Crusader Kings, where it’s strategically located on the border of the Byzantine/Abbasid empires.
Earthly and bluto seem to think Aleppo needs to be known because of its size and because beaucoup damage has been done to it. I think Johnson needs to have some kind of policy about Syria, Iraq, ISIL, and refugees, as least once he gets into office. Does he need a policy about Aleppo? I don’t think so. I don’t see why he needs to know the name of any city in Syria or Iraq to develop a coherent policy.
Knowing geography is important when setting policy, though I’m not sure how fine-grained the knowledge needs to be.
I think failure to name Aleppo isn’t a problem because it suggests Johnson can’t come up with a detailed plan of what to do in Syria, but because it suggests any plan he has is based on reading approximately one source. Anyone who has researched the war in Syria in any depth at all will know what Aleppo is.
@sweeny. At least from my point of view it isn’t a defect that Johnson hasn’t researched the was in Syria in detail. I don’t think it is the job of the President of the US to interfere in Syria’s war, and in fact any US interference would probably make the war worse. I think US policy should be to stay out, but help with refugees. I believe Johnson would pretty much agree with me on that, so naturally he hasn’t researched the war in Syria in any depth. Better he should spend more time on other issues. One can only research so many things. Besides, he can have experts help him on these things when he needs them. He should not be spending his time researching Syria’s war.
I don’t see why he needs to know the name of any city in Syria or Iraq to develop a coherent policy.
“And when I become President, the first thing I will do is introduce my environmental control policy for monitoring water quality in those cities with problems about that. You know the ones. Somewhere in the middle of the country – it is the middle, right, not the top or the side? Well, some of them might be near the bottom, I’m not sure. I can’t remember the names. Didn’t recognise some of them when I heard them, either.
Ah, who cares, who needs to know petty details like that when it comes to having a coherent policy? Also, one of my guys tells me he has a sure-fire solution to that state with the drought problem. Er, there is only one, right? Anyway, I’m going to let him get right on it, wherever it is.”
@Mark:
My knowledge of the war in Syria comes from reading a few newspaper articles, and I still know what Aleppo is. I don’t think the question was particularly tough or unreasonable.
I’ve read a few articles about Syria and didn’t know Aleppo before this argument came up. I’m not sure what the difference is here, but I don’t understand why knowing a city’s name matters.
Deiseich – I don’t see the relevance with comparing policies related to particular cities has with policies that relate to regions, not cities. Are you suggesting that every candidate should have a particular policy for Aleppo itself? I certainly don’t think so.
@Mark V Anderson:
You aren’t running for president. If you go to a job interview set up by a recruiter to do QA for user interfaces written in Java using Eclipse, and they ask you “and why do you want to work at (Company) XYZ” and you answer “What’s XYZ?” It’s your own fault for not knowing what company you were interviewing at, even though XYZ isn’t important to you.
I don’t think that’s a great example, Heel. Gary Johnson didn’t say “what’s Congress,” he asked “what’s Aleppo” and still demonstrated some knowledge about the overall Syrian situation.
In my line of business, pharmacy accounting, it’s like a candidate asking “what is sovaldi?” And then still talking in general about pricing disputes in pharmacy, like GER and MAC, and knowing what a bad debt reserve is.
I don’t think this is an instant DQ or an “oh my god, how stupid” moment.
Being President does not mean you are an expert on every single issue. In fact, you can’t be an expert, and need to simply learn shit really fast.
@Beta Guy:
Here is the the thing. I’m fairly sure Johnson did “know” what/where Aleppo is. Gary Johnson said later on that day he should have placed it. It was a “temporary loss of synaptic action”. I don’t think that it’s disqualifying.
But people saying that he shouldn’t have to be able to identify Aleppo are just wrong.
Your critique of my example has merit, so let me amend. You are interviewing with the board of a company for the CEO position. They have many products, but their new digital watch, iWear, looks like it either needs significant additional investment or needs to be scrapped. This could have a significant impact on next year’s revenue and profit projections. The board has stated they are concerned about this product.
If in the interview you say “And what is iWear?!” in a condescending tone, you probably made a mistake.
A good part of it, I think, is “wait, they’re making this a scandal? If that’s the worst they can get on him, I’ll take ignorance over sleaze/malice any day!”
Another part of it might also be “dammit, we need some kind of scandal to get this guy some publicity. Maybe this will work.”
Yeah, I was thinking that at this point, though they’ve been treating him much more seriously than they usually do third-party candidates or libertarians in general, he still suffers from too many people not knowing he’s running.
Though it’s clear some want to offer this as evidence that Johnson is not a serious, credible candidate for president, the media also doesn’t usually spend a lot of time worrying about the gaffes of unserious, uncredible candidates (the subtext being that he must be a credible candidate or we wouldn’t spend so much time trying to discredit him), so it could conceivably work in his favor, long term if it gets more people knowing who he is and thinking about him.
Seems this might have come true.
I plan to vote Johnson, and agree with you that his admission of ignorance was admirable on an epistemic level. With that said, I also count the incident as a point against his fitness for president.
To my mind, the president has several jobs, one of which is projecting strength and confidence even (especially) when he doesn’t have a plan. My conception of the president in this role is as a figurehead who can calm the populace or cow a foreign diplomat. Basically, the president should be able to bluff. The Johnson who failed to bluff about Aleppo is a weaker candidate than the counterfactual Johnson who could.
I find myself in much the same boat.
Relevant: minor British politician Emily Thornberry calls sexism after being asked to name the French foreign minister in an interview (and presumably being unable to do so). Disregarding the gender angle, no-one seems to think the questions on fairly obscure trivia were particularly unfair. Maybe there is significant cultural variation in how many of these kinds of facts politicians are supposed to know (although the implications of not knowing what Aleppo is and who Jean-Marc Ayrault is are different).
The thing is, Aleppo and Syria are potential “The US will be called upon to intervene by sending in troops” cases (if the newly-negotiated cease-fire doesn’t hold).
The US and Russia are working together to bring about peace in Syria. That is very much the kind of situation a presidential candidate is supposed to have an opinion on. That is something your handlers prepare a canned answer for you to trot out when a reporter or interviewer ask you about. And maybe it was because the questioner pronounced it strangely or something, but in that case you say “I’m sorry, I didn’t catch that, could you repeat it?” and then launch into your “I’m very glad you asked me that, John” canned answer.
Getting tripped up like that may be an honest mistake, but it makes you look unprepared, ignorant, and as if you are not interested or worse, have no idea what you’ll do if you win the election, move into the Oval Office, then your Secretary of State says to you “Now, Mr President, about Aleppo” and you go “Where? What’s that? The new Pokémon Go specimen?”
I know I’m being hard on the guy, but if he’s putting himself forward as a serious contender (rather than “At least with Trump running, there’s enough public attention being paid that I can use this chance to get my face recognised and my name known”), then he has to be prepared for the sticky questions. Not every media person is going to stick to “And what’s your policy on your very favourite topic that you’ve studied exhaustively and know to your fingers’ ends, Mr Johnson?”
I agree (and, in his statement, Johnson agrees) that he should have known what they were talking about, even out of context (though he claims he was just momentarily confused, which can certainly happen, especially if someone changes topics suddenly: if we are currently having a discussion about AI, for example, and someone says “what do you think about MIRI?” I might have an okay answer. But if “what do you think about MIRI?” comes out of the blue, I might say, “oh yes, I love sweet Japanese cooking wine. Tastes great mixed with miso on braised tofu.” This seems supported by him talking knowledgeably about Syria on other occasions.)
That said, I think, again, the number of things any given presidential candidate “should” know is probably more than any one person can know, and I don’t think having a really detailed knowledge of facts is the most important quality in a president, insofar as anyone is qualified to be president of 300 million people (which I don’t think they are).
Any reading recommendations on the subject of criminology and experimental design for crime policy interventions?
I have a stats/econ background. I want to know more about how crime policy is (or isn’t) trialled. I know what the word “criminology” means, but that’s about it.
Apologies if this has already been posted, but an interesting read on AI ethics for when AI (possibly) becomes a part of everyday life.
You seem to be missing a link.
Possibly?
It already is. The goalpost for AI moves every day. In what world would someone not consider a program that can recognize lots of images, count the objects in an image, translate every language in a somewhat understandable fashion, and accurately medically diagnose you, and beat you at most videogames *stupid*
> and beat you at most videogames
I agree with the rest of your comment, but that one is dubious. The “AI” in many video games is only even moderately competitive because it cheats, sometimes blatantly (having better stats than you), sometimes more indirectly (interacting with the game in ways a human is not allowed to do, i.e. using some API instead of the visual UI).
I grew a website! It does not have a lot of content right now.
In subsequent threads on this blog, I will be retiring my current handle in favor of The Gazeboist, partially to bring my handle in line with the name of my new blog and partially because I would really like to be able to Ctrl-f for my posts here. Please transfer all of your opinions about me, Guy, to The Gazeboist, we are the same person.
Furthermore, blog-owners among the commentariat: my blog is written in rst and produced by Pelican. I would really like to have comments, and I want to stick with Pelican. Unfortunately:
1) I want my comments self-hosted. This rules out Disqus, G+, and other similar commenting services.
2) Isso (a) refuses to use gravatars, (b) requires that I interact with the Node.js ecosystem, and (c) did not install properly on the VM I am hosting my site on, as far as I could tell.
3) The two existing self-hosted comment plugins for Pelican require that commenters email their comments to the site owner which is hilarious, but also terrible.
4) WordPress, as far as I know, does not have a stand-alone commenting app. I have also heard Terrible Things from people who have had to develop for sites using wordpress.
For these reasons, I’ve decided to just build my own comment engine. Ideally it would allow comments in rst and/or markdown as well as html, but that might be more trouble than it’s worth. Anyone have any thoughts/advice? I know this site uses wordpress, but can whoever it is who handles the technical side of things here talk about how they do things, and some alternatives?
Doesn’t wordpress have self-hosted comments? Isn’t that what we’re using right now? Or do you mean something that would plug in to pelican? That would be weird.
If you want gravatar (why???), just patch Isso.
Yes, wordpress has self-hosted comments. It just doesn’t offer them stand-alone, which I what I want (because I could easily glue it to pelican).
I would patch Isso but I couldn’t make it work.
Gravatar seems to be the thing people are used to, in terms of easily maintained multi-site identities. It’s also less intrusive than alternatives that I’ve seen (limited to G+, essentially), in that it only requires that you be consistent, not that you be truthful.
Why have global graphic identities? Why not just a name? Or why not Isso’s local graphic identities?
Yeah, (b) and (c) are fatal for Isso, but you bothered to mention (a), which is why I responded to it.
How strongly do you care about self-hosted comments? What if you use dynamic comments via disqus for 30 days, and then close comments, export to self-hosted static content?
When you add a dynamic commenting system to static Pelican, how are you going to do it? iframe? In that case, it probably is easy to use wordpress. You just have to (1) edit the theme (or just css?!) to remove everything except the comments and (2) make it so that when you push a post to pelican, it pushes an empty page or post to wordpress. And (2) is something you’re going to have to do anywhere, unless someone has written a Pelican-specific plug-in.
I mentioned (a) because it was something Isso had done to annoy me, not because it was fatal to it. Only (c) was ultimately fatal, but (a) and (b) definitely bugged me.
I want to use gravatars because I want people who have established global graphic identities to be able to use them, and gravatar seems to be the minimally-complicated way to do that (and doesn’t require that anyone who hasn’t configured it do anything at all). It would be trivial to patch gravatar into something that didn’t use it, but I can’t seem to find any others that work.
Self-hosting is pretty important to me and I want to be able to self-host everything.
As to the rest … I really want the solution I wind up with to be both my ultimate solution (not having comments despite the fact that I want them motivates me to work on the problem) and I want it to be something I can give to other people, not an unholy fusion of two different services.
Suppose one day ironclad scientific evidence is presented that those who sincerely believe that 2 + 2 = 5 live twice as long as everyone else. This property only applies to 2+2 = 5; no other combination of numbers and operators is known to generate a statistically significant change in the actuarial tables. No cause or explanation of this phenomenon has been found, though the simulation hypothesis is brought up fairly often. It definately isn’t a mistake or a statistical artifact; over the last thirty years the effect has been studied exhaustively by multiple scientific fields, and the effect has proved about as repeatable as that of ingesting large quantities of lead. (Fivers live twice as long after ingesting large quantities of lead, too)
In this alternate world, is it possible to rationally believe that 2 + 2 = 5?
Sincerely believing that 2 + 2 = 5 is impractical for us because we perceive no offsetting advantages to compensate for complicating our arithmetic. I think that Mathematics generally is so admirably clean because doing it any other way offers no advantage. Put another way, is Mathematics just the set of mathematical statements from which value can be extracted? In an alternate world where obvious value can be extracted from a contradiction in simple arithmetic, is it more meaningful to say that 2+2=5 is wrong because it causes you to give medical patients an overdose of drugs, rather than 2+2=5 is right because it lets people live twice as long?
[EDIT] – I disagree with a number of things in this link, but possibly related.
1. I wonder how the researchers found enough people who sincerely believed 2 + 2 = 5 to generate a convincing study, and how they tested their subjects’ sincerity.
2. The question “is Mathematics just the set of mathematical statements from which value can be extracted?” is very interesting to me.
3. Your scenario is ripe for metaphor…
@An Emphatic Maybe – “2. The question “is Mathematics just the set of mathematical statements from which value can be extracted?” is very interesting to me.”
To me also. I am embarrassingly bad at math, though, so I’m bracing for a truly epic telling-off.
“Your scenario is ripe for metaphor…”
Since it started as one, that is perhaps not surprising. Which ones do you see?
I started typing a few out but wasn’t happy with any of them. But I’m sure there’s a good one.
What does it mean to believe that 2 + 2 = 5? That statement doesn’t just imply that if I have two apples and you give me two more I have five apples. It implies that 0 = 1 (subtract two twice), which does a hell of a lot more than “complicate” our arithmetic – it brings the whole edifice crumbling down.
Alternately, what does it mean for “2 + 2 = 5” to be “right”? Your last sentence seems to conflate “right” in the sense of “true” with “right” in the sense of “moral” or “good”.
In brief: no, mathematics is not the set of mathematical statements from which value can be extracted. Mathematics is the set of rules we use to derive propositions from axioms, plus interesting sets of axioms and their (logical) consequences as discovered, with interestingness determined pretty much exclusively by mathematicians. Whether value can be extracted from those consequences is, as they say, a question of physics.
@Guy – “It implies that 0 = 1 (subtract two twice), which does a hell of a lot more than “complicate” our arithmetic – it brings the whole edifice crumbling down.”
Working around this was the point of “This property only applies to 2+2 = 5; no other combination of numbers and operators is known to generate a statistically significant change in the actuarial tables.” As in, the effect doesn’t change if you believe 2-2=0 or 1+1+1+1=4 or 2*2=4 or other permutations. There’s just something extremely weird about the specific formula 2+2=5 that makes you live twice as long if you sincerely believe it. If doing so meant people could live twice as long, could that particular formula be worked around sufficiently for us to still be able to do our taxes, take inventory and launch rockets? My guess is yes.
“Alternately, what does it mean for “2 + 2 = 5” to be “right”? Your last sentence seems to conflate “right” in the sense of “true” with “right” in the sense of “moral” or “good”.”
Does “true” = “useful”? What does it mean besides “useful”?
If I have two apples and five friends, and another friend has two apples, we don’t have enough apples for everyone. 2+2!=5, and there is minimal value to extract from claiming it does. It seems to me that on some level, mathematics plausibly breaks down into [equation] = [reliably useful answer], and that “reliably useful” is a lower bar than one might think.
Parallel lines never intersect, but there apparently is value to be extracted from non-euclidean geometry, so that’s a legitimate part of mathematics. In Fiver world, there is value to extract from 2+2=5. The difference may be that one is mathematical value while the other is practical value in the form of an increased lifespan, at the expense of an inconsistent mathematics.
As I understand it, Mathematics is so admirably pure because it is entirely optimized for internal consistency, because there is no value to the inconsistent alternatives. In a world where those alternatives contain significant value, does the pure version stay on top? I think it likely that given the Fiver incentive, some group of (un)scrupulous mathematicians could stack enough bullshit to make the question genuinely doubtful for most people. I’m also sure there would be another group arguing that True Mathematics was sufficiently aesthetically valuable to be worth half the lifespan. The question is, which side is “rational”?
As in, the effect doesn’t change if you believe 2-2=0 or other permutations.
Sure, but do you believe 2+2=5 in a meaningful sense if you don’t also believe that 0=1? That’s the real point of that paragraph – there is no meaningful way to escape the implications of 2+2=5. You can say that particular arrangement of symbols has the epiphenomenal property of Truth, and even believe that, but that belief doesn’t actually mean anything unless it has a consequence on at least other beliefs that you have, especially beliefs that it is clearly in conflict with.
I was going to say that 2+2=5 would be considered “special”, but in Fiver world that’s the literal truth. The discontinuity will be obvious to everyone, but I expect Fivers would argue that it didn’t matter, that 2+2=5 is a weird exception to all the rules of math, and that the proof is the doubled lifespan.
to quote Bertrand Russell:
I think Russell was basically correct in the above, but the problem actually goes deeper than he appreciated. He talks about an externally imposed belief offering only negative utility. The Fiver version has positive utility, possibly overwhelmingly positive on net; I do not think anyone would be laughing about it secretly in their cups. It would not be a “Sunday Truth”. People would genuinely believe it, and they would make whatever deformations necessary to science and society to make believing it as easy as possible. Go into a store and order two coffees plus another two coffees and you’d get five coffees, and the price of a single coffee would be adjusted to compensate. I am pretty sure they are even right to do so; 75 years of extra life is a hell of an incentive.
I may be very wrong but it sounds like Russel is talking about changing the map. It’s impossible to change the territory (though I would imagine that a sufficiently advanced dictator could get everyone not to ever mention that the territory doesn’t actually look like the official map–did any North Koreans question Kim Jong Ill’s golf prowess).
I can’t tell if your question is could a sufficent carrot change the map (which seems like an obvious yes) or could a sufficient carrot cause a society to just ignore the territory being different from the map (it certainly seems like the right sticks can produce the result given that North Korey has been making the official map the only thing anyone talks about for about half a century).
@bluto – as I understand it, the map is what you think reality is, and the territory is what reality really is, correct?
in which case, this would be changing the map. My point is that it would really change the map for a lot of people; they would be genuine Fivers, and they would change their maps sufficiently to be able to navigate regardless.
[EDIT] – “I can’t tell if your question is could a sufficent carrot change the map (which seems like an obvious yes)”
This. And more specifically, do you think it would be rational for them to do so?
Oh. Ok then. I’m pretty sure Russell is wrong there. Or, maybe he could make it work for a little while, but it’s not sustainable (I don’t happen to think North Korea’s denial of reality is sustainable either; I also suspect that the denial is mostly rhetorical, much like China’s continued adherence to communism).
@Gazeboist – I’m told doctors volunteer to go to NK and fix cataracts, giving people their sight back, and that those people then thank the Great Leader for making such a thing possible. Great distortion of the map seems not only possible, but practical.
In any case, whether it works or not, would you consider people attempting to be genuine Fivers to be acting rationally?
Yes, there is. It’s compartmentalized. It must be special.
2+2=5 because Science and 1+1+1+1=4 because that’s the way Math works.
Just don’t think too hard about it.
Most of our dogmatic knowledge more or less derives from “Don’t think too hard about it!” and “I fucking love science” and “Because Mom said so. ”
I mean, I agree, the whole edifice comes crumbling down, but that’s only if you think too hard about it and try to apply it everywhere.
This seems to be how most people actually think about the world anyways.
Think of how many people are confused by, and disagree with .333333 repeating and .6666 repeating adding up to 1. These people are more than capable of balancing a checkbook and reflect probably the majority of Americans.
Actually, I think at this level, it’s more or less hard-wired into our brains, but believing in objectively incorrect things is something most people have absolutely no problem at all doing, especially when they do not confront it all that often.
There’s a good example of changing the map in a meaningful way that almost certainly caused a great deal of confusion. The months of September, October, November, and December have names derived from the Latin for 7, 8, 9, and 10, because they were the 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th month of the old Roman calendar. However in the Julian calendar, they became the 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th month (but there was no question about their position, no one could argue that September was still the seventh month).
If fivers simply replace the name of this number of dots to five (….) and invent a new name for this number of dots (…..) (or simply ignores that the number exists like 13 or 4 in some contexts) then presuming the benefits (or costs of the wrong belief) were large enough it would happen as certainly as September can be the ninth month of the year without question.
However, if I walk into a fiver owned coffee shop and ask for (…..) bags of coffee and can happily give him two bags once, and two bags a few minutes later then leave with the remaining bag for free, then I suspect the reforms will not work, as the life extension benefit is likely to be offset by the poverty induced by never being able to form capital beyond four things.
So do communion wafers really turn into the “essence” of flesh?
I made the mistake of asking a Catholic about this once. The answer only makes sense if you already subscribe to certain specific metaphysical assumptions.
2+2 = 5 could be “right” if you just decide to make the fourth integer look like this: “5”.
I wouldn’t have any problems forcing myself to do that if it meant a twice as long life!
could you do it sufficiently that if someone asked you for two coffees plus another two coffees, you would instinctively give them five coffees without a twinge of doubt?
[EDIT] – and more to the point, would you think poorly of those who could?
I’m sure it would take some doing, but I have consciously changed the way a write certain letters or numbers at different times in my life, so I think it would be largely the same thing.
There’s two ways to do this:
(1) The number after three is now called “five”, so “2+2=5” is perfectly fine. There’s nothing mystic or special about the name, it has no effect on the quantity whether you call it “four”, “five”, “carrot” or “zarglebax”
That would probably be the way most people would approach it; we’d then need a new name for “five” but that’s no problem, and we could happily then keep counting “six, seven, etc” as in “one, two, three, five, zarglebax, six, seven, eight, nine, ten”.
“How many fingers am I holding up, children?” I I I I
“Five, miss!”
“And how many now?” I I I I I
“Zarglebax, miss!”
“Very good!”
(We’d then have the amusing equation “Five (4) plus zarglebax (5) equals nine (9)”, to go with our “is the answer 1 or 9?” trick equation of previously).
(2) Really genuinely honestly convincing yourself that 2+2=5 where 5 = I I I I I
That would be the tough one. I don’t know if it could or would work. Possibly practically it would work where you say “2+2=5” but you keep count that “2+2=4”
I suppose that 2+2 would just become an operation that made no logical sense – could you get around it by avoiding that specific expression and saying instead 2+3 – 1 = 4? Or are we saying that we can no longer do arithmetic?
Or are we saying that we can do arithmetic in certain circumstances, but it doesn’t really make any sense?
I actually think on a basic level it is impossible to believe that true is false. That a thing is it’s inverse. So, I guess what would really be happening is avoiding thinking about the subject at all – if somebody told me that thinking about the logical basis of arithmetic halved your lifespan I don’t think I’d have much trouble avoiding it – if someone told me that I simply had to avoid the expression 2+2, I could definitely manage it, but if somebody told me that I actively had to believe that 1 = 0, I don’t think that would be possible.
Much ink has been spilled concerning such questions. See also the question of “doxastic volunteerism”, which concerns whether we (that is, humans in general) could believe it, rationally or not.
My guess is that the way it would work out in practice is that a Fiver would see 2+2 and say it equals 5, but if they had to do something practical in a 2+2 situation, they would rephrase it as 1+3.
If you insisted on trying to straighten out numbers so there wasn’t a speed bump, people would think you were trying to be annoying.
It seems like you’re conflating things. Distinguish:
1) Believing that 2+2=5.
2) Developing some sort of alternate complicated mathematical system which was somehow similar to regular arithmetic but according to which the sequence of symbols ‘2+2=5’ express a truth.
It would be uncontroversially rational to develop or use the sort of system described in 2) if it would lead to people living twice as long.
The consensus among philosophers is that it wouldn’t be rational to form the belief that 2+2=5 on the basis of practical considerations, because practical considerations are the wrong kinds of reasons to bear on belief. It might be rational to do some actions which eventually lead you to (irrationally) believe it (undergo hypnosis, perhaps).
As, apparently, is a typical experience when reading Robin Hanson, I’ve been thinking about his farmer-forager dichotomy and finding it more and more interesting and plausible the more I think about it.
In particular, I’ve been think about how it relates to the issue of hierarchy versus egalitarianism. Farmers would be more hierarchical and the forager ways we’re now tending to return to are more egalitarian, as meshes well with the strongly egalitarian ethos of most liberal democracies today.
Yet what got me thinking recently about egalitarianism, ironically, is an argument I’ve always disliked that by paying workers less than they need to live, Wal Mart is somehow burdening the rest of society, which has to pick up the slack. This only makes sense if you see the employer-employee relationship not as a simple transaction of money for labor, but as a kind of personal, hierarchical social institution in which the employee’s agreement to work creates in the employer an obligation to see he’s taken care of, not just on the job, but in life.
I largely disagree with this conception of employment, though I see its appeal and, indeed, would much rather have one good job than do a bunch of freelance or, indeed, start my own business (though the latter point is also informed by what I see as excessive red tape in attempting to do so, such as the very same expectations people have about Wal Mart).
Yet we associate this conception of employment much more with liberalism–certainly with progressive liberalism–today, when it actually seems to me to be a more farmerish viewpoint. I have long suspected that economic progressivism/leftism is actually very conservative in a weird sort of way–a return to mercantilism, guilds, protectionism, etc. (though recently this last cause has become more stereotypically right-wing with Trump, Brexit, etc.). This makes me happy in a weird way–Gary Johnson supposedly drawing more from Hillary than Trump and Trump actually moving the GOP towards a more generally farmerish view. Are we getting closer to having parties that actually make sense?
Or am I mischaracterizing the “Wal Mart owes its employees a decent living” argument, which is actually not about hierarchy, but a forager model where everyone lives in small bands and has to share everything?
Epistemic Status: I have read little, if any, Hanson, and may just be describing the forager/farmer dichotomy by accident, rather than adding to the discussion
I think there’s more going on with the “standard” conception of employment than the hierarchical social institution you describe, although that’s certainly present. There’s still a sense that a person “should” only have one job; gig-economy lifestyle is viewed as a bad thing per se, whether or not the person in question is actually making a living off of it, and people are generally expected to only have a single job (or perhaps to only have one primary job). Needing to work multiple jobs is generally viewed as a sign that none of the jobs you have are adequate (and implicitly, that you are poor and therefore low-status).
In this framework, where a given employee is only “supposed” to have one job, it’s natural to declare that the employer must pay the employee enough to live on, otherwise the employee isn’t getting the value that they need out of the job. If society demands that people work only a single job, and employers refuse to provide a living wage, society must pick up the slack (or let people starve, but that doesn’t work in the long term).
An alternative framework would probably require that Walmart allow employees as much schedule flex as it demands of them – if working their next shift (but not necessarily all future shifts) abruptly becomes a waste of money, the employee needs to be able to say so with the same window of notification that Walmart provides when it’s doing productivity optimization and drops the employee’s shift. Then it matters much less whether Walmart pays a living wage, because the employee can just work a more lucrative shift somewhere else if they need to.
(As it happens, I’m actually kind of uncomfortable with the standard employment model in Western society. I don’t like making guarantees about my future productivity, so I would much rather complete publicly offered jobs in exchange for bounties, or accept payment after the fact for projects I had done.)
“society must pick up the slack (or let people starve, but that doesn’t work in the long term).”
I’m picking this up because there was a long thread some time back where I was arguing that “living wage” was dishonest rhetoric, since the wage in question was much higher than literally required to stay alive. Many people responded that of course “living wage” didn’t really mean the wage it took to live, it meant a wage sufficient to maintain a tolerable level of status or something similar.
I think what I just quoted demonstrated that people do indeed take “living wage” to mean “wage below which people starve.” Which is off by an order of magnitude or so.
I know what’s usually talked about as a “living wage” in the US is more than is required to live in many other countries, or even in other parts of the US, but I do generally mean enough to get food to eat, pay rent, pay utilities* (often an unavoidable addition to rent), and probably have a bit of wiggle room for emergencies / improving their lot. A person working 40 hours a week should probably be able to do this while supporting a single non-working dependent (the worker in this scenario might be eg a person with an unemployed significant other, temporarily or otherwise, or a single mother with one child). The person should also be able to maintain whatever status their employer demands of them: if you pay your employees enough to eat and pay rent, but not enough to buy new clothes, you can’t (or, well, shouldn’t) fire them for wearing second-hand or otherwise old stuff.
These things are what I would consider the basic ingredients of a minimum wage. That said, all of this does have one implicit assumption: the person in question does not need to move far to find a place where they can both live and work. It’s the mismatch (which as I understand it exists) between local living expenses and local minimum wages that drives minimum wage discussions. Some people are foolish and believe a minimum wage should be set nationwide; the entire US is much too big for a single minimum wage to make sense. A Vermont-wide minimum/living wage** probably makes sense, but I’m not sure how much larger it goes. Certainly not up to the size of California or Texas. Of course, my preferred *legal* solution would be a BIG to provide what I think of as “liquidity at zero” (so that you don’t need to work 40 hours a week in order to live for the week, even if you can’t maintain your ordinary standard of living for long), and just let the economy handle the rest.
*Minimally, by utilities means power and heating. These are basic standards in the US at this point, and the person in question might be required to pay for them as a condition of renting whatever home they live in. Culture is changing such that I might also include an internet connection in “utilities”, but only if we really do start treating basic internet access as a utility and regulating internet providers as such. Internet-as-a-utility is something I believe in a pseudo-moral sense; it is required for a reasonable participation in modern society, but I haven’t looked into the actual practical implications of making it the legal reality and don’t know what they would be.
** It might be interesting for various metros to publish studies on what a local living wage is, without actually requiring that businesses pay that hourly wage, and see what happens. Maybe you require businesses to say “this hourly wage is X% of the local living wage, as defined by Reputable Independent Body Y” when making an offer to an employee. What would that do, I wonder?
Your definition of living wage will vary substantially by person even within a given location. A teenager getting a job for spending money, a wife getting a job to earn vacation money, a student getting a job to make professional connections, a retired person with a good pension getting a job for social interaction, a young 20s professional renting a place with 3 roommates getting their first job out of college, and a single mother with 3 kids trying to make it on her own will all have different values for a living wage as you define it, ranging from 0 (or possibly even negative, if someone is willing and capable of paying to intern at a job) up to $X an hour.
A one-size-fits-all living wage just doesn’t make sense as an implementable concept.
Jobs being expensive is a well-known problem with no good solution. See the two-income trap for this continuing to higher-earning people.
The two income trap ended up being caused by taxes.
” but I do generally mean enough to get food to eat, pay rent …”
I picked up on this because it’s a good example of the way in which the standards of a very rich society are built into what we take for granted that people need. “Rent,” for us, takes for granted at least one room per person (or couple), typically more.
George Orwell, in Down and Out in Paris and London, describes the housing used by very poor people in London at the time–many beds per room. Going back a little farther, it was common for strangers to share a bed in an inn. In Moscow in the USSR, as described in the book The Russians, it was common for an entire family to occupy a single room.
As for food, the minimum cost full nutrition diet costs about $600/year.
The term “living wage” as it gets used in discussions in the U.S. at present is at best evidence of ignorance, more commonly deliberately dishonest rhetoric.
A different and unrelated point is that the argument for a basic income and the argument for a minimum wage are quite different. Setting a minimum wage of $15/hour doesn’t mean that anyone who wants can make $15/hour, it means that people who are not worth that much to any employer cannot get hired and so make zero.
Sharing of beds and rooms, in a society like the current U.S., where it is seen as fairly acceptable to be inconsiderate, self-centered, irresponsible etc., could be so problematic that I don’t think most people would wish it on their worst enemy. Would you ever consider sharing a room, much less a bed, with a typical Wal-Mart worker type person?
The possible problems with room mates are infinite. You could get room mates who are psychotic, who are drug or alcohol addicts, who keep you awake at night, who steal your stuff, who have problems with anger control, who are irresponsible about paying their share of the rent or utilities, who are just hard to get along with in multiple ways etc.
In thinking of how low a standard of living the poor theoretically ought to be able to tolerate, and how little medical care they should have access to, one can get into one of those situations where the saying applies “Nothing is so easy to tolerate as the misfortunes of others.”
Here is a book by someone who was actually willing to experience living on poverty level wages herself, to acquaint herself in the flesh with what such people experience, rather than simply thinking in a theoretical way about it. But even she apparently couldn’t bear to part with her health insurance or her car for this experiment.
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
https://www.amazon.com/Nickel-Dimed-Not-Getting-America/dp/0312626681/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1473365857&sr=1-1&keywords=nickel+and+dimed
@Jill:
The Orwell book was by someone who had experienced it himself.
You are asking what one “ought to be able to tolerate.” I am asking what results in your not continuing to live, since that’s what the term “living wage” implies.
So far as sharing a bedroom with one or more random people, quite a lot of people in even a modern society end up doing that for one reason or another. I did it at various points as an adolescent or young adult, in the context of a summer camp (camper then councilor).
Jill, what you are describing is what pretty much ever person I knew in college (myself included) did for four years. Sharing a room is less than optimal, but it’s hardly the end of the world.
Also, funny coincidence, my roommate worked at Walmart, and would be considered a “Walmart person” by most.
@Jill
If the culture of people in America has degenerated enough that most of the Walmart worker type people are likely to be inconsiderate, selfish, impulsively aggressive, irresponsible psychotics, why care about them in the first place? Why make special accommodations to people so savage that they can’t even live together as a community in a tolerable fashion?
Of course, being a poor person from a working class background myself, I don’t think the average Walmart type worker is nearly as bestial as you suggest. Then again, I live in the UK, where Walmart is Asda and all our inconsiderate, selfish, impulsively aggressive, irresponsible psychopaths are pacified on benefits, so maybe it isn’t quite so apocalyptic as to have a society where the standard that the poor tolerate is each other.
@David Friedman
Like I tried to say, a minimum wage is not my preferred solution. But if we’re going to have a minimum wage instead of a basic income (which is a terrible idea, but also the status quo), then that minimum wage ought to be enough to actually live in what we declare to be the minimum conditions. It’s true that we in the US ban what would be cheaper permanent housing, and to some extent that’s probably a bad decision, but that’s an actual choice that we made, and one of the consequences is that hiring people has (or needs to) become more expensive. Maybe call it a living-in-the-US wage, or a living-locally wage?
That kind of seems like you’re just doubling down on bad decisions at that point. If housing is too expensive why not allow cheaper housing to be made instead of artificially raising wages? The first option seems far more sustainable than the second one to me.
As DF said, a minimum wage doesn’t mean everyone gets that wage, it only means that employed people get that wage.
It is my opinion that welfare to bring every person out of poverty is a much better solution to the poor than a minimum wage. This is especially so in the US since the amount spent on welfare is already over enough to get every person out of poverty if we simply sent the funds to those in poverty. In this manner there would be an effective minimum wage equal to the amount of welfare per person, but in this case it would benefit the poor person instead of involuntarily making them unemployed.
By the way, Jill, I read Nickel and Dimed. It struck me as writing by a spoiled rich person who never had to work, since most of the bad situations she had that she attributed to being poor happen to just about everyone who has to work for a living. She also complained about how much it cost to live, but always lived in an apartment by herself, which I never was able to do when I was poor, so more spoiled rich person. Also she moved every few months to find a new terrible job, which is also not conducive to living when poor. She was just incompetent at living while poor.
It’s also illegal – or at least a breach of the lease contract – in most places to rent an apartment and put multiple people in each room, with a few exceptions such as couples being allowed to share a room and newborns not counting. And very small, low-cost apartments, the size of a smallish hotel room with a little kitchenette area and toilet and shower in the second tiny room, are frequently not available for rent. So while theoretically the cost of living could be lowered by renting a tiny efficiency or sharing a bigger place with a lot of people, Americans often can’t because the rooms aren’t available.
“Sharing of beds and rooms, in a society like the current U.S., where it is seen as fairly acceptable to be inconsiderate, self-centered, irresponsible etc”
I think the huge expansion in what 21st c. Americans see as a reasonable amount of living space per person is a big part of where all our money seems to get sucked up into such that we feel poor even though we make so much more money than people of the past. People used to (and in poor countries still do) live in a situation which we’d call “living on top of each other.”
But the problem is the people you used to be living on top of were probably your family, extended family, or members of your high-trust community. As you say, being roommates with random strangers is problematic for all kinds of reasons. One might be tempted to blame a general breakdown in social trust, but a lot of it seems to be a combination of smaller family sizes and especially the higher propensity for children to move away from their families for work.
That is, people being more mobile nowadays has increased job opportunities (in a way which might compensate for the deleterious effects of other things with anti-employment effects), but also counteracting that improvement is the fact that it costs more to live in a city where you don’t have a bunch of family you can move in with if things get rough.
Jill, in regards to what sort of people work at Walmart, I can offer something which is at least information-adjacent.
I know someone who works at a dollar store in a bad neighborhood. Things are pretty awful. There’s drug use and theft– starting with the management. Most of the people working there are fouled up one way or another.
There’s more violence than I think most of us would expect in retail. On the other hand, it’s pretty much scuffling related to shop-lifting. It’s actually amazing how territorial the staff is about the store’s stuff, considering that laying hands on a shoplifter is against company policy and the management mistreats the staff.
However, the staff still doesn’t sound nearly as awful as the way you’re describing people who work at Walmarts in spite of being a step or three lower in terms of the quality of the store.
The worst of the customers are scarier than the staff. I wouldn’t want to share a room with a random worker from that dollar store, but the customers would be more worth avoiding.
Part of the problem is that you don’t say anything the probabiliby of any particular bad trait.
What’s your source of information Walmart workers?
@Onyomi:
One of the cases I cited was Orwell’s description of housing for poor men in London. Unrelated, very low income, many people per room (although I think only one per bed).
@Cadie:
That hasn’t been my experience (in a 2nd-tier Atlantic Coast city). The general principles seem to be (1) there is a maximum number of people allowed in the unit (usually 2x [number of bedrooms]), (2) everyone needs to be on the lease. I know a set of five people who moved into two bedroom, one bathroom apartment together. While it was a terrible decision for at least one of them, nobody needed to pretend to be dating anyone else and I think they might have been allowed a sixth roommate.
This does mean that the fallback option Onyomi discussed (depending on length of stay – a week would probably be pretty easy to get away with; a month would likely be pushing it) has barriers it doesn’t need, and as I said the cap is usually a function of the number of designated bedrooms rather than the number of beds you could conceivably fit, but things aren’t quite as bad as you describe.
Which is to say, they make zero form the potential employer, and whatever from the government. In other words minimum wages without welfare lead to starvation…but who is calling for that combination?
Are arguments against a minimum wage actually arguments against any kind of minimum wage, or against something more specific…such as a minimum wage without a welfare system, or a minimum wage with US zoning laws?
One answer to that is that various actors are invested in housing continuing to be as expensive as it is. This isn’t a situation caused by a single bad decision, it is highly entangled, and requires real radicalism to solve. It can;’t be solved by the conventional left or right alone, because they are both in the business of supporting different parts of the problem?
I think the needs of an aging population is the biggest.
“a week would probably be pretty easy to get away with; a month would likely be pushing it”
Only because we have a culture which says successful adults don’t live with their parents. In most traditional cultures it’s quite common, even preferred, to have three generations living under one roof.
“Are arguments against a minimum wage actually arguments against any kind of minimum wage”
The usual economic argument is against any kind of minimum wage–and against price controls more generally.
Consider someone who is not worth more than $5/hour to any employer. You pass a $10 minimum wage, he is unemployed and goes on welfare. Is your argument that this is a good thing because without the minimum wage he couldn’t qualify for welfare?
If that is your position, wouldn’t it make more sense to have no minimum wage but a welfare system in which anyone making less than $X/year qualifies? We have a version of that already in the Earned Income Tax Credit.
You might consider that if you make him unemployable at the wage he can earn you are likely to make him permanently unemployable, while if you let him work for $5/hour, with or without welfare supplementing it, he may well move up in wages over time with experience.
How do you feel about a society where a substantial number of people are unable to earn money and spend their lives supported by the government? Is that a plus or a minus?
As a rule, rules have exceptions. A completely unregulated market can have very bad impacts on some individuals, even if performs well by the aggregate measures beloved of economists and regulators.
https://meteuphoric.wordpress.com/2016/09/07/price-dikes/#comments
I don’t see what is so great about having people living in third world conditions in first world countries. It’s not a reinvention of anything worth reinventing. (The many-to-a-room urban area was known as a “rookery” in victorian england: “Rookery” was a colloquial term given in the 18th and 19th centuries to a city slum occupied by poor people and frequently also by criminals and prostitutes. Such areas were overcrowded, with low-quality housing and little or no sanitation. Poorly constructed dwellings, built with multiple storeys and often crammed into any area of open ground, created densely-populated areas of gloomy, narrow streets and alleyways.”)
It degrades everything else. I mean, I know libertariansim is all about being externality-blind, but…
Consider someone who actually gets the $10 an hour…she was worth it , to her employer all along.
Welfare with MW makes more sense than MW without welfare. I wasn’t advocating MW without welfare, I was wondering why you were assuming it , when it is unrealistic.
Consider that if you increase someone wages, they become less likely to jump ship in search of higher wages, become more experienced at their job, and more useful to their employer.
That might be the fate of all of us.
I’m still not seeing the affordability of accomodation.
Like shanty towns? Well, shanty towns create public health hazards, lower existing property values, etc. Cheap do-it-yourself housing isn’t some novel thing, it has well-known disadvantages.
Shanty towns are improvised housing. There are alternative ways to get to cheaper housing than letting people build their own shacks. You can have professional companies build living facilities with communal kitchens, baths, and showers, and have them not be fire or health hazards. All you need to do is change zoning laws.
Also, in the Bay Area at least, strict zoning laws seem to be encouraging shanty town building. As rents have soared due to a lack of supply, I’ve seen more and more homeless encampments crop up.
Helpfully, the user jeff posted a nice link below to give an indication of how much zoning laws can make housing unaffordable: http://www.sightline.org/2016/09/06/how-seattle-killed-micro-housing/
Key quote: “You draw up plans to build 40 apartments of 175 square feet each. You estimate rent at $900 per month. That amount might sound expensive if you haven’t shopped for rentals in Seattle recently, but it’s a steal: conventional studios now go for $1,400 on average.”
Through zoning changes that effectively outlaw micro-housing leaving only conventional studios, places to rent go from $900 to $1400, more than a 50% increase in price leading to a large reduction in affordability.
Supporting quote:
“So what happened to Seattle’s micro-housing? There’s no one single moment when we lost the war. Rather, it’s been a process of accumulated bad decisions. In short, rule changes made by the city mandate larger and therefore costlier units, drastically limit the areas in which they can be built, require the extra process and expense of formal design review, and discourage participation in the city’s multi-family tax exemption, a program that lowers rents substantially for working-class households.”
“WalMart is burdening the rest of society” could easily be flipped – WalMart is helping society by providing some employment to people who are not productive enough to pay for a “living wage”, thus freeing the government to only cover the difference.
Which is better, having to pay a person 100% of “living wage” out of tax dollars, or paying the same person 50% of living wage in welfare with the remainder covered by their WalMart earnings?
I’ve wondered about the left wing claim that businesses which can’t pay a living wage shouldn’t exist. Doesn’t it make at least as much sense to say that some of those businesses are supplying a public service and should be subsidized?
I think I feel comfortable saying this: “If a business demands so much time of its workers that they cannot afford what society considers its baseline standard of living while working there, there is a problem to be solved.”
That’s pretty broad, but I think it gets the point across without saying “this economic model is morally wrong”.
One solution would be (and I have no idea how to go about this) to make it easier to live off of multiple part time jobs. I think the professional class (both salary earners and single source wage earners) has been dominant for so long in Western society that other models of employment get frozen out of the discussion. That might change if the “gig economy” style of employment actually works, but a series of gigs probably isn’t a solution for the low end of the wage scale.
“If a business demands so much time of its workers that they cannot afford what society considers its baseline standard of living while working there, there is a problem to be solved.”
Of course, the problem might be the society’s idea of a baseline standard of living.
@ Gazeboist
One solution would be (and I have no idea how to go about this) to make it easier to live off of multiple part time jobs.
Hm. Have I missed something about the sort of businesses that choose to have 100 part time employees rather than 50 full time? One incentive for this is regulations that require more benefits for full time employees.
ISTR that California, or maybe some city therein, has recently passed a law requiring employers to post schedule some period in advance and forbids them from canceling shifts. That should help with the multiple jobs logistic problem.
But unpaid internships can exist. So basically the employment band between $0 and $10 should be eliminated, but you can work for free. What if you’re a teenager living at home hoping to get some experience and a business is out there who’d be happy to pay $5/hour, but not 10? Is there a “problem” with that society? I think the problem is with the society that won’t allow that job to exist (yes, I know some places have exceptions for mentally disabled, underage/seasonal, and so on, but the very making of the exception shows recognition that there are people out there who’d like to work but can’t make the prevailing wage and may not even need to, since they’re not on their own; why should only teenagers and the handicapped be allowed the “privilege” of being able to work for cheap?)
I don’t know about seasonal workers, but the difficulty of squaring teenagers, interns, and the dependent mentally ill with people at the bottom end of the working-for-self-sufficiency scale is a big part of why I prefer a basic income (or another measure that would reintroduce the bottom end of the wage scale without harming the self-sufficiency workers). I do believe that there is a set of people materially helped by the minimum wage, that there are people making more money and living better lives because there is a minimum wage. I think we could do even better by dumping the minimum wage in favor of a basic income, but until a basic income is actually in the pipeline I think there is an optimal minimum wage that is greater than zero.
This is all just from my impressions of the state of things; nobody should take my statements as coming from any position of authority.
Not everyone is on board with this, though.
“I do believe that there is a set of people materially helped by the minimum wage, that there are people making more money and living better lives because there is a minimum wage.”
I think almost everyone in the argument agrees that there are some such people, since the demand for unskilled labor is not perfectly elastic. But that doesn’t tell us whether poor people in general are better or worse off as a result of the minimum wage. Since the demand for unskilled labor is not perfectly inelastic, there will also be people who are made unemployed by the minimum wage.
““If a business demands so much time of its workers …”
Is the existence of a business essential to your argument?
Consider self-employed people. Suppose the most they can make is below “what society considers its baseline standard of living.” Does the same problem exist? Should we make it illegal for anyone to do such work?
I somewhat convinced that this is the default intuitive way of thinking about all human relationships (which explains the the Copenhagen interpretation of ethics among other things) and that’s why the transactional, impersonal market economy feels so ‘wrong’ to so many people (the same way rational, disembodied thought feels so wrong).
Humans’ natural environment is the tribe, where everyone knows everyone else and all interactions take place in a context of ‘thick’ social relationships — other people are people, not objectified. Large scale societies of thousands or millions of people require different modes of interaction (despotism, feudalism, capitalism, your standard Civ stuff) that brings with them an unavoidable dissonance with our psyches. There seems to be an expectation that we ought to care about everyone else in our society (or even world) the same way we would care about people in our tribe (literal tribe). But it’s unworkable, and because of this I don’t think ‘politics’ can ever be ‘solved’.
The appeal of communism, various types of anarchisms etc. is grounded in a longing for that “natural social environment” on a large scale without any of the ugly kludges large societies demand.
People of course vary in how much they’re bothered about this. Libertarians don’t care at all. Many socialists, left-anarchists or small-scale conservatives care a lot. Both Meaningness and Ribbonfarm are kind of talking about this in different terms.
I don’t quite understand.
Consider any serious discussion of the value of life and the reception it is likely to get.
Abstract and hypothetical thinking has to be learned, essentially. And we’re still not good at it; we compartmentalize, rationalize, contextualize. The phrase “aspiring rationalist” is telling in that it shows us how we’re fighting against our natures* all the time.
*You can’t strictly fight against your nature, I suppose. But you know what I mean.
Libertarians don’t care at all.
I don’t think I quite believe this – most serious libertarians seem to be analogous to archipelagans like Scott, who solve the problem by breaking the global community into an arbitrary number of reasonably-sized ones.
I meant something closer to “libertarians typically don’t seem to feel squeamish or unsatisfied with a society where transactional, impersonal interactions without open-ended social obligations are the norm”.
I also suspect your word “serious” is doing a lot of work here, filtering a lot of “casual libertarians” I was including.
I think that’s a pretty good definition, but still goes a bit far. I think most “real world” libertarians do feel a bit squeamish about it, because it really is such a powerful instinct.
It’s not so much that “libertarians don’t care about the poor and aren’t bothered by treating them as commodities”, it’s more that they believe that treating them with rational, “disembodied” thought, as you put it, is on net going to help more people than trying to forcibly create artificially that “natural social environment” on a society that has outgrown it.
That is a statement I could agree with. I’d also believe the “serious” is doing a lot of work, but I think it is important work. In general I think we should try to compare who each side of a discussion points to as a serious thinker, on the assumption that their ideas are the ones people are actually advocating. Once we’ve decided what the appropriate framework is, we can then move on to the actual implementation details, where the people on the ground (of the movement, that is) matter more.
While I’m at it, let’s try to steelman the case for hierarchy/anti-egalitarianism, since it seems maybe the implications of farmer-forager (and recent cultural developments) is that people “naturally” prefer egalitarianism, though hierarchy may be necessary for technological and economic development.
But some positive arguments for hierarchy (beyond, just, we need it):
Hierarchy makes you more polite
People like not being responsible when things go wrong, if everyone’s equal, everyone’s responsible for making important decisions
People like being taken care of; if everyone’s equal, everyone has to take care as much as be taken care of*
Being taken care of (employees, women in patriarchies, children) creates a sense of reciprocal obligation and identity to take care among those in authority (some surveys even show women in conservative Muslim countries ranking their happiness more highly than in the West?!)
People have differing abilities, motivations, desires, ambitions; egalitarianism subtly suggests there’s something wrong with this or that everyone has an equally valuable “core self” separable from all identities; this may be wrong and/or cause cognitive dissonance
Some people like giving orders/being a leader/constant striving for advancement; egalitarianism not-so-subtly implies they should feel bad about that.
At the same time, if you’re happy just following orders, being a follower, or putting yourself in a subservient role, egalitarianism subtly implies there’s something wrong with that too.
I’m not trying to go all Harrison Bergeron or Ayn Rand here: my point isn’t that if we don’t let the exceptional excel we’ll all suffer when Atlas shrugs (though that may, also, be true); my point is I feel sometimes like it’s literally making people less happy to constantly strive after equality when, in fact, people seem preprogrammed for at least some degree of hierarchy/social caste differentiation.
All this is not to say that I prefer a rigidly hierarchical society to an egalitarian one, and I don’t necessarily agree entirely with all the above myself, though I do also get the sense that maybe focusing too obsessively, in a rhetorical sense, on egalitarianism in recent decades may have made some, possibly many people less happy.
Part of the issue here is that there are lots of different positions that are in the middle, and maybe one or more of them is far more ideal than a society so rigidly hierarchical that the people at the bottom are almost as bad off as slaves in their standard of living and their civil rights. And maybe one or more of these “between the extremes” positions is also far more ideal than a society so egalitarian that unskilled laborers get paid the same as the most brilliant and productive scientists and brain surgeons.
And then there is the matter of what the hierarchy measures. Is it a meritocracy? Or is it a Molochocracy where e.g. companies might do nothing that is beneficial to society, and might also drive the entire economy into bankruptcy, and might still get paid jillions of dollars in salary and bonuses– just because they have figured out a way to insert themselves into the economy as unnecessary middle men? Is it a crony capitalist hierarchy of “Them that has, gits”? Or is it a hierarchy where competence, and behavior that actually contributes to the society, count for something and get rewarded?
Another argument in favour of hierarchy: it’s easier to know where you stand in relation to someone, how you ought to act towards them and what you can expect in return. If you know that the person you’re talking to is a Lord and you should therefore address him as “My Lord” and bow when you first meet him, you can do that without thinking about it and without having to worry about messing up somehow, whereas navigating the informal power dynamics with somebody who’s theoretically your equal but actually has higher intelligence/charisma/whatever can be much more fraught.
Those are good thoughts on why hierarchy might be desired. As to whether it should be allowed, the only distinction I care about is voluntary/involuntary. A BDSM relationship with a voluntary master and submissive is cool. State agents claiming authority over citizens without their consent is not cool.
Yes, you are mischaracterizing the argument. Let me lay it out to you from the perspective of a social market economy.
The kind of people who work at wal-mart usually don’t have the bargaining power to refuse a job even if its conditions are unfair. They don’t have the bankroll to wait it out or go looking somewhere else until wal-mart caves and offers them a fair price for their labor. They either take the job or go hungry. An efficient market requires that all its actors are free to make rational financial decisions.
Ergo, Wal-mart is unduly burdening society by paying terrible wages, and they only get away with it because they are leveraging a market failure.
One of the fundamental roles of government is to protect society against market failures (other examples of this are laws against collusion, monopolies, pollution, etc). One way to do this is directly helping people who are earning too little, which de-facto is an unjust subsidy to wal-mart by making labor cheaper than it would be available “naturally”, i.e. if the people selling it were able to do so at market prices. A better way is to set a minimum wage.
You are free to disagree with the philosophy of this position of course, but it is internally consistent I believe.
“Ergo, Wal-mart is unduly burdening society by paying terrible wages, and they only get away with it because they are leveraging a market failure.”
But they are still doing more to help these people than the millions who don’t hire any full-time employees. This is why, economically, the argument makes no sense to me.
Let’s say you need $20/hour to have a decent standard of living but Wal Mart only pays $10/hour. Therefore, “society” has to pay the equivalent of $10/hour in social services, welfare payments, etc. to make up the difference. This is still better than “society” paying $12/hour to someone who had to take an $8/hour job because Wal Mart wasn’t hiring, or, indeed, $20/hour to take care of someone entirely unemployed, so Wal Mart is still helping, not hurting. And we can’t argue in this case that, if Wal Mart weren’t offering the subpar job, the people would be getting a better job elsewhere, because the original argument is predicated on there not being any better options.
First of all, there’s a moral hazard argument that could be made: yes, it is better to have to pay $20 to support someone rather than $10, if the latter implies that you’d have to tolerate a market failure and let the company in question keep entrenching itself.
As for a purely economic argument, the point (which I explicitly made above) is that wal mart’s whole business model is to exploit a market failure. If you forced them to either pay $20 or not hire anyone at all, they will pay the $20, because the job is actually worth that much.
Firstly, I’m not sure how “workers don’t capture their full marginal revenue product” constitutes a market failure, if that’s what you mean. It just means demand for labor is low, a problem with which Wal Mart is helping, not hurting, by offering jobs.
Also, I don’t think it is actually true that all Wal Mart jobs are actually worth, to Wal Mart, what they would cost if, for example, $15 minimum wage advocates got their way. I can easily see them firing some greeters and replacing a few more cashiers with machines in such a case. Yes, they can’t avoid hiring some people, but they aren’t currently employing the minimum possible number for continuing their business.
Wal-Mart has 14.696b in net income, 2.3m employees.
Assuming 2000 hours worked per employee per year, if ALL profits went to employees (i.e. you wipe out all shareholders) they would each earn an extra $3.25 per hour (minus payroll taxes etc).
It’s not an economic argument in the first place, The actual argument takes it for granted that Walmart is not going to shut itself down, so the comparison with a Walmart-free US is meaningless. It’s not that by hiring people Walmart are performning some gratuitous act that they could survive without.
It is not meaningless to the question of whether Wal Mart is, on net, helping or burdening poverty and social welfare-type programs.
And, again, Wal Mart surely can’t avoid hiring a certain number of people, but I’m sure they could find ways to make due with fewer if the minimum price of labor went up.
To say that it is good, without saying what it is better than, what the alternative is, is precisely what is meaningless.
You haven’t, up until now, suggested what the better alternative is that you’re sure would arise in the absence of Wal Mart. You’ve been content to argue that in this world, Wal Mart is burdening the welfare rolls, which is a different claim than “Wal Mart is burdening the welfare rolls relative to a hypothetical Wal Mart which is run more in accordance with my values” or “Wal Mart is burdening the welfare rolls relative to a world in which it doesn’t exist and something better has taken its place.”
Of course, anything is bad relative to a hypothetical world in which it’s replaced by something better. Doesn’t make sense to therefore say it’s bad in this world, unless it is actually a net harm in this world.
I don’t know what “a fair price for their labor” means. If Walmart increases its revenue as a result of hiring another worker by substantially more than that worker costs, it pays them to hire more workers, and continue doing so until it is no longer true.
That assumes a competitive market for such workers, which is not the same thing as assuming that workers are in a position to refuse to accept a job until they get an offer they like. But although Walmart is large, it’s far from the only employer of low wage/low skilled workers. If such workers are really being paid much less than they are worth to employers, then lots of employers will see that they can increase profits by hiring more such.
Or in other words, you are not describing conditions that lead to market failure. You are describing a situation where some people get paid less than you think they should, probably because they are not worth much more than that to any employer. The reason P=MV=MC in a competitive market is not that buyers and sellers bargain with each other by threatening not to buy or sell unless they get the terms they want.
It’s weird and question-begging (on both sides) to pump these intuitions through a solely economic analysis.
Phil is a good carpenter and really likes performing unwanted acts on the physically disabled. He won’t stop voluntarily, and he refuses to work when he is prevented. There are jobless physically disabled people around. Should we supply Phil with people to perform these unwanted acts on? No, even if it reduces overall productivity. And anyway, if we do nothing about it, someone likely will anyway.
Retail company X wants to hire person Y at a certain wage Z. The underlying intuition is that the overall circumstances can make Z a fair wage or an unfair wage. Those circumstances probably include some economic facts and some non-economic facts. Absent a judicial system backed by force, paying wage Z under these circumstances might result in social push-back like trashed stores or roughed up stockholders — individually counter-productive steps that for good or bad usually limit unfairness.
Of course people trashing a store are ultimately harming themselves in at least once sense. So are the people who put Phil in prison.
There are libertarian frameworks that attempt to divide these cases so that those of the second sort can be given a purely economic analysis. I’m most familiar with Nozick’s early account. That view faces various objections, one of which is that it can propagate past unjust distributions, or amplify differences that result from luck. People strongly disagree about whether such an account can be made to work. More economic analysis doesn’t address this question.
(I’m not necessarily criticizing the responses to Vitor, given that he or she also put things in economic terms. But good grief.)
Here’s an uneconomic argument against a living wage or minimum wage:
When I make an agreement to exchange my labor for compensation from another individual, it’s no one else’s business what we agree to. My body, my choice. So, if I want to labor for my hang gliding instructor in exchange for lessons, but no monetary compensation, it is my right to do so and no one else has the right to intervene or use physical force to stop this agreement. Similarly, if I’m a poor person that wants to take a job for $4/hr to gain work experience and a little cash to help pay the bills, no one else has the right to use physical force to stop this agreement.
Even if there are externalities?
And in this case, the externality is: that many fewer dollars have to be paid out by social welfare programs.
@onyomi:
I don’t think you can just blithely assert that. Walmart became such a valuable company to its investors by figuring out how to capture much more of the value of products that are sold for their own use. They managed to out downward pressure on every price, whether it’s prices paid to their own labor, or prices paid to their supply chain. They also took business away from all of the stores which were (now) less efficient and drove thousands of smaller stores out of business.
Yes, if we simply removed every job at Walmart from the market as it exists now, you would have an immediate spike in social spending, but that’s different than saying their net effect overall was positive.
@HBC
That is an entirely different case which no one in this thread has thus far attempted to make.
I’d say you’re probably wrong, but it would at least be conceivable that, on net, Wal Mart puts more pressure on social welfare programs by crowding out other, better jobs (though if we are considering all such broader implications we also have to consider the effect on society of offering goods cheaper, which leaves people more money to spend on other things and, again, takes pressure off social welfare systems).
But no one has even made that argument yet. Instead, they seem content to argue flatly that: Wal Mart exists; therefore we take its existence and the fact that it has to hire some people to exist as some kind of a baseline for determining its effect, rather than the counterfactual of its not existing.
The real question is: if Wal Mart did not exist, would a larger number of jobs or better paying jobs fill the vacuum or would they have come into existence? And would the higher pay that relatively small number of workers makes make up for the fact that a much larger population of Wal Mart customers will now be paying more for many things?
I’m pretty sure the answer is no (even a big raise for all employees plus a big increase in the number of employees would likely not offset the benefit of offering thousands of products to millions of customers at prices significantly lower than in hypothetical no-Wal Mart World), but it’s a much more complicated question which no one has brought up until this point.
All that said, it still seems wrong to assert that someone is “hurting” because if they weren’t helping, someone else would be helping more.
@onyomi:
I believe, although I admit I am not giving any links to studies, that there are studies that show what happens as Walmart enters new markets, and they show net job loss, and that the jobs at Walmart are less remunerative.
Given that as true (admittedly, very much citation needed) I think the only real counterfactual would be the position that there are facts in the market that would make this switch inevitable, even given a higher minimum wage.
So, I don’t think there is an “in a vacuum argument” here. Walmart enters markets and has a deleterious effect on the job market.
Offsetting that versus low prices for consumers doesn’t really work, mostly because the benefits are diffuse and don’t only benefit those on social programs, whereas the costs are concentrated. In addition, you have all the effects on the local tax base that have to offset against any local effects of lower prices.
“Offsetting that versus low prices for consumers doesn’t really work, mostly because the benefits are diffuse and don’t only benefit those on social programs, whereas the costs are concentrated.”
Why are diffuse benefits less… beneficial than concentrated? And why don’t low Wal Mart prices benefit those on social programs? It doesn’t seem like Wal Mart’s typical clientele is very wealthy and I see a lot of retirement-age customers in there as well.
@onyomi:
In terms of costs of social programs only, and Walmarts effect on those, the benefit is going to show up as a very small amount of downward pressure on inflation, as calculated nationwide. That’s a legitimate offset. But, “I shop at Walmart and I am on SS” doesn’t directly lower any social program cost.
Whereas the costs of people on various social welfare programs due to Walmarts effect on the local job market does directly raise those costs.
In addition, at a state by state level, the job effects, I think, are disproportionately distributed, whereas the inflation benefit actually benefits SS costs in other states more.
@HeelBearCub:
On the face of it, that claim seems pretty implausible. Can you give any more detail on where you might have heard it or how it might have been measured?
When somebody sells product to Walmart, they do so because Walmart pays better than their next-best alternative. Similarly when somebody sells labor to Walmart, they do so because Walmart offers them a better job than their next-best alternative. Now, it’s true that “better” is a multi-axis attribute – some jobs are “better” due to job security, chance for promotion, chance to work extra hours, training, commute, and many more – but pay is a pretty big aspect of “better” where jobs are concerned. When Walmart comes to town it has to quickly acquire a large and stable workforce including incentivizing people to leave smaller, less-profitable firms and incentivizing them to stick around as they acquire more firm-specific capital; they do this by offering MORE pay than the locals.
Let’s see…the first thing I found in a brief search was Do Large Modern Retailers Pay Premium Wages?
The full paper’s paywalled, but here’s a summary article: Kathryn Shaw: Big Box Stores Pay Higher Wages Than You Think
UPDATE: after looking a bit more, I found The effects of Wal-Mart on local labor markets, which makes the point that teasing out an effect is HARD because Walmart openings aren’t random. Walmart quite sensibly opens new stores in areas that are growing. After a lot of fiddly data stuff, they think it does NOT reduce retailer earnings and DOES reduce the expected number of retail jobs relative to what it would have been but not in absolute numbers and probably doesn’t reduce total jobs (because people shift out of retail to other areas). Quote:
[…]
“But, ‘I shop at Walmart and I am on SS’ doesn’t directly lower any social program cost.”
Money saved is as good as money earned. The question is: does Wal Mart’s existence add pressure to or alleviate pressure on social welfare programs for the poor, elderly, disabled, etc.? If we’re counting theoretical jobs which might exist without Wal Mart in that equation, I don’t see why we shouldn’t count money saved on food, clothing, and all the other stuff Wal Mart sells cheaper than most competitors.
Note that I don’t even accept that, absent Wal Mart, other stores would be offering as good (or better) and as many (or more) jobs. But even if they would be offering more and/or better jobs, if that means a world in which food, clothes, etc. are more expensive for Wal Mart’s many poor, elderly, and/or disabled customers, it is very doubtful that that would mean less need for social welfare programs.
@Glen Raphael:
What I am remembering is a study of Walmart openings in relatively rural areas where the Main Street businesses in multiple nearby towns would all go belly-up as Walmart took all their business.
The basic point you are making, that Walmart can’t just take labor away from their competitors is true. But they don’t take the labor away, they take their customers away. At which point their competitors’ labor goes away by dint of being unemployed.
Why is that such a bad outcome? If Society wants higher wages, it seems just that Society has to pay more, whether or not people notice the connection. But, in essence, the combination of higher wages and higher prices is what distinguishes a first world economy from a third world one. Is it such a terrible thing to be first world, or to become more first world.?
“Why is that such a bad outcome?”
It’s not. If society wants higher quality, more expensive products and higher wages then they can start shopping at higher end stores than Wal Mart. But the revealed preference of a large segment of society is they’d rather have the cheap stuff and own a car, live in a bigger house, etc.
@onyomi:
That’s a coordination problem, exactly the kind of problem that it usually takes intervention to solve.
The failure of the public to demand Asian Studies professors as highly as NFL players is a coordination problem too! I demand an intervention!
Farmers would be more hierarchical and the forager ways we’re now tending to return to are more egalitarian, as meshes well with the strongly egalitarian ethos of most liberal democracies today.
Sez who?
I think this is just the return once again of the notion of the Noble Savage, dressed up in pseudo-anthropological clothing.
Humans have all kinds of hierarchies. Do you really think forager societies/cultures were all “Bill is every bit as good as Bob”? No distinction between “Sue brings back the most berries, Tom always manages to pick the poisonous fungi”?
I imagine there was some kind of hierarchy where elders (by virtue of having lived long enough to be that old) got respect for their wisdom and practical knowledge and that translated into having the last word or having their opinion awarded more weight when making decisions.
I’m very suspicious of “in the Golden Age, we were all peace-loving egalitarian non-violent non-hierarchical matriarchies” because they describe less the reality of the past than a point the speaker wants to make about the society of the day. If we’re getting hip-deep into “today our modern neo-techno urban grazer lifestyle wotsits are a return to the primordial forager Golden Age before the dominance of agriculture and hierarchy”, then I say “phooey”.
Especially since hunter gatherers are around today. If you want to say anything in particular about non-agricultural societies, you can say they were incredibly diverse, as modern hunter gatherer communities are, having an array of cultural practices which seem bizarre and have no real analogue in the great civilizations (such as the tribe who hire a man to take their daughters virginity, the exact opposite of what evopsych would predict). Some of them would be very flat, but some of them are going to be Big Man type groups, and all of them are going to have their own unique way of organizing gender structures. Ted Kaczynski (yes!) had a pretty good breakdown of why primitive = egalitarian and matriarchal is wrong.
The modern world is more interconnected, so it’s going to be less diverse than disconnected tribes that “speciate” rapidly. Modern far-flung societies have been colonized by world spanning Empires to such an extent that their cultures still bare the marks of it (India is British), with so much being Chritianized or Islamized, and the necessities of modern globalization require culture to coordinate with economics to a greater and greater degree. At some point, even Japan will have to obey the cultural mores of the United States/Europe.
In the “Golden Age”, we were all… very very different.
So far as the peace loving part of that, I recommend War Before Civilization.
I disagree, particularly with the “only”. It also makes sense if you believe in implicit contracts and obligations to society, that is to say, if you believe in the things that libertarians characterisitcally don’t believe in. If you own a house, you have an obligation not to create a public nuisance by keeping junk in your front yard, and people will disapprove if you do so. If you are an employer, you have an obligation not to create a social problem by paying low wages. Same reasoning. It’s not really about the farmer/forager distinction , it’s about the way libertarians think versus the way everyone else does.
“create a social problem by paying low wages”
But they aren’t creating a problem. They are helping, though maybe not enough on a Copenhagen interpretation of ethics.
If you want to say libertarians reject Copenhagen ethics and most others accept it, then that may be roughly accurate. But then my original interpretation holds.
They are helping compared to not hiring at all, and hurting compared to hiring at higher wages. But why would a company shut itself down out of spite?
If you donate $1000 to charity you are helping compared to not donating and hurting compared to donating $2000.
But does it really make sense to say that someone who donates $1000, even though they could have afforded $2000, is “hurting” charity?
“But why would a company shut itself down out of spite?”
Both this and an exchange elsewhere which assumed that if a potential employee didn’t have a practical option of refusing to work until he got what he considered an adequate job offer that was a form of market failure suggest to me a large gap between the way economists see markets and the way some other people see markets.
The issue isn’t a company shutting itself down out of spite. It’s a company altering its behavior in response to a change in the price of its inputs. If unskilled labor becomes more expensive, you use less of it. If the cost to you of a worker who produces ten units of whatever per hour and one who produces twelve units is the same, due to it being illegal to pay the former what you have to pay to get the latter, you hire the more skilled worker.
People are used to thinking in terms of small scale face to face transactions where bargaining is important–including threats of refusing to deal “out of spite.” There are parts of the world where many transactions are handled that way, although my impression is that part of the reason is to make shopping into an entertaining game. But that doesn’t represent much of how a large modern economy works.
They most likely won’t shut down the company, but moving or shutting down the local part of it happens all the time.
Misleading analogy. The charity giver has a realistic option of giving nothing, Walmart doesn;t have a realistic option of shutting down.
Upskilling jobs doesn’t look terribly bad to me either. Isn;’t that part of what an advanced economy is all about?
“Walmart doesn’t have a realistic option of shutting down.”
If Wal Mart ceased to be profitable it wouldn’t be that long before it shut down. Of course, the stores and whatnot would be bought up by someone else, who might or, more likely, might not hire as many workers or pay them as well.
Or perhaps the stores would not be bought (because it would no longer be economical to operate them), and would ultimately revert to the taxing authority and stand as eyesores, eventually being vandalized, colonized by the homeless (perhaps including former employees), etc. Killing the goose that lays the golden eggs is a possibility.
@TheNybbler:
Walmart lays golden eggs for its owners. In this anology, you need to make the Feds into the Robin of Sicily coming by to say “That’s a nice goose. Pretty eggs. Shame if something were to happen to her.”
@HBC
You’re picking on the details of the analogy too much. To be more direct: If you change the tax and/or regulatory environment such that Walmart cannot operate a location at a profit, it is perfectly possible that you have also changed it such that _no one_ can operate there at a profit.
When you hire a contractor to do work for you, do you examine their life situation and pay them an amount appropriate to not create social problems? Or do you pay them an amount that is mutually agreeable to you both, regardless of the contractor’s life situation?
As to junk in your yard, that is usually accounted for with an explicit contract in an HOA agreement. If you don’t have an explicit agreement on junk in your yard, and you live in the woods, then it might be perfectly acceptable to have junk in your front yard. There could be other gray situations though where there is no HOA agreement but you create a nuisance to others, and something like the Coase theorem can be used to help resolve these conflicts. It could be the case that a person has ‘homesteaded’ the right to keep junk in their yard, and then it’s not clear they have an obligation to remove said junk.
You could also consider the obligation to keep your yard clean (or shovel your sidewalk) as an in-kind tax by your local government, in exchange for which you receive a road to your house, sidewalks in general, a sewage line, and so on.
Seems to me that if the provision of infrastructure can be used to justify requirements like that, they can be used to justify just about anything.
I think the provision of sidewalks-in-general probably justifies a requirement that you shovel and otherwise keep clear some reasonable portion of the sidewalk, and “that portion which is in front of or across* your property” strikes me as quite reasonable. I’m less sure about the rest, but I would definitely object to a government-or-equivalent complaining about a mess that is only visible from your private road that you maintain.
* I think, depending on jurisdiction, private properties sometimes extend to the middle of the street, and sometimes stop at the sidewalk.
Where I live, local councils do not provision sidewalks. They just send angry-worded letters to homeowners, instructing them to build one or pay a hefty fine. Nevertheless, the law still mandates that you shovel and otherwise keep clear sidewalks in front of your property. And people still see the requirement as quite reasonable.
This, especially combined with The Nybbler’s argument, suggests that the in-kind tax interpretation does not accurately reflect the legal/ethical principles at work in this situation.
Recently a newscaster got in trouble for calling a person of color a “colored person.” This may be signalling 101 for SSC readers, but Michael Malice had what I thought was nonetheless an insightful commentary in which he pointed out that acceptable terms have to keep changing in order for those interested in identity issues to keep signalling their greater degree of enlightenment than the general public.
I recall, for example, when everyone had to stop saying “black” and start saying “African American.” After a while, however, it seems like black gradually became okay again, maybe because too many regular people had caught on to “African American” which started to sound like you were being overly circumspect. I’m not immune to this either: I recall when “oriental” was just the usual word for East Asians. Now “oriental” feels weird and gross–indeed like something someone very not-with-it would say. Of course, “Asian” is not inherently better and is more confusing–Indians (yes, Indians from India, not Native Americans…), for example, are definitely Asian, but look very different from Koreans and would not, in the past, have been called “oriental,” I don’t think. I’d say it was Edward Said, but he wrote that way earlier… though maybe it took a while for it to trickle down from academia.
I wonder if there’s some old example we can find of this where inquisitor A says to inquisitor B, “hah, can you believe Miguel just called that heretic an ‘infidel?’ *snicker*” Though the difference here would be that the terminology must be right for those whom we are supposedly saving from oppression, not those whom we are damning.
Well, it depends when in the past. In my lifetime, no. But “oriental” has a history as more generally “Eastern” (go figure), and was often applied to the Near and Middle East (pardon me: Western Asia). Hence, for example, the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute, whose exhibits center on artifacts from Egypt, the Levant, Mesopotamia, and Persia. It wouldn’t have been particularly unheard of to refer to the Ottoman sultanate as an Oriental monarchy at a time when its writ extended well into Europe.
Yes, I think in the times of e. g. the Raj, India and, indeed, the middle east were also “the orient.”
Not disagreeing with the general thrust of this, but I don’t think it’s particularly notable, unexpected or worthy of blame that we require people to keep up with how language changes.
If a newscaster were to think that a TI-80 should be referred to as a “computer” (in an unsophisticated sense), this would be a gaffe, albeit without associated moral opprobrium. “Colored” probably was last in respectable use back when that would have made sense.
There’s at least a scalar (i.e. logical) reason why a TI-80 isn’t called a computer anymore. Plus I won’t get into trouble with anyone for calling my Macbook a calculator, even if I’m angry with it.
With African American vs. black vs. colored, the changes are pretty much willy-nilly.
What I find hilarious is when people use “black” all day and then when they want to suddenly get all solemn about something they switch to “African American.”
>With African American vs. black vs. colored, the changes are pretty much willy-nilly.
I disagree. “Imbecile” was a medical term, to my knowledge, until people started using it as an insult. The reasons terms change in regards to these things is I think, in part, because A: Human beings insult each others and B: Language is vague enough that we’re not always sure if someone insulted us.
And once a technical or descriptive term becomes commonly used as an insult, many people who don’t want to be insulting want a way to make clear that they aren’t. That the new term eventually gets used as an epithet in turn helps drive the euphemism treadmill, at least as long as the underlying stigma persists.
The terms may be near-synonyms (“retarded”, “slow”, “developmentally delayed”, all the racial terms which are simply “black” in different languages, or the polite term shifting from “Jew” to “Hebrew” for a while in the 19th century before going back again). But if a term hasn’t yet been used contemptuously they have a connotational advantage, however temporary.
You do sometimes get a bit of plus royaliste que le roi; at least when I checked a while back, “American Indian” is as or more popular among the peoples so described as “Native American” (or the Canadian “First Nations”). Or the perception that “Eskimo” is insulting and “Inuit” the polite term, where a) North American Arctic peoples aren’t all Inuit (especially in Alaska; they mostly are Inuit in Canada), and Eskimo (again, unless this has changed relatively recently) isn’t perceived as an insult.
Yes, I think both things happen. One is that a previously neutral or technical term like “retarded” becomes a colloquial insult, forcing those who might have once used it to find a new term. But I think there are also definitely cases of people inventing a substitution for a neutral word as a way to signal extra respect/enlightened sensibility. I don’t think “colored person” was ever an insult, for example, but it gradually become antiquated sounding.
That said, given that I think of the NAACP as representing the interests of black people specifically and “persons of color” referring more broadly, basically to anyone not-white (do East Asians count as “people of color”? I kind of think no?), there may actually be a slightly different referent here (though now that I think about it, I realize why “persons of color” bugs me; it’s not just needlessly wordy, it seems to imply, to me, an “us-against-them” mentality with respect to white people from the perspective of all non-white people; for a certain segment, of course, this is a feature, not a bug).
@LHN I recently learned that Eskimo is actually an umbrella term for the Inuit and another, related group called the Yupik. It is an exonym (from another native group) with a history as a pejorative, though it doesn’t have a direct pejorative meaning. Apparently the proposed alternative is Inuit-Yupik.
Depends on the context. If you’re talking about test scores or the demographics of Facebook’s workforce, then no, East Asians are whiter than Scandinavians. If you’re talking about a Boston museum exhibiting kimonos, then East Asians are people of color and it is wrong to get anywhere near their culture.
What bothers me about the “people of color” label is that most of the time it’s just used in place of “black”. Most of the gatherings I’ve attended and organizations I’ve checked out that talk about PoC issues are led by black women, talking about issues in black communities that are apparently of major interest to black people, but which they believe should also be of major interest to everyone else who’s not white. Which is a large group of people and thus a label that includes them all could lend a lot of weight to issues that might be considered just black interests.
@LHN:
In some languages, like Russian, the cognate of “Jew” (zhid) is insulting while the cognate of “Hebrew” (Yevrey) is insulting.
@Guy I’ve been told that the folks in question in Alaska use “Eskimo”, and don’t consider it a pejorative. But I haven’t spent much time there, and it’s possible I’m wrong. (Or that it was true and no longer is.)
But FWIW, when I was in Alaska, I never saw any references to “Inuit-Yupik”. (Eskimo, yes. Alaska Native, which encompasses both Eskimos and Indians, definitely. I think “arctic peoples” as well.) Which leads me to suspect that it’s something that’s being pushed, but isn’t yet standard usage. (Though of course it may come to be in the future.)
But since I don’t have much direct knowledge, I’m open to correction.
In the UK, we still use black for obvious reasons.
We’ve come up with new acronyms though, like in the sentence; “The BBC needs to prioritize the hiring of more BAME individuals.”
Can you expand that acronym? Is it “black and middle eastern”?
Black, Asian*, and Minority Ethnic.
*Asian identity is complicated in the UK. Whereas in America, Asian more typically referred to East-Asians such as Chinese, and Japanese etc, in the UK, Asian traditionally referred in a more proper fashion to people from the continent in general (not including Russia).
However, a narrative shift has gone on. In the mainstream media, Asian is more often than not an over-generic euphemism to refer to people from Pakistan when they are implicated in crimes. See the use of “urban youths” in American rhetoric and compare to “Asian youths” in UK rhetoric; we all know they’re not talking about people from India or China. This is driven by political correctness.
The other shift is the parallel adoption of the American usage where Asian means East-Asian only for informal use. This is driven by porn.
So, if you are in the UK and you see a newscaster say something about “gangs of Asian youths have blah blah blah” then you know he’s talking about Pakistanis, whereas if you see a young person say he’s got a thing for Asians, he has “yellow fever”.
EDIT:
Some people don’t like BAME precisely because it packages minorities that are doing well such as East-Asians and Indians with minorities that are doing badly such as blacks, so a conjoined effort against discrimination against BAME people would not target resources proportionately at where they are most needed.
Here’s a Guardian article on the subject.
But “colored person,” semantically speaking is no different from “person of color.” I picked that example because it’s a case where it literally means exactly the same thing; only the connotations feel different due to the former reminding us of an older, more racist time.
That is, I think most people think they are moving on to a more precise, accurate, and/or kind word when they start calling retarded people “developmentally disabled,” but the difference between “colored person” and “person of color” seems to show that, at least in some cases, it’s really 100% about historical connotations, overtones, fashion, etc.
Word order matters not to Yoda.
But to everyone else it actually does.
The word order still doesn’t change anything about the meaning in this case. Unless you think “leaves of green” means something different from “green leaves” (obviously it makes a difference rhetorically, poetically, aurally, etc. but it means the exact same thing).
@onyomi:
But if “leaves of green” were a common phrase, substituting “green leaves” would not necessarily carry the same connotation.
It’s like saying “baby talk” and “talking to a baby” mean the same thing. They don’t.
HBC, your example doesn’t really hold up. All the other examples are compound nouns, but “talking to a baby” contains a verb. Something something, I’m not a grammar pendant but they are obviously different things.
Fair point, so:
“Pink slip” vs. “slip of pink”
There’s always Indian American vs. American Indian.
“There’s always Indian American vs. American Indian.”
That actually does mean something different. In the first, “Indian” is the modifier, in the second, the noun. Like the difference between an American orange and an orange American. The first is a fruit, the second a presidential candidate.
Re: Affirmative Consent.
You know how sometimes you have a jokey thing you do, but then it becomes real?
Well, after I saw Borat, I started saying, “Shall we have a sexy-time?” before I had sex.
That movie was released about ten years ago, and I said that expression more and more as time went on. Eventually, I was saying it pretty much every time I initiated sex with my girlfriend (and she doesn’t do much initiating).
So, this got me thinking. Am I a poster boy for affirmative consent?
I don’t think it’s necessarily un-sexy to ask, but I do tend to approach things with a bit of aggression when my partner is playing hard to get.
I wouldn’t really think twice about trying to get to second base if the signs were a bit ambiguous, but I wouldn’t go any further than that unless I was fairly sure she was up for it.
So… is that affirmative consent?
The short answer is that this, yes, this could be affirmative consent, and it probably is.
But it also might not be, if you are simply ignoring everything else other than some affirmative answer to that particular question.
B=/=I dude, fix your username.
And, assuming that your girlfriend is saying “yes” (instead of running away screaming) when you do that, and that she pretty clearly means it (like, she isn’t looking frantically around the room for a blunt object while saying “ye-e-es?”), I think you have probably achieved affirmative consent. Congrats.
Here is my thinking: if asking for consent is unattractive because women like men who will act decisively, you can get the best of both worlds by asking for consent in the most annoying way possible.
I’m going to ask you for consent, whether you like it or not.
PS What’s wrong with my username?
Nothing is wrong with it. They were making a joke.
TMI == “Too Much Information”
No.
I think the key point is that you found a girl who continues to have sex with you year after year even when you ask like Borat. That seems like a pretty strong endorsement.
More evidence that the crime rate drop can be explained by a particular cohort aging. It seems fairly clear that the young people of today are far less likely to engage in criminal activity than the youn people of 20 years ago.
that just begs the question of why modern youths are less likely to be criminal.
Because they can play Grand Theft Auto. All the fun, none of the criminal record.
Also, note that the hyper-violent cohort is mine and HeelBearCub’s, so everybody just think twice about crossing either one of us.*
(* N.B.: misusing “beg the question” counts as crossing me. You have been warned.)
Talkin’ ’bout my generation!
So we’re the angry violent criminals? Yes! Kids these days, don’t know they’re born, they have it so soft 😉
Leaded Gasoline is a popular answer to this, but lacking dispositive evidence.
Like all cohort explanations, it predicts the wrong cohort.
Go on…
I think it’s porn. (This is also my explanation for decreased teenage pregnancies and the whole “nice guys vs jerks” internet meme.) See http://yourbrainonporn.com or The Demise of Guys
Porn and video games? Before that it was television. And comic books. I’m not sure if radio ever had the reputation but I bet it did. Dime novels.
(BTW, we had porn before the Internet.)
I mean, maybe this time, it really is the particular form of popular entertainment which is causing the demise of society, but I gotta admit my priors are pretty strong against it.
Your prior might be off. The Amish and other Plain People are a living demonstration that some combination of TV, comic books and dime novels are causing the demise of society.
That said, the evidence on porn specifically is weak. Opposing it out of general conservative caution makes sense but then you can’t blame specific social problems on it rather than Modernity as a whole.
Given the context, I assumed the argument was that the greater availability of porn was responsible for drops in the crime rate.
It isn’t an absurd claim. There is evidence that increasing the availability of porn results in a drop in the rape rate, presumably because they are substitutes.
How so?
Yes, I think DF has it right. Both Nybbler and Dealgood seem to think that the argument is that porn has caused problems, but based on context, I think he is saying it has decreased crime. And I suspect he is partly correct, although only a small part. I find the decrease in leaded gas and ground more convincing, and just the general mileau of decreasing violence causing a virtuous cycle, as discussed by Pinker.
I’m not sure how a much crappier reference society is supposed to prove anything about the ‘demise’ of ours.
>implying previous forms of popular entertainment haven’t been causing the demise of society
More like the improvement of society. I want more alienation. I want more destruction of traditional family values. I want less births. I want less people on this planet.
Machines will fill in the economic gaps and we’re all good.
So if someone claims that TV, computers, and popular media are causing young people to breed less, my answer doesn’t involve scrambling to defend my favorite low brow entertainment, it involves me saying “Yes. Great, isn’t it?”
(But actually the real answer is the birth control pill so it’s moot.)
I think the idea was that porn is the reason for young men being less violent and lower teen pregnancy.
“I mean, maybe this time, it really is the particular form of popular entertainment which is causing the demise of society, but I gotta admit my priors are pretty strong against it.”
Your serve starts off our game of reference class tennis. I’ll respond with another reference class: that of addictive behaviors and substances. No one seems to doubt that abusing addictive substances (alcohol, cocaine, heroin) or immoderate engagement in addictive behaviors (gambling) can have a profound negative impact on one’s life. We also see other substances and behaviors (cigarettes, marijuana, World of Warcrack) that have some level of negative impact for many people. Porn falls in to the latter category. Tube sites are a concentrated form of Playboy in the same way heroin is a concentrated form of opium. The emerging category of “internet addiction”, I suspect, is basically porn addiction. (It strikes men 3x as often as women even though women use e.g. social media as much or more.)
I don’t want to try to elaborate the full argument here… you’re better off reading one of the sources I linked. There are truckloads of anecdotes about this online if you know where to look, and it seems like academia is catching up with folk wisdom.
I didn’t claim that porn is causing the demise of society, btw. I claimed that it’s reducing crime and decreasing teenage pregnancies. And also making nerds socially anxious and unable to converse naturally with women. (Women only sleep with the “alpha males” that are able to converse naturally with them, the way most men have been able to do over most of human history. BTW, anxiety is a common side effect of addiction.) So it’s a mixed bag.
” The emerging category of “internet addiction”, I suspect, is basically porn addiction.”
For some of us it’s SSC addiction.
Yep, maybe me too a little bit.
Check it out, Ross Douthat semi agrees with me: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/21/opinion/sunday/the-virtues-of-reality.html
I can’t find the citation, but you may have heard the statistic that only 20% (or something like that) of medieval men had children. Does this ring a bell for anyone reading?
(Edit: not medieval, not 20%, but:
http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/05/the-missing-men-in-your-family-tree/?_r=0
https://psmag.com/8-000-years-ago-17-women-reproduced-for-every-one-man-6d41445ae73d#.q7vfyjm22
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/through-history-more-women-have-reproduced-men-180952840/?no-ist)
I think greater variability of reproductive success among men is probably a historical constant, though extremes like “only 1 man reproduces for every 17 men” might also be historical anomalies of extremely hierarchical early farming civilizations or something. I wonder what the rate is like for hunter-gatherer societies which still exist?
People spending their lives on facetwit (or SSC) don’t seem to be considered “internet addicts”, whereas those who spend their lives on internet porn or video games are. So “internet addiction” being “porn addiction” may be just a matter of definiton.
Technically it’s your sources were claiming the socially negative effects (“demise of society” being hyperbole on my part). Nerds were socially anxious and unable to converse naturally with women before the Internet (and in particular Internet porn) was a big thing; this was the 80s nerd stereotype, and it was not baseless.
What about testosterone? Apparently it’s lower. Some worry about sperm counts etc. Though is it lower because we live in a less violent world or is the world less violent because testosterone is lower? Or maybe a positive side effect of everyone being poisoned by estrogenic plastic instead of lead is that we’re less violent?
I would think that the ratio of men-younger-than-20 to men-over-35 in the population would explain more than any particular cohort.
That’s an odd choice since it omits that demographic most likely to commit crimes. I find that age demographics explain 20% of the doubling and then halving of homicide. Nothing to sneeze at, but glass 80% empty.
My goof. (twice, probably…)
I was thinking of one of two things, and probably jumbled my comparison:
A. the fraction of population consisting of males ages 15-to-30, compare to the fraction of population consisting of males-over-age-30
B. the population groups aged 15-20, 20-to-30, and 30-plus.
However, I do find it odd that this particular set of numbers is rarely brought up in discussion of historical crime rates in the United States.
Another set of numbers that comes to mind: how does crime vary with the number young people who are first-generation urban dwellers?
Maybe people don’t talk about age demographics because 20% isn’t much. My comment that I linked to above was on an SSC post that linked to a Vox piece on a Brennan Center piece that proposed lots of explanations and put only 5% on age demographics. Surely that’s small enough not to emphasize. But the report does lots of stupid things, like only looking at the 90s, which downplays demographics.
What is the significance of first generation urban youth?
@DouglasKnight,
I don’t have a really good reason for my supposition that the first-generation children of urban youth were more likely to cause trouble than their parents (or their peers whose parents had not moved).
It’s the kind of thing I wonder when I see a graph like the one here
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/05/17/rick_nevin_murder_statistics_safest_year_ever.html
And I notice that the 20th Century had two large peaks of homicides…which appeared to lag after large internal migrations in the U.S.
That lag time appears to be about 15-to-20 years. [1]
Maybe I’m also putting too much weight on the idea of growing up in a small town where your parents grew up might lead to strong social pressure to not cause too much trouble…But growing up in a dense urban area in which your parents are relative newcomers might weaken or remove that kind of social pressure.
I don’t know how to quantify that question to figure out whether sociologists have studied it.[2]
[1] To my eye, the first wave of large internal migrations was the industrialization of early-20th-Century. The second wave was the growth of big cities and suburbs following World War II.
However, I’m willing to accept correction on the details of these internal migrations.
[2] I have seen references to studies about criminal behavior and transient populations. But I don’t think I’ve seen references to studies of how economic migrants and their children behave.
What do people here make of the fact that surveys continue to show that a vast majority of registered Republicans (as in 72%) unwilling to answer yes to the question “Was Obama born in the U.S.?”
Is this just similar to how Democrats might answer questions about Bush and his National Guard service? It seems different to me.
If you’re asked something like that you have good reason to suspect it’s a trick question.
Furthermore, it’s unfair to count all the “no answer” results as “unwilling to answer yes” with the implication that they think the answer is “no” rather than that they actually have no answer.
It’s not “no answer”, it’s “Neither agree nor disagree”
In other words, it’s correct to say that they were unwilling to say that they agreed with the statement “Barack Obama was born in the United States.”
And, I don’t think “I think this is a trick” is a good explanation. I am quite comfortable asserting that we would not have these kinds of percentages for other (former) presidents, certainly not ones alive when the questioned person was a registered voter.
Sure, lizardman constant and all that, but this is well past that.
But how would you do with “Is JFK taking orders from the Pope?” (pre-assassination)
You’d need something there was a genuine controversy about, and in particular a nonsensical controversy.
But there never was any actual controversy about whether Obama was born in the US. People might have questioned Bush’s bone-fidas as a rancher, but no one questioned whether he actually owned the ranch (and people would have taken the tax records as evidence and been done with it).
Taking orders from the pope is interesting, but essentially not provable one way or the other. You really can’t provide evidence, especially if JFK went to confession (did he?)
Whereas birth records are far clearer, and essentially dispositive.
No, there definitely was a controversy, it just happened to be nonsense. It’s hard to find a really comparable one in recent history, because a controversy being absolute nonsense is a rare thing. “A Catholic president will be subject to orders from the Vatican” was the closest I could find, and like you say it’s not exactly a great fit.
A controversy does not have to have a factual basis in order to exist. People will believe what they want.
@ HBC
Whereas birth records are far clearer, and essentially dispositive.
Where
a soul can be discerneda long-form record can be obtained short of years of struggle, when the POTUS finally bothers to obtain it.So how many Hillary supporters would have said “not born in the US” or “not sure” to the question in early 2008?
@ gbdub
So how many Hillary supporters would have said “not born in the US” or “not sure” to the question in early 2008?
I personally would feel a difference between ‘not sure’ and ‘would not say yes’. To me, ‘not sure’ would suggest that I had looked into the question far enough to form a definite opinion but (tentatively) concluded that the facts were unclear. But ‘would not say yes’ feels more agnostic, ie scarcely having looked into the question at all, just stating a general policy of not jumping to conclusions.
Hillary, Gore, Palin, Bush, etc, were from stable families well known (at least within their local areas) and (I presume) born in local hospitals. There would be wide continuity of family and friends who remembered their birth occasion, kindergarten, etc etc.
Obama had only sketchy hospital records, dodgy parentage, minimal newspaper announcements. The official record-keepers were not forth-coming with what little original long-form record they did (presumably) have.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of fraud. But weak evidence is not strong evidence, either.
Well apparently the wording was “neither agree nor disagree”, that response got ~30%, and HBC is lumping it with “was not willing to say yes”.
Regardless, that’s orthogonal to my point, which is that a significant number of Hillary supporters were birthers and a survey taken at the time when the “partisan” split was between Hillary and Obama would have produced a different result than this latest one. I think this bolsters the idea that it’s mostly signaling, rather than a case of “conservatives are uniquely dumb” which is how it’s being spun.
@gbdub I really doubt that significant numbers of 2008 Clinton supporters were birthers. No one in the Democratic establishment would have touched birtherism (Polifact if you doubt the obvious) and voters take their cues from that.
I haven’t been able to find any polls from 2008 asking if he was born in the US or not, but I did find that as of June 2008 equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans thought he was Muslim, which I think is a fairly good proxy.
http://www.pewresearch.org/2008/07/15/belief-that-obama-is-muslim-is-durable-bipartisan-but-most-likely-to-sway-democratic-votes/
I also find it interesting that in 2008 only 12% of Republicans thought he was Muslim. As of a year ago that number was 43%, which would point to pure partisanship as the reason people would claim something like this. Back in 2008 Obama was going against Hillary, and a lot of Republicans were happy to see someone beating Hillary, so they wouldn’t necessarily want to bad mouth that guy too much. A year ago, Obama was the main adversary, so people would take any chance they had to attach something negative to him.
http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2015/nov/23/arsalan-iftikhar/do-59-percent-americans-believe-barack-obama-musli/
Regarding your second sentence – why does it seem different to you? I think in both cases, the signaling value has far outweighed the actual truth at this point. And it’s probably one of those cases where we vastly overestimate the likelihood that a random schmoe with a landline who picks up for strange numbers has actually looked into the issue. “Well I heard once that he might not be… I better say not sure”.
Let me put it this way, a think a similar question would be:
Do you agree, disagree or neither with the statement “George W. Bush was in the Air National Guard”.
Do you think you would get those kind of percentages from Democrats for this question? I’m somewhat confident that you would not.
You might get similar questions to “Was George Bush AWOL from the Air National Guard”, but it seems like a different kind of question.
It’s the simplicity of the statement, and the easy to understand nature of the proof that seems at question. That and incentives at the time. Obama would still have been a citizen even if he wasn’t born in the US, so there was no incentive to lie about it, leaving aside the difficulty of pulling that off by essentially unconnected people, etc.
I don’t know, it still feels to me like you’re harping on a minor distinction to put up some anti-Republican boo lights.
As for why the meme sticks… Well, Obama is pretty “foreign”. And not (just) so much because he’s black, but because he was born in Hawaii (already pretty exotic, despite being a state) and spent a chunk of his youth in Indonesia. He’s not really “African-American” in the sense we usually think of it in America (descendent of former slaves) – he’s half Kenyan. He was raised primarily by a white woman and her parents – I’m not sure when he was first exposed to what we’d call “mainstream American black culture” but he certainly didn’t grow up in it. His background is pretty atypical for any American. (But that’s part of what’s great about America!)
None of this, of course, matters to his eligibility for the Presidency. But I suspect “was he born in America”, which is a factual question with a straightforward answer, gets conflated with “is Obama a foreigner” which is more of a value judgement. I think for a large chunk of the 72%, they are mostly signaling “Obama does not represent me / my version of America”.
People are capable of believing pretty dumb things, like e.g. the sizable number of people that believe Bush either was involved in or at least knew about 9/11. Which would be much harder to cover up than a simple birth certificate forgery, if you’re inclined to conspiracy. Or hell, the number of people that think Ted Cruz is the Zodiac killer, which started as a stupid and obvious joke but then people started taking seriously for some reason.
I’m sure there is some of that.
But, if some controversy started that GW Bush didn’t actually attend Yale, and then Yale released a statement saying “He attended Yale” I would expect that people might then switch to “he was actually a bad student” or something like that, but I really wouldn’t expect people to be hanging on to “he didn’t attend Yale”.
This is such a basic claim, so easy to check. And there was so much coverage of it. You really have to willfully (in some way) hold onto the idea that it isn’t settled.
Other Republicans/conservatives in this thread find the fact that the question can still be asked to be insulting to Republicans. And yet something like 40% of Republicans still answer “Don’t agree he was born in the US”.
Like, I might find it dispiriting that so many Democrats are still anti-vax or anti-GMO, but I don’t find it insulting that people would ask that question of Democrats in a survey and report on it…
Well, I certainly don’t consider it “insulting” to ask the question. And I don’t really see it in the responses you’re getting here – mostly my thought is “You can ask, but the result isn’t that meaningful… and I’d probably be a bit suspicious about the motives of someone asking today”, which is quite different from “I’m insulted that you’d ask!” EDIT: I didn’t realize quite how deep the conversation went after our little subthread here. Still, interpreting “I think you’re up to something, go away” as “I am irrationally insulted!” is kind of uncharitable, and I think the former better characterizes the responses you’re getting. Especially when you’ve got e.g. Tekhno literally doing what they are suspicious of and spinning this as “Ha ha, conservatives are uniquely dumb!” END EDIT
Yes, it’s an easily checkable fact. It’s also something where knowing the right answer has essentially zero value, while signaling the partisan answer has some value. That probably plays into it.
Do you think some of those people might be conflating “US” with “the mainland” (or the continent, or however you think of the large landmass and not the islands lying off it)?
Also, looking it up, I see Hawaii didn’t become a state until 1959 and Obama was born in 1961. People who aren’t sure of his age and birthdate but know he was born in Hawaii may be unsure if he was born before or after it became a state.
This does not square with the large partisan differences between respondents.
I would wager that the large partisan differences are just partisan signaling. Saying he was born in America is the “good” answer while saying he wasn’t in the “bad” answer. A very partisan person won’t say something “good” about someone from the other side even if it’s true.
@JayT
If something is both clearly false and transparent in its partisanship doesn’t its use only mar the reputation of your side? You’d think they’d be able to grasp the meta-level of “Wait. Even if we have all this obscure evidence on some guy’s blog that Obama was born abroad, liberals being equally partisan will never believe us, and it’s a side issue anyway vis a vis Obama being any good, as it doesn’t do anything to convince Independents that he has the wrong policies, so we should probably just drop it to avoid looking like a bunch of swivel eyed paranoid idiots and alienating people who aren’t already conservatives further.”
I don’t want to be unkind, but there’s a reason people wonder about the intelligence of conservatives as a group. Surely even a very very partisan person who was intelligent would have an awareness of what believing easily disproved things does to the reputation of their group.
I would agree with that. I think some people get so worked up over politics that they don’t think forward enough to realize that it’s ok to sometimes say something nice about the other side. I know a good amount of Republicans, even some that are of the Glenn Beck/Infowars variety, but I’ve never met one that seriously believed Obama wasn’t born in America. Perhaps my personal experience is an outlier, but I just have a hard time taking these types of poll results at face value, so I was looking for other possible explanations.
“Surely even a very very partisan person who was intelligent would have an awareness of what believing easily disproved things does to the reputation of their group.”
Individuals are interested mostly in the effect on themselves not on their group.
The example that repeatedly strikes me is the tone of online climate arguments. Most posters on both sides are insulting their opponents, boasting of their superior wisdom and virtue, and providing very few actual arguments in support of their position. Insofar as there is any effect on the debate it is to persuade any reasonable neutral to reject the side they are arguing for.
But their behavior lets them attack people, puff themselves up, generally enjoy themselves, so they do it.
Dan Kahan (Yale Law School) has done research on issues that have become markers for group identity. On average, the more intellectually able you are the more likely to support your group’s position, whether that means believing in evolution or rejecting it. It’s entirely rational, once we realize that whether your belief is true has very little effect on the world, whether it fits with the beliefs of the people who matter to you has a large effect on you.
“there’s a reason people wonder about the intelligence of conservatives as a group.”
An obvious reason. The people doing the wondering are unable to imagine that reasonable and intelligent people could disagree with them, observe that conservatives do, and draw the obvious conclusion.
It works in the other direction too.
Sure it does. Because Democrats like Obama and Republicans don’t, only Republicans bother trying to think about whether there are any tricks in the question. This is not rational, but it matches how people actually think.
Well, I don’t think conservatives can’t be reasonable and intelligent. I just think that lots of conservatives can’t, more so than for liberals.
Perhaps I’m just more exposed to conservative stupidity. The non radio talk show US media does have a liberal bias after all.
You must not know enough liberals then. Some of the things I see some of my liberal friends posting makes birthers look sane.
For a recent example from the FB climate discussion:
“we have ushered in intractable near term extinction (NTE) of most of life within the next several decades.”
That’s an extreme version, but a lot of people are predicting catastrophic results of climate change in the fairly near future.
In the same thread I had a very rare experience, an interaction with a reasonable and civil person who disagreed with me and pointed me at evidence, although it turned out that the evidence did not provide the support he thought it did for his position. I learned some things, he (hopefully) learned some things.
Lots of nuts on both sides but a few reasonable people on both sides too, whether it’s climate or other politically linked issues.
JayT, examples?
Nancy, I see a lot of anti-vax comments that are beyond ridiculous. Lots of alternate medicine using stuff like homeopathy, lasers, and magnets.
Then there are the ones that still think the USSR would have worked if it just wasn’t for the nasty old US getting in its way.
Probably my favorite is my one friend that sincerely believes that it would be better if we were to get rid of all technology and just live an agrarian lifestyle in communes.
Now, I’m not saying that these things are unique to liberals, or even that they are liberal stances. I’m just saying I see people with ridiculous ideas on all sides, and I don’t see a big difference in the propensity to have odd ideas.
“and I don’t see a big difference in the propensity to have odd ideas.”
It’s worth remembering that almost nobody has an adequate primary source basis for most of his beliefs. Almost all of them are based on what sources of information we trust, people we kno