This is the twice-weekly hidden open thread. You can also talk at the SSC subreddit or the SSC Discord server.
Altruisto is a browser extension so that when you shop online, a portion of the money you pay goes to effective charities (no extra cost to you). Just install an extension and when you buy something, people in poverty will get medicines, bed nets, or financial aid.
AISafety.com hosts a Skype reading group Wednesdays at 19:45 UTC, reading new and old articles on different aspects of AI Safety. We start with a presentation of a summary of the article, and then discuss in a friendly atmosphere.
The Effective Altruism newsletter provides monthly updates on the highest-impact ways to do good and help others.
Beeminder's an evidence-based willpower augmention tool that collects quantifiable data about your life, then helps you organize it into commitment mechanisms so you can keep resolutions. They've also got a blog about what they're doing here
Seattle Anxiety Specialists are a therapy practice helping people overcome anxiety and related mental health issues (eg GAD, OCD, PTSD) through evidence based interventions and self-exploration. Check out their free anti-anxiety guide here
.
Norwegian founders with an international team on a mission to offer the equivalent of a Norwegian social safety net globally available as a membership. Currently offering travel medical insurance for nomads, and global health insurance for remote teams.
Giving What We Can is a charitable movement promoting giving some of your money to the developing world or other worthy causes. If you're interested in this, consider taking their Pledge as a formal and public declaration of intent.
The COVID-19 Forecasting Project at the University of Oxford is making advanced pandemic simulations of 150+ countries available to the public, and also offer pro-bono forecasting services to decision-makers.
Dr. Laura Baur is a psychiatrist with interests in literature review, reproductive psychiatry, and relational psychotherapy; see her website for more. Note that due to conflict of interest she doesn't treat people in the NYC rationalist social scene.
Jane Street is a quantitative trading firm with a focus on technology and collaborative problem solving. We're always hiring talented programmers, traders, and researchers and have internships and fulltime positions in New York, London, and Hong Kong. No background in finance required.
80,000 Hours researches different problems and professions to help you figure out how to do as much good as possible. Their free career guide show you how to choose a career that's fulfilling and maximises your contribution to solving the world's most pressing problems.
Substack is a blogging site that helps writers earn money and readers discover articles they'll like.
MealSquares is a "nutritionally complete" food that contains a balanced diet worth of nutrients in a few tasty easily measurable units. Think Soylent, except zero preparation, made with natural ingredients, and looks/tastes a lot like an ordinary scone.
B4X is a free and open source developer tool that allows users to write apps for Android, iOS, and more.
Support Slate Star Codex on Patreon. I have a day job and SSC gets free hosting, so don't feel pressured to contribute. But extra cash helps pay for contest prizes, meetup expenses, and me spending extra time blogging instead of working.
Metaculus is a platform for generating crowd-sourced predictions about the future, especially science and technology. If you're interested in testing yourself and contributing to their project, check out their questions page
“Social media” in general and especially Twitter are leading to some journalistic soul-searching, such as:
and
(emphasis mine)
Twitter really is horrible. When I imagine why putative alien civilizations have died out, I’m not entirely kidding with the explanation “eventually someone invents Twitter.”
On my last deployment, I came to the conclusion that Facebook and Twitter were the tools of the devil. I mean that literally. The speed with which rumor, hate, and discontent could spread, devoid of all reason, was astonishing.
Have any of you seen this article yet? He’s arguing that the AGI community is rife with white supremacy, and the whole project of AGI itself is racist because it conflates intelligence with consciousness.
@Forward Synthesis,
Until you linked to it I was completely unaware of the article.
I just skimmed the article and it seems very niche in a “Somewhere, some people are wrong, I read about them on the internet and you should be worried about them!” way.
Since there’s no indication of how powerful and how common, I’m not that impressed.
This kind of association between Less Wrong and particularly Eliezer, silicon valley celebrities like Elon Musk, and the alt-right has always struck me as mainly innuendo and guilt by association, along with some willful cluelessness along the lines of “Poor people and minorities won’t care if an AI destroys the world, they would be no more oppressed as paperclips than they are now!”
I’ve never had the will to dive deeply into that sphere of thought, though, so I’m undoubtedly missing something. One of these days I’ll read Sandifer’s book and see if there’s anything to it.
Did you find the article persuasive?
No, but I can’t say I’m surprised. As soon as anything niche percolates into the mainstream, somebody is going to write a Hot Woque Take on it to harvest those sweet clicks as a matter of survival (see Buzzfeed and the former Oath, now Verizon Media, properties as well as legitimate traditional print media with all the layoffs).
What is the point of linking to this article? The thesis sounds difficult to take seriously. Did it persuade you?
No, I don’t find it persuasive, but I thought it was an entertaining hit piece. Your mileage may vary. Really though, it’s just the most over the top and lurid example of a narrative that’s been building recently about discriminatory algorithms, and that narrative absolutely does have to be addressed. I expect the same arguments this article makes to get louder over time because it’s only natural to apply “Who? Whom?” to a subject that’s about a supercapable entity that can potentially bend the world to its whim.
Yudkowsky’s Friendly AI concept is supposed to be politically neutral, but it can’t be.
Meh. In order to work on Artificial General Intelligence, you pretty much have to believe that General Intelligence is a thing that matters and that can be measured. If you claim that general intelligence matters and can be measured, progressives are going to accuse you of being a racist. If you don’t carefully defend yourself using progressive-approved terminology, they will take that as evidence that you are an unrepentant racist. And if you do carefully defend yourself using progressive-approved terminology, you probably don’t have much time left to do AGI research.
And if you’re a Person of Color, you’ll probably face extra criticism for not devoting yourself to work that benefits the Colored community, plus criticism from your family for not working in a more mainstream specialty with better pay and job security to lock in your precarious middle-class existence. That’s if you went into computer science in the first place, which People of Color disproportionately don’t unless we’re counting Asians as Colored this week.
So, yeah, by process of elimination, the people who do AI research will be disproportionately whites of the sort that Progressives like to call “racist”. And AI research probably is solidly on the SWPL list. We’ve been through this before, and there’s no real significance to that.
Scott linked about this a couple of times, here’s the latest:
via https://patrickarmstrong.ca/
Better late than never, I hope.
@David Friedman and anyone else:
I run a D&D game in which the primary cultures are anarcho-capitalist (or “anarcho-feudal” as I prefer to call them) and I’m trying to figure out how an anarcho-capitalist society would treat necromancers and intelligent undead.
“Are those corpses ethically sourced?” (Not my blog, just a really witty post.)
To clarify, while “ethical necromancy” (i.e. only reanimating corpses that you have legitimate legal title to) and being “vitally-challenged” may be victimless crimes, they tend to creep most people out.
More importantly, like cannibalism, it makes people afraid that its practitioners will go after non-ethically-sourced products (i.e. attack people in a dark alley) when no one is looking.
My best guess is that (1) it would depend a lot on the details culture, e.g. religious beliefs (and the Amthorian Empire is Christian, while the Karg tribes are Jewish); and (2) it would probably be handles something like the way drug use would be handled according to the chapter “Is Anarcho-Capitalism Libertarian?” in The Machinery of Freedom.
So I’ve been assuming that open necromancy, and openly being an undead, are legal in one particular province of the Empire and illegal in most other places.
Does anyone have any suggestions/advice/comments?
A lot of this depends on your worldbuilding.
Is it inherently evil to create undead?
Perhaps it is evil because you’ve bound a once-living soul to a decaying body where it exists in agony.
Perhaps it is evil because the undead you created are bound to obey your every whim in a particularly brutal form of slavery.
Perhaps it is evil because the constant need for fresh corpses gives you terrible incentives.
Perhaps it is evil because the particular style of negative-energy magic you use is an Affront To Life and has a corrosive effect on your soul.
Or perhaps none of that is true, because souls aren’t really a thing, undead can’t really feel, and you’re using the bound undead as menial laborers which create free wealth.
In D&D 3.5, we have a clear answer to this question: the animate dead spell has the [Evil] tag, which means that casting it is definitely unambiguously an evil act. In D&D 5e, the spell tells you that it “imbues the target with a foul mimicry of life” but it leaves the other questions unanswered.
Are undead inherently evil?
Do they have an insatiable hunger for the flesh of the living?
Does the process of returning from the dead somehow damage their mind, removing the parts that would let them ever feel joy or fulfillment?
Does the process of becoming a lich involve such gruesome, twisted acts that any who could perform them would be the vilest sort of evil?
Or is it a harmless life-extension procedure which really everyone should do if they can assemble the components?
D&D 3.5 tells us that “the process of becoming a lich is unspeakably evil”. D&D 5e tells us that a lich can commonly have “any evil alignment” but doesn’t address the process of becoming one.
—–
If evil is a real thing in your world, and if undead really are evil, then it seems likely that your society contains strong taboos against necromancy and undead, and no undead will be tolerated regardless of your political beliefs.
On the other hand, if you’ve decided that your society really believes in the principles of nonviolence, even against the undead, then it seems very likely that some of the wealthiest members of your society will turn undead to extend their own lifespan. Then they will lobby for legalization of undead and necromancy. More and more people will do this, over time, until eventually your empire is entirely undead rulers and living fodder-slaves.
And at some point during that process, yes, it’s likely that your empire will have one particular province where the undead are legal, and other places where they’re not.
——
Either way, it seems weird to describe necromancy as a “victimless crime”, unless your worldbuilding is very different than the standard D&D setting.
Is it inherently evil to fornicate? (Well, the Church says so, and I am a Christian IRL.)
Is it inherently evil to use heroin? (That gives one terrible incentives and corrodes one’s soul.)
If so, then I can see how practicing necromancy would be inherently evil.
On the other hand, none of the other things you mention — binding souls to an agonizing existence, keeping them in slavery — are necessarily part of practicing necromancy.
Of course, and I’m asking for something different than Rules As Written or even Rules As Interpreted.
Not particularly, although ghouls *crave* living human flesh the way a heroin addict craves heroin, and vampires crave blood the same way. But there are substitutes and other ways to deal with this.
Right now that’s actually an important issue for at least two player-characters and one NPC, who are desperately searching for a way to become liches without taking innocent life, if possible. (The NPC, though, will reluctantly sacrifice infants if that’s the only way he can avoid dying.)
Right, but previous editions gave explicit recipes, which I’m letting the characters find.
Perhaps, but see “The Lich Kings of Avalon – A Campaign Seed for D&D 5e” (written by an economist).
You’re right, Terramar is definitely not a Standard Fantasy Setting. (I try to make sure people know that before I bother to discuss the mechanics of character creation.)
you’re using the bound undead as menial laborers which create free wealth
Could be misused (and now I think about it, I read an SF short story along those lines) because is it legal to sell yourself into slavery (undead labour)? The desperate and the profoundly indebted could be induced to sell their corpses (once dead of causes other than “the guy holding my contract had me offed”) for such work, and unless there’s a limit (e.g. you can only really get five years out of the corpse which will fall apart after that) it seems like this would be an indefinite term.
Maybe you don’t care about what happens your body after death, but your family and friends might be distressed to see your corpse shambling around.
Local lords/the king/the emperor declares that as all the inhabitants are his subjects, he has a legal right to their corpses, and now all the graveyards of the poor get dug up regularly to supply a labour source for him (maybe it is now a crime to cremate or otherwise destroy a corpse so that it can’t be necromantically resurrected, which now means that even in death the poor can’t call their souls their own).
A thriving trade in Resurrection Men sourcing corpses for necromancers (instead of medical schools), with the same kind of results as with real-life Resurrection Men.
Maybe nobody cares too much if the undead are working in the salt mines, but maybe local labour cares a whole heap if they are displaced as workers by those who literally work for nothing until they fall apart.
And of course, the material wealth generated is going to stay at a certain level of society – why would it trickle down to the now unemployed masses who are now best seen as a source of potential corpse labour? Unless it goes into the kind of “bread and circuses” pacification of the urban poor that the Roman Empire engaged in, which is a whole other set of political and social problems.
You seem to have invented a combination of fears over low-skill immigrants and fears about automation displacing working class/lower class labour in one, congratulations! 🙂
Oooh, this point makes me wonder! Are the undead mindless shambling corpses, or can they still think and be conscious of who they were in life? Because if the undead still remember and can think, then it’s slavery to resurrect their corpse and use them as menial labour in the salt mines, and people would resent and rebel even more against widespread necromancy in this sort of use.
Unless there’s a two-tier system, where Pauper Thomas gets the cheap basic ‘undead shambling corpse sold for manual labour’ treatment but Duke Philip gets the full-on lich with mind and will of its own. And then, of course, there’s the whole philosophical question of “is this really still Duke Philip or just an animating spirit that has possessed the body and has access to the brain contents”?
Undying Emperor who, a hundred years after his natural death, still holds the throne and commands your obedience seems the kind of situation that would evolve into Eternal Undying God-Emperor to be worshipped as well as obeyed as a secular ruler, in time.
You’re still not thinking big enough.
For the record, @ing and @Deiseach, in case there was any doubt, I’d love to have either or both of you in my campaign.
Same for probably anyone else on here.
Thank you for the compliment, I like looking at a new idea and wondering “How could this go horribly wrong?” since I’m a bitter twisted cynic 🙂
I am intrigued by this campaign. How do you manage it online? And what would it take to get involved?
What does anarcho-feudal mean? At the national level feudalism can look anarchic if the lords only pay lip service to their oaths and fight amongst themselves, but at the local level the lord is a powerful ruler.
I don’t know either but pagan and immediately post Christianity Iceland had an interesting system.
For more on which …
Link is broken for me.
That link should have worked–I don’t know why it didn’t. Try this.
If that doesn’t work, here’s the link to the whole book, which includes the chapter on saga period Iceland. Not quite the final edition, but reasonably close.
By “anarcho-feudalism” I mean a feudal system in which each vassal (including individual peasant) is free to choose which noble will be their feudal lord, much the same way the way folks in Iceland could choose their goði.
I could call it “anarcho-capitalism without modern technology” but I think “anarcho-feudalism” is more colorful and clearer.
I sometimes describe the Icelandic system as “franchise feudalism,” since there was a fixed number of godord and they were transferable. But that doesn’t cover the non-territorial nature of the system.
I swear– by my reanimated corpse and my love of it– that I will never walk the earth undead for the sake of another zombie, nor ask another zombie to walk the earth undead for mine.
I swear– by my reanimated corpse and my love of it– that I will never walk the earth undead for the sake of another zombie, nor ask another zombie to walk the earth undead for mine.
Oh, Paul Zrimsek, you have inspired me!
A zombie version of “Romeo and Juliet” where the star-crossed lovers, being idiot teens, not alone commit suicide but sell themselves into undeath to some (unscrupulous/no it’s perfectly legal) necromancer in order to be together forever despite their families’ ban.
Which has a whole mess of complications as the families now have to try to get the bodies back/redeem them from undead labour and this adds another layer to the feud because now the Montagues and Capulets have stopped fighting each other and united to fight against the supporters of legal necromancy and whoever bought the corpses, which is equally bloody and messy as their original feud.
Also what happens if they do get the bodies back? Another philosophical/moral conundrum! Do they kill them again (so they can rest in ‘natural’ death) or let them continue as undead until they fall apart? Is it murder to kill the undead? What about the purchasers’ legal property rights – can they be compelled to give over the zombies if they don’t want to? (Now I’m imagining Paris set it up to buy Juliet’s corpse and revivify her as a zombie which is even creepier than the original play).
Yep, this one could turn into a cross-over with Titus Andronicus very easily, and be the smash-hit long-running sensation of the Imperial stage! 🙂
Zombies are overdone!
“A gay zombie struggling to fit into a homophobic zombie society.”
“Come on, this is the 21st century. Done like ten times. One of them won the Booker.”
That has actually been done, at least in the form of a BBC TV series from 2013 involving a “young gay zombie dealing with homophobia on top of prejudice against those suffering from Partially Deceased Syndrome”.
Truly, there is nothing new under the sun.
Yeah, whether it’s evil or not, people are going to feel really fucking iffy about their ancestors getting pulled out the ground to shamble and do anything except lie still.
You can wonder whether or not it is evil in framework X or Y; without further information about your setting, that’s a really meaningless question. But unless there are some very far-reaching and universal customs about undeath being acceptable, most humans are going to find the idea of it awfully revolting and will come up with any number of justifications for why it’s an evil practice rather than consider rationally why it’s okay.
Yeah, whether it’s evil or not, people are going to feel really fucking iffy about their ancestors getting pulled out the ground to shamble and do anything except lie still.
I could see it working in a way as a variant of something I saw in a documentary years back – Madagascan burial ritual, where the bodies of ancestors are exhumed at intervals to be celebrated then re-interred.
It could be acceptable to have a ritual where at intervals revered ancestors are briefly re-vivified for a celebratory festival of this kind, then returned to their dead (or maybe if undead, suspended) state. But turning that into “using corpses for free labour” is not going to sit well, unless you separate out the “corpse labour” zombies as something completely different and a penal punishment, for example, where executed criminals are revived to ‘work off their debt to society’.
Prison reform in such a culture would focus on disparate treatment (the poor being sentenced with capital punishment for relatively trivial crimes) and how this is cruel and unusual to not alone deprive someone of their life but also their natural death.
U.S government reopened for three weeks, no funding for further wall/border security yet.
Bets on how this plays out three weeks from now? Same song and dance since there’s been no actual compromise and less pressure to come up with one, Trump quietly drops the issue as a losing battle, the haitus successfully reframes the narrative such that further stalling is blamed on the Democrats?
Tortured and convoluted language in a funding bill that the GOP claims is totally a wall and the Dems claim is definitely not a wall, which is vague enough that one or both sides tie it up with lawsuits?
A reasonable ending, especially if the blame shifts towards neutral/Democrats, but why didn’t that happen at some point in the past few weeks?
My prediction (in the spirit of predictions): There will be no legislative compromise. Democratic rhetoric has made it politically impossible to approve any compromise that includes a single dollar for anything that can be called a “wall.” Trump’s rhetoric has made it politically impossible to approve any compromise that does not include a single dollar for anything that can be called a “wall.” Feb. 15 will hit without an agreement; Trump will invoke his emergency powers and declare victory; Congress will then pass (and Trump will sign) a budget including zero dollars for anything that can be called a “wall” (but plenty of trillions of dollars of other stuff).
95% certainty.
Meanwhile, suit will be filed within 24 hours; the entire project will be enjoined by some federal judge within a few weeks. (95% certainty). That judge will be either under ambit of the Ninth Circuit, or in the Acela Corridor. (90% certainty). Trump will tweet something nasty about the enjoining judge. (100% certainty). The pundit class will criticize Trump for his unseemliness. (100% certainty).
Everyone gets what they want. Trump gets to declare a victory. Democrats get to declare a victory. The pro-immigration establishment gets to declare a victory. The politicians who just want to get back to spending China’s money get to declare a victory. Trump and the media get to bash each other rhetorically over something whose real-world effect is zero dollars spent and zero steel/concrete erected.
I didn’t expect the current deal, but that is how I expect this will end.
With roughly equal probability:
1. Pelosi and Trump negotiate something that involves token funding for a Wall, in exchange for substantial immigration reform elsewhere.
2. Trump shuts down the government again in three weeks, and then caves again a few weeks after that.
3. Trump shuts down the government again in three weeks, and Congress passes a budget over his veto
4. Trump declares state of emergency to fund wall; courts say he can’t do that and make it stick
5. Trump declares state of emergency to fund wall; courts let him tap into some small pool of money/resources to build a really crappy barrier along a few hundred miles of border.
Black Swan events mostly involve catastrophic failure for Trump, e.g. resigning because Mueller indicted his daughter, or attempting an autocoup because Mueller indicted his daughter, or starting a nuclear war with North Korea to distract everyone. But there’s one in there for Trump arranging a non-token Wall construction via some clever plan involving eleven-dimensional chess.
I’d be surprised if it publicly came to that, that seems embarrassing for both Republican congressman and Trump. If there was a real threat of congressional override, I think the chamber leaders would give Trump a heads up to back out more gracefully (as in your #2).
If it were any other POTUS I would agree, but you just used “Trump” and “gracefully” in the same sentence.
Still, you are right that this is in the trade space, and part of the reason I didn’t try to make more specific predictions is that #2 and #3 have a fuzzy border that depends on how obvious it ultimately becomes that Congress is on the veto path.
General ‘this blog is amazing and I can’t believe how informative and entertaining it is, right up there with amazing things like the sequences and Unsong’ comment.
I’m not sure how much I should think when other people say ‘You are so much smarter than me’, my instinct says ‘but intellegence compounds on itself with excellent returns, so even small differences in intellegence can give big returns’ or just agree.
Say ‘thanks,’ then say something positive about the other person that’s on roughly the same level of implied praiseworthiness, same as any other compliment.
This is a culture peace-free thread.
…
(Not at all really, but I couldn’t resist.)
Thesis: an intelligence that credibly claims to experience something that it can’t articulate ought to be considered conscious. Such a claim is credible if the intelligence generates it without prior exposure to the concept of inexpressible experience.
So when I write a program that can output a catchall “Unknown error occurred!”, does that mean it’s conscious? It seems you’re conflating several things including the entity’s vocabulary.
A hard-coded error message would mean no more than would
printf("I am conscious");But if a program that should be able to give specific error messages started saying ” I don’t know, something doesn’t feel right about this input,” I’d raise an eyebrow.
That’s the same printf, where the memory has been corrupted and the null terminator was overwritten.
So for any given level of intelligence, the worse an entity is at articulating its thoughts the more conscious it is? If a human is an incredibly skilled poet and orator, able to put their deepest feelings into words, do you begin to doubt that they are conscious?
Antithesis: Accurately articulating experience is impossible, c.f. Wittgenstein, so this never returns ‘non-conscious’ as a value if you want ‘articulate’ to be rigorous enough to make sense for non-biological intelligences.
Proposed synthesis: an intelligence which can notice its own confusion and take steps to correct it, where those steps are either novel or were drawn from a source which the intelligence can modify, is conscious.
Bullet-biting: panpsychism is true.
I mean, you do you, but I don’t think ‘this rock notices its own confusion’ is a very defensible position, or that it’s going to articulate its experiences very credibly.
Proposed synthesis marks many existing advanced ML systems as conscious, at least for many reasonable values of “novel”. And in fact many intelligent animals too, probably even most birds and mammals, at least for many reasonable values of “noticing one’s own confusion”.
I don’t know enough about machine learning to comment, but I don’t necessarily have a problem labelling more animals conscious than we generally do.
That would be mostly just redefining the word to mean the concept we do more or less understand – self-awareness. It’s not the difference between intelligent and somewhat less intelligent animal species that we fail to understand. It’s the difference between a human mind and every other single information-processing algorithm we know of.
Well, ok, “conscious” often is used to mean self-awareness, but then there’s little need to invent ways to define it either theoretically or experimentally – they’re already established.
Earth may have gotten its volatiles because the collision which created the moon was with a sulfur-cored plaent.
Version with more sceince
The paper it’s all based on
My speculations, which go considerably beyond the science:
If this is true, it might suggest that life is rare. Or maybe not, if sulfur-cored planets are common and can host life themselves.
On the other hand, if you need an iron core (magnetic field to fend off solar wind) with a big infusion of volatiles, we’re very unlikely.
How necessary is the iron core? Venus seems to keep an atmosphere just fine without one.
Venus has almost no hydrogen and therefore almost no water. Sooner or later, every atom of hydrogen found its way into the upper atmosphere and got blown away by the solar wind.
This is somewhat true but exaggerated. Venus’s atmosphere has a water vapor content of ~180 mbar at the surface, Earth’s atmosphere averages ~250 mbar. The real differences are, first, Venus has an extra 93,000 mbar of carbon dioxide, which makes its atmosphere relatively drier than Earth’s, and second, Venus doesn’t have any liquid water under the atmosphere. These are driven primarily by runaway greenhouse effect, with water loss being aggravated by solar UV irradiation; solar wind impact is a secondary effect.
I was thinking about the magnetic field protecting from excessive mutation rather than hanging on to the atmosphere.
Was Maduro’s election in Venezuela fair? I have been in two different filter bubbles, one saying obviously yes, the other saying obviously no, and neither felt any need to defend their decision or even consider it needing proving.
I don’t need a discussion about how Maduro sucks. I know that one already.
In which bubble do people think the election was obviously fair?
Earlier today I read this comment, which prompted me to search, and this is the first article I came across:
https://newint.org/features/web-exclusive/2018/05/15/venezuela-presidential-election
From it, I quote:
I briefly looked for, and failed to find, online video evidence that it is really so.
I’m leaving this topic with a proverbial shrug of shoulders.
Voting system != electoral system
Yeah, this seems relevant https://xkcd.com/538/
Everyone knows that voting system does not = electoral system. I just brought to the table the specific information I had.
<frustration>
I wish we had a system like that in the US.
Neither. It was an election rendered meaningless by the opposition’s decision to not participate.
… after several of its leading candidates were disqualified on dubious grounds.
Popular opposition candidates were banned from participating, so no fairer than Bolsonaro’s election in Brazil. I’m not a big believer in the mystical healing power of elections so it seems less relevant to me than who has the Mandate of Heaven. But if you do believe in Democracy and the Popular Will it seems like you should trust the People not to vote for corrupt officials, rather than banning them from elections because the government claims they are corrupt.
Do you think someone currently serving a jail sentence should be free to run for office? I believe that was the issue in Brazil.
I seem to remember a mayor of Boston getting reelected from jail once.
Why not?
Jailing politicians is a very easy way of silencing political opponents. This is a practice of every dictatorship ever.
If people really elect a guy who is in jail, well, it will be awkward, but I don’t see why that would be that bad. But I generally have the view that all politicians have done shady stuff that deserves a jail sentence, and for the guy in jail we know the type of crime he made.
I personally prefer a competent thief to run a business, where he skims part but makes sure the business, to an honest manager who runs the business to the ground.
+1 ana
I do think someone currently serving a jail sentence should be free to run for office. This is America, after all. And Venezuela and Brazil might not be America, but wouldn’t they be better off if they were?
If you think a guy in jail shouldn’t be president, feel free not to vote for him. If your fellow citizens agree with you, he won’t win the election. This is the idea behind democracy, that the people will make good choices. If you can’t even trust the people not to elect convicted criminals, why do you trust them with your government at all?
@suntzuanime
A guy in prison did run for President of the U.S.A., and he got 3.4% of the vote while he was still behind bars.
Plumber beat me to it.
That said, that was a receding tide. Debs commanded almost double that amount eight years before.
Am I mistaken in remembering that a mayor of Boston got elected from prison?
I do think someone currently serving a jail sentence should be free to run for office.
Put him in to get him out!
You’re probably thinking of James Michael Curley. He won his last election (Mayor, 1945) while under indictment. That indictment ultimately put him in prison for 5 months, but he continued in office afterwards. This was not the first time he was elected mayor, but neither was he incumbent, so I wouldn’t call it re-election. He won his first election (Alderman, 1904) from prison, with the slogan “he did it for a friend.”
Googling “elected from jail” produces lots of 21st century examples.
Bolsonaro wasn’t an incumbent when Lula was jailed, nor was his party in power, and Rousseff (the president when the investigation against Lula was started) tried to shield Lula. So, unlike in Venezuela’s case, it doesn’t seem likely that it had political motives (and definitely not the sort where the incumbent jails the opposition leaders).
The pro-Lula Brazilians I know see it as basically a judicial coup. The president tried to shield him but the president is not the only force with power in Brazilian politics.
Like imagine if in summer of 2016 Comey had decided a reasonable prosecutor would pursue a case against Hillary Clinton after all, and she wound up in jail and disqualified from the 2016 election. Would that feel fair to the Clintonites, do you think?
To the Clintonites, no.To an outside observer, possibly.
So then the question is, is your democracy being run by its people, or by outside observers?
@suntzuanime I’d say that the elections are fair if the candidate in question was imprisoned (and thus disqualified) with due process and without political motives, unfair otherwise. Of course this means that we often cannot determine with 100% certainty if an election was fair or not. I don’t have a strong position on whether a criminal conviction should disqualify a candidate, I lean towards not, but if a country has a rule that it does, that doesn’t make the election unfair if the trial was fair.
Most of us on SSC are outsiders when we talk about whether Venezuelan or Brazilian elections were fair. Supporters of the disqualified candidate are likely to be biased towards thinking that the process was biased or it had political motives, even when an objective observer would say it wasn’t.
I only read about it on Wikipedia, which avoided taking sides. But it does cite a poll saying that 79.9% of Venezuelans want Maduro to step down, which doesn’t look like the kind of number someone who just won an election should have.
The government shutdown is starting to bite. La Guardia has been shut down for lack of air traffic controllers.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-47006907
Here’s a hypothetical: how much capacity could the system support with no ATC staff at all? I mean, if there were enough space between planes, just having the crews looking out and communicating with other planes would be enough to keep things safe. That’s how things run at smaller airports, and for low enough volumes it works fine.
How small are you thinking? I grew up near PSC, which I would consider pretty tiny, and I know that they had air traffic controllers (my parents were friends with several, by random coincidence).
Very small. The sort of place that caters to recreational pilots, with maybe a bit of flight instruction and the occasional business jet. No scheduled flights.
Places like this:
https://www.google.ca/maps/place/Eagle+Ct,+California+94514,+USA/@37.829316,-121.6298602,17z
I’m not sure it would work at all. The big difference is that most planes who operate in uncontrolled airspace are fairly slow. A 737 is bigger than a Cessna, but it’s also going much faster. Overall, I think that’s going to reduce how many planes you can put through uncontrolled airspace over even current levels.
I assume this is a question of technical capacity, and not practical capacity? As in, if we factor in concerns over liability my guess is the answer is 0 for flights with passengers.
I expect that a modern airport like SFO or LAX could support one landing or takeoff per hour with no ATC support at all in good weather during daylight hours even with all due concern for safety and liability. But could it handle 10?
I think part of it is how you cope when things start to go sideways. So you have your slow trickle of planes, 1 per hour to avoid too much risk and then something happens that means a plane can’t land during it’s slot, now you have a couple of big planes circling overhead with a third incoming.
If they’re big passenger planes…. lets assume a plane with 400 people on board, we can multiply by 8 million for value of a human life so now you’ve got billions of dollars worth of risk circling and no controllers and with those big planes even the turbulence from the hot exhaust can be a hazard if another plane crosses the path of one that just passed too short a time before…
How do you find yourself unable to land during your slot when your slot is an hour wide?
Avoiding a storm on the way makes you an hour late?
A delay at the starting terminal makes you an hour late?
Snow on the runway takes an hour to clear?
Bad weather, a spill of something on the runway, any kind of accident etc.
We went through this at Lancaster (KWJF) when it looked like sequestration might shut down our tower but not the rest of the ATC system. With the help of the controllers while we had them, the community determined that procedural tweaks could keep operations at roughly current levels without too much trouble and still acceptably low risk. That’s ~200 flights per day, no commercial airline operations, but including heavy tanker activity during fire season.
Then they changed their mind and we got to keep the tower, so never mind.
The bigger problem would be IFR(*) separation, which for the current system absolutely requires ATC. Now that we have near-ubiquitous ADS-B and TCAS, I think you could do enroute self-control with a modest loss of efficiency and capacity by tweaking the rules of the road, e.g. standard airspeeds on the high-altitude jet routes so that if you see 5+ nm of clearance when you join the flow you should have it for the duration. But approach and departure separation for high-traffic airports without ATC would be a bitch.
* Instrument Flight Rules, which is mandatory in sufficiently bad weather, above 18000 feet, and for all commercial airline operations. Some but not all of that could be relaxed while keeping the risk reasonably low.
Even in the terminal area TCAS might be enough for the basic job of not letting them hit while in the air. Spacing and sequencing of arrivals would be a toughie, though, unless they’re willing to relax the requirement that the preceding arrival has to clear the runway before the following arrival crosses the threshold, which I don’t think they will be. There’d also need to be some sort of solution for ground control, which actually tends to be the most challenging ATC position to work at the major airports.
Even if you got the IFR sequencing working, which might be possible with lots of new systems and training for everyone involved, there would still be lots of problems when things go pear-shaped.
Problems on the ground like FOD (foreign object debris), braking action tests, gate delays, windshear, and the like all need someone central to disseminate information to the aircraft.
Emergencies, weather diversions, runway changes and runway closures need someone to take control and coordinate all the diverting and holds. There isn’t enough bandwidth on a single frequency for the aircraft to sort that stuff out between them, and to make matters worse a lot of pilots at international airports have poor English anyway.
It would be an interesting experiment though, and I’ve often thought it would be cool to simulate this sort of stuff. Designing the systems to make it work would be pretty fun.
I’m sorry but 5 nanometers clearance between aircraft just doesn’t seem like enough to me
I think this would’ve worked better if you’d pulled out the relevant quote:
What is the smallest amount of money that would make a meaningful permanent change in your life?
You are given the money by an anonymous benefactor, tax free and obligation free.
What sum is the smallest that still makes a difference?
This mostly depends on our definitions of “meaningful” and “permanent”. I think this would be a better question if you got more concrete, like- what amount of money do you think you’d need to receive now to make you rate your current life (subjectively) 10% better a year from now? (just an example, but at least they are comparable!)
Yesterday a coworker handed me $116 that I won from a fantasy football tournament that I had more-or-less forgotten I was still owed money from. It pleased me, but I stuck it in my wallet and didn’t apply it immediately to a debt or anything, so I think it’s clear that $116 wouldn’t count as very significant to me by most standards. I’m tempted to say $1000, but I think that’s the “nice round number” fallacy in action.
Several million dollars; say $5 million. If it’s not enough to retire on at my current standard of living, it can’t make a meaningful permanent change.
I’m kind of in the same boat. A bit more money wouldn’t make a real difference; it needs to be enough money that I could change my life. Though if I wouldn’t have to work, I’d be willing to accept a significantly lower quality of life in other respects, so my sum is lower than yours, though I don’t know by how much.
I agree with this. Even if I were given enough to pay off my house, great, that frees up ~$1500 a month, but I still gotta punch the clock.
That seems like a high standard. An extra $1,500 per month starting now would seem like it would permanently change your material circumstances even if you still have to work for it.
Nicer things, better vacations, and the security that comes with knowing you won’t lose your home if your income stops for any extended period for whatever reason.
Enough to pay off all forms of debt and stash a decent savings to have as a safety net for unexpected expenses, so probably a little north of $100k.
For a really permanent and life changing gift, make it something like $300k or $350k and I can also buy a decent house cash in the area where I work which would definitely be a drastic, life changing improvement.
I’m going with $120,000–a down payment on a home around here. I can cover monthly payments fine, but that’s a big chunk to save up, I’m not comfortable with zero-down type loans.
Alternatively, a job offer in a state with a lower CoL.
Yep, seconding “enough for a down payment.”
I’ve been putting off a lot of projects because I’m waiting to get into a more confidently permanent living situation. Buying furniture/appliances, hosting parties, practicing instruments, etc.
Depends on what you mean by meaningful, and how long of a timescale is covered by “permanent”.
At various orders of magnitude:
Around $1000 to $2000, I’d likely stuff it in savings and forget about it. (I got something not-quite-expected, at about this order of magnitude, a month after sold one house and bought another. It was the escrow cash-out from the house I sold.)
Around $5000, I’d likely put half of it to pay ahead the mortgage, and set aside half so I don’t have to save for vacation travel in the coming year. Meaningful? Permanent? I’ve just chopped a noticeable amount off the end of paying the mortgage on my house, but that won’t be realized for many years.
Around $10000, I’d likely earmark it, so that I can purchase my next car sooner. Meaningful, and for a period of a few years. But not quite permanent.
(If I instead decide to drop that into paying down the mortgage, or use it to max out my IRA contributions this year, it looks like a version of the above…but the savings realized by that strategy would likely end up being put towards the next car, anways.)
Things start getting serious in the range $20000 to $50000. I’d put huge amounts into investments. Still not immediate, but a permanent decrease in my need to save for retirement.
If the range is $100000 to $200000, I start looking more at retirement investments. However, I think I’d also do some number-crunching to see if I get a better ROI from paying down most of my mortgage, then re-financing. The decrease in monthly on the mortgage would be very nice. The upper end of this range allows me to pay the debt off on my house entirely. Permanent and meaningful, but not quite as life-altering as a higher amount would be.
When the range climbs above $500000, the plan includes paying off the mortgage, then split the remainder between index fund investments and real-estate investments. We’re still not in the range of take this job and shove it!, but we are in the range where the future is markedly different.
Above millions of dollars, the plan doesn’t look that different…but the range of new things that can be invested in grows significantly.
The biggest change is when the gift runs into the range at which I no longer have to work. That range is much larger, but I’m not sure how much larger.
I’m thinking that about $10,000 would be the lowest. I agree with the definition of “meaningful” and “permanent” make a big difference overall though. An extra ~$10,000 would result in currently unexpected house remodeling which would increase the value of my home and likely increase my enjoyment of my home (permanent/meaningful is stretched a little bit here). Alternately, buying a vehicle or removing a payment – those also stretch “permanent” but if you include the knock-on effects of saving several hundred dollars a month for several years, I think that qualifies. Certainly all of these gains could be reversed fairly easily, but I can’t think of an amount of money that fits [cannot be reversed] in an overly strict definition.
If we don’t stretch “permanent” very much… a few hundred thousand? I think at that level, while I would definitely still have to work (and probably until the same retirement age), the only expense that would really threaten to bankrupt us would be a combination [loss of employment]+[large medical bill]. That would result in enough freedom to make meaningfully different choices in life.
I’m going to call it $3,000
That, applied directly to my mortgage, jumps me forward just about a year in getting it paid off, which translates to a year earlier and an extra $10k for buying the next investment property, which is my plan for snowballing into fabulous and luxurious future financial security.
I’m going through a bankruptcy, so for $40,000 I could avoid the bankruptcy and get the same result without the credit hit. That would long term allow me to buy a house sooner, so certainly meaningful. Any amount less than that, I’m better off continuing bankruptcy, and those assets would get seized to pay debts anyways
At minimum, enough to pay off my mortgage and student loans (I would then be debt free).
Probably my student loans plus the down payment on an NYC apartment. Call it $400k. It wouldn’t be a billion dollars life changing, but it would meaningfully alter the trajectory.
I always figured I would never buy a lottery ticket that didn’t pay at least $1 million, because any less than that wouldn’t make a meaningful change on my life (I could retire). But I said this some years ago, so with inflation it might now be $2 million.
Actually I have never gotten around to buying even a high jackpot lottery ticket, because it always seemed like too much trouble to figure them out. Obviously I am not a gambling type.
Other than insta-retirement, the other thing I can think of that would make a large, permanent difference in my quality of life would be something that made travel much easier. An entry-level NetJets card starts in the neighborhood of $150k/year and I think I’d need to have at least $10M in the bank before I thought that that was a reasonable way to spend money.
This question can’t be answered because you could then ask “why wouldn’t X – 0.01 make a meaningful permanent change?” To resolve that, you would have to define a threshhold and probably something like “just above this threshhold it has a 50% chance of changing my life (or changes my life by 50% of a ‘large change’) and just below it 49.99%”. You won’t be able to measure it to such accuracy, of course.
Even ignoring that, you get a related problem where things can affect your life in various amounts. There is probably a range of houses of different quality I could buy, for instance, with price smoothly increasing within that range.
About $5000 to spend on some hearing aids. At 37 my hearing loss has become significant enough that it’s affecting my employment prospects, and causing me to isolate myself from social situations due to embarrassment at constantly needing to ask people to repeat themselves or pretend I heard them when I didn’t. I’ve never been regularly exposed to the kind of noise that causes hearing damage, but my father’s hearing deteriorated in much the same way post-30, so I guess it’s just bad genetics.
It might be worth considering PSAPs, which the AARP has reported work “about as well as hearing aids” for some people.
Enough to pay off my mortgage: ~£90,000. At that point, I’d (at a pinch) be able to live off my lodger’s rent, which would give a satisfying level of financial stability. I could find a job I really liked and start saving money really fast. And still have enough to increase my charity donations.
The next really significant jump up from that would be about a million. That’s retiring money.
Meta-comment: it’s amazing how much house prices differ. I live in a comfortable, four-bedroom house, in decent condition, on a quiet street, two blocks from a big (Central Park sized) park. On a good day, with a motivated buyer, I might be able to sell it for $200K.
For me, enough money to make a significant difference would be high–$1 million plus. Enough to either retire, or retrain for a different job and live like I do now while training. (Not sure what I’d do, but something else.)
@SamChevre
We bought our 1,121 square feet, two bedroom, one bathroom house built in 1927 on a 3,850 square feet lot for about $550,000 in 2011, and we put in about $100,000 in roofing and structural repaits, getting it painted, and I put in a new faucet and water heater, this last year comparable nearby homes sold for $920,000 to $1,200,000.
“Meaningful” and “permanent” aren’t binary categories. Your question makes no more sense than “what is the smallest number of grains rice that could constitute a heap”.
I used non-specific words to let everyone answer on their own. For some people a single mortgage payment faster is “permanent” because it means retirement is closer.
For others, it has to be a substantial and immediate change. I enjoyed seeing how everyone responded differently.
Season 3 of The Good Place finished last night, and kept up the show’s standards of being amazing. Those of you who haven’t seen it, go watch it immediately. (Seasons 1 and 2 are on Netflix in the US.) Seriously, just go. You can thank me later.
Cneg bs zr vf fnq gung gurl pna’g frrz gb raq n frnfba jvgubhg chfuvat gur erfrg ohggba ba gur fubj, nygubhtu ng gur fnzr gvzr, V pna’g jnvg sbe vg gb pbzr onpx. Puvqv jvgubhg gur crefbany tebjgu vf uvynevbhf, naq V’z nyfb ernyyl phevbhf jub gur bgure gjb arj neevinyf jvyy or.
Snibevgr zbzragf sebz gur frnfba: crrc puvyv, Qbaxrl Qbht, naq Wnarg(f).
Thanks for the tip! I’ve been waiting for that!
ETA: Aw schucks, I wonder when it will make it to Netflix.
Season 2 hit Netflix just before Season 3 started airing in September.
Honestly, I’ve been enjoying Hulu’s available content more than Netflix’s lately; among other things they get new episodes the day after they air.
I just remembered that NBC lets you stream episodes through their app/website, although I’m not sure what their selection is like.
Unfortunately, my wife works late, and I work early, and I am going on a bar crawl tomorrow, so I will not see this finale until Sunday. 🙁
Seriously, one of the best shows on television right now, if not THE best.
I remember when it was considered a bit edgy to have a TV sitcom set in a Nazi prison camp. Now we have one set in Actual Hell. Go figure.
The devil hasn’t been edgy for awhile. Greatest accomplishment, etc.
At least it means we’re past “the devil is actually the good guy” stuff.
No, Netflix picked up Lucifer for a fourth season.
@John, you really ought to ROT13 that (not the Lucifer comment, the other one)
@Nick, uhh, have you watched The Good Place?
Season 1: Gur tbbq thl vf npghnyyl n qrivy
Season 2: Gur tbbq thl jub jnf npghnyyl n qrivy vf fgvyy n qrivy, ohg ol gur raq bs gur frnfba vf npgviryl jbexvat gb uryc gur tbbq thlf (jub ner ba nirentr penccl uhznaf) sbe frys-cerfreingvba
Season 3: Gur tbbq thl jub jnf npghnyyl n qrivy unf qrpvqrq gur tbbq thlf jub ner penccl uhznaf npghnyyl qrfreir n frpbaq punapr, bayl gb qvfpbire gung gur jubyr flfgrz bs zrnfhevat “tbbq” naq “onq” unf orpbzr fb ubcryrffyl pbzcyrk gung ab uhzna, rira gur aba-penccl barf, pna rire or whqtrq “tbbq”. Ur gryyf guvf gb Urnira ohg gurl ner fb zverq va ohernhpenpl nf gb or hfryrff. Fb ur qrpvqrf gb svtug Uryy, jvgu gur uryc bs n arhgeny Whqtr, gb cebir gung uhznaf ernyyl pna or tbbq va gur evtug pvephzfgnaprf.
No. I was just saying that if we’re not trying to be edgy, there’s no desire to portray him as the good guy.
You aren’t looking at it backwards, though.
Start with the premise that Satan is evil and that God is good. Notice that many genuine followers of God commit evil acts, against people they say must be followers of Satan. Note the cognitive dissonance. Make (potentially interesting) fiction based on this dissonance.
I mean, even Paradise Lost portrays Lucifer as somewhat sympathetic. A Fallen Angel that split from God for plausible reasons is a much more interesting dramatic character than a simple embodiment of evil. From that it’s a natural step to explore whether the devil had a point, and from there to, hey, maybe he was right after all.
Or the alternative of “yeah, he’s the deity of evil/temptation, but only because somebody has to be. Can you really blame him?”
“Evil” quickly gets boring as a character (it’s interesting to watch people struggle against Evil, less interesting to just follow around as Evil kicks puppies just for the hell of it). If you’re going to make the devil a character, he needs some qualities other than “is bad”.
Not so I’ve noticed, Nick. Wouldn’t watch it if you beat me with a stick, but judging by the cooing over the show and the Actual For Real Demons I’ve seen people online doing, the whole schtick of “The Devil is Just Misunderstood!” is still going strong.
Of course, it helps that the writers (from what I’ve seen people quoting) stuck in An Adorable Moppet to help with Lucifer’s redemption/vindication, and that the Devil is sound on things like gay rights (the really bad people who are racists etc. get their just deserts from the Devil, but he never hurts ‘I’m a good person’ type people who only do the ordinary average comfortable sins we all like).
If they tried writing “The Devil supports gay rights because he does think it’s evil”, I imagine they’d be lynched and the commissioning body burned to the ground. That would be edgy, but the wrong kind of edgy. Saying “Hey, Heaven is a bureaucracy staffed by rule-bound fussbudgets and God is distant/unavailable/gone/the real bad guy!” is the right kind of edgy (never mind that by now it’s so old a concept it’s got whiskers).
You might have an evil character in several different ways:
a. He shares our moral system, but actively seeks evil for whatever reason. He wouldn’t kick puppies unless he believed puppy-kicking was evil, but since he does, he’s all about kicking puppies. Ignatief in The Peshawar Lancers is kind-of an example–he actively worships the devil and thinks of the thing he worships as the devil (or the peacock angel).
b. He has a different moral system which contradicts ours in ways that make him evil. His moral system teaches him that puppy-kicking is a virtue, and he’s following it. Think Thanos from the most recent Marvel movie.
c. He is amoral–he thinks questions of right and wrong are meaningless and he just does whatever he wants or finds amusing. He happens across a puppy, and on a whim kicks the puppy because hey, why not? Think of The Comedian from Watchmen[1].
The only examples of (a) I can think of are people who are trying to rebel against society/show how hardcore they are by, say, getting a swastika tattoo or worshiping the devil or something. But this is mainly a movie-villain thing, and it’s hard to see *why* anyone would particularly do it.
There are zillions of examples of (b) and (c)–that’s most of the evil we actually see in the world. A person whose moral system tells them that mass-murdering their favorite ethnic group or torturing enemies of the state is a good thing will do some pretty awful things.
[1] You could think of this as an alternative moral system that said “the right thing to do is what’s in your interests/what you want to do right now.” For maximum villain impact, you pair this with personality traits or tastes that lead to horrible things–the amoral sociopath who also gets a sexual kick from inflicting pain and misery on others, say. (Alice Hong from the Nantucket series is an example.)
One of my favorite implementations of an evil character would be if they weren’t really evil, but rather had simply thought through the implications of various positions on an issue one layer further than everyone else, causing them to take the position everyone else thought was evil.
And then coupling that with a second character who has thought one layer beyond that, resulting in either the previous position or a third. Possibly followed by third and fourth characters as the climax nears.
Severus Snape is sort of adjacent to this, although in his case, it wasn’t thinking through implications, but rather possessing additional information that no one else could have had.
the chili scene was just amazing. It’s so ridiculous on the page, but dammit if the actor doesn’t sell the shirt out of it.
Aw, was that the end of the season? Damn.
I really want them to finish it now. In fact I wish they’d finished it after season 2. I loved season 1 and thought season 2 was really good, but it’s the sort of thing that should have a beginning, middle and end, and I just feel as though they’re going to keep milking it for all they’ve got.
Gurl’er tbvat nebhaq va pvepyrf. Jr’ir frra gurfr punenpgref trg gb xabj rnpu bgure va zhygvcyr qvssrerag jnlf. Jr’ir frra gurz fgehttyvat ntnvafg Gur Flfgrz, juvpu unf orra znqr bhg gb or gubebhtuyl synjrq. V jnag gb xabj jub vairagrq guvf flfgrz! V jnag gb xabj vs gur znva punenpgref ner tbvat gb svk vg! V jnag gb frr gurz trg vagb Npghny Urnira naq gura sbe gur jubyr punenqr gb raq. Unccvyl rire nsgre naq nyy gung.
In short, I want it to be a story, not a never-ending sitcom.
Most successful television series have the misfortune to endure beyond the credibility of their premise, either retelling the same stories to diminishing effect or veering into jump-the-shark territory. The Good Place, as you note, is particularly vulnerable to that fate because it has a story that demands an ending.
In hindsight I can take the season 2 finale as a tolerably good ending, and would prefer that to either ending here or straying further from the path in season 4. On the other hand, the next season might not suck; balancing the indications in that direction against three mostly-good seasons so far, the odds are not that bad.
Maybe it would be better for American TV shows to try the anime thing of having one season, with a story with a set beginning, middle, and end?
Indeed. And to be honest, I expect it to be fine. But it seems like a missed opportunity* to turn what could have been 24 episodes of awesome into 40+ episodes of ok.
*a missed opportunity from the point of view of good television, anyway. Probably not a missed opportunity from the point of view of profits…
Edited to add: I don’t have a problem in general with the “never-ending sitcom” model. Lots of types of show don’t need a beginning, middle and end, and many of them remain good for many seasons, or even have a lull and then improve again. The late seasons are rarely as good as the early ones, but their existence doesn’t detract from the quality of the early ones. It’s just not the right model for a show like The Good Place.
It’s really good but man is the non-stop talk about feelings and relationships tedious.
I have lots of questions about Warren’s proposed wealth tax. But first, is it constitutional?
“Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, two left-leaning economists at the University of California, Berkeley, have been advising Warren on a proposal to levy a 2 percent wealth tax on Americans with assets above $50 million, as well as a 3 percent wealth tax on those who have more than $1 billion, according to Saez.”
…
Warren’s proposal includes at least three new mechanisms to combat tax evasion, according to a person familiar with the plan. Those are a significant increase in funding for the Internal Revenue Service; a mandatory audit rate requiring a certain number of people who pay the wealth tax to be subject to an audit every year; and a one-time tax penalty for those who have more than $50 million and try to renounce their U.S. citizenship.
No. Direct taxes must be apportioned.
Furthermore Warren very well knows this.
Ah, so you think this is just signalling. Does apportioned mean the federal income from the tax is given back to each state’s government proportional to the state’s population?
EDIT: I just found this which I interpret that direct taxes can only be taken proportionally to population. If I’m interpreting correctly, does that means direct taxes can only be federally implemented with the same per person tax? So a tax that was $1,000 per person would be constitutional?
No apportioned taxes are even crazier than that. What Congress could do is say that it wants to raise 320 million dollars through a wealth tax, then it would mean that the wealth tax would have to generate $40 million of that (no more, no less) in California. So each state would end up with its own percentage in order to make the total amount drawn from each state proportional to population.
With a friendly Supreme Court, they could easily get such a tax through, by calling it a tax on income. After all, you had to get that $50 million somehow, and the Court has already ruled that retroactive taxes on income are allowable.
Infinite cynicism is boring.
Wait, what? I thought we didn’t like retroactive legislation.
Calder v. Bull (1798) limited the ex-post-facto clause to criminal law. Kansas v. Hendricks, 521 U.S. 346 (1997) eviscerated what remained.
lolwut?
And that is why infinite cynicism, boring as it may be, is justified. Well, that and Wickard v. Filburn.
Granted that it is unconstitutional, it seems to me that there is a trivial workaround. Set the apportioned tax to be a billion dollars per person, and then legislate a UBI of a billion dollars to any person who has less than ten billion dollars in assets. The UBI is not a tax and therefore not affected by the restrictions in article I, section 2.
If you want finer control, set the tax to 10B dollars and legislate a UBI of 10B to anyone with less than 1B, and 5B to anyone with less than 10B. Iterate fractally.
Is this any sillier than all the gyrations about whether the ACA penalty was a tax?
(Best of all, when the government goes broke, all it has to do is cut back on the UBI. After all, it’s irresponsible to hand out such a huge UBI when the government is broke.)
One the prime defending arguments of the ACA tax, used in the majority opinion upholding it, was that it was small.
This particular workaround would not fly in an actual court. Once it was determined that it was just a wealth tax [1], it would fall.
[1] You can argue “no no it’s not a wealth tax it is a huge burden with a selective rebate” all day. But the court won’t listen. They are very used to people trying to implement a banned thing by calling it the negation of something else.
It would be nice if you’re right. And in fact I suspect that it’s rather more likely, if a wealth tax is enacted, that it would just be done directly, Constitutional or not.
Does it matter that the ACA tax was textually part of the ACA, while I am supposing that the tax and the UBI are separate pieces of legislation? Has there ever been a decision that a constellation of laws was unconstitutional when each law considered individually would have been?
@Doctor Mist , In the litigation about Trump’s travel ban, even Trump’s earlier campaign statements were considered as evidence about his motives by some lower courts and some SCOTUS justices (though the SCOTUS majority held it to be constitutional). If that may count, then a rebate law (and politicians’ explanation of how this combination of laws works) may count as well.
@10240: Hmm. Good point.
I’m still curious about my question regarding a constellation of separate laws. If there is an example it would be very interesting to read about. But it’s true that for a large part of our history, the Constitution was considered a good thing by the legislature rather than an obstacle, and they would not have been nearly as inclined to game an end-around.
I suppose a more likely end-around would be something like the extensions claimed on the basis of the commerce clause or the preamble — just go ahead and enact the wealth tax, if necessary arguing either that it’s not actually an example of what the Constitution means by a “direct tax”, or else that the reasons for the prohibition no longer apply, so the intent behind the prohibition is not violated. (Hell, it might even be true: that the states ratified the 17th amendment argues that they no longer care about their sovereignty within the Federal project.)
@IrishDude
I’ve no idea if it’s constitutional but it sounds like a great idea!
Maybe have an “Alternative Minimum Income Tax” that’s based on lifetime income (including inheritance!) instead of just annual income, so that once someone has gotten say $3 million in their lifetime all additional income will be taxed at a 50% rate.
I’d support that!
So your view is that if someone gets a certain sum of money when they’re 18 from inheritance, invests it unwisely or gives it away, and then has no real wealth and an income that’s, say, half of your family’s income, they should be taxed at twice your family’s rate?
Yes.
I dislike gambling.
When their after tax income gets low enough then have a welfare state kick in support including public housing..
Cool story bro. I’m glad you didn’t do anything dumb enough when you were a kid to have half of your money taken away from you for the rest of your life.
By the way, my recollection is that you’re a fairly senior city employee of SF and your wife has some kind of white-collar job. What’s your family’s lifetime earnings at this point? Are you signing yourself up for this tax?
@sandoratthezoo
Close, I’ve been employed by The City and County since 2011, and my wife did have a white-collar job when I met her, but she hasn’t earned a paycheck since 1993.
Sadly, many years to go for that, and I may not make it, but yes signing up for the tax that doesn’t exist but I’d like to see.
If I earned at 18 what I earn now, and continued to earn that, I would now be just about where I’d have to pay my proposed lifetime earnings based tax, but sadly I didn’t.
Coincidence, surely?
@Randy M
😊
sandor, you’re really pushing me to support Plumber on this one.
So through no effort of your own you get a silver spoon and a golden platter, waste it all, and then expect sympathy? Maybe if the prospect of a tax such as Plumber suggests was in mind, your hypothetical wastrel might not blow it all on hookers and blow. There have always been foolish heirs who burned through the family fortune, but it’s hard to feel very sorry about someone born into good circumstances when all your life you’ve been one of the people told “No, sorry, giving you an extra ten cents an hour would ruin the company” while at the same time the CEO who drove the business into the ground is threatening to sue for the gold-plated contract that guaranteed him a bonus and pension and perks into the millions if they try to sack him without paying him all that.
And he’ll probably get it because it was in the contract and fighting it in court isn’t worth the bother, even though he did more to ruin the business than the shop floor workers asking for a very modest pay raise.
“Not having a special additional quite large tax” is surely a very broad definition of sympathy.
What if you omit the “including inheritance!” clause and instead raise the so-called “death tax” to punitive levels?
@Gobbobobble
Seems to do much the same thing, so sure why not?
I’m also pleased by a tax code that encourages the very wealthy to have lots of heirs who inherit more equal portions (no ‘primogeniture’).
For some reason twelve near millionaires by inheritance bothers me less than two billionaires by inheritance.
Is this a real problem? What ultra-rich people practice primogeniture?
Look:
Progressive income taxes are a good idea. We can quibble about what precise levels they should be, but they’re broadly a good idea.
Wealth taxes are not a wonderful idea in general, but may have some utility in some cases.
Most people who get wealthy will either stay wealthy or have the means to have future high income. For such people, Plumber’s idea basically means a weird, inefficient wealth or income tax. For some small percentage of people, they will become wealthy through some lucky event(s) and then lose their wealth through some unlucky event(s). Plumber proposes that because he has some inchoate dislike of “gamblers,” those people should be punished for life for their temerity to be lucky, then unlucky.
This is obviously dumb.
@sandoratthezoo
I suppose it is, after all I’m not in the cognitive elite, I just have an ‘inchoate’ dislike of a John Lobb shoe on a human face forever.
And you don’t distinguish between “he is much richer than I am and so gets a nicer life” and “he is stamping on my face.”?
You are considerably richer than the median human being at present. Should people in Africa or India think of you as stamping on their faces?
@DavidFriedman
I imagine that many already do feel that way, though I suppose how likely that they do depends on how the circumstances where they live have improved or fallen.
I know for my lifetime it seemed that in the earlying ’70’s they were less extremes of wealth and poverty, then an economic centerfuge started, and while on balance the total wealth has increased a lot enough have lower living standards than their parents that it’s irksome, not quite Kennedy’s “rising tide that lifts all boats”.
It’s odd, I see more construction cranes building more housing than I’ve ever seen, but I also see more tents on sidewalks, and under freeways than ever as well, so yes I do support more progressive taxation and the return of “welfare as we know it”, and yes I’m aware that total wealth and economic growth will likely be diminishes, I still judge it the right thing for this generation and “the least among us”, though I suppose if we all turn Japanese or Mormon that will do the trick as well.
I don’t want to go full Cuba (and certainly not North Korea!), but something more like Japan, Scandinavia, or Utah and less like Hong Kong please.
@Plumber:
Does it matter why the rich are getting richer?
Suppose, what might be the case, that the reason the top 1% have a larger share of national income than they did forty years ago is that the talents that earn the income of the top 1% are more valuable than they used to be. Forty years ago, a very talented CEO made his company produce a thousand more widgets a year for the same inputs than an ordinary CEO, now it’s two thousand. Forty years ago, a very talented author wrote books that gave great pleasure to one million people, now it’s two million. Similarly for other high income roles.
Do you still feel as though the high income people have a shoe on your face? As though you should resent their high incomes? Or does it depend on a particular theory of why their incomes are high?
There is a perfectly defensible position of, “higher top tax rates and more welfare.”
That is different from punitive taxes for people who have committed the grave sin of ever having had a fortune, or weird concerns about primogeniture. It seems to me that most of your attitudes are broadly about resentment, and only when challenged do you fall back to the more defensible position of concern for the well-being of the poor.
I don’t think that the tent cities exist now because there weren’t people in the seventies that poor. Rather, the city in those days just didn’t tolerate the ultra poor putting up semi-permanent tents. Plus the involuntary commitment of those with mental health problems.
@Deiseach
☺ Thank you Deisearch!
It’s nice to feel less alone, very much appreciated!
@DavidFriedman
Actually…
….no.
In most ways the current ruling/wealthy class are nicer than that of the past, they’re not hiring Pinkerton’s to shoot striking workers, “tractoring out” sharecroppers, et cetera, and most of them are at least a bit self made now and mostly coming from the upper-middle-class rather than being born tycoons. But it’s the scale of wealth and how many of the wealthy they are now as well as a somewhat reduced “safety net” compared to 40 to 50 years ago that I perceive the problem to be..
Back then stronger unions, higher top marginal tax rates, and/or social norms compressed the differences in incomes between the rich and the poor (the oft cited statistics of the ratio of average C.E.O. pay to worker pay being 22.3 to 1 in 1973, and 295.9 to 1 in 2013 for example), more and a higher percentage of Americans are living below the “poverty line” now than in 1973, while at the same time the centrifuge has gone the other way and they’re more people who are wealthy, and total wealth is greater, which is compounded by “assortive mating” and “double incomes”.
What I see is far more having second cars, overseas vacations, and frequent restaurant meals, while at the same time college educations, and (especially) single family homes are being bid out of reach for more and more, indeed (judging by the tents), any housing with a solid roof is increasingly out of reach for many.
I see a link between rising total wealth that is unequally distributed and increasingly unaffordable education and (especially) housing.
@sandoratthezoo
I’m sure Herr Doktor Freud could find many explanations for my economic, political, and social attitudes, I know that I have reflected that, given my temperament, had I been born 15 years earlier or later I’d likely have the opposite political alignment than I do, but that doesn’t change my leanings.
I’m pretty happy with my present circumstances, my resentments are chiefly of my past, especially that none of my peers growing could find the income to own a home near where we grew up, and that I was over 20 years older and worked many more work hours before I get get an older and smaller house than the one my parents got in 1973.
The percentage of Americans below the “poverty line” reached an all time low in 1973, so yes they were indeed less Americans poor then, both in total and as a percentage. Johnson’ s “War On Poverty” worked, and the abandonment of it is shameful.
I’ll add that my reading of The Spirit Level inclines me to believe that a more egalitarian distribution of wealth will increase overall happiness, and not just for the poor.
I’d be more inclined to believe you about that if the tents weren’t in every city I see (except the island city of Alameda, which I’m very curious about, and intend to make a “top-level post asking why).
That only explains California, where Governor Reagan had the mental hospitals emptied out, it doesn’t explain Seattle (I haven’t seen the conditions ‘back east” so you tell me please).
There are lots of ways of having wealth than losing it besides “gambling.”
One idea I had a long time ago was a lifetime income tax. Simple implementation: You get 10K tax free each year and then are taxed at 20% of everything on top of that. Each year, you add up all the income you made over your life, subtract out 10K * age, multiply by 20%. Then compare to the total amount of tax you already paid, and pay/receive the difference. If you stop making money, you end up getting tax rebates as your “average” lifetime income changes.
I gave up on the idea after a few years when I realized what evil people would do with it, but it’s not a crazy place to start from.
A lovely example of the fact that facts don’t speak for themselves, they have to be interpreted. Let me repeat the same facts you are observing with the opposite implication.
In 1950, 40% of the population lived below the poverty line. By 1964, when the War on Poverty was announced by Johnson, the rate was down to about 19%. It took a few years for the War on Poverty to be fully funded and staffed, say until about 1967 (I haven’t been able to find figures online–that’s by memory).
The decline in the poverty rate stopped about 1969. Since then the rate has gone up and down with economic conditions, ranging between about 12% and 15%.
(Graph of the poverty rate from Wikipedia. The pattern is pretty clear—contrast what was happening before the War on Poverty to what happened after it.)
The obvious interpretation of the evidence is that the War on Poverty ended the decline in the poverty rate, making it the reason so many people are still poor today.
If you are interested in a critical discussion of the War on Poverty by someone who was part of it and eventually disillusioned about it, take a look at Losing Ground, Charles Murray’s first book.
I am using the poverty figures from Wikipedia (plus a 1950 number from an old book by Krugman), that being the most readily available reasonably neutral source.
Defining how many people are in poverty is complicated, and some people argue that, if you calculate it correctly, taking account of government benefits, the poverty rate is now lower than it was at the end of Johnson’s term. Mother Jones has a piece briefly describing several different measures.
But the promise of the War on Poverty was not to make poor people better off by giving them money but to lift them permanently out of poverty, make them economically self-sufficient, and by that standard it was a striking failure.
@DavidFriedman
Those are interesting articles!
I thank you for linking them.
I’m reminded a bit of me reading that the economic fortunes of black Americans did indeed rise after the Civil Rights Act of the 1960’s, but they rose more in the 1940’s and ’50’s (some kind of magic about those decades).
I’m entirely not an economist, but how much of the decline after the late 60s you two are getting at could be explained by simple supply and demand of labor given the largest generation in modern history coming of age?
Issues (other than what sandoratthezoo said):
– It would hit the elderly hard. Not only have they accrued income for longer, but it would mess up retirement savings (traditional IRAs are taxed as income when money is withdrawn, not when the money is put in), meaning more of the elderly would have to work at high tax rates.
– It takes more money from people who get money late in life than early in life, even if it’s the same amount, so, say, a person who inherited $3 million at 20 then barely worked again would pay less based on this tax than someone who made $3 million by working and slowly getting better positions their entire career.
@liate
I suppose that a minimum amount of annual income (roughly enough for an upper lower-class/lower middle-class or, if we want to be generous and other tax sources are sufficient, a median lifestyle) could be exempt, but I do rather like the “Don’t gamble it all away” incentive, and I am aiming for something like the “Great Compression” of the mid 20th century U.S.A. when mansions on Long Island were subdivided, while at the same time millions left tenements and moved into modest detached homes in sweet suburbia.
Quite the contrary. The superconnected and hyperwealthy don’t care as much as the upper middle class. In fact, they’re disproportionately for tax increases relative to their income. There’s little you could put in the tax code to affect the Clintons and Zuckerburgs of the world. When America went into the 30’s with its sky-high taxes, those taxes didn’t destroy the 19th century robber barons.
The upper-middle class and nouveau-riche care because they are the ones who will be taxed out of existence. Elites at the ‘tippy-top’ have a way of perpetuating themselves and bearing the costs of whatever laws happen to exist. As with many things, such laws have effects on the margins, which is why the lower end of the upper class cares.
The investors who owned Russia’s oil rigs didn’t die. Much of the nobility escaped. But the kulaks were massacred.
It’s also possible that the lower end of the upper class sees that there isn’t enough money in the super-wealthy to satisfy the appetites of the taxing authorities. So they oppose the camel’s nose in the tent.
“It’s also possible that the lower end of the upper class sees that there isn’t enough money in the super-wealthy to satisfy the appetites of the taxing authorities. So they oppose the camel’s nose in the tent.”
Exactly this. ‘Oh, we only want to tax the 1%’, goes the cry (or the top 0.1%, or whatever). Then when that produces much less revenue than expected, the next step is, ‘oh just the top 2% need to pay their fair share’. And so on until the entire middle class becomes the target. We’ve seen this movie before. Only very naïve people can doubt how it ends.
It’s not the taxing authority that has the appetite problem.
Legacy costs (bond interest & retirement benefits), social security, medicare, and national “security”, that’s where the money is going. Which congressman has any serious plans to make significant cuts to any of those? For better or for worse, the AOCs and Elizabeth Warrens are the only fiscally conservative people around in Washington these days. No one else is even trying–the Republicans are back to voodoo math.
Yep. Warren Buffett complains that his secretary (upper salaried class) pays more in taxes than he does, then supports tax increases… on his secretary.
I’d argue that the classes are acting independently of each other. High taxes and regulations tend to create an hourglass shape: larger entities who can bear the costs of dodging or complying and everyone else. And it makes it harder to move from one group to the other, in either direction.
So the incentives of the upper middle class or the lower upper class are to keep taxes and regulation low. The incentives of the hyper-wealthy and powerful are to increase taxes and regulation. And I’d say you generally see this: the tippy top tends Democratic, even if the wealthy classes overall do not.
There are things we could do to target the hyper-wealthy. They’re usually not proposed because, cynically, Democrats are more interested in taking out the generally Republican upper middle/lower upper class than their own donor classes. And the Republicans aren’t interested in taking out their own donors either and are ideologically committed.
Quite the contrary. Warren and AOC’s ideas give more power to the government without cutting out the influence of the hyperelite, and thus more ultimate power to the hyperelite at the expense of the just-normal elite. Warren and AOC’s ideas don’t actually threaten the hyperelite. They threaten the broadly Republican nouveau riche etc.
Yes, they will be happy to give up more money because of a concept that progressive activists seem to understand very well when it comes to the poor but forget when it comes to the rich: the marginal value of a dollar goes down as you have more money. And not all things that have value are monetary, a fact that progressives seem capable of understanding when it comes to race and sex but not class or geography.
Let us imagine two individuals, Justin and Bob. They both make twenty million dollars a year and so would be hit equally by the proposed tax.
Justin grew up in a nice, upper middle class home. He had access to the best educational tools and schools and got into Princeton. He studied finance in undergrad and graduate school (Harvard, you know). Then he worked at Bank of America as an analyst, where the bosses liked him. He now works as a fund manager at Very Big Investment Fund Inc. His fund performs such that he gets take home pay of $20m. He lives in New York City and goes to trendy bars, cocktail parties, and alumni reunions with other Harvard alumns, including a senator and three representatives.
Bob, meanwhile, isn’t college educated. He grew up in a single mother household in a poor part of the country. Bob graduated from high school and went to work in a factory that made building supplies. While there, he noticed a gap in the market and used his savings to start Bob’s Building Co. Bob’s Building Co. now does a bit under a hundred million dollars a year, leaving Bob with take home pay of $20m. He lives in Kansas City, where he gives heavily to his church and takes regular mission trips. He spends most of his leisure time at barbecues, local fairs, and sporting events. He too knows a few mayors, but of smaller towns and no national representatives.
Which of these two people are going to be more concerned about losing their money? Which of them will be happier the more power and control the government has?
The answer is Justin because Justin has much more in non-monetary assets (his Harvard education, his social status, his geographic location, his knowledge of elite social mores, his political connections). The government will be staffed by people like him. In addition, supporting elite mores gives him something in return (access to those elite circles and acceptability within them). He also is part of a larger organization that will defend his interests whereas Bob has only his own company.
Warren/AOC is merrily increasing government power and raising taxes. Justin and Bob now make $5m each. Let’s pretend for a moment Justin couldn’t get carve outs or something and the tax works exactly as intended. (Hint: It won’t.) Bob has lost much, much more than Justin, who still has his political friends, his education, his social status… And these things become more valuable as money becomes less valuable.
Now imagine a world where Justin makes five times as much as Bob ($100m), so Bob would be making $5m and Justin would be making $25m. Who does this hurt more? The answer is the same as imagining a world where Justin and Bob make $20,000 and $100,000. It hurts Bob. Much more.
And this isn’t even getting into how people like Justin usually are good at getting control of elite institutions, like government or corporations, meaning they often possess power or monetary assets that are not personally theirs. Even a 100% income tax wouldn’t change that CEOs get to choose where corporate money goes.
(I do agree, by the way, Warren/AOC won’t get very far. The media loves them because the media has certain… let’s call them ideas. They’re not really popular in a widespread sense. Bernie Sanders did better, in part, because he was different from them in important ways. And partly because even Democrats didn’t love Clinton. But it won’t be the donors: it will be the fact most Democrats don’t really hate the wealthy or support socialism.)
I don’t really understand your argument as an objection to the wealth tax, assuming it is intended to be one.
If the poor and the super-rich are both in agreement about what the best policies are… then that’s fine with me? I’m glad they see the light and are in harmony? No ones philosophy should be “do the opposite of what x group wants”.
And your argument regarding the utility of a dollar being less for the super rich- doesn’t that just bolster the case for the wealth tax further? The point of the wealth tax is to make the lives of the poorer classes better off, not to make the super-rich be miserable.
Most people who come from upper-middle-class backgrounds and go to Ivy League universities become doctors, lawyers, politicians, scientists, professors, and the like, making solid six-figure salaries. The ones who become fund managers with eight-figure salaries, are the ones who really really really like money.
The answer is Justin because Justin has much more in non-monetary assets (his Harvard education, his social status, his geographic location, his knowledge of elite social mores, his political connections).
And yet, he took the unusual career path of turning those assets into money.
The government will be staffed by people like him.
No, the government will be staffed by chumps who turned down an eight-figure salary to civil servants (Justin’s view), or principled decent men and women wholly unlike that greedy SOB Justin (their view).
I really don’t think you’ve got a handle on Justin. Justin doesn’t happen to be rich; he’s not rich just by accident or circumstance; he’s rich because he really wants to be rich more than anything else in the world. Maybe he’s playing a game where they keep score in dollars, maybe he’s an Effective Altruist who is trying to do maximal good and thinks he’s better at doing good than you are, probably it’s something in between or completely different.
You’re the person who is trying to make him lose the game that is the only thing that matters to him, or trying to stop him from anonymously saving a thousand lives so you can publicly take credit for a dozen, or otherwise thwart his most important goal in life. He’s not going to be your friend, or amenable to your plan.
Bob, mostly cares about his family and his community and his God. He’ll probably kick in 10% for the common good, and if he trusts you to be a good steward he’ll probably handle that. Justin’s friends who became doctors and professors, ditto. You’ll need a few hundred of them to match Justin’s fortune, but that’s probably still the path of least resistance.
It’s not an argument for or against a wealth tax per se. It’s an argument about how it’s in the class interests of the hyperelite but against the class interests of the elite. And how it will increase the power of the former and decrease the latter. That might be a good thing. Or it might be a bad thing with other positive results that make it worthwhile. But it has winners and losers and those losers are not the top of the elite.
It’s more of a reaction to the idea of a unified and undifferentiated upper class above a certain dollar amount. Understanding that will allow you to understand their reactions and reasons, which you really should do. Because otherwise you might end up with things you don’t want, like an even more oligarchal system.
Why is it, then, that Justins are much more likely to vote Democrat than Bobs? Why do Justins choose to live in liberal metropolises and Bobs choose to live in red areas? The empirical behavior of these classes of people is at odds with your narrative.
Out of curiosity, how many Justins do you know? Personally know, have eaten out with, gone drinking with? Because you are reading his mind to make your point. Your point requires knowing how he thinks. I didn’t get inside his head at all. I simply looked at how laws affected his social status, power, and money. But you seem to be impugning his character.
@Gossage Vardebedian
If I ever have met a “Justin” I didn’t know it, but I have worked for and even have had beers with a few “Bob’s”.
In general they are indeed Republicans (when they reveal a preference) and I’ve found the “Bob’s” (business founder owners) are both the best and the worst bosses.
In my experience it goes from best to worst:
Nice “Bob” > government > corporate > grandchildren of a “Bob” > mean “Bob”.
Working for a “Bob” is a real roll of the dice, but while the worst Bob’s are pretty bad, the nice “Bob’s” are much better by far than even government, sadly they usually can’t keep many hands employed for long.
What’s the actual mechanism by which the wealth being taxed is harmful (EDIT: I mean why is the wealth harmful, not why is the tax harmful)?
If Rich Guy is sitting on $10B in company stock, the actual money is tied up in assets for the company. If rich guy actually wants to use any of that $10B to show off and make the poors feel bad, he has to sell it, at which point it will already be taxed.
If it is literally money in a bank somewhere, it was almost certainly taxed as income or capital gains already, and any interest earned is already taxed.
If it is tied up in real property, then there are property taxes, and more capital gains if you sell at a profit.
If you die while holding it, there is a death tax.
What exactly is the upshot of taxing this wealth in new ways when it is already subject to other taxes? Can’t we do the same thing by say, making the capital gains rate progressive?
Short term, this will probably provide a temporary boost to tax revenue, consumption, and charitable giving, although this will peter out. Long term, it discourages investments.
Mostly, it probably just makes a bunch of money for financial lawyers who help Rich Guy structure his assets in a way that minimizes the impact of the new tax on his lifestyle.
The exit tax seems particularly likely to be challenged not just on constitutional but on historical and moral grounds; it is essentially the Reichsfluchtsteuer all over again.
And practical ones, depending on how long it takes to extract all your assets from the country.
I don’t see other countries being too willing to extradite folks back to the US just for them to be taxed a bit more.
Let’s also remember that when the income tax was instituted, it was seen as affecting only the extremely wealthy. Smash cut to the present.
Life began in the sea. Or did it? Now that there’s more life found in Earth’s deep biosphere (or rather, we figured out, that there is one), could life have evolved under the sea, instead?
From what I know currently the most plausible hypothesis seems to be that life originated in ponds near hydrothermal vents on land. The main arguments for this is first that as these ponds repeatedly (almost) dry out and then fill up with water again, very high concentrations of simple organic compounds can occur there, which is almost impossible in the ocean. And the second is that while the chemical composition of body fluids of multicellular organisms has a lot in common with seawater, the chemical conditions inside a cell are notably different, and apparently have a lot in common with what’s found in the water of a certain type of hydrothermal vents. Plus some minerals, namely pyrite, can serve as a catalyst for polymerization of big organic molecules. Here’s a link to Wikipedia, and there should be someone more knowledgeable here to provide more details or correct me.
On the SSC Discord a few months back, there was a discussion about whether the federal government should secure people’s right to legally transition (i.e. change their official gender on birth certificates, ID cards, and other government documents), and the general consensus was that it wasn’t necessary, since there are only 3 states that still don’t allow it. One person sarcastically remarked “what, should we worry that the other 47 states are suddenly going to make it illegal too?”
Well, does this mean that it’s time to start worrying? https://utahpolicy.com/index.php/features/today-at-utah-policy/19148-bill-bars-transgendered-utahns-from-legally-changing-their-sex-on-birth-certificates
Why should the birth certificate be changed? In general, the birth certificate contains data at birth and it’s not changed; e.g. it contains your birth name even if you later change your name. Why should sex be different?
More generally, why it it a problem if the government decides to use a biological definition of sex rather than a psychological one?
The two counter-arguments are 1) they were always that sex, just wrongly assigned at birth, and 2) we do this for adoptees, for various social reasons, and T* deserve the same treatment.
I’m not saying I necessarily agree with those arguments, but there they are.
That’s not always true. The name on a birth certificate can be changed when a child gets adopted, and most states allow trans people to change the name on their birth certificate along with their gender marker. Some states also allow people to change the name of their birth certificate just for getting a legal name change, even if it’s unrelated to adoption or gender transition.
As for why states should (and usually do) allow people to change their birth certificates, despite it being a record of information at birth: having a birth certificate with a different name and/or gender marker than the rest of your documentation (ID card, licenses, passport, Social Security profile) can cause a lot of problems for both the person in question and for the government bureaucracy that has to figure it out.
It makes some people really sad if they can’t change their sex on their birth certificates. Perhaps it makes you really sad if they can, but (a) I don’t think that’s actually the case and (b) it seems unreasonable to be strongly invested in the contents of birth certificates that don’t belong to you.
I mean… it seems like there is a pretty general interest in maintaining vital records, historical records, identity records, and the like. If not, why have a central register to do it at all? Just hand that function off to the individuals and they can tell you whatever they want.
This. My dad’s a statistician, and he’s talked several times about how a whole lot of statistical studies depend on accurate birth certificates.
Seems like the compromise is to allow changes, but keep a changelog.
I agree with @Randy M.
It seems like an update log, rather than a change log, would be the reasonable compromise. Don’t alter the birth certificate; that is a public record of a historical fact. (Which is another way of saying – that record doesn’t “belong to” the person, and they’re not entitled to do what they want with it – for example you’re not allowed to simply destroy your birth record because you want more privacy).
If something must be done for clarity, since society appears to want to recognize the change, then just append an additional document in the file showing that the person now identifies differently. Call it a second birth certificate if you want, when you were “born again” as a new sex or name or whatever.
A lot of states do exactly that: They’ll issue an amended birth certificate while leaving the original record untouched. And even in the states where they alter the original, I’m reasonably sure they still keep a record of the changes.
There aren’t many trans people, and it’s a smaller number still that want to change their birth certificates. If you care about accuracy in records, I think you should be more concerned about adoptees having names changed on certificates (and possibly just people filling out the certificates making mistakes).
I wasn’t aware this was a thing, and it seems obviously correct to apply the same principle of preserving the true history in both cases.
My level of ‘concern’ in either case is low.
LadyJane
Yes, if you’re born in Utah and had plans to get the certificate changed.
If you’re born in California or (I imagine) most “Blue” States, I wouldn’t worry about it, “There Be Dragons” will do what they do, unless you plan to move there and vote don’t sweat it (but I tend to view other States as other lands where things are just different).
So people shouldn’t be concerned about what happens outside their own country/state/city?
People shouldn’t be as concerned, for example Saudi Arabia (the first place I thought of off the top of my head) sounds terrible in most every way, but I’m not a citizen of there so what goes on there isn’t my business, same with Utah.
Other places are other places, I may think of them as examples of what to do or not do in California but how they govern themselves isn’t my business.
What about literal Nazi Germany?
@rlms
After literal Nazi Germany declared war on the U.S.A. the U.S.A. went to war with them.
What’s your point?
Before literal Nazi Germany declared war on the U.S.A. the U.S.A. was actively providing their enemies support of war–for instance transferring destroyers to the U.K.
Before Japan attacked the U.S., the U.S. was sending fighter planes paid for by the U.S. government and piloted by air force personnel released for the purpose into China to fight the Japanese. It was only the fact that getting them into action took longer than expected that resulted in Japan making an undeclared attack on the U.S. military before the U.S. made an undeclared attack on the Japanese military.
@DavidFriedman
All true, but both those nations were expansionist and judged threatening, unlike say Cambodia in the 1970’s or Rwanda in the 1990’s where great evils were done but the U.S.A. didn’t go to war over.
Maybe there is a level at which the evils done elsewhere inside their own borders are so high that war is warranted, I suppose a case could be made to invade, let’s say North Korea right now, but I’d be hard pressed to think of a standard that doesn’t result in endless war and most of the world against us.
The evils of Stalin’s Russia in the 1930’s were pretty bad, and a moral case for invasion could’ve been made, but I don’t think it would’ve gone well.
I’m not a strict pacifist, but I think war is bad enough that the case for it needs to be pretty strong.
The Axis powers turning Europe and China into slaughterhouses was a pretty strong case, but the U.S.A. didn’t go “all in” until after the Pearl Harbor attack (and my grandfather told me he was asked to be one of the “Flying Tigers” but he didn’t volunteer, he spent the war as a test pilot, his brothers though did go overseas).
Personally, as long as there are strong exit rights, other states can do whatever they want. Admittedly birth certificates are something that really do not have exit rights, so I’m on favor of the federal government creating exit rights by issuing their own birth certificate to anyone that requests that they can change, while the old state can do whatever it wants to with the old one.
Something like that sounds great to me. Or, even, the state can issue a new one and keep the old one for statistical purposes with a clear “SUPERCEDED” mark.
Maybe we should get government out of the gender business.
Delete the line from birth certificates, driver’s licenses, passports, anywhere else it appears. Make all restrooms gender-neutral. We eliminated legal consideration of race, we can do the same for gender.
This elegantly solves the issue at hand, but will do weird things wherever government overlaps with health care. Also, legal =/= practical, and we might want to retain the ability to assess things for disparate impact by gender for future policymaking.
Might be better to go the exact opposite way, and improve what we’re recording. Instead of hiding gender, track the history of gender and make the documents show the values they care about.
Birth certificates are recording a birth, and thus they should have the record of what gender baby was coming into the world in that birth. They have no bearing on what gender the associated person is currently: it’s a statement about the past.
Driver’s licenses are generally used for current identification, so they should show current gender.
Medical paperwork should probably have a full history, because it’s the kind of thing that could be important in treatment. If you only have space for one letter in medical because it’s a small form, then just adjust the label to “current gender” and put that, which reminds providers that if it might be relevant, check the full history.
I’m sure there are some hard cases I’m not thinking of though.
RPG discourse: guns edition.
What’s the most satisfying way to handle firearms in an RPG that has Hit Points as a stat?
GURPS, in its attempt to be universal, likes to use the terms “realism” and “cinematic”, with the implication that realistic humans are much easier to kill. However, in real life, a normal person like Kenny Vaughn can survive 20 rifle bullets point blank with no cover. Yet one bullet to the torso can be fatal, and this is what movies portray at least 99% of the time, if not universally.
So what do? Use hit locations and make bullets do modest HP damage to limbs but instant death on a head or torso shot to be “cinematic”? Come up with a damage system “swingy” enough to model reality? Or what?
D&D already has critical hit rules. You could make them arbitrarily complicated. Seems that some chance to insta-kill (e.g. brain/heart/aorta), another chance to take out of the fight but can be saved with immediate healing (assuming you have magic or modern tech), or “ordinary” hit would work reasonably well. You could add “walking dead” for hits to organs that don’t necessarily kill you immediately (so the person could still fight, but will die anyway without healing). If you’re going for realism you already need “bleeding out” rules (someone who is seriously hit continues to lose HP until stabilized) for edged weapons, guns would also be included in that.
The most satisfying way is to sit down and redesign the system so that it doesn’t have Hit Points as a stat. But I suspect you’re asking for the easiest satisfying way.
I will note than in baseline GURPS, a character with HT 15 has a better than even chance of surviving 89 hit points of damage, which gets you a good ways to Kenny Vaughn territory. To improve on that:
Hit locations are vital for anything resembling realistic treatment of gunshot wounds. Or any other wounds for that matter. But if you’re also doing something resembling a realistic treatment of morale, you can avoid 90+% of the hit location rolls by ruling that for any NPC/monster who is not Highly Motivated(tm), more than X damage always causes them to run away and more than Y damage always causes them to fall down unless there’s some specific reason to care about the difference between “fell down screaming and cradling their shattered arm, hoping you don’t shoot them any more” vs “…unconscious” or “…dead from a headshot”
Due to the high variability of gunshot wounds, really wounds generally but especially penetrating missiles with indifferent shot placement, avoid “Nd6” damage rolls in favor of “1d6*N”. Except for shotguns, which do it the normal way. This is one of my preferred house rules for GURPS, and I really wish I had thought of it when I was a playtester.
With this, damage modifier for shot placement where for each 2 points that you beat your to-hit roll you roll an extra damage die and take the best of the set. Except for autofire, where you roll once for the whole burst and each 2 points gets you an entire additional hit up to the burst size.
I think you want “hit point” loss to be sublinear with energy or tissue damage, to account for the observed fact that old-style military rifle bullets are not actually an order of magnitude more lethal than standard pistol rounds, but coupled with a robust critical hit system to account for the fact that a well-placed .22LR can kill just about anything. And possibly a dual-tier critical hit system where for PCs and Important(tm) NPCs you roll some specific result but for most mooks it’s just a fixed damage multiplier.
Or, you know, don’t do hit points.
Re: HP, my thought is that players have a revealed preference for this. Not only is D&D a supermajority of the tabletop market, but every CRPG uses them.
I note that GURPS is an odd case in that, with system mastery, you can build a character who passes their death checks 98% of the time and doesn’t go unconscious, meaning you spend nearly 5/6th of your health bar in negative numbers. I could see using a system like that but making the equivalent of HT 16 universal for characters (as opposed to “extras” or “monsters”) and switching to positive numbers.
As far as avoiding most hit location rolls, I’m thinking of a bell curve attack roll where one of the dice is read as hit location and another as 1dX*N damage. I’m a big believer in One Roll after DMing D&D 3.5 to Epic level. (Roll to hit, roll to confirm critical, roll damage…)
It can’t be revealed preference, because it’s not just every CRPG that uses hit points but almost every tabletop RPG as well. There’s been no real chance for players to reveal any other preference. At most, you can suggest that game designers have been 100% accurate in assessing an unrevealed preference.
Mostly, I think it is founder effect. D&D used hit points (poorly), everyone else did it the way D&D did it, and the more people did it that way the easier it was to say “we’re just doing it the way everyone does it”.
If there’s a difference, it is between systems that try to retain D&D’s kludge of “Hit Points also mean skill so that you can keep dodging just enough that the sword only scratches you, except when they obviously don’t, shut up, Conan has to be hard to kill so he has to have two hundred hit points”, and systems that try to make hit points really just mean severity of injury and then either make Conan too easy to kill or mooks too hard.
As am I, except that for some things you really do need a second or third roll to get a broad and detailed range of effects. So, and not limited to guns: Wound level based primarily on the extent to which the to-hit roll is exceeded. To-hit mechanics reflect Conan being really good at being where the sword isn’t. And morale rules mean that mooks mostly run away after a moderate wound and go down after a serious one.
One roll. If it’s Conan swinging at a mook, the one roll tells you whether he missed, inflicted a superficial or light (mook at -1 from now on) wound, or a moderate-plus wound and then we move on to the next mook. If it’s a mook vs Conan, almost always no effect or superficial wound, sometimes light (Conan at -1 from now on), and only on the rare occasion when the mook’s to-hit roll is exceptionally good do we need a second roll to determine hit location or evaluate a crit. Conan v. Boromir, still mostly one-roll misses or minor injuries but slightly more interesting stuff.
For missiles instead of melee, injuries will be sufficiently randomized from skill that I would want a die roll added to the severity side of the equation, but that can be a colored die rolled at the same time as the to-hit roll and ignored on a miss.
It’s still common in CRPGs, but shooters have been drifting away from it over the last few years — there are numbers under the hood, but no numbers are exposed to the user, and interface screw is a big part of how it cashes out in gameplay. I’d model that as a wounds mechanic in an RPG, not a HP mechanic.
I say it’s first-mover advantage. Or else it’s just simplicity.
To me the problem isn’t with hit points per se, it’s with hit dice/levels, so that an adventurer might have five, ten, or twenty times as many hit points as an ordinary civilian.
That’s a good point – a big part of the reason guns tend to work in Call of Cthulhu (or with the Delta Green variant I mentioned downthread) is that Call of Cthulhu PCs don’t level up. When most people have about 8-12 HP, a gun that does 1d10 damage feels appropriately lethal (but isn’t a guaranteed kill if you get shot once).
Well, yeah. Either Chainmail or OD&D treated Conan as a Superhero who fought as 8 men, while normal men went down from their first wound.
It wasn’t until D&D 3.0 that you could have more than 9 hit dice, which were perhaps already way too many.
The overall mortality rate for gunshot victims is only 27%, so you have a roughly three-in-four chance of surviving a single gunshot. However, if it’s a gunshot to the head, the mortality rate goes all the way up to 95%. Depending on what percentage of gunshot wounds are headshots, that could significantly raise the overall average. The mortality rate for a gunshot to the heart is 24%, and I’d imagine that would be the second deadliest location to get shot, so the mortality rate for wounds to the abdomen or limbs is probably well below 20%.
I’m not sure how much being shot multiple times affects the mortality rate. From what I can tell, the main risk is that each subsequent shot is another shot that could hit a vital area. While you could eventually kill someone by shooting them enough times in non-vital areas (via blood loss, damage to musculoskeletal integrity, etc.), that’s a surprisingly ineffective strategy, which is why you have stories of people who survived getting shot 10-20 times. Unfortunately, most tabletop RPGs tend to combat systems built around killing people through attrition, which makes them very bad at emulating the results of gunshot wounds.
I think the best solution would be to keep the base damage for small arms fairly low, but include rules for hit locations and have them matter a lot. I don’t mean the usual “headshots do 2x/3x more damage” rules, I mean something more like “headshots do 15x more damage” or “headshots have a 19-in-20 chance of just killing the victim outright, regardless of how many hit points they have.” The second best solution would just be to have a really wide damage range for small arms, so any given shot had the potential to do a lot of damage or hardly any damage at all.
It’s worth noting that the low mortality rates for gunshots is largely a result of people having access to modern medical technology, and it’s probably much lower for adventurers wandering around a forest or soldiers on a war-torn battlefield miles from the nearest hospital. In those situations, a lot of people with gunshot wounds would probably die from blood loss or infection within a matter of hours. It’s also worth noting that, contrary to the expectations of most tabletop RPGs, most people will not (and in many cases cannot) keep fighting until they are dead; a gunshot wound to the shoulder is very unlikely to kill someone, but it’d take the vast majority of people out of the fight. So a tabletop RPG aimed at realism should probably have mechanics for incapacitation, blood loss, and infection caused as a result of even minor wounds, though that would probably make the game’s rules too complex for a lot of players.
Wow, that’s surprising.
It seems like the general rule is that people either fall down from attrition (we have stories of people who aren’t even soldiers dropping after 20+ knife OR pistol OR .22LR wounds and surviving after being rushed to the hospital) or 1-2 hits. I think we can model this as “most people/animals go into shock easily, but PCs never do, and head shots with guns give 5% chance of a death save.”
I met a guy once who’d been hit in the chest by a stray bullet back in 1990s Los Angeles. He put pressure on the wound and ran six blocks under his own power to the emergency room, where they pulled a pistol round out of his heart, sewed up the entry wounds, and gave him a couple liters’ worth of blood transfusion. He survived in good enough shape to still be doing martial arts twenty years later, though he did have to endure a couple months of physical therapy.
Yep, that’s why there are hit location rules. GURPS (and Chaosium/BRP) for the win! 😀
I love BRP!
And I also love many of the GIRLS “Worldbooks”, but the core rules came out when learning shiny new rules just didn’t feel worth it anymore.
Anyway, D&D also had a “hit location chart in the 1975 Blackmoor supplement, but I don’t remember anyone using it.
Yes, GIRLS “Worldbooks” are cool. 😉
*sigh*
“GURPS”
Damn you auto-correct!
@Plumber:
Come play in my campaign.
Just as with D&D (or BRP) you don’t need to know the rules in order to create a character and play!
Just come up with a character concept and someone who knows the rules can fill out a character sheet for you.
And when you play, just explain what you want your character to (try to) do and someone else will tell you what funny-sided dice to roll.
@Ventrue Capital
That’s very kind of you, my time is pretty limited, I know “Roll 20” simply doesn’t work on my phone, how does “Discord” work?
Discord works perfectly fine and well on phones.
The problem isn’t really unique to guns. An arrow or a spearhead through the intestines can kill you just about as dead as a 9×19 round. It’s more a matter of genre expectations: if a cowboy, cop or soldier in the movies gets shot in the head or torso, that means instant death, whereas Conan the Barbarian can get pretty cut up in his battle scenes. It follows, then, that hit points probably aren’t a good choice of mechanic for a game that’s supposed to model cowboy, crime, or war stories, and that if you insist on using them anyway, they should be scaled such that a single shot can drop them to zero. Then add in cover, wounding, or “hero point” mechanics to give your PCs the survivability they need.
(If you do need a “realistic” gloss, though, the instant-death-bullets thing is a Hollywood invention — with prompt medical treatment, you’ve got good odds of surviving a single gunshot wound. Though your quality of life may not be great for a while afterwards, and I gotta assume these are mostly relatively low-powered pistol rounds on the grounds that that’s mostly what people shoot each other with.)
In D&D, at least 1e D&D, “hit points” were not about how much physical abuse you could take. It was the fact that, when shot with an arrow, the more experienced person can flinch or dodge so that the hit is just a Flesh Wound and doesn’t tear the intestines.
Various editions say something to that effect, but it doesn’t actually make much sense in the context of the system. Constitution improves HP, for example, and Dexterity doesn’t, which is the opposite of what you’d expect from this justification. Similarly, a cure light wounds spell repairs 1d8+1 hit points, period; am I to believe that the same first-level spell can close life-threatening wounds on feckless peasants but can only handle a minor flesh wound on a 9th-level fighter?
The old Star Wars d20 had separate tracks for Hit Points (which were basically what D&D claimed their Hit Points represented, dodging and flesh wounds and the like) and Vitality Points (which represented actual serious injuries). Normally, attacks would only reduce Hit Points, but if the attacker got a Critical Hit or the target’s Hit Points were at 0, they’d lose Vitality instead. It’s worth noting that characters typically had dozens of Hit Points, but their Vitality Points were equal to their Constitution, meaning it would only take a few serious hits (or even just one or two serious hits, if they were from a sufficiently powerful weapon or the attacker had a really good damage roll) to kill even a particularly tough character. It was somewhat similar to the system that sfoil proposed below.
@LadyJane
You have it backwards. Vitality Points were equivalent to D&D hit points, and were the ones used up first. Wound Points were equal to CON and were the ones used second.
Source: First RPG I played and am currently running a game in it.
Personally, it’s one of my favorite systems for resolving this problem. Also, it’s worth noting that non-heroic NPCs had special classes which didn’t give them VP, so you can easily build high-level stormtroopers which have the skills to be a threat to the heroes (stop laughing) but still go down in a hit or two.
I’ve played a couple of console JRPGs (yes, I know, they don’t count) with a broadly similar system. In all of them, the “deep” health stat was substantially harder to replenish than the shallow; you basically had to go to an inn to get them back, while the shallow could be restored by magic, items, or in some cases automatically at the end of a fight. I think the original Halo had a similar system, way back when, but replaced it with one where both kinds regenerate.
It had fast- and slow-regenerating health tracks, yeah (“shields” and “health”). Shields regenerated in seconds if you weren’t actively taking hits; health you needed a medkit to fix, which weren’t too scarce but also didn’t grow on trees.
The system was dropped for 2 and 3, but returned for “Halo: Reach”. I haven’t played any of the more recent ones, so I don’t know what’s become of it since.
Well yes, exactly. I wonder if this is the true cause of Fantasy Gun Control? In pre-modern adventure stories, characters get to take lots of wounds, while in cowboy, crime, or war stories, characters are either wounded in a limb or dead from the first bullet.
I can’t speak to the RPG aspect, but I can speak a little to the realism from growing up as a hunter. This is largely a problem of terminology. Saying “rifle” is not enough; it’s like saying someone was hit by a vehicle without specifying the speed or the type. From the article, Vaughn was shot with a .22 rifle. It’s the smallest commonly used rifle. The same bullet can be shot from a pistol or a rifle, and in both cases it’s going to have about the same energy: a little over 100 ft-lbs.
A .22LR (long rifle) is not legal for hunting deer anywhere in the US, and instead something with more energy is required. A typical large deer rifle might be a .30-06, which shoots a heavier and faster bullet, achieving about 3000 ft-lbs. That’s 30x greater energy, which is about the difference in energy between a fully-loaded super dump truck (80,000 lbs) and an empty Honda Civic (3,000 lbs) if they are travelling at the same speed.
My guess would be that the 99% movie death rate for a torso-shot from from a high powered rifle with an expanding bullet is more-or-less right. They exaggerate the “instant” death aspect, but the almost certain lethality is unfortunately not just cinematic. This make me believe that if you are seeking realism, you are definitely need to include both the specifics of the weapon and the location of the injury.
Good catch. I was wondering how powerful the rifle in the story was and missed it.
People don’t like getting shot. That’s why they usually avoid it. Thus your character can be more or less accurate, but your target will not be in a mood to expose himself. So just assume, that most shots fired will not hit anything or will be supression fire.
In the World Wars most people actually didn’t shoot to kill, because humans have to be conditioned methodically to instinctively and reliably do that. But that’s really lame for an RPG, so ignore that fact.
Guns are very loud. This matters mostly indoors. Implement that, how you like.
Machine guns, sniper rifles, submachine guns (mostly as defensive weapons indoors), RPGs, Carbines, Pistols, Revolvers obviously are guns which fit different time periods and are useful for different scenarios.
Depending on desired complexity, you can implement recoil, accuracy, skill with specific weapon, reload time, bayonets, magazine size, rate of fire, (night vision or thermal vision) scopes, body armor and many different things.
Grenades, grenade launchers, trenches, land mines, barbed wire, poison gas, creeping barrage artillery, flamethrowers, biplane air support might be fun to have in your scenario as well.
For mobility, consider Skis (WW2, Winter War), horses, jeeps, horse wagons, railways (the German-French war comes to mind), dog sleds (not sure if that’s ever happened)
Getting shot has a 70% chance (guesstimated) to take you out of a fight quickly. If it’s realistic, then it has to be some kind of teamfight, for a gunshot not to be a quick game-ender.
x% hand/arm/leg/shoulder shot (no artery), “wait what?!”-affliction, which is a y% chance to miss your shot or grenade throw, because you’re noticing, that you’re missing a finger, are stumbling, can’t lift your arm. The adrenaline keeps you from noticing it, which in combination with grenades can lead to amusing deaths. Limbs are easy to loose as well. Though, it’s not realistic to amputate an arm and then to immediately continue your adventure.
‘instant liability’ is an interesting scenario, that gets opened up:
y% chance to, that your teammmate has to be taken care off quickly (or he bleeds out)/needs hospitalization quickly after that in addition in more severe cases; even if no hospitilization is needed for survival, there should be penalties in stamina, after first aid. Loss of consciousness and so on.
x% screams loudly in pain (which might be a problem, depending on scenario)
headshot scenarios:
z% chance that you’re dead (z is fairly high)
y% grazing shots (ear, eye, bruising the temple, teeth), gives you a hideous debuff, depending on what’s hit and with which ammo, you might loose an eye, teeth, ear, your good looks, your ability to chew food, whatever;
which can be translated into various debuffs, which can be helped thru modern surgery/magic or whatever your scenario offers
x% chance that you loose consciousness for a minute and then have a Phineas Gage scenario (random insanity debuff, not realistic, but amusing)
headshot (with helmet):
WW1 German or British decent chance, that the character hears a loud ring, takes cover immediately and is fine
WW1 French (early WW1) dead, (late WW1) more like the above
weapon shot scenarios:
100% weapon broken, forcing you to use secondary weapon, possibly a broken finger or two, depending on grip and the physics (not sure if realistic, but might be a thing)
(big explosion if our hero has a flamethrower and the tank gets hit, which then does explosive + fire damage against anyone unfortunate to be around)
all shots taken should normally decrease accuracy, your ability to control the recoil of your gun, the ability to run and throw things, the ability to help your teammates.
Short Term Pain resistance and an adrenaline rush might be a buff, which can help out in situations.
Depending on the situation, getting shot makes it very easy to get shot again, so the character should seek cover, probably try to wildy shoot back and hopefully is protected by immediate suppresion fire of his mates.
scenarios:
If you want to roleplay Verdun (ish), then he might stumble into an artillery shellhole, where he most likely can’t climb out off and most likely die. Or stumble into some mud and die. Or his gasmask is shot and he dies. Keep in mind that WW1 is extremely loud. Like imagine the loudest thing you’ve ever heard, double that, and then imagine that for hours on end, day after day. Shellshock is something that can definitely be explored.
WW1, Western Front is fun, because many of it’s aspect can be modelled as enviromental hazard.
Or they can take a hard left turn and go into Lovecraftian territory like in the movie Deathwatch.
Also for character classes:
German stormtroopers are highly trained, wild young men with long hair and a devil-may-care attitude, equipped with the best gear and sent on dangerous missions. Also keep in mind, that after they’ve taken position in a French town and feel reasonably safe, they might just raid the bar and get absolutely shitfaced. Because they’ve been through a lot, didn’t have enough to eat and really want to do that at the moment.
If I wanted to know more about actual combat during trench warfare (especially storming an enemy’s trench), then I’d probably start reading ‘Storm of Steel’ by Ernst Jünger, who’s seen and survived a lot of the action on the Western front. The generals all survived and they wrote a lot about their experience too, but that’s not too helpful for an RPG.
If you want to roleplay the recent Iraq war, then keep in mind that 300.000 bullets are used up for every insurgent. Those guys sure can take some punishment 🙂
Not sure, how that actually looks like in practice. Lots of suppression fire, I guess. You’re gonna need a large inventory (though, a lot of this is probably from Tanks, helicopters and turret enplacements, rather than infantrist)
Finnland’s Winter War is also very interesting. Your five hero Finns have to use stealth, local knowledge and skis to take out an ill-equipped, demotivated, very cold, but very numerous Soviet bataillion, who’ll nervously will shoot at anything that moves.
Japan has his own period of gun warfare, that I know nothing about. But they got quite a lot more sophisticated than the Europeans did during the same period, till they managed to completely ban them, because guns are dangerous.
American settlers vs Indians is also a good scenario. Comanche make for great, fearsome enemies. And vice versa.
The opening scene for ‘The Revenant’ gives you an idea of how such a fight might look like (not Comanche, the Indian tribe attacks the beaver hunting expedition, slaughter many of them and force the others to abandon most of their fur). I’m not sure how accurate it is, but… not sure there’s a lot of realistic fighting depicted in TV.
Those flintlock rifles are probably easy to work with in an RPG setting.
If meant to be believably “realistic” (not in the sense of being a super crunchy quasi-wargame, necessarily, or in actually being realistic, but believable enough not to kill the mood of a game and for it to be enough like real life that people’s tactical instincts aren’t miscalibrated. Swingy dice (eg d10 instead of 2d6), multiple attacks, multiple bullets expended per attack (with no difference to the attack mechanically), make reloading slower. One of the reasons firearms are deadly is that it takes less energy from the user to fire a single round – whereas most games make attacking with a sword about as fast as firing a gun; conversely, this means that ammunition lasts for many, many combat rounds. Guns are deadlier but a bad damage roll will just nick someone, and emptying your magazine at a bad moment happens more often.
@Le Maistre Chat
Isn’t that what variable damage dice rolls are for?
Make HP a representation of luck/cover/risk-minimizing movement technique. Perhaps critical hits actually involve being shot (this would imply that armor reduces the risk of critical hits, possibly at the cost of reducing maximum HP). The bullet that brings a character to 0 HP is always a hit. Otherwise, non-fatal HP losses are basically suppression. Critical hits (i.e. actually being hit non-fatally) reduce max HP until healed and have additional status effects. HP lost to “suppressive fire” on the other hand recovers quite quickly on its own once the shooting stops.
I think this accounts for being shot being a big deal, and for the fact that the overwhelming majority of bullets fired don’t hit anything but still have an effect.
Another way to add to this is to make sure that combat occurs at the “correct” range — something that video games and films have a really hard time with. Two units exchanging fire from behind cover at 300 meters probably isn’t a slaughterhouse, although those same units fighting inside a house might produce a lot of casualties (represented in gameplay by large critical hit bonuses at close range).
As Nornagest pointed out, a system like this means that having HP based on Constitution doesn’t make sense. So: don’t do that.
Take the system from the first d20 Star Wars RPG. (LadyJane mentioned it deep in one of the threads, but I think it deserves to be a top-level post.)
Anyone with heroic class levels has two tracks: vitality and wounds. Vitality is essentially D&D hit points, and basically represents the ability to turn a hit into a near-miss. Wounds is equal to Constitution (plus some modifiers for feats and the like) and represents actually getting hit by attacks. This resolves 90% of the weirdness you get out of a conventional single-track HP system. Vitality hits aren’t real hits, and vitality damage is easily cured by rest. I’m still baffled that d20 Modern didn’t use it. (Well, I know they wanted plug-and-play compatibility with D&D, but I still think it was a stupid decision.)
NPC classes don’t give VP, so this also makes it easy to build high-level mooks that can actually hit high-level heroes, but who still go down in one shot.
You can also separate going up in skill from going up in vitality.
Steve Jackson’s pre-GURPS RPG The Fantasy Trip let characters advance on three tracks: Dexterity (accuracy), Intelligence (quantity of spells or skills) & Strength (HP + damage).
Then if not using muscle-powered weapons, it would be trivial to make mooks who reliably hit high-level heroes and go down in one shot.
Oh, there are loads of different ways to do that, and overall I’m partial to point-buy systems for my RPGs. But I was specifically interested in contrasting this system to D&D, where hit dice and levels are the same thing, and it’s hard to get a glass cannon.
How does that work in terms of lore? I gather that “HP” in this context is a sort of stamina you use up by dodging a lot in a short period of time? Do you also use up HP by running, lifting heavy stuff, swinging a Gamorrean axe, etc.?
Also, has anyone ever integrated the two tracks? I’m thinking of a system where you have, say, fifty health and fifty life (shallow and deep, respectively). You take ten points of damage from grazing blows and punches, NBD. Then you get stabbed by a big knife; it inflicts ten points of health damage and five points of life damage. The kicker is that, with those five points of life damage, you can’t be healed past 45 health. Your current life is your max health, and life is much harder to recover. Your current health also factors into damage calculations; when you’re really roughed up, you can’t hit as hard. Dunno if D&D et al have a way to model that already.
VP also are the fuel for force powers. I’m not positive if they get used up for other fatiguing activities or not, but I don’t think so. The other idea is interesting, but it’s rather different from what Star Wars d20 did.
I like how the new edition of Delta Green handles this. Particularly lethal weapons have a Lethality rating; if you get hit with one of them, there is a chance you just die, HP be damned. If you don’t automatically die, you take HP damage as normal (which of course might still kill you).
So for instance, getting shot with a pistol does 1d10 HP damage; might just wing you, or maybe kills you instantly, depending on your HP and the roll.
If you get shot with an automatic burst from an SMG, that has a lethality rating of 10%. You roll 2d10 and treat it as a percentile roll, with one as the 10s and one as the 1s. If the result is under 10%, you’re dead. If the result is over 10%, you add the two dice together and take the result as HP damage.
Just a reminder that
1. Le Maistre Chat runs an online D&D game on Discord.
2. RainyDayNinja has set up a Discord server for SSC members who are interested in roleplaying games. https://[ remove this if you’re not a spambot ]discord.gg/PpwJtQ (Link expires in 24 hours.)
3. I run a roleplaying campaign (on Roll20 and also on Discord) set on a world called Terramar and I specifically want SSC members and/or libertarians as players.
Draft campaign wiki at http://terramar.obsidianportal.com/
Campaign also has a Discord server at https://[ remove this if you’re not a spambot ]discord.gg/SgZNhn. (Link expires in one day from posting. Contact me if you want in and the link has expired.)
Are any of these open for complete beginners or are they for more experienced players? Followup, what kind of time commitment/schedule for each?
Open to complete beginners. Get the Adventurer, Conqueror, King (Basic/Expert D&D clone) PDF and start reading. Schedule is Saturdays 3-7ish Pacific time.
@acymetric:
My campaign Terramar is open for complete beginners.
You don’t need to know the rules in order to create a character and play.
Just come up with a character concept and someone who knows the rules can fill out a character sheet for you.
And when you play, just explain what you want your character to (try to) do and someone else will tell you what funny-sided dice to roll!
Normally I run regular sessions on Roll20 from 6:30pm to 10pm Eastern Time (currently UTC -5, so 2230 to 0200 UTC) every Tuesday, Friday and Saturday.
You can play any one or more of those.
Right now my regular sessions are on hold due to work-related issues but I’m still doing play-by-posting on Discord. https://[ remove this if you’re not a spambot ]discord.gg/GTQddx (Link expires 24 hours after posting.)
I have a player who had only played D&D once before … with a DM who apparently required that everyone in the party play a troll and ran nothing but combat adventures, while the player wanted to play a housecat.
I encouraged them not to quit D&D, and now they are playing an intelligent, talking, magic-using housecat (whose backstory is that they are a former witch’s familiar) in my game, and having a great time sitting in the other characters’ laps, demanding to be petted and getting their ears scratched, and running off to chase birds, bugs and snakes.
Rename “Hit Points” to something that better communicates the fact that it’s about mitigating damage and not simply tanking hits. Call it “Luck” or “Evasion” or “Combat Focus” or something. If you get shot 20 times and you’re hanging on at 1 HP, you didn’t survive 20 sucking chest wounds only to get put down by the 21st. You took 20 grazing wounds, shots to nonvital areas, or near-misses that required really stressful dodging, but now your luck has run out and the next one is going to hit something vital.
No, don’t do that. The first time is exciting, but by the tenth “grazing wound” both suspension of disbelief and the dramatic impact of being shot are both gone. Also, people will start thinking that number that keeps going down on your character sheet represents health/injury status after all, and you won’t be able to keep “It’s mostly luck and skill except when it really does mean injury except when it mostly doesn’t” straight.
Have a mechanic where skillful and/or lucky characters can avoid getting shot, and don’t try to make every shot that doesn’t seriously connect into a “grazing wound” for the sake of false drama. Bang bang, you missed, did so, really.
“It kills you but you spend hero points to turn into a graze” is indeed better than “it hits you, doing damage to your many ablative hit points” – especially with HP inflation over the years (did it start in earnest in 3rd, or 4th? I know enemy HP went off the wall in 4th).
In Old School D&D, you stopped gaining Hit Dice at 9 and a CON bonus of more than +1 per die was rare. 3.0 established a new Hit Die for every level and uncapped attribute bonuses.
So an old school Mage who’s throwing around 9th level spells would be unlikely to have more than 40 HP, and a Fighter with the same XP about 70, giving him 50-50 odds to die from a 200-foot fall, something that just became a source of attrition to 3.X tanks.
One of the things I have noticed ’round these parts, prompted by a mention elsewhere in this open thread, is how discussions about marriage frequently involve asking why the state is involved in the question in the first place. To which I generally see some mention about adjudicating divorce.
But, then, why does the state of a monopoly on adjudicating divorce?
Let me back up. We seem to have rediscovered something that worked perfectly fine across cultures and for a few thousands years. Having rediscovered it, however, it now involves a lot more lawyer fees. I am of course speaking of choice of law.
It is interesting to note that regardless of where it is issued, most every corporate and a large share of government bonds are governed by the laws of the State of New York. A lions share of the companies listed on the major stock exchanges are chartered in Delaware. Returning to our topic at hand, one of the primary purposes of paying a lawyers thousands of dollars to write you a prenuptual agreement is so you can have the first paragraph picking the state whose laws will govern the divorce.
The only reason that the state has a monopoly on divorce is because the King had a vested interest in being able to control the laws of inheritance and shut down all of the competing venues to adjudicate the issue. Plus Western Europe in general, and England in particular, went through a long period of (real or enforced) cultural homogeneity so competing venues were obvious not necessary. The fact that it really wasn’t culturally homogeneous is a big part of why, for example, the US threw of the yoke of British Imperialism.
The US has also gone through the whole post war period pretending that it is culturally homogeneous when it really isn’t. Which is how we ended up in the mess we are in, where all cultural issues (such as the proper composition of marriage) must be adjudicated by the federal government. Yeah, well, that didn’t work out so great for Europe during those couple hundred years when they couldn’t stop killing each other over these kinds of issues.
If you want to get married in The Church, and be bound by their rules when it turns out you were just young and horny, that’s your choice. If you don’t like their rules, find a different church. Or “church.” Or State. And then let them deal with it.
This really isn’t that radical. Other than the intrusion of the SCOTUS into the composition question, and having to pay a lawyer a lot of money if you don’t like the local monopoly, this is basically the system we have now. But seeing as how we are not culturally homogeneous, even within a state, much less the entire US, breaking the local monopoly and getting the SCOTUS out of it probably wouldn’t hurt.
The state doesn’t have a monopoly on adjudicating divorce, but it does have final say in the matter. If your Rabbi says X, and then one party decides they no longer wish to be bound by Rabbinic law, what path should society follow?
1) Parties then take their dispute to the state courts, which can enforce the law decision with violence
2) Parties then take matters into their own hands
Are you proposing
3) The state enforces the Rabbinic adjudication, provided the parties can prove they agreed to be bound to it? That’s an interesting decision, but it will fail in many cases for the same reason Federalism is failing (busybodies want to have a say in the conduct of others), and anyhow the majority are unlikely to have prior agreement to any religious (or other…? Masonic? Tribal?) marriage law, so at best you’ve carved out a few niche exceptions (like the covenant marriage)
What happens today if you don’t get a civil marriage, but you get a religious marriage, and you sign a contract saying that you agree to pay or give the other whatever the relevant religious authority says you have to give him/her in the context of this religious marriage agreement and possible subsequent divorce? Would such a contract not be enforceable in civil court?
In a lot of even Muslim countries, the triple talaq divorce is not allowed. So religious decisions will differ from civil ones.
I don’t think you could have a civil contract where one side (and only one side) can unilaterally break a contract just by saying so. Contracts have to give enough to both sides in order to be enforceable.
Some clauses in marriage contracts will be unenforceable, if we start building the system of civil cohabitation contracts from zero. We already have a body of law for a standard civil cohabitation contract. There are tweaks to it, where by signing addendums to the contract you can change some conditions of the contract.
So why change this system of civil cohabitation contracts, just because you don’t like the fact that they are called marriage? Any other system of such contracts will end up being regulated by the government, if the government is expected to enforce those contracts.
Plenty of contracts allow its parties to cancel them at any time, for example, many rental contracts. Both sides give something to the other as long as the contract is in force, but either side may cancel it (usually with a notice period), dissolving the obligations of both sides. There are also contracts that only one side may dissolve at any time, for example some loans which the debtor may repay at any time, but the creditor can’t cancel them and demand immediate repayment.
I just think it doesn’t make much sense to call these contracts marriage when, under the proposals where private institutions handle marriage and divorce, they would really just be contracts with arbitrary terms, depending on the institution. Much of the existing body of law regarding marriage would not be usable when the terms are different from the current marriage law. If the current terms of marriage wouldn’t be enforceable if written as a private contract, that should be fixed: it’s weird if it’s legal to agree to a certain term in conjunction with a bunch of other terms (many of them unrelated), but not in itself. Anyway, these proposals to privatize marriage usually come from libertarian-minded people who tend to agree with me that a contract with (almost) arbitrary terms should be enforceable (as long as the promises made by the two sides are legal).
Yes, in some contracts, both sides have the right to unilaterally rescind the contract. The critical part here is both sides.
In a talaq divorce, only the husband has the right to unilaterally break the marriage. The wife doesn’t. I can’t imagine a secular country which would allow such an unequal contract.
Different countries have different laws regarding marriage, and different types of marriage. These different types of marriage have different ways of assigning marital property on divorce.
For example, you can get married in Spain, where the default type of marriage is community property. But then the poorer spouse can move to the UK, live there for a number of years, and get a division of non-community property. In most continental countries, there are strict limits on alimony, unless the spouse is too old to work. In the anglo-saxon world, there are cases of unlimited alimony for young spouses of working age.
Other contracts don’t change depending on where you are. Most other contracts are not so easy to change by just having one side move to another place.
I don’t think privatizing marriage would make it better, or easier. I think it would become an even bigger mess. Judges would have to learn the traditions and contracts of all those private groups, and it would be a mess.
There’s nothing per se unconscionable about a one sided option to terminate. Some bonds are putable, some are callable, some are both, and some are neither.
@ana53294 What you say is another reason private contracts are superior to marriage. Marriage is a “contract” whose terms may change if one or both spouses move to a different country. The government sometimes also changes marriage/divorce law in a way that also applies to marriages contracted before the change. Government rarely changes regular contracts after the fact.
On the other hand, with my proposal they would just have to read the contract. (Well, some of the private marriage proposals also propose having private institutions adjudicate them.)
This is not taking things out of the governments hands.
Most people who want to take the decision of the terms of marriage out of the state’s hands at the same time support the enforcement of contracts by the state (except anarchists). Also, your Point 3) was about whether the state should enforce religious marriage contracts.
Well, I was trying to get at what exactly Another Throw had in mind.
Basically I’m recalling the liberarian principle that all laws are ultimately enforced by men with guns, while pointing out that any other enforcement method–non-binding arbitration, social shame or rewards–is already available for non-state actors to use. “Government out of marriage” means either no one enforces the marriage terms, the state enforces terms the parties have otherwise agreed to, or the state loses the monopoly on violence.
It would become relatively moot if no laws (especially tax & inheritance) were conditional on anyone’s marital status.
That’s probably never going to happen, because tax and inheritance depend on property ownership information, and ownership information depends on whether individuals are married. Otherwise, the Homemaker who spent a decade saving money and beautifying the property bought by the Breadwinner’s salary will have nothing on paper to show for it. Any Western society will roundly reject any claim that the Homemaker is entitled to nothing even so. The only question will be how far the Homemaker’s entitlement reaches.
The couple can get around this by formal transfer of ownership as they go, but that’s expensive, and wasteful if the couple never divorces (true of about 5/6 of them).
I don’t understand why this argument are usually phrased in terms of “we should allow private venues to handle marriage and divorce”, rather than “abolish marriage as a legal institution, and let people sign whatever contracts they want (if they want)”. Once you have various different venues with different rules, it’s effectively equivalent to private contracts anyway. It seems to me that, for some reason, many people view marriage as a necessary natural institution rather than an artificial institution created by the government.
As was pointed out last time this came up, the effects on third parties are significant, desirable, and important. Marriage is what lets your spouse visit you when you’re in a coma, what lets them pick your child up from school, and what grants them access to your information and accounts if something happens to you. The ability to designate someone a spouse for these purposes can’t be accomplished if the institution of marriage is dissolved without extensively modifying contracts, including Ts and Cs, for any service you use to refer to them as an individual and make them an explicit party to the contract – and don’t even think about the headache a divorce would involve.
What’s the point of visiting when they’re in a coma?
Being the children’s parent lets you pick them up from school. My mother never married, and she had no problem picking me up from school.
What information? Why should they have access to your accounts? It wouldn’t be all that hard to create ways to allow one to designate an arbitrary person for all these purposes, if you want to (in many cases such mechanisms already exist). It would have the benefit that you can also designate a friend without all the other consequences of marriage which you may not want with a friend (perhaps not even with a romantic partner).
How many services actually refer to one’s spouse in any way?
What would be a headache about it? No marriage, no divorce. Bank accounts belong to the one whose name is on them (joint accounts are divided), real estate belongs to the one whose name is on the deed, movable property belongs to the one who bought it etc. Plenty of unmarried couples live together and separate, without major issues.
This applies to the other points as well. Plenty of people date, cohabit, and have children without getting married. It’s not unknown territory, it’s something for which we have mechanisms to deal with. How many people do you think there are whose main reason to get married is to avoid the sort of inconveniences you describe?
Being the parent that has custody today lets you pick the kids up from school. A significant portion of kidnappings happen when a noncustodial parent does so and blows across state lines. Schools (and Departments of Education) aren’t terribly keen on this and have started to actually check.
I recommend you ask your parents, your siblings, your friends, or any other more-or-less-average person. It emotionally matters a lot.
Yes, and we should create those ways. However, we should also have a one-stop solution that lets you designate one person for all those purposes, rather than leaving people to puzzle through it on their own and maybe forget any number of parts. To make it legible to people, it should probably be called something like “marriage.”
Ask any number of ex-spouses, and you’ll get any number of answers to this. You frequently have situations where Husband deposits his paycheck in his bank account, Wife deposits hers in hers, and one or another pays more of the bills because it’s more convenient – leaving the other spouse with an arguable claim to part of the other’s paycheck. Or, one spouse quit their job to stay at home raising the couple’s kids, with the implicit promise of support from the still-working spouse. You’re basically taking a hammer to the whole elaborately-constructed system of divorce law. It very arguably needs one, but it should be done with great thought because the situations it covers really aren’t simple.
@Evan Þ It’s a fault, not a benefit, that people take on a bunch of different agreements in one go, without thinking about them separately in detail (at least with regards to the more consequential effects). It can be at least as much of a problem if you designate a person for some purpose without realizing it as if you forget to do so.
Absent an agreement, that should be considered a gift on part of the person whose account it was paid from. If you pay bills from the account of one of you, the other one should regularly transfer money to that account. Or you should open a joint account, or write a contract that your property is jointly owned — my original point was that these non-state varieties of marriage would effectively be similar to substituting marriage with arbitrary contracts.
Implicit promises shouldn’t be enforceable. Again, it’s a bug, not a feature, that you can sign up for a variety of different obligations you probably don’t understand properly in one go; people should decide for themselves what they want to agree on. If you want to make such a promise, write a contract that you’ll pay a specified amount of support in the case of a separation — or, simpler, just transfer money to your partner’s account while she stays at home, so that nothing needs to be done after a separation.
Things would be much clearer and more predictable if we declared that there are no implicit agreements or implicit promises (legally enforceable ones at least); if you want to rely on a promise, you write a contract. This way you would know exactly what you have, and what obligations you owe. More fair, too: the simplest way to make a fair agreement is to have both sides voluntarily agree to it, understanding its terms, then it should be automatically considered fair. It’s much harder (and costly) to have a judge decide, say, what the fair compensation for some work is, and it’s less certain that it will actually be fair.
With all that elaborately-constructed divorce law, you can do two things: either you try to understand it all, which probably takes more effort than to just write a contract with the specific agreements you want (assuming that pre-written contracts would be available). Or you just sign the marriage contract without properly understanding the consequences, and hoping that the eventual outcome (if it comes to a divorce) will be fair. Plenty of ex-spouses feel like it isn’t.
Even without a lawyer, I can understand things like transferring money from one account to another, what a joint account is etc. In a system without implicit agreements and promises, one can manage most personal finances (such as transferring money to a partner’s account, paying a bill and sharing the cost, supporting a partner by paying their bill) even without signing any contract (other than the contracts with the bank and the utility companies). However, if a law says something like “the judge decides how much alimony is paid based on the financial circumstances of the spouses”, I need a lawyer to help me understand what it means in practice, I’d need a lawyer to get a decent settlement in an eventual divorce, and even with a lawyer I can’t accurately predict what the settlement will be. In a system with implicit promises and implicitly shared costs, I can’t even support someone by paying their bills without writing a contract to assure them that I won’t come up with claims on its basis.
It’s hard to come up with divorce law that will produce fair results for all the couples in a jurisdiction, but a couple should be able to understand their own finances.
This is because marriage is a necessary natural institution that was not created by the government.
How is it necessary? And, under proposals to have it handled by private institutions, what would be the essential difference from abolishing marriage and allowing people to write up contracts?
I assume that, a long time ago, marriage originated from some form of cohabitation that eventually came to be regulated by the government. But in today’s terminology, we wouldn’t call unregulated cohabitation marriage, we would call it a long-term relationship, cohabitation, boyfriend/girlfriend etc.
Possibly not “necessary,” just “strongly recommended.” Without marriage, women have no guarantee that fathers will stick around and help, while men have no stake in society to keep them stable, focused, and not doing something stupid or antisocial. Which is why most societies have invented some variant on it, with rare exceptions like that Chinese minority where women keep fly-by-night boyfriends and uncles act like fathers.
@theredsheep Marriage doesn’t guarantee that either. There is divorce, and I’m unaware that marriage law has a requirement to help your spouse. However, law obligates you to support your children, in the form of child support if you leave your spouse (assuming your spouse gets custody).
What is a stake in society? Regardless of marriage, men have an interest in a reasonable way in their own interest, and in that of their children. Your phrases sound like platitudes that sound good to some people, but have little meaning — or at least they are not explicit enough to make it clear to me what they mean, and how marriage incentivizes these things.
Sorry, aiming for brevity and overshot, I guess. As you said, marriage begins not as a matter of law but of custom; men and women stay together for an extended term, each having a claim on the other, and form the foundation of a family unit, which is itself the foundation of society. Government takes an interest in marriage, but then the government takes an interest in most important things sooner or later, and family formation is utterly crucial. Monogamy is the norm and I’ll assume that here for simplicity’s sake, but yes, the other kinds are a thing, though they have liabilities which monogamy lacks.
Human children take a really long time to become self-sufficient, and require an environment with long-term stability–can I cut to the chase here and say that somebody needs to be raising the kids in a society? That means parents, and ideally they need to be the same parents throughout because kids don’t do well with instability.
Mere monetary support is not sufficient; it really helps to have an extra person there to help you watch the kids and raise them right. Now, you could have, say, a sisterhood of mutually supporting women helping with each others’ kids, and in practice that does happen sometimes, but it’s not a standard arrangement and it has the potential to get quite uncomfortable, especially when one considers that those women are still going to want men around in some form.
As for men, well, we tend to do stupid stuff when left to our own devices. Young men in particular commit the overwhelming majority of crimes. A single woman can still be a single mother, which is proven to be bad for kids but still gives her some bond to the human race. A single man, on the other hand, can most of his life radically untethered, a part of no family, in charge of nothing.
This is very bad news, and I think the only reason our increasingly single society doesn’t have a higher crime rate is that we invented really good video games and opened the floodgates of porn. Now all the listless men who would have been out raising hell in earlier societies play games instead, as captured in those angsty news stories about men who sponge off their parents instead of looking for work. The stories always blame the video games, but in any earlier era, strong social pressure would have forced them to marry by that point, and their wives would have threatened to leave them if they didn’t get their asses in gear. Instead these men just … float. It’s not long-term tenable, and the axe will come down sooner or later.
Now, you can argue that marriage isn’t essential, you just need long-term committed pair bonding with repercussions for breakups, etc., but at that point you’re arguing that you don’t need lemons to make lemonade, only a specific combination of organic compounds which happens to be found in lemons.
@theredsheep,
I’m not going to bother pulling quotes, I’ll just say that I agree with a lot of what your arguing, and say well done!
For childless couples, sure, do whatever, “fly your freak flags high” and “be free to do you’, but once children are involved I become very authoritarian and the gates close and the children’s parents happiness and freedom mostly concern me as far as it effects their children’s welfare.
I was a child in the 1970’s and I have very strong and bitter feelings about this. You want to be a “free-spirit”? Then don’t have kids, once you do your and societies duty is to them, and if some adults chafe, so be it.
@theredsheep: I don’t think any of that is particularly accurate. There are plenty of single men (and single women, gay men, and lesbians) in the workforce, so there’s no real basis for the idea that young men will just drop out of society and become criminals or parasites if they don’t choose to start a family. For one thing, almost no one turns to crime just because they’re bored; when people commit serious crimes, it’s generally for money or for specific personal reasons, not just because they have nothing better to do. And sure, there are plenty of aimless men who spend most of their free time playing video games and watching porn and getting high, but a lot of them still have jobs, and some of them can even make good money. They usually have social lives too, at least to the extent that they have friends who they play video games with, go drinking with, and so forth. You might consider them failures if you define success in terms of starting a family, but that’s a tautological argument.
@theredsheep The angle that we guys shouldn’t have too much freedom is an argument I’ve haven’t heard before. I’m not very sympathetic to it. Of course if you have children, that gives you responsibilities whether you’re married or not.
Adult sons who live with their parents are primarily the responsibility of the parents who won’t kick them out and/or put their asses to work. Then again, if parents are willing to work in place of their sons, that’s their problem for all I care.
Well, the question of whether we should have marriage or just long-term relationships is central to this thread. I find it somewhat perverse for government to be involved with people’s personal lives, thoughts, emotions, plans etc.
It’s not obvious if marriage creates significant negative repercussions to breakup/divorce. The main way it changes the situation is that it alters the distribution of property after the divorce. That disincentivizes divorce by the spouse who is worse off in a divorce than in a split-up after an unmarried relationship, but it incentivizes divorce by the spouse who is better off to the same extent. A divorce may leave both spouses worse off because maintaining two households is somewhat more expensive than one joint one, but that equally applies to unmarried cohabiting.
There may still be some social pressure against divorce, but that could be attached to splitting up while having children.
@Plumber While I agree that children’s interests are important, I don’t see why they should categorically override the parents’ interests. A somewhat better childhood but less freedom during adulthood is not an obvious trade-off; I wouldn’t take it (I was raised by a single mother).
I don’t mean that they’re bored in the sense of “hmm, nothing on ESPN, better go rob a liquor store,” I mean that we are social animals and are not meant to be unmoored from families (or, in theory, other strong social groups, but families are the norm). And it’s specifically unmarried young men who do most of the crime. Marriage is good for us because it ties us down and forces us to grow up–it used to be a critical life stage one more or less had to pass. This doesn’t mean that every unmarried young man is going to become a criminal, just that the danger greatly increases while he’s circling in a holding pattern like that.
For human society to continue and be healthy, the substantial majority of men and women have to marry (or enter functionally-identical analogues thereof if they have an aversion to the word). Because the next generation of men and women has to start as someone’s children, in a stable household. We (in the US) are an increasingly anti-reproductive society, and our total fertility rate is now well below replacement–and that’s just TFR, not what percentage of the kids are in healthy families. This cannot and will not last, as a matter of simple math if nothing else. Either the culture will change, or we will be displaced.
I know little or nothing of gay men and lesbians; I consider them a separate case, and irrelevant to the issue insofar as they very seldom have unwanted/neglected children, which is the greatest evil that comes from the abandonment of marriage and commitment. I don’t know how being gay effects other behaviors, but since something like one man in forty or fifty is gay it doesn’t strike me as a big issue.
My point, 10240, is that the government-enforced aspects of the thing are an afterthought, if a necessary one. Saying that marriage is a government thing is like saying that property rights are a government thing; the government may enforce both, but people don’t need the people in charge to be a married couple any more than they need those people to tell them that their stuff is theirs. The actual legal and social mechanisms of marriage and its enforcement varied from time to time and place to place. In the middle ages, peasants routinely got married in private by verbally agreeing to it, then having sex to seal the deal. For a long time, this was considered legally binding.
If you were single-parented, you don’t know what you missed, but I’m guessing you were one of the lucky ones. Studies consistently find that single parenting is associated with higher rates of basically everything going wrong with a child’s life. I don’t know how your mother managed it, but as a parent of two it strikes me as fundamentally unfair to both parties.
I’m not one of the people that’s terribly interested in fertility. I tend to think these things will sort themselves out.
But that said, if it was something I was worried about the last thing I would want to do is make having children even more of a phase change than it has to be. When parents are expected to spend so much time, energy, and money on children or be considered horrible throwbacks to the dreaded latchkey parents of the 70s is it any wonder that people aren’t in a rush to have kids? Now you want to add on top of that you can’t get divorced? Which direction do you think that’s going to move the equilibrium?
? Where did I say that people couldn’t get divorced? It’s tragic, but it does happen, and it’s far better to allow it than to force people and their families to remain in an increasingly dysfunctional relationship. I don’t know where I stand on the specifics of divorce law, with no-fault versus whatever. I know too little to have an opinion worth considering there.
The contemporary treatment of parenthood as some kind of overachievement contest by a relatively small body of trendsetting cul-de-sac denizens is a separate issue. Parenting needs to be common; whether or not the kids go to soccer practice matters little.
For clarity, I jumped in specifically to contest the idea that marriage is unnecessary. I’m not following the larger thread very closely, and I hope that isn’t causing a lot of confusion here.
@brad
I was a lackey kid in the 1970’s and I feel pretty strongly about this, ’tis better to have fewer kids that are well raised than a larger but scared generation.
@theredsheep
That was me in other posts, unfortunately I haven’t thought of a way to punish the parents without also harming the kids, maybe by the parents being put in stocks and be ridiculed by the other villagers?
“Lackey kid” is one of the more inspired autocorrect fails I’ve seen lately. I was a vassal kid myself, though I got to be a toady for a while in high school.
My wife was a Lackey kid; I preferred sci-fi.
Oh!
It turns “latchkey” into “lackey” but it doesn’t turn “helo” into “help”?
Demon dogs!
I haven’t looked at the studies, but there may be a lot of confounding effects there other than the causation you suggest, which may be hard to separate. It’s also plausible that there is a significant effect in the segments of society that are too poor to adequately raise a child as a single parent, but little in the wealthier segments.
I’m reminded of those very general “diversity trumps aptitude” vs “homogeneous groups work better” studies that the two political sides can pull out to win debates. Again, I’m not saying that two-parent families aren’t beneficial, I just don’t think the effect is that great, a lot depends on individual circumstances, and I don’t trust “studies find…” arguments in social science very much (though it’s possible that I’d be convinced if I looked at the studies).
“Lackey kid” is also what Holden Caulfield called his roommate when he wanted to get his goat.
@theredsheep
I guess I must have read multiple posts in this sprawling thread on conflated a different one with yours. My apologies.
The best argument I’m aware of is that the state has a compelling interest in the welfare of children. In the absence of children I mostly agree with you. However, I’d also note that the powers vested by statute in a spouse are, to a significant extent, part of what the institution of marriage is perceived to be, and the divorce-centric view of marriage tends to ignore that.
That’s not very reasonable given that it’s perfectly legal to have children without getting married, and it’s also legal to enter most sorts of contracts while having children.
If two people sign a marriage contact that gives the mother full custody of the child in the event of divorce, and she turns out to be abusive when the child is 5, does the state have a responsibility to ensure that the child doesn’t end up with her or to ensure that the father gains custody?
If the state has an interest in the welfare of the child, it is separate from the father’s interest. The contract can only yield the father’s interest to the mother; it has no effect on what the state can do to protect its own interests.
Child custody is something the state should be concerned with. I consider child custody a somewhat different issue from marriage and divorce, since some married couples don’t have children, and some couples with children aren’t married.
@10240
The Burkean in me says that quick radical change is dangerous, but for giggles; how about this then:
Only have parents be legally sanctioned and bound as married.
The state also has an interest in clarity about the ownership of property.
I’m honestly kind of spitballing and haven’t thought through the implications terribly closely. That’s why throwing it out there is interesting, to see what y’all come up with.
Marriage involves a lot of different things:
1. The powers vested in your spouse. A power-of-attorney-lite. A medical-power-of-attorney-lite. Visitation rights. Custodial rights over any issue that happens to occur during the course of the marriage. What have you.
2. Rules about property ownership and inheritance. What is communal property, joint property, separate property? What is the mandatory minimum of the estate a still living spouse or children must receive? Other constraints on beneficial gifts the disinherit the spouse or children?
3. The rules about how to divide all of this during divorce. Are any of the marital powers retained? Visitation rights? Custodial rights? Who gets what property? Spousal support? Compensation for foregone earnings? Child support?
4. Rules of procedure to undertake the division under 3. Valid grounds of divorce? Predivorce consoling? Mandatory arbitration and by whom? Can you skip that arbitration under certain types of fault? If that arbitration method falls through?
There is enormous scope here for different approaches to acheive conscionable outcomes. To the extent that distinct cultural groups have a shared understanding, or at least a large overlap, on how to acheive these outcomes, having an option to undertake the marriage under that shared understanding would be beneficial. These cultural groups are not necessarily religious, but it is a common source for a shared understanding.
Suppose that at the time of marriage, say, you were able to chose from a few common sets of rules on any/all of these items (with the probable exception being item 1 as it mostly deals with how third parties treat the marriage) that most closely matches you and your spouse-to-be’s understanding of these issues, and if you don’t like any of the preformulated options you can still hire a team of lawyers and write a prenup.
Like, a lot of states require premarital consoling don’t they? Where you sit down with someone and they harass your for a while about whether you really want to be doing this thing [under the rules you have chosen]?
People, including even children, aren’t a species of property to be disposed of at will in a contract.
Other than that, I don’t see what’s so different between what you are saying and what we have now. You can designate a set of rules (e.g. Halacha) and an arbitrator (e.g. a Bet Din) in a pre-nup today.
The catholic church is free to publish pre-nup agreements for all 50 states.
What isn’t exactly you want, for people to be forced to use alternative dispute resolution mechanisms?
I don’t particularly have a problem with this, but the “multiple systems of law” opens up a whole can of worms for a nation state. We can’t even get people 100% on board with arbitration agreements. You’re talking about turning the Catholic Church into the arbiter of a sizable fraction of the nation’s marriages, and also allowing Shariah Law for another sizable fraction.
What exactly differentiates this from allowing Duke Scott Alexander to reinstate feudalism in the Duchy of Somewhere San Francisco?
A major victory of the modern age (IMO) is centralizing law and eliminating a great number of insane carve-outs.
90% of the purpose of government is settling property disputes. When you say “I own X” and somebody else says “no I own X” you can either do pistols at dawn or we can just ask a judge to decide. And if you disagree with the judge, well, the judge has men with guns.
If you shift this responsibility to decide who owns X to the Church, do the guns shift to the Church as well? Or does the judge (government) enforce Church decisions for them?
I think you’re just moving the problem around but not solving it.
Exactly. People who say “government out of marriage” should say exactly what they are taking out of the state’s hands. Is it just about not having a commonly accepted contract, but making everyone specify their own terms in every single instance?
Further, is everybody okay with every contract? Like, let’s say a 45-year-old man wants a not-marriage contract with an 11-year-old girl. Is that okay? Probably not. Maybe we should have a minimum age for when someone can sign these contracts?
And what happens when someone disputes the totes-not-marriage contract? Says “No, I was drunk when I signed the contract it doesn’t count.” Maybe they should have to sign the contract in the presence of a witness the judge trusts?
And what happens when somebody tries to sign a for-reals-not-marriage contract with two different people without the others knowing about it? That kind of gums up the works on the whole “who gets half the stuff” thing when half the stuff is already pledged to someone else. Maybe there should be a central register where these definitely-not-marriage contracts are kept so we can make sure nobody signs more than one at a time? It could be kept by some sort of clerk…of the county.
Maybe these problems are so common that we just call the standard don’t-you-dare-call-it-marriage certificate a “marriage certificate,” code it in law, but say you can make any additional agreements you want and call those a “prenuptial agreement.”
@Conrad Honcho,
It’s almost as if you imply that customs, laws, and systems that evolved over centuries shouldn’t just be thrown out on a whim.
Perhaps they should even be…conserved. I will call this new outlook “conservatism.”
@Conrad Honcho
That would be fitting but unfortunately there’s been a large group calling themselves “conservatives” who’ve been advocating radical change for most of my lifetime.
It might get confusing.
The problem is that the people who want to conserve SOCIAL structures also wanted radical changes to economic structures. Many of which damaged the social structures.
I would give the left the tax rates of the 1950s back if they let me have the social laws of the 1950s back.
I’m not sure what changes you are thinking about. I would have said that the radical changes in the economic structure occurred during the 1930’s, supported by (among others) the same people who wanted radical changes in the social structures.
@EchoChaos
Are you talking about segregation and anti-miscegenation laws? Because holy hell, that’s S O B R A V E
@Hoopyfreud
> Are you talking about segregation and anti-miscegenation laws?
Sure, them too. I don’t see why it’s a big deal to people in New York if the people of Virginia want to make another marriage legal or illegal.
The idea that people are allowed to democratically choose things like who can marry or associate except when it offends liberal principles is a dumb one.
@DavidFriedman
The ‘New Deal’ was pretty radical (though I imagine that compared to Asia and Europe at the time the changes seemed tame), it probably reflects badly on my knowledge of history but most every other changes to a society that were that much and that fast that I can think of didn’t turn out so well, the fall of communism in eastern Europe seems to have turned out relatively well for most, but civil war still broke out in a few places and average lifespan lengths dropped in the former Soviet Union, Croatia (for example) is now a major tourist destination and has better living standards now, but if in 1990 the Croats were told “You’ll wind up living in better place, you just have to go thorough a civil war first”, I think some of them would decline the trade.
I think the U.S.A. was very lucky that our experiments with fast radical change in the 20th century turned out as well as they did, and I think we should be more cautious about messing with the status quo too much, too fast.
Since circumstances change some reforms are necessary but I think an incremental approach is better (and yes I’m well aware of some radical changes I have advocated, but I’m not expecting them anytime soon, if they actually looked probable I’d recommend fractional steps first).
AFAIK the 1950s arrangement is known more for astronomical tax rates on the rich (which didn’t generate all that much revenue) than for particularly generous benefits or services for the poor. It looks like some people here, when talking about inequality or taxation, find it more important to drag down the rich than to pull up the poor. Why is that?
@Conrad Honcho , It’s already possible to make various contracts other than marriage, so some of your examples already have mostly adequate solutions (and if they don’t, that’s a problem that should be fixed in a general way). Minors usually can’t sign binding contracts with major consequences. No idea if being drunk can be a defense to a contract; either it shouldn’t be, or it should be but there should be a way to sign a contract in such a way that there is no doubt about its validity (e.g. in front of a notary). Again, if you couldn’t sign a contract (other than marriage) such that no drunkenness defense can be raised, that would be a problem anyway.
What happens today if you sign two different contracts that you can’t fulfill at the same time? I presume it would be illegal, and perhaps criminal in some cases. I don’t know if the existing legal system adequately prevents this sort of thing from happening. If not, that should be solved in a general way (e.g. contracts involving real estate or significant amount of money should be registered, and contracting parties should be able to see your existing obligations); that way the problem would be solved for all sorts of contracts rather than marriage only.
Also, if the problem of conflicting contracts is not handled by the system adequately, that’s a problem for marrying couples too: e.g. what happens if you get married without disclosing an existing contractual obligation to your spouse, or if you get married, and then take on a contractual obligation without informing your spouse? Many people would just say they trust their spouse (rightly or wrongly), but (assuming the trust is justified) that would solve your questions too.
I am pretty sure that the fraction of the Federal Income Tax paid by the bottom quartile was substantially higher in the 1950’s than it is now.
Marriage gives protection not just to property rights.
In a lot of countries, even an extremely poor person that cannot support themselves and requires state assistance can marry a foreigner and have the state give them a residence permit. Usually, other types of contracts presume the ability to maintain that spouse. In Sweden, for example, they have cohabitation agreements. A cohabitant can only invite the other one if they can afford it, and it’s different for marriage.
Marriage also gives protection to non-biological children. So let’s say that a woman who is already pregnant meets a guy, falls in love, they get married, and gives birth. The man knows he is not the biological father, but chooses to raise the child as his own. And then, 10 years later, during the divorce, the man says he is not the biological father, and his son is crying asking why his daddy hates him.
Most states have presumed paternity rules where a man has a limited time to deny parentage (usually 2 years). After that, even a DNA test won’t get you out of parental responsibilities.
I may disagree with the ethics of a woman who has a child by another person and does not tell the legal father about it. But the formation of the paternal bond is too important to let biology undermine it. And this is done for the protection of children, not the mother. Indeed, the non-biological father can get full custody if the law determines it, and the mother can’t use a DNA test to get custody, either.
The step-dad can adopt the child if that’s the intention.
Very interesting article linked by Slate:
https://slate.com/business/2019/01/scandinavian-socialism-might-be-a-product-of-19th-century-us-immigration.html
I am skeptical of the stated thesis for a bunch of reasons, but I think it’s noteworthy that a Slate author is implicitly endorsing the idea that traits like individualism vs. collectivism can be somewhat-reliably transmitted within ethnic populations and subpopulations over several generations with consequences as large as the Scandinavian tendency toward large welfare states (regardless of what you think the transmission mechanism is).
I better see “No One Is Prepared for Hagfish Slime” in the next links post.
Although, to be fair, that article doesn’t get into the interesting potential applications of the slime as much. This one has the goodies, though the most interesting part to me was the one-sentence reference to spider silk farming via bacteria!
Another pretty major achievement in AI: DeepMind has made a system that plays StarCraft II at the level of human pros, with minimal amounts of cheating.
How does that level of cheating compare to the level among the human pros?
I kid, mostly.
Now they should program an AI for real military tactics rather than a war-ish computer game.
What is it you’re supposed to do re: that which you cannot put down? Call it up just to see if you can, was that it?
Drunk-dial it.
@dick: Well, that was a rhetorical flourish to highlight AI risk. That which you cannot put down shouldn’t actually be invented.
Mind, I don’t even believe in Yudkowskian AI risk. But giving a non-FOOMing AI officer control of a few hundred war drones seems risk enough.
Stalkers are OP, I knew it! I’ve been saying that for years!
I don’t know that it’s actually minimal amounts of cheating. Its APM advantage is pretty large, though they try to downplay it in their article.
(The article tries to claim that the machine doesn’t have a major APM advantage because its APM averaged across the entire game is lower than the human players. However, human players do lots of kind of inessential actions during relatively low micro-intensive times — they “stay warm” as it were by constantly twitching around the interface. The computer bursts up to 1,000 APM with perfect accuracy, allowing it to do stalker micro that is clearly inhuman. Humans can have 1,000 APM, but not those kinds of actions, and particularly not with perfect accuracy. A lot of the human APM is tapping hotkeys, not selecting a unit and then selecting a precise point for it to move. And when they do try to do that kind of micro, they are often inaccurate at hundreds of actions per minute.)
I don’t know that much about Starcraft at those levels, but I did read their summary and that stuck out to me. I remember playing enough Starcraft that toggling around and directing micro action was always the hardest. It’s moderately impressive that they have learned legitimate strategies, but this seems like it’s adding decent strategy to the speed and accuracy advantage the base-game AI always had anyway. Seems a bit like Watson-owns-the-buzzer again.
The other “cheat,” which may actually be more important, is that the AI can “see” the entire map at the same time. Meaning, it can interact with the entire map at all moments. Feints against a human player to draw their attention would literally be worthless against the AI.
The article really glossed over that portion, but there was a second AI created without the ability to see the whole map, and it lost to the human players. There was some handwaving about it being less trained and planning for a rematch, blah blah blah.
Agreed the APM is a huge factor though, also glossed over in the article. They did mention that the AI interacted directly with the game, so no mouse/keyboard. That alone is a rather significant difference.
Not to overly downplay the accomplishment, but I think that “AI is better than humans” is overemphasizing the skill of the AI over the functional differences.
This same thing happened with OpenAI’s DOTA 2 project. When the humans play the game on the AI’s terms, they lose. When the AI plays the game on the human’s terms, it loses.
My impression (as someone who has played Starcraft about twice) is that AlphaStar did cheat with superhuman micro in the way you describe in a couple of matches, but it wasn’t relying on that completely to win. While its macro wasn’t superhuman in the same way, it still looked like it was at worst almost as good as a pro, which seems like a significant achievement.
Yeah, it’s definitely not cheating to the level that would make up for laughably bad macro. Just probably enough to bring it from “reliably a little worse than the pros” to “reliably a little better than the pros.”
My impression (as a non-Starcraft-player who watched the matches and has done some reading) is that AlphaStar had a big advantage in micro and a moderate disadvantage in macro, but was definitely doing passable high-level strategic play. Only that one blink-stalker match against MaNa was really egregiously micro-dependent (I thought the disruptor-spam against TLO was also, but then some people on r/starcraft seemed to think the disruptor micro wasn’t even that great, so…)
Is Starcraft II a worthy enough successor of Starcraft for this to count as a major achievement?
The things that make it a good challenge for AI – real-time decision making, fog of war, long list of possible actions at every moment, early-game decisions with long-term consequences – would exist for almost any RTS, “worthy” or not.
But yes, Starcraft II has a big enough pro scene that beating the top pros is impressive.
To me, the big question is how much of the code used by that AI was successfully borrowed from other AIs with minimal adjustment. Because that plays into the question of how easy it would be to develop a winning AI for the next game to come along.
And by extension, the effort required to produce winning AIs for activities that aren’t games.
Today I found out, totally unconnected to the reasons for the original search, that back in 1972 Leonard Cohen did a version of Kevin Barry. It’s also a very upbeat cover, given the lyrics and subject; you could dance a waltz to it!
Consider me properly boggled 🙂
@Deisearch,
He probably learned the song from a Clancy Brothers album, which judging from my parents record collection was a pretty common record to have among “Folk” fans in the early 1970’s.
The discussion below about Alexander the Great (and subsequent comparison to Genghis Khan) got me thinking. Is there any single trait, or suite of a few related traits, that defines “great military leader” or “military genius” across history? Or, given the vastly different social and technological eras in which they operated, were they all different, simply contingent on mastering different iterations of “one neat trick” which held true at the time?
For example, one could say that Alexander and Genghis Khan and Julius Caesar and Napoleon all had “the right stuff” – that, with sufficient time, cultural familiarity, and opportunity one would expect them all to be great military leaders whenever they arose. I suppose this might be viewed as the “Art of War” model (or the “Ender Wiggin” model) – they’re all blessed with minds extremely good at identifying and implementing local versions of timeless principles like “outnumber your enemies” and “fight on good ground” and “demoralize your opponent.” So if that’s the case, what are the traits one would say they all possess? Genius intellect? Great skills in visualization (terrain and maneuvers)? Great people skills? Detail-oriented logistician?
Alternatively, one could argue that “great military leader” is correlated with military success, but the causation runs the other direction. A “great military leader” is simply one who has succeeded in most of his important fights. This makes him popular, experienced, and charismatic to his men. He has improved morale and loyalty because his troops expect success. He has improved resources because people want to help a winner. He has improved success because enemy troops are afraid to face him. But it all originates because of something entirely contingent to his environment and time period – one is Henry V with English longbows and French mud on his side; one has mastered the art of the phalanx; one’s people have figured out the best way to use stirrups with horse cavalry; one is the master of entrenchment logistics. But take Alexander out of his time, and even with time and education he would be no better than most at figuring out how to defeat the Mongols; take away the stirrup and horse bow, and Genghis Khan would be no better than most at setting up tactical maneuvers; put Napoleon in WWI and he would have no great insight into winning trench warfare. They all had their “one neat trick,” but there’s nothing inherent in them that would make them great military minds across place and time.
I lean towards the former, but I’m not sure. What say you – if great military leaders are a thing, then what is that thing (or set of things)?
It’s hard to say for a lot of generals, but Alexander and Genghis Khan both fought so many different people in so many different ways that “one weird trick” doesn’t seem plausible. Alexander would be faced with an army fielded by a people he’d never seen before, with totally unfamiliar tactics and equipment, and he’d figure out a way to beat them more or less on the fly. This happened not once but many times, and he never lost a battle.
Being intimately familiar with his own side’s phalanx and cavalry tactics helped, certainly. If you pulled him out of the sand in Bactria and plopped him down in a command vehicle at 73 Easting, he probably wouldn’t have been much help, even discounting the language barrier. But if you then ran him through a course at West Point, I’ll bet he’d have come out the other end as a top-notch commander. Maybe not the best — the world was a lot smaller in his time, and a world-beater then maybe isn’t a world-beater now. But very good.
I’m not so sure about that. First, Genghis Khan unified the mongols. Then he defeated the Tanguts and Jurchen, nomadic people occupying northern china. And finally he beat the Khwarezmid Empire, centered on Samarkand. All of these places would be fairly comfortable fights for a nomadic horseman. It wasn’t until his children that you see them conquering people originating from more geographically diverse places.
I’ll argue that great military leader is a thing, but i’m not sure what it is.
My go-to examples are Odoacer and Harald Hardrada. Both fought in multiple places, with multiple groups of soldiers, and were successful until they weren’t.
Don’t have time to give an effortpost, but I would boil it down to strategic and tactical superiority and the logistical ability to raise (and feed) an army. Also, cultivating generals below them that also have the appropriate skills.
It is tough to say, though. The historical record is relatively thin for several of history’s greatest generals, like Alexander, Hannibal, and Genghis Khan.
EDIT: strategy =/= tactics
EDIT 2: Also, I’m sure Clausewitz has a lot to say on the matter.
Yes, that seems true more or less by definition. I’m pondering whether those abilities can be broken down further into a set of discrete personal traits – spatial reasoning, social skills – that would transcend their environment, or if it’s just “great military leaders are people who are good at military stuff.”
Then there are counter-examples like George Washington, who by most accounts was at best an indifferent strategist and tactician, but a sufficiently inspiring leader of men to keep the Continental Army together and lead it to a most unlikely victory.
luck
But take Alexander out of his time, and even with time and education he would be no better than most at figuring out how to defeat the Mongols
I’m not so sure about that; at Gaugamela the Macedonians went from “Holy crap what are those unknown monsters?” to “So this is how you take down an elephant” pretty fast:
Alexander seems to have been very adaptable and very good at quickly picking up how to handle previously unmet conditions. He beat Darius on Darius’ own ground, I think that after the initial “well we got our clocks cleaned there” encounter(s) with the Mongols, Alexander would have worked out what, if anything, he could do.
Militarily he was brilliant, but as a civil ruler he left an awful lot to be desired. I honestly begin to think that he would have done much better as the general of an emperor – let the guy on the fancy throne do all the ruling of the conquered territory, just keep supplying Al with all the men and matériel as he keeps conquering all before him.
I’ve read that the Mongols, like the Huns, Parthians, Scythians, etc. before them, were victorious in large part because skilled horse archers were basically superweapons in open battle; they could simultaneously outrun and outrange anything else on the field, attack while retreating, and cover enormous stretches of ground in a few days. The only reason they weren’t used more often was that riding a horse is hard, firing a bow is hard, and doing both together requires so much practice that you almost have to be a lifelong nomad who does little else with his time but ride around shooting stuff. Which is why all those powers were short-lived as empires; riding around all the time is less fun than settling down with concubines and booze, so the conquerors go soft within a generation or two.
Now, I’ve heard varying reports on the efficacy of recurve bows. Some people say they’re almost as vicious as longbows, some say more so, others say they’re just peashooters used for annoyance. Don’t know who to believe and can’t find a good YouTube demo.
But it might be that Alexander wouldn’t have had a particularly good counter for the Khan.
“Superweapons” is putting it a bit strongly: arrows aren’t actually all that good at killing things (even the famous English longbows didn’t actually stop the French charges; that was done by hand-to-hand fighting from prepared positions), and horse archers need a lot of space or else they’ll get trapped against some natural feature and slaughtered. (Which, I suppose, is why they never really took off in western Europe.)
Also, I think the effectiveness of horse archers tends to get overestimated due to the spotlight fallacy. Sweeping conquests are big and dramatic and get talked about a lot, so we tend to focus on those rather than all the occasions when nomads were defeated by non-horse-archer-based armies. Everybody remembers the first Mongol invasion of Hungary; practically nobody remembers the second, far less successful, invasion.
As for the peoples you mention, the Mongols used melee-fighting heavy cavalry as much as they used horse archers; the Hunnic forces which terrorised the Roman Empire had more Germanic vassals/mercenaries than Hunnic horse archers; the Parthians’ capital was sacked by the Romans on no less than five separate occasions; and the Scythians never managed to seriously defeat a settled empire on said empire’s home turf. So, whilst they were all good soldiers, they weren’t quite the military supermen pop history makes out.
Parthians were the armored cavalry anyway, I was thinking of the Medes and proto-Persians. I’ve read that there are claims that the Mongols used melee cavalry, but they can’t be substantiated. But yeah, this is not anything like an area of expertise for me.
We’ve been through this before, and no. There’s lots of ways to beat horse archers. A heavy cavalry charge wasn’t one of them, and the Mongols had the good fortune to make their move into Europe when European armies were A: very much focused on heavy cavalry charges as the one true path to victory and B: sufficiently bad at logistics that they usually couldn’t afford to wait for the Mongols to make a mistake but had to rush in and make their own.
Composite recurve bows certainly outranged longbows and they are more efficient–the ratio of energy stored to force at full draw is higher. How they compared in other ways I don’t know. If you believe the reconstructions of the Mary Rose longbows they had very high draw weights, which suggests that they required a lot of training. I don’t see any reason why one couldn’t have similar draw weights for recurves, don’t know if they did.
I’d say a great military leader needs a few things:
1.) To be born in a time of military conflict. As the oracle famous said to Cao Cao, he would only achieve his full greatness in chaotic times.
2.) To have access to regular, committed, skilled military formations. It’s remarkably rare that a great military leader creates their army from scratch. In fact, I can think of no examples.
3.) Military charisma, as defined by the ability to get respect and obedience out of soldiers and warriors.
4.) Extreme tolerance for discomfort and risk in pursuit of military objectives.
5.) Strategic and especially tactical insight above their opponents. Tactical insight is privileged not because it’s more important but because it’s more dramatic.
Someone with these things will not necessarily win. But they will overperform and if that overperformance is noticed then they’ll become remembered as a Great General in Civ 5 etc.
Philip of Macedon would count, since he basically created the Macedonian phalanx from scratch. He tends to get overshadowed by his son, but he was a great commander in his own right, and the first man ever to unite (almost all of) Greece.
Philip of Macedon reformed an existing army drawn from a people already considered uniquely skilled at war. Ancient accounts tell us he inherited an army of eleven thousand men who were already considered one of the best armies of the barbarians.
Frederick the Great considered George Washington to be one of the greatest military leaders of the age. And he wasn’t the only one with that opinion, just uniquely qualified to make the assessment.
George Washington had access to a populace that had fought en masse in a world war ten years earlier and had been involved in intergenerational conflicts for their very survival for more than a century and a half. Virtually every American man had some military training and a gun.
That is a very different thing than an army, as even a cursory study of George Washington’s attempt to build an army will show. And not unique or even particularly noteworthy when it comes to the raw material most preindustrial military commanders (great or otherwise) had to work with.
Quite the contrary, George Washington’s great pain was not creating military formations. It was reforming existing formations into a standing army. And American militiamen were uniquely skilled at fighting, at least in their home country. Indeed, they formed armies before Washington was even on the scene and beat the British at times.
And yes, the American militiaman was uniquely accustomed to warfare compared to his peers in other countries. Rates of gun ownership and enrollment in militias, as well as actual war experience in those militias, dwarfed anything seen in Europe.
Yes, but a militia and an army that will actually fight a war are very different things. Washington had to do an incredible amount of work to turn one into the other, and did it successfully. In large part, this was by abandoning the militia model in favor of long-service regulars from the lower classes, but he did it.
Sure. Washington was effectively recreating the British system with a standing professional army assisting by local militias, except both were American rather than having one shipped from the metropole.
But that concedes my point. It’s not that the person doesn’t reform the army or make it better. It’s that they already have skilled, committed military formations to work with. Likewise, Genghis Khan reorganized his armies too but he certainly didn’t invent everything about them. Horse and bow, driving tactics, etc.
No, it really doesn’t. He didn’t have skilled, committed military formations to work with. The history of the militia in the Revolution is mostly one of failure, with an occasional victory thrown in despite themselves. They were neither particularly skilled nor particularly committed. And there was no regular army in 1776 at all, so it couldn’t have been skilled or committed.
We appear to be turning here on the definition of skilled, committed, and military formations.
Perhaps you are right. I do not think so, but I’ll leave it to people to read about things like the Siege of Boston, General Lee, General Arnold, and all the other pre-Washington battles. They might also compare the American militia to near contemporaneous rebellions who had more dismal track records from the start.
If they feel Washington was dealing with people accustomed to fighting, part of existing organizations, and who were more skilled than, say, their average countryman back in England, my point stands. If not, then it falls.
I think you still have the goalposts in the wrong place with these conditions, which are probably technically satisfied. The military story of the Revolution is basically Washington trying to keep his army together. He spends a bunch of time running away or getting defeated, and wins just enough battles that things keep going. Eventually, Cornwallis marches into
Dien Bien PhuYorktown, and Washington wins that battle. But he absolutely had to build the army that won there.Belisarius is generally credited with the magic combination of firm authority, a quick grasp of the situation, and extreme ingenuity. I could see that combo working well in a variety of situations.
For Napoleon I recommend this 20 minute explanation of various factors behind his success.
Well, I wrote a story putting forth one explanation for Alexander the Great…
(Can anyone here figure out exactly how Alexander Outis was killed?)
It seems like a straightforward deduction, even if they don’t say it outright. The article says he died of “a Foundation memetic kill agent contracted through unknown means at an unknown time.” That means it was a Foundation agent who did the deed, and that they didn’t feel the need to conceal who did it. That implies official sanction, which implies O-5 gave the order (Especially since they explain why he had to go immediately afterwards). Was that it, or was there some other detail I missed?
Nope. O5-10’s letter came decades after this incident. And at the time, they weren’t happy that he’d died — as the letter said, they’d come to rely on him to a larger extent.
Check the timeline.
@hls2003
From WW1 on, if not a little before, great leaders cease to matter as much and great organizations are what wins wars. I’m sure Joffre wasn’t intrinsically more or less capable than the younger Moltke. The reason the French had such staggering losses against the Imperial German Army was more to difference in military doctrine, culture and preparedness ensured by Moltke (the Elder), Klausewitz, Bismark et al, who weren’t actually involved in that war themselves. So at some point reformers matter more, than campaign leaders. Falkenhain, Hindenburg, Ruprecht, Churchill were capable leaders at the top, but all were arguably replaceable. (perhaps not Churchill)
And the militarry orgs coupled with a nation state’s resources themselves weren’t ones that relied on ‘one neat trick’, but rather were evolving into ever more efficient killing machines.
So I think we should only consider pre-20th century warfare for the question.
For that I’d say a mix between:
low risk aversion (this is not a very common trait for humans to have!),
manic energy (Napoleon and Churchill, which might be triggered by being at war and in charge itself for some people; see “Napoleon never slept” by Randall Collins),
creativity (for the required out-of-the-box thinking, pretty much anyone considered great),
familiarity with the enemy (true for Hannibal (I think), Alexander, Flavius Aetius)
and the property refered to as clutchness (dealing with things not according to plan, staying calm under intense pressure)
You’re wrong about Alexander, Napoleon and Genghis. They weren’t one-trick ponys. They were constantly innovating and taking risky novel approaches. I recommend the Dan Carlin’s HardCore History podcast to get better insight into Alexander/the Macedonians and Genghis/the Golden Horde. Also ‘Blueprint for Armageddon’ if you want to hear 20 hours+ about WW1.
Nobody would have immediate insight into how to conduct trench warfare, trench warfare just kinda happened. They each would have done just fine in each other’s shoes I think.
There’s not one property or one word for this complex combination, because why would there be word for something that so few people or even understand (historically anyway). Greatness works works well enough.
I think the characteristics you mention are pretty on the money.
Everyone seems very focused on land warfare, so I’d like to offer, as another example of those characteristics, Admiral Thomas Cochrane, particularly his exploits as Captain of HMS Speedy.
I enjoyed Carlin on WWI very much, although it was rather bleak sledding. For the record, I wasn’t saying I think the Alexanders are definitely one-trick; I lean the other direction – but I think it’s worth asking the question.
I really like the “requires less sleep” theory. As someone who needs a lot of sleep, that always sounded like a superpower to me.
I thought trench warfare was invented by Lee in his final campaign, when, if I remember correctly, Grant lost more men in two months than Lee had in his whole army. Unfortunately for Lee, Grant had the men to lose.
Was nobody in Europe paying attention?
From what I’ve read and learned: No, Europe wasn’t paying attention at all. Too busy taking over colonies in Africa and suppressing the indigenous people. When World War One started, nobody had updated their doctrine to match the weapons available and that’s why it was such a bloody war. Calvary got shipped across the English Channel and set to charge against machine gun emplacements. Just as a given commander was figuring out why traditional strategies weren’t working, they’d get pulled off the front line for failure to make headway and the next foolish senior commander would take charge and make the same mistakes.
Cavalry were necessary for scouting, and to screen your own movements from enemy scouts. Whilst I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that some cavalry units happened to find themselves on the wrong end of a machine-gun emplacement, that certainly wasn’t the reason for their being there.
That’s false; all sides learnt from the experience of trench warfare. Hence the introduction of such new weapons as tanks.
@Woah77
As the original Mr. X notes, commanders did learn from trench warfare: the practice of trench warfare itself kept “evolving” new techniques and technologies, and by the end of the war they were starting to do stuff that would have broken the deadlock pretty well. They weren’t failing to learn the lessons, but rather, they were just dealt a lousy hand. Advantages in defence over attack for technological reasons: machineguns and artillery, but also a lack of portable radios for infantry, low levels of motorization, etc. Successful attack could be very costly (in resources if not lives) and it was hard to follow up on due to poor communications and mobility. The best generals of WWI faced the same problems as the worst.
People in Europe were indeed paying attention, and their military observers generally had positive things to say about US military equipment. It’s just that the lessons which seem obvious to us now simply aren’t if you don’t already know what’s going to happen in 1914, especially since the central example of ‘modern’ warfare to a late-19th Century European is the Franco-Prussian War, not the US Civil War, and the former seemed to prove pretty conclusively that strategic speed and superior military organization are the ways to win.
I also think it’s worth noting that Germany was really close to replicating [something close to] the lightning victory of the Franco-Prussian War (though with vastly more casualties). They drove to within a few miles of Paris by September 1914. If they could have taken the city and regrouped over the winter in French territory, it’s not at all certain the Allies wouldn’t have sued for peace. They were more than holding their own on the Eastern Front. If things had gone not too much differently in Belgium (as the Germans planned upon, although perhaps foolishly), we might be talking about how the lesson of WWI is that speed is essential, and trenches are useless because they will just get either flanked or stretched too thin to be defensible, and how wars could be limited to quick conquests to extract concessions from the French.
Don’t forget the Crimean, Franco-Austrian, Schleswig-Holstein, Austro-Prussian, Russo-Turkish, Boer, and Russo-Japanese Wars, which all involved military technology equally or more advanced than that used in the American Civil War, and all saw troops successfully making attacks against enemy infantry. And European leaders did learn from them: as you say, the Franco-Prussian War was won in large part thanks to Prussia’s quicker mobilisation and prompt invasion of enemy territory. The idea that the US Civil War showed the way for WW1 but that European generals weren’t paying intention is only tenable if you ignore pretty much every late-19th-century war between modern armies.
European military observers noticed the American civil war, and then extrapolated from the massive size difference between continental Europe and the continental US. “Swift decisive movements will still be possible here, where the distances are shorter” was correct until newer technology changed the balance.
Also, because both sides in the USCW were essentially creating their armies from scratch, their soldiers weren’t as well-trained as European forces, and consequently were less able to successfully carry through attacks. European forces were generally able to close with their enemies, right up until they weren’t.
As you say, difficult to reduce this to one thing. Also: is a great general one who wins battles, even against the odds (Hannibal, Napoleon, Lee) or one who achieves a great objective without much or any fighting at all (e.g. William of Orange in 1688)?
Assuming we are interested in the former (i.e. the great tactician): one feature that unites Alexander, Hannibal, and Marlborough (& probably others) is that they held a mass of cavalry (i.e. shock troops) in reserve until the right moment and then unleashed it (e.g. Cannae, Blenheim). Easy to say, hard to do; what is the right moment? This sense of timing is probably critical and at least partly instinctive – all the training in the world wouldn’t necessarily provide this sense of timing.
It’s a very fair point, but would we say that William J. Crowe, Ronald Reagan’s chairman of the Joint Chiefs, was a great general because he presided over the end of the Cold War? Or Reagan himself as the great general in that instance, since he had more control of policy? I lean towards the second – I think Reagan deserves credit for the application of severe pressure for the Soviets to keep up with US innovation – but then you end up rather blending the categories of “great leaders” and “great military leaders.”
Purely based on gut, I’d say there are qualities that could make one a good military leader across a wide range of places and times, but the difference between good and one-of-the-all-time-greats is mostly contingent.
I’m not seeing as much SSC contrarian pushback as I’d like, so I’m going to steelman the position that a lot of people we call great conquerors are people in the right place at the right time more than uniquely different people.
Alexander is the very best example of such a person. When we learn about the Ancient Greeks, as I had to do during my full six years of high school education, you learn history, mythology, and philosophy. What you don’t learn is that the Greeks were some of the most fractious and warlike people in classical antiquity, to the point that even among what writings survive a lot of them question whether they should be infighting so much. No hoplite army has ever lost a battle against an army similar in size, and the Greeks were accustomed enough to war that Thucydides (a little farcically, but only a little) implies the Athenians sailed for Sicily to make war out of sheer boredom.
This has very strong implications for how impressive you find Alexander. Here you have a man whose father reformed an already powerful military, who unified most all of Greece, and all of whom have ancestral reasons to really ferociously hate the empire next door. Someone who has no riches to find elsewhere, no other neighboring great civilisations, and commands a united army of people who have spent the last five centuries practicing year in, year out endemic warfare against one another constantly.
It’s either that, or one random person who inherited the throne this one time just happened to be that skilled a conqueror. Hmm.
You can make a similar case for Julius Caesar. Even if you take his own propaganda to be true, the man had an enormous advantage over his foes: here you have someone with effectively limitless soldiers, who is pulling warriors from Africa and across the Mediterranean, up against some people who don’t even like each other very much. What were the Gauls ever even going to do? A great deal of their people had been bought off or swayed by the Romans, and they couldn’t petition home for more soldiers should they lose a battle. In the Roman track record of conquests, it really doesn’t stand out as a case of unique leadership as much as it is one more republican addition of territory.
No. I’m of the opinion that if you want to look for places with great generals, you need to look at times and periods where said generals earned their position. In times and periods of warfare and strife to the point that leaders aren’t selected hereditarily or strong ones come out on top, this is really very visible: it’s easy to point at Napoleon and explain him away as taking advantage of citizen armies the first, or at Genghis Khan and noting that anyone could’ve taken his army and conquered, but the victors of the Sengoku Jidai or a figure like Shaka arose in areas where success was much less guaranteed. A lot of great conquests in history had to benefit from some very excellent timing, and it’s likely more valuable to look at that than to look at the conquerors themselves and consider their victories entirely their own.
Caesar’s conquest of the gauls does have that issue, but caesar also beat other romans, often romans who outnumbered him.
To my mind, the greatest generals are precisely those who build fundamentally superior armies. Phillip of Macedon, Frederick the Great, Hans Von Seekt, napoleon, they didn’t just maneuver troops well on the battlefield they had armies that were capable of battlefield achievements that their enemies weren’t, and that gave them a huge advantage. But those armies didn’t come from nowhere, they made fundamental innovations that gave them that capacity, and that to me is the supreme test of generalship.
The case for Caesar is a little weaker than it is for Alexander, but then history went along as it did. If Pompey had won the power struggle we’d be having the reverse discussion here.
Agreed about the rest of your statement, though Frederick the Great is one more person who got astoundingly lucky enough that I’m not sure he’d be admired as well if history had gone just a tiny touch different.
Frederick was incredibly luck to survive, much less win, the 7 year’s war, but he still built an army that was fundamentally better than all those of the neighboring states. It was just only enough better to take on two of them at once, not 3.
You’re welcome.
Because of how links get automatically underlined, I misread the title of your recommendation as “Brave Men, Gentle Herpes” and thought that was really funny even though I immediately knew I was misreading it.
I made charts about the comment threads under the oldest-first and newest-first orderings. I expected that the number of top-level comments would increase, but the number of comments in the average thread (under a top-level comment) and the longest thread would decrease, as we drop a discussion faster. Eyeballing the charts, the effects are unclear, but it looks like there is a slight increase in the total number of comments, the number of top-level comments, but perhaps even in the length of the average thread and the longest thread. (Script, data.)
I tried resposting four comments (as quotes within one comment) from a 119.25 thread in order to show context and continue the conversation here, and it got marked as Spam. Is this because I tried adding the following link to the conversation, or is it because reposting in this manner is frowned upon and someone clicked report?
(The original thread is about the US Constitution, original intent, etc…)
Original thread: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/01/16/open-thread-119-25/#comment-712702
Original poster here. My point, supported by the fact that the Founders told us their intentions, is countered with that they may have been lying. You then go on to say that if something is ambiguous, we must presume we cannot know the Founder’s intent. We then presumably may insert our own, as you argue for.
Frankly, you have an issue. We have mountains of evidence on our side and you have an innovative definition you thought up recently and that contradicts how it was understood at the time and all times until your innovation. You’re desperately reaching to make evidence irrelevant by constructing a world where there can be no evidence at all and all interpretations of any ambiguity are allowed.
But nothing can change the fact we have evidence and you do not. You can make an epistemic argument about what evidence is or how we even know anything at all. This might make you a great philosopher. But it makes you a poor lawyer.
You also make the absurd claim that nothing in the US system privileges precedent. The US is a Common Law system, except for Lousiana. The Supreme Court itself uses common law precedent principles on its decisions.
Who told you his intention? A handful out of dozens of drafters? And even if you had all the drafters they exercised no sovereignty whatsoever, not even the delegated kind. They were mere proposal makers. The act of sovereignty were the ratifications held in the states. It was the ratifiers and what they believed they were agreeing to that matters, not the inappropriately capitalized (and quasi-deified) founders, which is in the end largely just Hamilton and Madison.
Is this a consistent legal principle? I was under the impression that if you misunderstand a contract you’re SoL
First, I should say that this is assuming the contractarian view of constitutional legitimacy. I have mixed feelings about that and texualism in general, but for this discussion it clearly fits.
Secondly, in both cases (contract and constitution) if the text itself is clear that’s it. It’s only in cases of ambiguity that the understandings of the parties come into play. In the case of a contract, the parties are the people that signed the contract (not the lawyers that drafted it!). In the case of the constitution it is the ratifiers that matter, hence original public meaning, not the drafters (Founders, peace be upon them).
Ah yeah, I’m not meaning to contest the constitutional aspect too strongly (not necessarily agreeing but it’s outside my expertise and is at the least an interesting take I hadn’t encountered before).
More curious about whether contract law actually worked that way. I guess the issue there would be that contracts which are arcane to regular shlubs – but “clear” to lawyers – are also clear to judges?
Contract law gets fairly complicated, fairly quickly. There’s something called an integration clause (https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/integration_clause) that is put into every professionally drafted contract. There’s the parol evidence rule (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parol_evidence_rule). There’s the UCC that, among other things, provides “gap fillers” for contracts it governs. There’s rules about industry customs and practice, and how that sheds light on ambiguous provisions, etc, etc, etc.
But to your question, ambiguous and unambiguous is judged “objectively”, which means in practice that they aren’t concerned about the understandings of shlubs.
The people who occupied leadership positions within the group and actually drafted the law. Of course, this is irrelevant because I do not need to have every single person for my interpretation to be stronger. I have more than you, who have none, and that is sufficient.
If I have exactly one person explaining their intentions to me, no matter how dubious, and you have zero, then I have more evidence for my interpretation than you. This principle applies not only to Founding Fathers but, for example, the people who wrote laws last year. Or in the 1950s.
What is your argument precisely? We do not know the secret thoughts of every person who voted to ratify a bill so we are free to interpret any ambiguity however we please?
Here you equivocate between the Founding Fathers and the drafters for some reason. The two groups are not equivalent. But yes, the arguments in the Federalist Papers are relevant because they were advanced to the people who ratified the document. Of course, the bar for this has sometimes been much lower. The entire concept of Separation of Church and State comes out of Jefferson’s letters.
Yes, therefore it might be relevant to see what the Ratifiers were told to influence their ultimate decision. Reading people who ratified it, as many of the Founding Fathers did cast such votes, also helps.
And on a petty but revealing note: ‘Founding Fathers’ is a proper noun and is thus properly capitalized. It is not a particular mark of respect. The All Union Communist Party and the Nationalist Socialist Workers Party both require similar capitalization. I do not know why you keep returning to this point. Or why you keep accusing me of deifying them. You seem to have some unique objection to them. Something that drives you to object to basic rules of grammar when you feel it gives them respect.
No it isn’t. We don’t need intent to begin with. You have what you believe is intent and you are using that to bootstrap a need for it.
We have the plain text, we have the shared context, we have the teachings of our nation’s history, we don’t need Jefferson’s letters. They have no bearing on the meaning of the Constitution.
Alexander the Great wanted to conquer all of India but was forced back because of low morale among his men. If it wasn’t for that, is there any reason to doubt that he could have done so?
As I understand it, the predominant theory is that Alexander died as a result of infections produced by some of his numerous battle wounds. So there’s no reason keeping going with the fighting in India would have prolonged his life any, and in fact it would likely have shortened it. India did not have a unified government as Persia had had, so there wasn’t any one enemy he could defeat and bring the campaign to a close; he’d have to defeat a lot of petty states, which would unavoidably take time, possibly more than he had.
If you extend his lifespan, his prospects improve some, but it would be very hard for him to bring reinforcements from home all the way to India. Replacing losses with local recruits would, over time, reduce the proportion of his troops that are Macedonian, and at some point having too few Macedonian troops and too many foreign troops would worsen loyalty and morale problems, so even if he’d averted the initial crisis that caused him to turn back, more would likely have arisen.
I’m not sure the local recruits would have been an insourmountable problem. Towards the end of his campaign, he accepted a batch a freshly trained Persians in to his army. There was some grumbling but his troops were still loyal to him. If he doesn’t die from infections/poison, then he was still a young, ambitious 33 year old who had plenty of time for deft maneuvering to take care of that problem.
I know he used foreign troops, but that practice would have become more troublesome as the ratio of Macedonian to foreign troops shifted to fewer of the former and more of the latter.
I understand, I’m just saying I don’t think it was an insurmountable problem. Didn’t the Mongols increasingly use foreign troops in their army? They had a much larger empire with very few mongols relatively speaking. I don’t know if they had any serious problems but it didn’t seem to affect them terribly.
Sure, Genghis Khan made it work. Impressive though Alexander was, he was not so impressive that “if the Great Khan could do it, he could do it” looks like a safe inference to me.
What was it about the Mongols that made it possible for them to have higher numbers of foreigners in their army but not the Macedonians?
Mongol-style horse archers are almost unbeatable in a straight-up fight with the technology available at the time. If the conscript troops mutinied, the Mongols probably could’ve just slaughtered them.
@broblawsky:
My impression is that the non-Mongol forces were mostly other groups of steppe nomads, also fighting as horse archers.
Linking to the other instance of that claim in this OT, for discussion of the rebuttal.
From what I understand, the Indians wouldn’t have been pushovers like the Persians were. Them being non-unified (and I’m assuming semi-constantly at war with each other) would have made them tough to beat on their own turf.
After Alexander won against Porus his men were less than amused, because just that one petty state gave them a lot more resistance than they were used to and at this point willing to face (what’s the point of having conquered, when you just die trying to conquer more).
If it wasn’t for a shortfall of the single most important thing in war, the one that successful military leaders agree is three times as important as everything else put together, [X] could have won more military victories than he did.
True for all values of X.
I’m not saying I believe that low morale is something that can be glossed over. I don’t think there’s a scenario where he could have kept going. I’m saying that if you look at the resources available to him along with his own strategic thinking and imagine that troop morale was higher, how does that compare to the states of India?
I’m intrigued by this and I wonder how literally you mean it. Your point is that morale is very important, and I can believe it’s more important than I’d expect, but is there any meaningful sense by which we can say it’s more important than other factors?
It hasn’t really been true since the introduction of the machine gun, but in premodern warfare Bravery was *the* stat. Formations were strong, individual soldiers were weak, so battles were about scaring the enemy soldiers into breaking formation and massively reducing their strength. And having your formation fearlessly charged is really scary, so it was an offensive weapon as well.
I was mostly riffing on Napoleon, but he wasn’t just pulling the number out of thin air.
Very few armies retain much useful combat strength after even 20% material losses, and usually break well before that point. If you know how to make your army be the one that endures until 20% losses, and you know how to make the enemy be the one that breaks at 5%, then you can expect to defeat an army 2-4x the size of your own, depending on which version of the Lanchester equations you are using.
And yes, this works even in the modern era. You just substitute “scare the enemy into breaking formation” to “scare the enemy into hiding at the bottom of their foxholes, each one content to leave the fighting to the rest”. Formations made it easier to handle morale, because it is immediately obvious to both commander and comrade-in-arms who is not doing their part.
That’s very interesting; thanks for the explanation.
(By the way, your link to the Lanchester equations appears to just direct to this thread. It’s easily googleable, though, so no worries. 🙂 )
I love fungi! I was once the youngest person to write a letter to the British Mycological Society. Perhaps I still am. My knowledge is pretty rusty, unfortunately. No, that’s not right. My knowledge of fungi is mouldy. I was thinking of my knowledge of metallurgy.* Anyway, twelve year old me would be appalled at how little I can recall.
Fungi are closer to us biologically than they are to the plants, but unlike animals they spread their tissues across acres of decaying organic matter in damp forests, rather than being encased in one compact central body. These fragile mycelial threads communicate across great distances. No, not a mind, not the internet either, but something nonetheless. They can live for centuries and mass more than a whale.
Given this habitat it should perhaps not be too surprising that they have developed some truly remarkable compounds to defend themselves in the bitter microscopic turf war that is their existence, compounds that humans can make good use of.
*Could probably extend or alter this joke by talking about rusts on plants, which are fungal.
Do you have specific compounds in mind when you refer to humans making good use of them?
The nootropics community has been singing the praises of lion’s mane supplements for quite some time now. Are they on[to] something?
I think the anti-microbial and anti-viral potential of many fungal compounds is going to receive greater attention in coming years. Paul Stamets, undoubtedly the most famous of the fungal popularisers has a number of youtube videos on the potential of Agarikon and other species.
Bear in mind that he is a bit of a showman and many of his claims are oversold and require further scrutiny. Take what he says with a big pinch of something that has good anti-fungal properties and could rid you of athlete’s foot.
That said, I’m still a fan. If he can create a groundswell of interest in this field and increase the number of professional mycologists he will have done a very good thing.
Indeed, after moving to a house with juniper trees in the yard, I learned all about cedar-apple rust. What a bizarre life-cycle, though I take it not actually unusual for a fungus.
I love fungi too, at least intellectually. (Not gastronomically.) I don’t know a lot about fungi but most of what I do know is from the In Our Time podcast episode about them. Fascinating stuff, and inspiring too.
Do you expect there to be fungi in the deep biosphere? I’d assume, there’s not enough organic material down there, but since until recently we assumed there’d be close to none at all…
Also, mushrooms talk to each other?
Or are you referring to those yellow, jelly fungi (I don’t recall what their name was)?
Wow, I’ve just recently learned about prototaxites, which some say were fungi. Do you think it’s likely, and if yes why the hell would they need to be so huge – 8 meters tall – in the era when the biggest plant was waist-high?
If Wikipedia’s right and it had algal symbiotes, then it would have got its energy through indirect photosynthesis. Then it could have formed vertical forests like true plants did later, and for the same reasons — to compete for light with similar organisms.
Alternately, growing higher would have meant better spore dispersal, though that’s a bit more of a long shot.
Yeah, lichens competing for light is one option, but as I understand it remains highly controversial whether those things had symbiotic algae. And if they didn’t – is it such a great benefit to have better spore dispersal to justify the expenses? I mean, how big and far spreading a mycelium should be to support say one such thing, if it’s a plain fungus?
Hello, and welcome to the eighteenth installment of my Biblical scholarship effortpost series. Last time, we looked at wisdom literature and its main example in the Hebrew Bible, Proverbs. Proverbs teaches, among other things, that good and prudent behaviour is rewarded whereas bad and imprudent behaviour is punished. Both of the books that we are going to look at today, Ecclesiastes and the book of Job, are at least in part examinations of the observable fact that this is not in fact the case.
Caveats: I’m not a real expert on this, but I did study it in university. I’m aiming for about a 100/200 level coverage of this, fairly briefly, but will try to expand if people have any questions. This is about secular scholarship, not about theology. I’ll be providing limited summaries, but space is an issue.
Ecclesiastes is a book of experiential wisdom on a variety of topics: it presents its content as the result of the writer’s experiences. It seems to have internal indications of structure, which might indicate that it is a coherent document.
The author of Ecclesiastes, calling himself Koheleth (the names meaning something like “assembler” – of sayings, or of people to a gathering), begins by discussing the futility (the word literally means air or breath; it’s been translated in various different ways in English) of human endeavour. Nature and human life are cyclical. Attempting to understand the ways of the world is also futile. The pursuit of pleasure, the acquisition of property, luxury, is also futile. The wise man and the foolish man both die – what advantage is it to be wise, especially considering that wisdom can make you unhappy? The oppressed suffer. There are those who have riches but do not enjoy them. Chance can make or unmake a person.
One thing the author notices is that reward and punishment, as presented in a tradition like that of Proverbs, and on a different level in much of the rest of the Hebrew Bible, don’t always work. Some good people don’t prosper, and some evil people do. Everyone will die in the end and whether someone prospers or fails depends on more than just their merit. The latter is most famously put in 9:11: the fastest doesn’t always win the race, and so on. The author of Ecclesiastes seems either to think there is not an afterlife (3:20-21 says people come from dust and return to it, and questions whether a person’s lifebreath rises upwards and that of an animal down – men may be no better than beasts; also, this may be a reference to a particular Hellenistic belief about the afterlife), or that the afterlife is undifferentiated and does not preserve a person’s self (see 9:5-6); in either case, there is no reward after death to make up for unrewarded merit in life. The wise man and the fool are in the same boat once they die.
Ultimately, the conclusion of Ecclesiastes is that human understanding is limited, and part of wisdom is to understand this. What ultimately can be known is that God is in charge, and that people should try to enjoy their lives, even if they cannot fully make sense about what happens to them. There’s comparable material in some other ancient Near East wisdom literature, especially from Egypt (as noted in the last installment, Israel’s wisdom tradition seems most influenced by, or at least most similar to, Egypt’s).
The text itself identifies the author as a king, specifically Solomon. However, the rest of the document isn’t consistent with this; the author does not consistently speak from the position of a king. Based on contextual references (to politics, land, and money) it is likely that the author was of a landed, well-off class, but not connected to the royal court.
Internal evidence, including the use of Persian loanwords, suggests a postexilic origin for Ecclesiastes. It might be from the Persian period, or from the Hellenistic period. As noted, 3:21 may indicate a Hellenistic origin, but this is fairly weak evidence.
Considerably longer than Ecclesiastes, and more challenging from a scholarly perspective, is the book of Job. It begins with a prose introduction. Job is a “blameless and upright man” who is quite prosperous. “The Adversary” (or, “the Accuser” – Satan in Hebrew), part of God’s divine court, incites God against Job, saying that Job is pious only because life is good for him, and that if this wasn’t the case, he would blaspheme. God agrees with this, and Job’s life is ruined: his children and his flocks are all killed or carried off. He doesn’t blaspheme, though. The Adversary, however, answers that if Job suffers physically, he will blaspheme. Job is then struck with a terrible skin disease, and while his wife urges him to blaspheme, he still does not. Job’s friends come to comfort him.
The text then shifts to a dialogue between Job and his friends. Job insists that he is blameless and questions why these things are happening to him. His friends insist he must have done something, and that he presumes to question God. Ultimately, God shows up and basically tells Job that he isn’t capable of understanding what’s going on – he’s not God, and cannot judge God’s power. Job agrees.
The dialogues are followed by another prose section. God condemns Job’s friends for not speaking the truth about God as Job did. God restores Job’s fortunes, and he is more prosperous than ever, dying “old and contented.”
The book’s Hebrew is trickier than usual, and there are features (such as indications a speech is meant originally to have been spoken by someone else) which suggest there have been transmission errors. In general, the textual history of Job is very confusing. The scholarly debates are pretty arcane, but a fairly common view is that one way or another Job consists of two stories combined. The first, consisting of the prose introduction and conclusion (some scholars think 27 is also involved, and the discussion of wisdom in 28), is about a man named Job who has everything taken away from him, does not blaspheme, and then is restored. The dialogues are about a man named Job who has everything taken from him, disagrees with his friends over his responsibility, demands justification, and then is shut down by God.
The scholarly debates, as I noted, are complicated, and rely a fair bit on fairly advanced Hebrew work, which I am not equipped to deal with. The consensus seems to be that Job is two stories combined (plus a bit of other stuff). One story takes a view that goes with what we saw in Proverbs: Job is a good man who is harmed by what amounts to a test which he passes, and is thereafter restored. Good behaviour is rewarded. The other book has a message that more resembles what we saw in Ecclesiastes: humans are not God and cannot understand things as God does. What seems to us incomprehensible or unjust is simply beyond our capability to get. We’re not in charge. The alternative explanation to this view would be that disjunctions between the prose and dialogue, and between the introduction and conclusion, were the result of a rougher-than-usual transmission process.
What God says to Job includes a lot of creation motifs. God’s statements include a lot of rhetorical questions pointing out that Job had neither a hand in creating the world nor in the operation of that creation in the present. Similar to the speculations about God’s past enthronement in the Psalms, there’s some speculation that the creation motif includes hints of supposed older traditions, in which God’s role at the beginning had included struggle. Regardless of this point, God’s superiority is expressed very heavily in these terms.
Job is a non-Israelite, from the land of Uz. Uz, another name for Edom, was part of the Transjordan. This area in general was sometimes known as “Kedem” (more generally, one could talk about “the East”) and its people were known for their wisdom tradition (1 Kings 5:10 boasts that Solomon’s wisdom was greater than the Kedemites and Egyptians; you wouldn’t boast about being wiser than a people not known for their wisdom). Job is cited in Ezekiel 14 as a righteous character. Job may originally be a folktale character, famous for his response to catastrophe. There are some similar stories in other ancient Near Eastern literature.
Job is tricky to date, because the dialogues are poetically styled, and poetry is more likely to be intentionally archaic in style. The language of the prose introduction and conclusion suggests no earlier than the sixth century; meanwhile, the dialogues seem closest to material from the sixth century also. The role taken by (the) Satan in the introduction suggests a postexilic date, while the use of the definite article points to a date before Chronicles. Job must be from before the third or second century, the date of an Aramaic paraphrasing version found at Qumran. Most scholars thus date it to the sixth or fifth century.
So, that’s Ecclesiastes and Job. Both are associated with the wisdom tradition, but are quite different from the more typical wisdom worldview we saw in Proverbs last time. Ecclesiastes is a reflection upon humanity’s ultimate failures, and the book of Job includes, or is, one – depending on how you look at the scholarship. Both deal with the observation that God doesn’t always reward the good or punish the bad. Job is likely from the sixth or fifth century, while Ecclesiastes is probably a bit later.
EDIT: If I’ve made any mistakes, let me know as soon as possible, and I’ll edit or note them.
One alternate interpretation: Ecclesiastes is exploring the implications of there being no afterlife, rather than necessarily endorsing that position.
I’m not informed enough to have a real opinion but I wouldn’t be surprised if Job was originally two stories because as a single story it badly undermines itself.
In the beginning we get an omniscient narrator who tells us exactly why God is punishing Job: he’s got a bet going with Satan that Job won’t blaspheme, and goes along with Satan whenever he raises the stakes. Then, when Job questions why he’s being punished, God makes a big deal out of how Job can’t judge him because he has no idea why God is doing what he’s doing. Which might be a fair point for Job himself to keep in mind, but the reader knows exactly why he’s doing it thanks to the omniscient narrator telling us about the bet. Which makes God come off as a liar, since he’s clearly implying that there’s some good or at least incomprehensible reason for what he’s doing when it’s actually just the sort of shenanigans that Zeus would have gotten up to.
Either you can have the story about the bet or the speech about God’s unknowable motives. Putting them both in the same book undermines them both.
1) Can’t you just go back a step and say we don’t know why the bet was a good idea because we can’t comprehend God?
2) Alternately, Job’s virtue is precisely in having faith in God even when God doesn’t appear to have a good reason for his actions, which is coherent but not immediately very satisfying.
The problem with 1) is that if we do that, we’re fighting against a plain interpretation of the text. There’s no reason to think that Job has an unreliable narrator, and the narration suggests a perfectly straightforward motivation for God to take Satan’s bet.
2) is what I meant when I said that it makes sense for Job himself to behave as though God has a real reason for tormenting him even if we as readers know it isn’t true. We don’t have the benefit of omniscient narrators in our own lives so we can’t actually make those judgements.
Thanks!
1) I think there’s more to it than that. I think we see God permit Satan to afflict Job, but I don’t think the Bible tells us why. The passage explains (twice!) that Satan shows up, that God volunteers Job as a example of perfect virtue, that Satan argues that Job’s virtue will wither if his fortune does, and that God permits Satan to test Job.
a) First, a quibbble, but I think an important quibble; I don’t think that precisely describes a “bet” – there aren’t any stakes that we know of.
b) It would IMHO be fairer to say that God permits Satan to afflict Job and predicts that Job will remain virtuous.
c) You could call it a “test,” then, instead of a bet, but ultimately I think this is exactly the problem of evil – why, exactly, does God permit undeserved evil (here, personified as Satan), to occur to Job?.
One possible answer is to prove a point – that God wants Satan to learn that Job’s virtue does not depend on his fortune. Another would be that God himself wants Job to be tested by adversity. but (i) IMHO, neither interpretation is clearly spelled out in the text, and (ii) even that would just force us to ask why God cares what Satan thinks about Job and/or wants Job tested.
But ultimately my read is that (a) God permits undeserved evil to happen to Job, (b) we don’t know why, and (c) then he tells Job that Job doesn’t get to know why and/or couldn’t understand it. It adds a little extra edge that it seems like God is just doing it to prove a point – that He and Satan are throwing dice with men’s lives – but IMHO, the beginning creates that assumption and then the end reveals it as an unjustified assumption. God says “you have no idea why I am doing what I do,” and when we look back at the original narrative, we realize that we don’t.
Why isn’t it true? By letting Satan test Job, God is giving him an opportunity to grow in faith and to become detached from transient, worldly goods. Those are both good things.
Well, the bet is Satan saying there is no such thing as real virtue, people are only good when they’re well-off and happy, take someone like Job who is praised for being blameless – it’d be different if he lost all his riches and contentment, then he’d turn on God just like the rest of humanity.
God is saying “Job is not like that” and in a wider sense virtue does exist. He permits the testing of Job because He has confidence in Job (and in humanity, His creation). Satan is the everyday cynic who believes it’s all relative – people are good until it costs them, then they revert to their original and base nature. It’s like the people who say that you don’t see someone’s real true self until you see what they’re like when they’re angry or stressed – then you’re supposed to take the drunken/angry/stressed snap reaction as the ‘real’ person and ignore all the times they haven’t snapped because that wasn’t the ‘real’ person, that was only the comfort talking.
It’s not really a bet on God’s part because, well, He’s God, He knows how this is going to turn out. This is letting Satan (and by extension all the other “yeah there’s no such thing as good and evil, there’s no such thing as virtue, it’s easy for you to be good” types) see that they can be wrong. Job gets everything stripped away from him, is put under stress, and the ‘real’ Job that emerges is the same as the ‘fat and happy’ Job who put all his trust in God.
In Hindu mythology/religion, there is the concept of Pariksha (a test or examination, also used in this meaning in ordinary life as for example sitting an exam) that devotees and ordinary people undergo, either by the gods or for other reasons. The famous one is the Agni Pariksha, or trial by fire, that Sita had to undergo to prove her chastity after being rescued from imprisonment by the demon Ravanna. However, later on Sita is exiled (because the common people of the kingdom still doubt her after spending all that time in another man’s house) and called upon once again to prove her chastity by undergoing another test, and she refuses and returns to Mother Earth. At least Job got his happy ending after the testing!
The scholarly debates are basically a fancier version of “hey, this story undermines itself!” I think Job is one of the places where the scholarly consensus requires relatively few tenuous bits where people sorta say “uh huuuuuh?”
EDIT: Also, there is a Zeus-y edge to it. I think it’s relevant that some scholars think the prose intro/conclusion are based on an older folktale: older, “folksier” stuff is often supposed to be older. For some reason I’m remembering that some scholars think the amoral/weird miracle-type things that happen in Kings are older: folksy, amoral tales are supposedly a different beast from more literary, theological stuff.
I wonder if any of that comes from expecting ancient people to be less sophisticated than we are. A fable where everything made perfect sense and the message was perfectly consistent might have made for better propaganda (what biblical scholars seem to think the purpose was) but not matched reality as well and thus not been preserved as well.
I think you’re right that there’s an expectation that less-literate cultures are less theologically inclined. But I think I’ve explained it poorly. It’s not that the earlier societies had stories that made less sense or were inconsistent. It’s that moralizing elements, stuff that exalts God more, etc can be a later theological element: the original stories feature a God who makes bets like that. Meanwhile, earlier people just cared less about that stuff. So some kids (JPS translation has “little boys”) made fun of Elisha and he sicced bears on them. So what?
The God who shows up to say “hey you know what, why don’t you try and be Me, why don’t you try that, since you got all these criticisms, oh right, YOU CAN’T” is by this theory the product of a later tendency to have a God who is more majestic and removed from our experience. Even the betting stuff is fairly small potatoes by the standards of deities of the time.
Couple this with the whiffs some scholars find (and/or imagine) of early polytheistic stuff, of the idea of God having once had to win a primordial victory, and you get some interesting (if wildly speculative) things going on. Unfortunately, the bits of Job that include the supposed primordial victory stuff are not in the folktale-seeming bit…
Agreed with Randy on the scholars thinking ancient people were less sophisticated.
I’d like to come at this from a slightly different angle. I know Biblical scholars aren’t rationalists, but when we see an apparent contradiction in just about anything there’s two possibilities. One, there’s two opposing things there. Or two, one of our assumptions is false. What if wisdom literature is designed to question our assumptions precisely by presenting apparent contradictions? Seems like a thing it would do. But Biblical scholars aren’t exactly set up to question their own world view assumptions.
It’s possible, but it’s untenable for scholarship if any inconsistency in a document of a philosophical, etc bent could really be evidence of being intended to make the reader question their assumptions. At a minimum, one would need some indication that there was a tradition of this in Judaism – I have no idea whether there is or isn’t.
I think there is an unfair assumption of simplicity of folktales, especially given that these were folktales written down later.
Whoever put Proverbs 26:4 and 26:5 right next to each other was clearly intending for the reader to directly notice and grapple with the contradiction. So that’s some evidence for deliberately posing paradoxes being a thing in the ancient Jewish wisdom tradition. Certainly Judaism does not seem to have a tendency to shun paradox, unlike other religious traditions I could mention.
If believing that the ancients were sophisticated in this particular way undermines the methodology of biblical scholarship then… so much the worse for biblical scholarship?
One problem with saying that the prose and poetry parts of Job were originally two separate accounts is that there’s nothing in the prose part of Job, as we have it, for 42:7 to refer to.
To me this is the key verse in the entire book—God says that Job was justified in speaking as he did (even though he did so from a position of ignorance). And therefore, believers are justified in being honest about our actual grievances rather than thinking we sin unless we accede to pat justifications. It seems to me fairly obvious that the writer of the poetry section agreed with that judgement, i.e. that he was on Job’s side of the debate.
Of course, you don’t really avoid such theological issues by saying that the prose and poetry were originally two separate documents. Because once you postulate a redactor who edited them together, then you can still ask what the redactor meant by combining them in a way that leads to an obvious paradox. Unless you want to say that the redactor simply didn’t notice the issue, but that seems too contemptuous of his intelligence.
(In some ways this supports my point about Judaism. If there was a school of redactors who combined superficially inconsistent religious literature into books, then the theology of that school obviously believed that it was important to synthesize apparent contradictions rather than picking one side and dropping the other. And may I humbly suggest that, if we are asking big questions like “does virtue lead to happiness”, then it’s pretty obvious that both the yes side and the no side contain important insights that need to be combined if we’re going to match the data in the real world.)
@Aron Wall
1. The scholars who think that the story was originally one thing usually appeal to transmission errors being likelier for Job, due to complicated Hebrew-related reasons. So either way you’ve got a problem: either they were kinda mashed together, or there’s stuff missing that would reconcile the prose and the poetry.
2. I think that, while it is true that Biblical scholars have a tendency to posit greater “development” with time, at the same time, the German Protestant Biblical scholarship tradition has a strong preference for earlier stuff: it’s very easy to read the foundational Biblical scholarship and come up with the comparison of cool, ethically-concerned prophets and lame, rules-and-purity-obsessed codifiers. (Similarly, a lot of them really seem to dislike Paul, viewing him as having sold out the message of Jesus.) Biblical scholars seem to prefer the poetic bits of Job, but frankly, it’s more interesting than a story about a guy who is tested and vindicated.
2. So, this is an area out of my wheelhouse; the actual hardcore redaction criticism is above my pay grade and I did enough Hebrew to conclude that Hebrew is hard. The redactors definitely did know they were preserving multiple accounts of things, contradictions, etc. Possibilities I can come up with:
a. they were, not more cool with paradox in some kinda Zen sense or something, but more cool with putting two different accounts there together. We might be the weird ones, overly concerned with determining the way things really happened. (We almost certainly are the weird ones.)
For something dissimilar but arguably related: up until a certain point, it was completely normal to put historical scenes, scenes from the Bible, etc, in contemporary dress (and now if it happens it’s seen as having some greater significance – the stained glass window with Christ alongside men dressed as Canadian soldiers circa ~1918 while there’s been some attempt at historical accuracy in the other windows was paid for by the parents of some poor boy or multiple boys). Presumably Caravaggio knew that Christ wasn’t apprehended by soldiers wearing what some guy with a musket in his day would be wearing. (But I’m not an art historian and maybe it had special meaning intended actually.)
b. it was really, really easy to screw up. I still make mistakes on a computer, touch typing. Imagine if you had to do everything with ink on paper, and probably paper and ink are more expensive. And your pen kinda sucks. And you don’t have electric light (which provides way more illumination than all but an impractical number of candles). There’s things for ease of reading which are more recent developments (it’s way easier to translate Greek or Hebrew from a nice modern scholarly printing than a papyrus withthewordsallrunningtogether.
c. I don’t know very much about Jewish traditions and their history concerning the copying and handing down of the text and much in-depth scholarship about that; I spent more of my time on bits of the New Testament. You’re right that there has to be a reason for the two things being presented alongside each other; the scribal types who wrote and edited this stuff down weren’t dum-dums.
On the other hand, the Biblical scholars weren’t/aren’t dum-dums either – I’m probably not doing a good enough job of presenting the more arcanely-derived bits. (One could also make the case that the professors share many of their virtues and vices with the folks who put the books together in the first place: there is a ton of scholarship in German that’s taken as basically foundational, or at a minimum you gotta respect it.)
I find it interesting that these books are bundled together with Proverbs in the Wisdom literature.
(It reminds me of the humorous stereotype, that three Jewish scholars can have a discussion and produce four different opinions on the subject of discussion.)
The book of Ecclesiastes has a cynical edge, but it also has beautiful poetry. Chapter 3 is especially interesting, and has entered the popular culture of the 20th century in the form of a song.
I think I’ve also mentioned elsewhere that the book of Job is an epic-style story. It is not linked closely to the historical parts of the Hebrew Bible. It tells a story in an epic-poem form. It refers to people who might be connected to the family of Abraham (detailed in the genealogies of Genesis), and it tells a story of a man who worshiped God in a style similar to Abraham. But it doesn’t deal with foundational cultural events or heroic military leaders. It is an epic-poem about…theological discussion.
I tried reading Job once and found it unfathomable; Job and his interlocutors kept appearing to say the same things, yet still be in disagreement with each other. A corrupted manuscript would explain a lot there.
Job is difficult, no question, but I have never read it as the interlocutors saying the same things in different ways. Job says “I am suffering without deserving it, God is punishing me unfairly, I demand God account to me for why.” His friends then state as a syllogism that (1) God only punishes the wicked, (2) Job is being punished, (3) therefore Job must have committed some wicked sin. Job protests that he has not, that he’s better than the wicked men around him (which appears true). His friends get progressively nastier and more personal and proceed to directly accuse Job of secret terrible sins, perverting justice, harming the poor, etc. The argument breaks down when Job calls God to witness an oath that he has no such specific sin-skeletons in his closet.
One way of looking at it is that Job is saying “How could God do this, God should be righteous, and I know I am better than other men, many of the truly wicked don’t endure this kind of horrible suffering.” And Job is correct that he is better than other men – God in the end answers with incomprehensibility; he does not tell Job he is worse than other men, only that he is a man and cannot understand God’s ways. But the friends dispute Job by saying “Actually, you are worse than the truly wicked – we just don’t know how.” That is why God says the friends have not spoken rightly, as Job has. Job is correct that God is just; Job is correct that Job is not especially wicked; and the friends’ attempts to justify God by smearing Job are wrong.
Idunno, I kept reading through the interminable conversation and thinking that they were all saying the same thing, viz. “God only makes bad things happen to bad people, so shut up.” I’m familiar with the broad outlines of the story, I just found actually reading it to be an unedifying experience.
Perhaps I had a bad translation.
Actually, Job spends a fair amount of time complaining that God does not make enough bad things happen to bad people – he opines that the wicked are often fat, happy, and prosperous.
@theredsheep
Really? Job is the only book of the Bible that I’ve fully read, it just felt more cogent to me than the others I tried to read.
If I understand Robert Alter’s translation of Ecclesiastes correctly, he puts a much more Buddhist-seeming gloss on it: the author is framed as meditating on the ephemerality and meaninglessness of the material world. Thus the literalist translation of “havel havalim/hakkol hevel u re’ut ruach” as “merest breath/all is mere breath and herding the wind, and thus also the recasting of 9:11 and after: it’s not that the swiftest doesn’t always win the race because sometimes the underdog does instead, it’s that *nobody ever really wins because victory is meaningless,* because time and chance wipe out whatever illusory meaning victory might have.
Job represents the Jewish people / Am-Yisrael — that’s why he can’t himself be a Jew. The whole thing is a meditation on what has happened to the Jewish people and a repudiation of the typical (Christian) charge that the Jewish people were punished for their sins.
Similarly, the speaker in pretty much every psalm is the Jewish people / Am-Yisrael — the psalms are absolutely not about the spiritual condition of “the individual.” They make no sense as expressions of an individual person’s suffering and hope (how many individual people are destroyed to the extent that the psalm-protagonist is typically destroyed?) and complete sense as expression of collective Jewish suffering and hope.
Same with the Jonah story, by the way, which is evidently built up around the psalm that’s embedded in it — probably the story was constructed in order to make more literal sense of the psalm but still in a way the preserves the psalm-protagonist’s representative identity with the Jewish people as a whole.
What event are you referring to when you say “what has happened to the Jewish people”? It can’t be a Christian charge, because whenever you date Job to, it’s definitely BC.
Are we talking about later interpretation, or about initial context? Job couldn’t be a repudiation of a charge made by Christians, who didn’t exist yet. Plus, at a minimum, chunks of the Hebrew Bible come from a period before suffering and hope became the big thing: there was a period of, what, half a millenium or so where the big question wouldn’t be “why do these awful things keep happening, and somehow getting worse”.
What a time to be alive!
I don’t follow. Why should a symbol of the Jewish people not be a Jew himself?
One argument for the book of Job being rather early is that the poetry sections contain many extremely archaic words. You mention this in your description, but maybe don’t quite convey the extent of the issue: I’ve been told that a large part of the book was left untranslated by the Septuagint because they couldn’t understand it.
On the other hand, a lot of the dialogue between the friends seems to presuppose that a wisdom tradition similar to Proverbs is already in existence. One would naturally think that such a tradition would not first appear in the context of a dialogue where the proverbs are being “perverted” (either by being misused by Job’s friends or reused ironically by Job).
Agrees in the sense of allows Satan to intervene; I don’t think you meant to imply that God agrees with Satan about how Job will react.
I must admit that my limited Hebrew exposure is a hindrance. I did more Greek than Hebrew, and the New Testament is easier Greek than the Hebrew Bible is Hebrew – some parts of it are very easy indeed, and classicists make fun of people learning Common Greek (or at least, some classicists made fun of me in particular). I’m far better able to describe the character of a text in Greek than in Hebrew.
(With regard to God and Satan, yeah, that God was agreeing to give him the power.)
Some parts of the Hebrew Bible really aren’t so hard to read. Job is very much not one of them. In Proverbs, grammar often goes out the window, but at least the individual words are still legal. Job not only has archaic stuff, it’s got lots of individual words that are either in some wacky dialect of Hebrew, so old the rules are different, or something that produces much the same results. For this reason I have not read Job, just English translations.
Agreed that most of the NT is less elevated Greek than the Hebrew Bible is Hebrew. But think of all the wacky puns you miss not reading in the Hebrew.
Samu had posted an interesting prompt in this OT, but I think their elaboration got it deleted by the aurors. Nevertheless, let’s try again: what are your strongest Left wing, Right wing, and Libertarian beliefs?
(“Wait, do you mean which of my beliefs are the most extreme in those directions, or what are my strongest beliefs that happen to fall in those windows? And where are those windows anyway?” Your call! IMO, the meta-discussion ought to be half the interesting bit.)
Mine:
Left: I’m unapologetically on the Demon’s side. That does cash out as a Right-wing position in a few interesting cases, but most of the time I feel like it’s solidly a Left thing.
Right: Pax Americana is real, important, and worth actively maintaining.
Libertarian: A significant relaxation of governmental and “ethical” oversight in medicine would be net positive. Particularly in the field of human genetic engineering.
Is the Pax Americana a right wing position? It seems like one of, if not the, core centrist / establishment positions in American politics.
Paleoconservatives aren’t exactly fond of our policy of “invade the world, invite the world.” Progressives are likewise skeptical of the “military industrial complex” and “American imperialism.” It’s the neoconservative and neoliberal wings of both parties which support America playing the role of world police.
A right wing position would be either to reduce foreign entanglements or at least insist that other countries kick in their fair share of the costs of defending them. The status quo of Washington threatening to spend American lives and tax dollars to punish other countries for not towing the line on LGBT seems like the precise opposite of right wing.
I think it depends on what we mean by “Pax Americana”. If it means taking John McCain’s policy positions of invading every country that looks at us funny, then probably not. But I bet most believe that something like the Gulf War was a good thing. Basically, don’t invade because of internal problems in a country but do invade when when they are threatening some other country.
Pax Americana may also mean economic interests in addition to military or human rights interests. So for example, it is worth pursuing trade deals favorable to the US, on PaxAm grounds.
To me Pax Americana implies a belief that Western Civ in general, and America in particular, are, in meaningful ways, better than the available alternatives (particularly Communism and Islamism). And therefore, a world where everybody is either directly allied with the US or at least generally willing to avoid directly opposing American and allied interests, lest they get the Big Stick, is the best world we can reasonably hope for right now.
It does not mean that American Culture is the best possible culture, or without issues, just that the USA is the only state with both the willingness and ability to be a Superpower that I want anywhere near Superpower status in today’s world.
Why does US culture being better than, say, Haitian culture require us to invade or bomb them?
In what way did gbdub imply this?
All he seems to be claiming is that US culture being better than Nonustan culture means the US is going to be pickier about who it bombs or invades than Nonustan would be (while still having “bomb or invade” in its playbook as a plausible deterrent), which is probably better for everyone.
Compare China, considered likely to invade Taiwan if US culture weren’t around, and Russia, which very much has “invade” in its playbook and poses a threat to the US ability to deter.
This is a just partisan fantasy. When did the US ever seriously contemplate military action (I assume that’s what you mean by “spend American lives and tax dollars”) to punish a foreign country for not “toeing the line on LGBT” rights?
From the “which of my beliefs are the most extreme in those directions” angle:
Left: Anti-corporate. Strongly pro-labor, generally pro-union [1].
Right: Close the borders [3].
Libertarian: Taxation is theft [2].
[1] But you gotta keep a close eye on the leadership.
[2] But is a necessary evil in support of civilization.
ETA: [3] Fine I’ll put a caveat on that one too. Not so much “close” but “moratorium on immigration until we figure out what the hell is going on.”
@Dan L
@Samu
Sure, but since I’m wishy-washy as to which I believe most strongly I’ll do more than one per category:
Right-wing: Parents getting divorced is mostly bad for children, and the widespread social acceptance of the practice did more harm than good.
The most effective social-welfare system in the U.S.A. is the church-based one in Utah, it better to be born poor in Salt Lake City than in most other places in the U.S.A.
Most social issues should be decided by local elections not national judicial fiat.
Too many immigrants all at once is too much competition for those already here especially for the so-called “low-skilled”.
Leftist: Trade unions are a good thing and there should be more of them
Affirmative-action to benefit many African-Americans is still warranted
Affirmative-action to benefit all kids growing up in poverty is warranted.
Great extremes of wealth and poverty are a bad thing.
Libertarian: Government should be progressively weaker the more remote it is from the individual citizen (I suppose that’s “Localist” rather than “Libertarian” so please someone help me out with a suggestion for a Libertarian idea that sounds good to me).
There was a thread on that one or two OTs ago. I can’t remember what term they came up with…municipalist or something?
@Well…
Yes that was a suggestion in that thread, @Watchman suggested “localism”, and that seemed clear, “municipalism” seemed good as well.
Localism to me is the thing about buying/eating stuff made/grown locally whenever possible. Doesn’t have implications about the size/power of government at various levels.
Mine
Left: Corporate control of government is a real and serious problem in America, largely because corporations are so big and powerful.
Right: Diversity is an active negative, not a positive and therefore immigration should be zeroed out.
Libertarian: Regulations on small businesses (<100 employees) are substantially too high.
Left: Some sort of larger redistribution of wealth should be implemented, not sure if I favor UBI, wealth tax, expanded EITC, or something else.
Right: It is usually better for families to be a two parent household, with one relative staying or working from home, with a religious upbringing.
Libertarian: All occupational liscensing should be abolished. Certification, yelp reviews, insurance costs, and legal liability can deal with the risks better than occupational liscensing.
Left: ethno-nationalism is bad. Having lines drawn in ways that cannot be changed or are perceived as being unchangeable is really dangerous and has a long, bad history. It’s kind of a silly idea in the first place (because the definitions do change; there are “ethnic groups” that in the past were a bunch of smaller, often hostile groups)
Right: it’s beneficial to have some changeable cultural means of creating a dollop of group identity and so forth. The important bit here is that it’s changeable and can thus in theory expand to include all people in the group “humans”. Is this really right-wing? All the workers and peasants everywhere identifying as a group would be pretty left wing, so really I’m a big ol’ cheater.
Libertarian: all recreational drugs should be legal starting at 18. The nastiest drugs either would disappear when better stuff can be easily found or the nastiness is in large part due to the illegality.
I don’t really disagree with the proposition this is supporting, but put this way, it sets off just-world alarms in my head. There’s nothing inherent to how drugs work that’d require this, and it’d be awfully convenient if it was true by pure chance.
On the other hand, you could get opiates and cocaine over the counter for decades, and the world didn’t end.
Does it mean that you also oppose Affirmative Action based on ethnicity or gender?
@WarOnReasons
You didn’t ask me but I’m going to chime in anyway, if affirmative-action based on ethnicity was replaced with affirmative-action based on relative family wealth I’d have no problem with that and would even support that, but what I wouldn’t support would be no affirmative-action at all, which is usually what’s advocated.
As for affirmative-action based on sex, I feel no great urgency to have more women be carpenters or plumbers and more men to be lawyers or teachers, but I don’t feel very strongly against those efforts either (but I hardly notice them anyway).
What would be AWESOME!!! is affirmative-action based on age, forcing the young out of jobs that don’t require heavy lifting would be great, and less Americans would have to subsist on Disability, and a program to maybe create more of those jobs (doubling the number of teachers for example) seems good to me.
>and can thus in theory expand to include all people in the group “humans”
I can think of three big explicit attempts to do this: Islam, Christianity, and Communism. Each seems to slow down, Xeno’s Paradox style, and fragment the closer it gets to planetary fixation.
I think it probably says something interesting about a person whether they view The Demon as mostly left or mostly right. I kind of view it as mostly right. It’s all about competition, and about the most efficient course winning, whether or not it’s good and pure. (Of course, what “efficient”, “good” and “pure” mean are different to different people…) Sure, it’s progressive, but it’s progressive in an unchecked way, being guided more by an invisible hand than by a government or a local community.
However, I am solidly left and still mostly on The Demon’s side, so perhaps I’m talking nonsense.
To answer the question:
Left: A myriad of options, but probably the leftist view that I hold most strongly is that some services such as the railways, health service, post office and energy are better off nationalised than privatised.
Right: I’m not sure if I have any strongly-held right-wing views, but I would accept right-wing proposals to fight climate change, if I expected them to be effective. (One example might be increasing the tax on fuel, even though this will disproportionately harm the poor. Stopping climate change is more important than fighting poverty right now.)
Libertarian: Prediction markets should be experimented with as part of the process of government. (This isn’t specifically a libertarian view, but given that it’s extending the market to something that it’s not normally extended to I think it’s within the spirit of the thing.)
I’ll interpret “strongest belief” as “most aligned with that viewpoint that I am still reasonably confident of.”
Leftist beliefs: We should engage in carbon taxation because a significant portion of the population is concerned about carbon output, it’s a reasonable compromise, and you have to tax something. Marginal gun control (like outlawing extended magazines) is probably the right thing to do, even if it amounts to depriving people who bought extended magazines of a good faith expectation, and even if it doesn’t do much good.
Rightwing beliefs: “Western civilization” (the mish-mash of Greek and Roman roots, Christianity, and the enlightenment) has some significant harms to answer for that should not be ignored, but has been net positive and should be celebrated.
Libertarian beliefs: Great jumping Jehoshaphat, leave people alone and get a life you bloodless bureaucrats! Let that little girl sell lemonade! Shut down the G-D raisin cartel! When you find yourself in the M-F US Supreme Court defending the United States practice of destroying people’s raisins in order to make sure we don’t have too many raisins in the US, you should look at your life and judge it a failure. I don’t particularly even care if it’s Constitutional, and I don’t like raisins, but how do you go to work every day and say “my job is to make sure there aren’t too many raisins in order to maintain raisin price stability.” HOW????
I like this question! (I assume for the sake of argument that you’re referring to the US sense of these terms – I feel a little sorry for the extent to which this leaves out our extra-US readers…)
Left: The right to acquire and use birth control should not be infringed.
Right: +1 to Pax Americana being real, important, and worth actively maintaining.
Libertarian: Any failure in a free market exists in any alternative economic framework, to equal or greater extent.
I feel like the latter is significantly stronger than the former two. And I notice the conflict between them. And I’m open to counterarguments on all three.
Birth control is a bit complicated. The recent pushes to make it OTC have been either Republican led or at least Republican supported. I am not aware of any push by the Trump administration nor the Republican Congress to reduce access to birth control.
The conflict appears to be an underlying issue related to the ACA. Republicans (and Libertarians) might characterize the conflict less about access to BC, but instead who is required to pay for it. The recent court cases are about religious organizations with an ideological reason not to want to buy BC being required under the terms of the ACA. That’s either pro-religious freedom (mostly Republican) or anti-government force (Libertarian), rather than anti-BC.
One reason I gave the answer I did for Left was that it was something I expected Democrats to advocate, and Republicans to oppose. So it’s interesting that OTC BC gets Republican backing.
OTOH, it’s not surprising that Republicans oppose having the state pay for it, which is why I wrote “the right to acquire and use“, rather than the more ambiguous “the right to”.
Like David Friedman, I find a lot of my strong views about right and left tend to also align with libertarianism. My view on PaxAm is a rare point where I (and the Right) part with the latter (though perhaps not with a consequentialist implementation of it). It’s harder for me to think of a point where I side against it with the Left. I did, however, have two candidates written down that I hold more weakly:
Left: It may be worth pushing to expand the options available to the poorest 40% of Americans, even under threat of force. At the very least, it is worth mapping those current options in greater objective detail, thus expanding options by way of raising awareness of available options, and doing so now rather than later.
Left: There exist certain segments of US infrastructure that might be mature and institutionalized enough to not be worth the cost of trying to privatize them at our current technological level (e.g. interstate highway maintenance, vaccination, collective defense, and fire prevention, but not education, local road maintenance, health care, medical care, or welfare).
It’s possible there are others, perhaps involving the rights of children, the comatose, and generally people unable to act as their own representative. Also, there are cases involving incomplete information that I have yet to work out to my satisfaction.
The problem for me is that the views of mine that might be considered left are also libertarian. Examples would be drug legalization and free immigration.
For conservative, it would probably be support for stable marriage, especially as a context for rearing children. My guess is that mf and ff couples both work—I’m not sure which works better. My guess is that both work better than mm couples, but I don’t have a lot of data to support that. As a libertarian I am not in favor of legal restrictions on casual sex, polyamory, open marriage, and the like, but my guess is that the more traditional approach, probably watered down a little, on average works better.
For libertarian, my most extreme position is probably support for a stateless society.
Left: Take everyone’s guns.
Right: Punish people who break the law, even if they are sad.
Libertarian: Gov shouldn’t know about marriage, period, relate to citizens as individuals.
The problem with this one is that the government gets called in to settle your divorce. When someone is trying to take half your stuff (or you’re trying to take half of someone else’s stuff) it’s really useful to be able to point to the existence or lack of thereof of a document certifying that yes you were in fact married, you were of age, not coerced or intoxicated, not still married to someone else, etc. This is the true purpose of a marriage license and is why when Mrs. Honcho and I got our license it came with a 30 page booklet, one page of which said “grats on getting married” and the other 29 pages were about how to get a divorce.
This is pretty much the rationale for civil unions.
No marriage, no divorce. You can always write a contract that each of you can get half of the other’s stuff by invoking the contract. Absent a contract, no-one gets half of the stuff of anyone; bank accounts belong to the one whose name is on it, real estate belongs to the one whose name is on the deed, movable property belongs to the one who bought it (or the one who was gifted it), etc. The last one may be hard to prove, so if you have movable property of considerable value, it’s a good idea to write a contract about who they belong to (unless you have a general 50–50 contract).
A lot of people enter marriages without actively thinking about all its legal consequences. If you were forced to write explicit contracts about all these legal agreements (assuming you want to make them), you would actually think about them, and about whether you want them. I’m not sure at all that most people who get married today would actually be willing to sign contracts equivalent to the current legal consequences of marriage; for example, the part where you have to give half of your stuff to your partner on demand would be a hard sell if it was not part of an institution that most people consider an expected part of a life path.
I agree with this comment. This is what I was thinking of.
I agree with this too. There is a bunch of discussion on this in a thread above this (but written afterwards, confusing), in which I kind of wanted to chime in with agreement to 10240, but hard to get in a word. I think that government regulating marriage is a bad idea, but it is also true that you’d need a whole lot more than the two paragraphs above to discuss what sorts of contracts would replace marriage contracts. But I do agree with 10240 that marriage is way too much of a “one size fits all” to work very well. I also think the government provides far too many privileges to married people, which is discriminatory to singles.
What fraction of the human population do you think want something significantly different than the “standard contract”, and in what way?
How to handle divorce would be an obvious point of divergence, except that almost everybody still goes into a marriage expecting there won’t ever be a divorce, so good luck getting people to implement real improvements over the standard marriage contract through careful consideration of divorce terms up front.
Given the number of people living together without being married, I would say a pretty large fraction.
We just went through a culture shift where now two folks of the same gender are included with the group are widely accepted in the marriage umbrella. How long before more than two living together are acceptable? And how about siblings or others couples (or groups) living together with no sexual components included? It seems to me that there are a lot of different contractual arrangements for different situations where some of the current rules for marriages are needed, but not others. Our society has gotten used to the idea that kids grow up, then get married, then have 2 1/2 kids of their own. Because of this meme in society, competing contractual arrangements haven’t been developed. I think such other contracts would be useful.
How many of those people have any sort of contractual relationship with one another?
“Living in sin”, shacking up, what have you, has pretty always been a thing, often frowned on to some degree, now not so much. Marriage, one man one woman one economic union with joint custody of the children till death do us part, exit clause for adultery abuse or abandonment, has pretty much always been a thing. And as long as governments have been a thing, they’ve passed laws saying “this is what we understand the standard marriage contract is; if our courts take official notice of any problems, this is what we will enforce”.
The claim, as I understand it, is that governments are doing this badly because they are enforcing a one-size-fits-all contract and lots of people want a different contract. If that’s the case, people who are just shacking up with no apparent desire for any formal agreement, don’t come into it. We need to look at the people who are drafting domestic partnership contracts that are substantially different from traditional marriage. How many of those are there, and what do their contracts look like?
I bet more people would go for a formal contract other than marriage if society considered it an option.
i.e. They were aware of it as something they could do,
enough legal precedent had been established that they knew how the courts would interpret things
enough lawyers with experience in drafting such agreements
etc.
Also, there’s the issue that the current ‘one size fits all’ agreement is tangled in a load of social stuff, such as throwing the most expensive and stressful party of your entire life.
But there is a standard, legal form that can be signed when you are starting cohabitation, and it is known and widely practiced – it’s called a will.
And many cohabitating couples don’t even get a will, the standard contract that can be changed at any moment while you are alive. Stieg Larsson’s girlfriend famously lost all rights not just to the copyright of his books, but moral rights also, because he didn’t get a will.
So no, all those people who cohabitate do not seem to be demanding a new type of cohabitation contract – they seem to want no contract at all.
Also, cohabitation agreements and domestic partnerships are a thing; they’re just rare. Except where they were the only way that same-sex couples could have something like a marriage – and when that was a fairly high-profile thing, the same-sex couples in question mostly seem to have wanted their domestic partnerships to be as marriage-like as possible. And approximately no straight couples looked at this and said, “Hey, we could use this newfangled ‘domestic partnership’ thing to formalize that arrangement we’ve always wanted, that’s just like marriage but only lasts seven years” or whatever.
And of course legal marriage can be uncontroversially modified by prenuptial agreements, but only about 5% of Americans do that. Variants like explicitly open marriage are even more rare.
All the places this alleged demand for something other than standard-issue marriage could manifest under current law and custom, are too conspicuously underpopulated for me to believe that there is a huge demand for variant marriages that is suppressed because states and churches don’t make it part of the standard contract labeled “marriage”.
Look, John, I don’t mean that married and unmarried folks out there are clamoring for new contractual arrangements. Most people don’t think about such things, and don’t want to think about such things. They just go with the flow, and they either get married or shack up as they decide is the best option.
But that doesn’t mean a whole bunch of them wouldn’t grab different options if they were available. And I don’t mean they are going to go find a lawyer to write up their own special contract, as your link suggested. Of course, most people won’t bother with such complications.
Marriage is a very strong meme in society. It has benefits both in custom and law. It allows you to file joint tax returns, it gives the spouse the right to various procedures if the other becomes incompetent or unconscious, one gets additional medical benefits and pension benefits (both from employers and the government), and a bunch more things. I got married 36 years ago so my girlfriend would be covered by my employer’s health insurance. It is hard to judge how much people would demand other contracts when the law and customs so favors marriage. I strongly favor the government undoing those rights, so maybe we could find out.
It also doesn’t mean that they would grab different options if they were available. Because, different options are available, and very few people are grabbing for them. You keep claiming that this is because it’s too hard and it isn’t evangelized the way marriage is, but some of them (e.g. prenups) aren’t that much harder than straight marriage.
You are asserting a substantial demand for variant marriages, but presenting zero evidence beyond “you can’t prove there’s not a demand, if it’s cheap enough and promoted widely enough”. So I think I’m just going to rest my case.
I just want to repeat the most important piece of my previous rant:
@Mark V Anderson
Ypu want a radical change in customs and laws just to see what would happen?
Why take the gamble?
I think some states have “covenant marriage,” which means that divorce can only be gotten for cause (rather than just because someone got bored). And many states were offering domestic partnerships as an alternative to marriage (mainly to allow gays to get more-or-less the same benefits from the law as straight couples, at least within the state, but some straight couples used them). It would be interesting to look at how popular those were, to get a sense of how much demand there is for this sort of thing. Perhaps another small step that would let us learn if this is something a lot of people want would be to publish a few standard prenups and recommend choosing one when you get married.
An interesting aspect of marriage law is that the terms of the contract were changed from the top down over several decades, as states and judges changed the requirements for divorce, the assumptions underlying alimony and child support, etc. In a world where that had been spelled out by explicit contracts, I wonder whether we would have seen the same changes.
One reason to suspect we would have seen those changes is that a lot of racial discrimination in housing was done via private contracts (restrictive covenants). I think (from a quick Google search) these were declared unenforceable by the Supreme Court in 1948, but they were still put into contracts until they were made illegal in 1968. It seems plausible that the same social forces weakening marriage might have led courts to decide that some common terms of the standard marriage contracts were no longer enforceable.
@John Schilling , I find it plausible that many people get married primarily because it’s a tradition rather than because they actually want its legal consequences, and if marriage was not available, they wouldn’t make any contract (except perhaps about a small part of its consequences such as inheritance or hospital visitation). To the extent transfer of property is justified (e.g. if one partner does more housework than the other), in most cases it can be handled in ways such as transferring money from one account to another, having a joint account, or deciding in what proportions to own a real estate when you buy it.
As you implied, most people don’t sign prenups because they find it unromantic to discuss what would happen in a divorce when they get married. If the standard option was taken away, they would be forced to make a conscious decision about it — or just not sign any contract. Another problem with prenups is that they are not enforceable in some jurisdictions.
@Plumber If most people are actually on board with the current legal consequences of marriage, nothing would change as people would continue to get married at private institutions or sign contracts with similar consequences.
The custom of marriage evolved under very different economic and social conditions from today’s. It’s unlikely that the traditional rules of marriage are best suited to today’s conditions. The institution has been updated in some aspects (e.g. no-fault divorce) but not in others (e.g. lifelong alimony, which still exists in some jurisdictions, is hardly justified when women can and do work).
@albatross11 It’s unclear because when the laws around marriage were changed, they typically didn’t make it illegal or unenforceable to make contracts with terms similar to the earlier legal effects of marriage, unlike in the case of segregation. However, some of the current or earlier terms of marriage may be unenforceable in a generic contract as one-sided, or for other reasons.
What 10240 said to John and Plumber.
Taking away the legal benefits of marriage doesn’t mean people won’t get married, or keep up tradition. If it’s a good tradition, it will stay. I think we saw in the discussion on gay marriage the discrimination that single people face. Allowing gays to marry just subtracted a few of those discriminated against. I think we should eliminate the discrimination altogether.
And if it stays, it will result in disputes over property and child custody and yes even hospital visitation. Which courts will have to resolve, and they’ll ask “OK, so what did you guys agree to?” And when the answer is basically the same as the last hundred billion or so people to implement this tradition, they’ll start presuming that agreement exists unless some other is explicitly specified, and then legislatures will formally codify it, and most of us will live happily every after. And really, you can replace all those “if” statements with “p>0.95”, because we’ve done every part of this before many times and it pretty much always ends the same way.
This is the lowest form of “eliminating discrimination”, where you reduce every thing and every one to the lowest common denominator, take away a benefit that most people enjoy just because it can’t be provided to anyone.
Speaking as someone who is not enjoying that benefit and is among the victims of the alleged discrimination: knock it off. You’re not helping people like me, and you’re not helping people like you, you’re just hurting all the rest.
@John Schilling The “If most people are actually on board with it” part is important. As I’ve said, I don’t think that most people consciously agree to all of it’s current legal consequences, and that they would stay. I doubt that anywhere near 95% of people could say that they’ve agreed to something equivalent to e.g. the current rules about property distribution and alimony in a no-fault divorce if they didn’t have the memetic power of being the default arrangement tied to marriage, which they consider to be an expected part of a life.
We should separately consider the legal consequences of marriage which constitute an agreement between the two persons (and which could be substituted by a contract), and the ones that constitute benefits accorded to the couple by the government. The latter part is where discrimination happens at the expense of single people. (Although such benefits are minimal or non-existent in many jurisdictions.) Such benefits could be either eliminated or, if we consider it beneficial to society to have children, tied to having children rather than to being married.
> Right: Punish people who break the law, even if they are sad.
I don’t see this as remotely right-wing. The left wants aggressive enforcement of the law just as much, they just don’t care about the same laws as the right.
I hope that you are right, but in my experience the left have a strong tendency to want to let people off, because racism/patriarchy/they are refugees/whatever.
I find that this is mostly an excuse to get laws they don’t like defacto repealed rather than go through the pain of repealing them, not really principled objections to strong enforcement.
There aren’t tons of left wing protests against super strict gun laws in Chicago that primarily incarcerate young black men, for example.
It is part trying to defacto repeal laws we don’t like via lack of enforcement, but also trying to reject the outsized punishments that have developed for some crimes that are agreed generally should be crimes but where the penalties have become far too severe through constant “tough on crime” one-upsmanship. It also isn’t always related to feminism/racism/etc, sometimes people just think laws (or at least their associated punishments) are bad for everyone and do more harm than good when enforced.
If you think a crime warrants some community service, a fine, and maybe some kind of substance or behavioral rehab, but the mandatory minimum sentence is 5 years in prison, you might well decide to look for some excuse not to convict the person of that crime at all rather than issue what you see as an outsized punishment that harms both the person and the society more than it helps either party.
I’ll push back against this one, using an argument that I’ve seen elsewhere.
Imagine a scenario, in which a violent man confronts a woman in an dark parking lot late at night.
The scenario might lead to several possible outcomes. In outcome A, the woman is forced into the trunk of her own car, driven to another location. It ends with the possibility for rape and murder.
In outcome B, the woman resists with a firearm that she had been carrying. The would-be-attacker ends the evening on the pavement, severely wounded. The intended victim waits for Police and the ambulance to show up, gives a statement, and then drives home.
In outcome C, the woman also has a firearm, and points it at the would-be-attacker. He runs away, and the woman sits in the parking lot waiting for a Police officer to write down her description of the would-be attacker.
Which outcome is morally superior?
If you are in favor of taking everyone’s guns, you are in favor of making outcomes B or C much less likely.
This is an edge-case. But it is a good way of describing the tradeoffs involved in forbidding the law-abiding from carrying a gun. It is also a good way of describing the tradeoffs involved in forbidding the law-abiding from even owning a gun.
I’m fine with having just young and/or unmarried men and boys being forbidden gun ownership, Hell just make it so only women are allowed to possess pistols.
This is obviously unconstitutional, even before questioning how on Earth you’d go about enforcing such a policy. Or, you know, why we apparently don’t care about self-defense for men.
My sense of the issue is that no plausible gun control has any real effect, so we should all stop shouting about it every two years until the political climate changes.
EDIT: Illegal under the Civil Rights Act, not unconstitutional. I forgot where the protected classes came from.
@Statismagician, it’s unconstitutional under the Second Amendment as well.
Right, yes, obviously. *smacks forehead*
And what if the young and/or unmarried men and boys are sickly, and the scenario S_J describes above is a mugging (just to make it a bit less edge-case)?
What if they appear strong, but aren’t able to fight due to nerve damage?
What if the man is middle aged and/or married, and still finds it lucrative to go raping and pillaging?
What if the attacker decides he can get a black market gun (he’s going to commit rapes and muggings anyway, so why not) and mug and rape until he gets caught?
Possibly under the Fourteenth Amendment as well. Discrimination by private parties is made illegal by the Civil Rights Acts only, but discrimination by the government is usually unconstitutional.
I read that as “discrimination by private parts” and it made perfect sense.
Indeed it does, and you got me to laugh!
Thanks @Randy M
Maaan, you don’t need to go into A/B/C until you establish that I care about this situation, yeah?
I don’t trust y’all. I am safer if less of you are armed. There are less cops than there are folks, so a vibe where just cops have guns is better than a state where cops and folks have guns. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
I can’t tell what you’re getting at here. If, for instance, you care about women being abducted even in cases where no guns are around, why are you okay with them being disarmed?
There’s the rub; this simply isn’t true. Reduce the number of guns, and eventually there will be people who can get guns, and people who can’t, and the former become safer while the latter become much less safe.
This is compounded by motivation. When guns are scarce, the former group will contain people with intent to make the latter even less safe. But if everyone can obtain them legally, there will be many more people with intent to make people (themselves, at the very least) more safe.
This was strongly implied by the A/B/C post, and is fairly common knowledge. If you want to claim “less guns = more safe”, you will be required to address this, or the claim won’t make it farther than the nearest listener who understands how incentives work.
If you only consider one side of a tradeoff, obviously you’ll get a one-sided conclusion.
But also, that argument isn’t in favour of permitting gun ownership. Rather, it’s in favour of *mandating* gun ownership (at least for people who could be the victim in that scenario). And empirically, I believe a mandate like that would go against the majority of people’s preferences about carrying guns.
How so? The woman who could carry a gun but doesn’t only increases her own chance of getting in trouble. While many people (though not everyone) support creating some obligations in order to protect people from their own bad decisions, most people don’t support creating such obligations for every possible situation.
Maybe mandating was the wrong word. I mean that it makes the stronger claim that people should carry guns, not that they should be allowed to. In comparison, you should be allowed to e.g. drink heavily and endanger your health, but it’s not true that you should actually do that.
@rlms Assuming someone thinks that it’s a good idea for women to carry a gun as a means to defend themselves, it’s not implausible that he thinks that they should carry a gun (at least in some situations).
@10240
Perhaps, but that’s weird for several reasons. Firstly, most people exhibit revealed preferences against carrying guns; saying that actually you know what’s best for them doesn’t seem very libertarian. And secondly, the claim that people should do something typically comes policy proposals to encourage them to do the thing. But e.g. a proposal to give tax breaks to people who cary guns would be very peculiar, and even purely cultural promotion of carrying seems to focus on defending the culture against politics where it exists, rather than expanding it to places where it doesn’t.
I think even among very gun-positive people, most everyone recognizes that some people shouldn’t have a gun. For example, if you’re inclined toward suicidal depression or homicidal rages, you really should not have a gun, because you’ll do something terrible with it. If you can’t be troubled how to use the damned thing safely, likewise, you ought not to have one. And so on.
There’s a parallel with herd immunity here, right? If a large enough fraction of the public is armed, then some kinds of predators will be driven away or killed off, and so there will be almost no rape/armed robbery/mugging/etc. in that society–the would-be perps either got wise or died of lead poisoning. But then there’s very little incentive to carry a gun around, since crime is almost nonexistent….
@rlms Your argument is a really weird argument from repugnant conclusion (if I understand it correctly). You’re basically saying that it’s implausible that carrying a gun makes a woman safer, because that would mean that women should carry a gun, which would be non-libertarian, and which would lead to proposals to make it obligatory to carry a gun, which nobody supports. With your example, it’s like saying that it’s implausible that heavy drinking is bad for your health, because that would mean that you shouldn’t drink heavily, which would be non-libertarian, and which would lead to proposals to ban heavy drinking, which few people want.
Of course such arguments have no bearing on whether carrying a gun actually makes you safer, or whether heavy drinking is bad for your health. Depending on one’s understanding of what a “should” statement means, either the first implication (“you should carry a gun if it makes you safer”) or the second one (“if you should carry a gun, then it’s reasonable to make it obligatory to do so”) doesn’t hold.
It’s also likely that it’s only worth carrying a gun for some people, and only in some situations, and the person in question is better suited to decide than the government.
@rlms Or maybe you are arguing that even if carrying guns makes people safer, it’s not an argument for making it legal, because if it had any bearing on whether it should be legal to carry one, it would also be an argument for making it obligatory, which we disagree with. But the same logic could also be used to argue that everything should be either forbidden or obligatory, something anyone who cares even a little bit about freedom and doesn’t want to live in a totalitarian state disagrees with.
What’s interesting is how few of any of these so far I disagree strongly with. Anyway, for me, and I’m probably going to cheat and do more than one:
Left: Yay gay marriage. Purely market based health care is never going to fly, so let’s just get on with Medicare for all already.
Right: +1 to Pax Americana (and Pax Western Civilization in general). Ban unionization of government employees and pass right-to-work everywhere.
Libertarian: Legalize most drugs, decriminalize the rest. Significantly curtail legally required professional licensing, or at least the ability of non-government modern guilds to control it. Citizens United was correctly decided.
Left: Open borders
Right: Strong nuclear families create strong individuals and societies
Libertarian: Political authority is not legitimate
Note that your “left” is a position more popular with ideological libertarians than with ideological leftists. Bernie Sanders was against it. I’m for it.
It’s complicated. Some of the best open borders arguments I’ve read have come from Bryan Caplan, an ancap. But libertarians have a split on this issue in the same way the left does, with factions within each arguing for and against open borders. Some libertarians argue against open borders because of the welfare state or concerns about cultural assimilation/voting patterns. And the leftiest parts of the left, international workers of the world uniting types, are open borders advocates:
“Whatever practical compromises we may be forced to make on the route to “free movement,” we should always insist upon it as a core value, and we must never repeat the mistakes of the bigoted, conservative parts of the labor movement, which were self-destructive and misidentified the causes of working people’s suffering. The best and most noble radical traditions have always been fueled by immigrants, welcomed immigrants, and upheld the central left slogan that must always continue to guide us:
Workers of the world, unite!”
That said, you may be right that open borders have a larger base with libertarians than the left; I don’t have good data on that.
I struggled a bit to come up with my most left position, as they all seem to overlap with my libertarian position (drug and sex work legalization, the destructiveness of crony capitalism, etc.) and settled on open borders because I was kind of stuck.
Left: Whereas conflicts of interest between “races,” nations, and religions are socially-constructed and exist because of subjective wills that define their identities in certain ways in opposition to other subjectively-contrived identities, conflicts of interests between different classes are not socially-constructed. Class is not an identity to which one ascribes, but instead an objective economic condition with objective and unavoidable interests attached to it. Therefore, different class interests and class struggle are inevitable under capitalism, and it is only to their disadvantage if participants on each side fail to recognize these objective class interests of theirs.
Right: Modern IQ tests probably point to some type of capability that we should care about; perhaps it is not the only type of capability that we should want humans to maximize, but if we discover genetic interventions that could predictably raise IQ in future generations with little to no side effects on other types of human capability that we care about, we would be wise to employ those interventions.
Libertarian: Protective tariffs slow down the aggregate growth of the capitalist world economy.
Left: bigness and high inequality are problems. They give too much ability to manipulate politics.
Right: anti-discrimination law is an utter disaster and should be abolished at the Federal level and scrutinized carefully by the courts at the state level. Any group that people are free to leave or to avoid dealing with should be able to set it’s own criteria for what and with whom it will associate.
Libertarian: people should be allowed to run their lives how they want, unless they are defrauding or attacking others. If John’s good life is wake-and-bake pot use, Jim’s is a bunch of opium every day, Joe’s is ascetic monasticism, and Bill’s is peddling conspiracy theories on street corners–this isn’t the government’s problem.
Basically, I want lots and lots of little hierarchies and few and weak big hierarchies.
Left: Coordination problems are hard, and this difficulty cashes out into a lot of the environmental, social, and economic problems we face. Large corporations exert undue influence over regulatory processes. Neoconservative nation-building exercises were a terrible idea and we shouldn’t participate in them.
Right: Culture is complex and potentially fragile, and the downsides to messing it up can be very severe. While claims of marginalization deserve to be listened to, proposed solutions that involve overhauling foundational cultural concepts should be steeply discounted. (But on the other hand, some cultural concepts aren’t as foundational as they appear. The shift from viewing marriage as an institution for producing children to an institution enshrining romantic love was a major overhaul by my lights, but once you have the latter, it’s not a major overhaul to then bring in gay couples.)
Libertarian: Individual and local sovereignty is a goal worth pursuing, even at some cost in safety. “First, do nothing” is a good heuristic for governments.
Left: Medicare for all.
Right: Two-parent families for every child. Immigration control. Western countries and India should have state religions, and where impractical due to having many different churches with significant “market share”, that’s a suboptimal fact on the ground rather than a fundamental human right.
Libertarian: Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Therefore, we should replace political parties that contest universal-suffrage elections by making voters hate and fear their fellow citizens as an enemy tribe with giving all power to two guys who will check and balance each other. 😛
Yes, but which two guys?
For maximum reality-television potential, I nominate Mel Gibson and Tim Curry, stipulating that the latter be made up as Dr. Frank-N-Furter whenever he appears on camera. Both will be armed with ice picks.
I’m skeptical. Wouldn’t one die from an icepick wound, allowing the other to become absolutely corrupt?
No, we’ll replace the one that dies with Tom Hardy or Laverne Cox, respectively.
Oh, OK. So long as the Constitution is hashed out for all these contingencies!
Crassus and Pompey?
I’ll try again at something that could be shoehorned into working for all 3:
A liveable UBI should be given to all citizens above the age of majority. Open borders for anyone that can demonstrate they would pay enough tax to cover their portion, at least for [some number of] years. This would create a strong enough foundation that we could then get rid of most welfare, unions, and government departments: gives sufficient resources and negotiating power to workers, and the govt could be more-or-less stripped down to the UBI apparatus & military (+border control) that protects it.
(I personally would prefer to keep state-run criminal law enforcement and FDA/CDC types, but we’ll set that aside to try and qualify for the libertarian prong)
Most, but not all, libertarians are in favor of state enforcement of criminal law. Anarchists are a minority within the movement.
I am a partisan Republican, political center-right (US spectrum)
Left: The majority of people on the right are pretty damn racist or selfish, with a sizable minority that are just flat-out unapologetic racists.
Right: The majority of people on the left are disaffected outcasts that want to blame others for their problems, and a sizable minority that are basically just socialists in it to take other people’s money.
Libertarian: If the public education system gets trillions of dollars and is unable to teach more than half of Americans that the Earth revolves around the Sun, the public education system does a crappy job of educating the public and we should start defunding it.
Centrist opinion: The US is a decently well-run nation and almost no major politician deserves even a tenth of the outrage they have to deal with. The major exception is DJT. I am undecided on AOC. America’s political opinion, IMO, roughly tracks with people becoming more politically active, and greater political activism will probably make things worse, not better.
Self-reflecting opinion: My opinions have changed enough in the last decade of my life that I don’t put too much stock into them. If they are stable over the next 5, I’ll start trusting them a bit more.
Beta Guy, what’s your thumbnail guess on what percentage of the right and left are racist. (And if it makes a difference if we believe it’s possible to be racist against white people, maybe give a number assuming it is and a number assuming it isn’t.)
@J Mann
You didn’t ask me but I’m going to chime in:
My rough guess is that 99.9999% of “The Left” is racist to some extent, and that roughly 99.9999% of “The Right” is racist to some extent.
Since I assume that I am a person who does bad things I do assume that I’m sexist, bigoted, and generally tribalistic, as well as my being prideful, greedy, lustful, envious, gluttonous, angry, and very lazy, indeed since people aren’t celestials I assume that most everyone I meet is, to some extent, as well and I try to check my dark impulses and I try to be forgiving when others don’t, as I think much of that is “baked in”.
That doesn’t mean I don’t bemoan those qualities in myself and others, I just try to view people as people not demons.
Realize the evil, strive for the good.
To answer that question, you have to define “racist.”
If believing that there are significant differences in the distribution of significant characteristics by race counts as racism, then I expect that over ninety percent of both left and right are racist. If reacting differently to individuals of different races does it, then still a large majority of both left and right.
If “racism” is limited, as I think it should be, to hating or despising people because of their race, I would guess under ten percent on either side.
It’s possible to be racist against white people, and it’s possible to be racist against other black people even if you yourself are black.
My back-envelope calculation is 20-30% of the American Right are “I don’t want my daughter dating a black man” racist, and maybe 50-80% are “I really don’t feel comfortable with all these black people being here” racist. I’m not even counting the “I think black people are lower IQ,” because that’s a totally different question and I don’t think believing in genetic variances among people should fall into the “I don’t like them” camp.
I don’t know about the American Left, because it contains too many ethnic underclass minorities I do not regularly interact with. My impression of America’s white liberal upper class is that Lizardman Constant are “I don’t approve of inter-marriage” racist, and 20% are of the “I don’t feel comfortable” racist. I am NOT including the “I don’t want to deal with those idiots in AP after they outsourced it to the Philippines,” which would drive up those numbers to something like 80%.
I’d put, at most, 15% of the Left in the “I will assume the worst of white people” camp, though this gets amplified considerably if HuffPo tells them to hate on a white man who is assumed to be wealthy.
You didn’t ask, but among the American Left that I deal with, I’d say about 50% are one Lost Decade and one charismatic leader away from “Hail Stalin” in terms of their economics, particularly as you advance down the economic ladder. I’d say about 75% are one step away from the Jacobin.
Probably about right.
Waaaaaaaay too low. I’d put this only slightly lower than the right-wing equivalent, maybe somewhere around 50-60%; you’ll have a hard time getting them to say so, but there are a lot of people in the white liberal upper class who’ll talk up minorities any chance they get but still cross the street when they see a black dude coming, especially as you start looking at older people and/or people outside of ethnically mixed city centers. Note however that this isn’t incompatible with “I will assume the worst of white people”, especially when that amounts to talk more than action.
Upper-class Blue social mores come down way harder on explicit racism than Red ones, but upper-class Blues are probably less likely to come into frequent social contact with non-Asian minorities than any other other white cohort outside of actual hillbillies. That means you’ll end up with a lot of implicit racism. (The urban WWC on the other hand is probably the most likely.)
ADBG: That seems way high to me, but I don’t really know whether you’re right or not. Is there good polling data on this stuff?
This poll said 96% of blacks and 84% of whites approved of interracial marriage in 2013. Assuming not much has changed, that might give us some notion of the right numbers–people who disapprove of interracial marriage[1] presumably would not want their kid to bring a black girlfriend/boyfriend home with them, and as of 2013, that was probably about a quarter of whites. That’s *way, way* more than I would have expected.
[1] Note: the question isn’t whether it should be illegal.
If this belief were due to blacks having 8x the homicide rate of whites, would you still code it as “racist?”
16%. About a sixth.
It also doesn’t specify why they disapprove of inter-racial marriage. One reason might be that they believe the couple, or their kids, would face hostility.
I’m thinking of a real case, a couple who are good friends of ours. She is Chinese-American (born in the U.S.), he is Croatian-American (ditto). Their parents knew each other professionally (chinese restaurants and wholesale butchers) and cooperated in an unsuccessful attempt to keep the kids apart. Her Chinese father thought American men didn’t treat their wives properly. His father thought the children of a mixed marriage would have problems.
The couple are married with four children, the youngest now college age. As best I can tell, they got along fine with both sets of parents. I would be reluctant to describe either set of parents as racist.
David:
a. Thanks for the correction! Yes, 16%, not 26%.
b. This seems like a reasonable first cut to the answer, but what would really be useful would be a poll which asked party affiliation and whether (assuming you had kids) you would object to them bringing home a partner of another race.
My intuition is that when the other race is black, you will have much higher negative responses than when the other race is Asian or hispanic, but that’s just a guess.
@ albatross11:
My guess as well, but there is still a problem of interpretation.
My guess is that many parents would be more uncomfortable if the Asian brought home was a recent immigrant, speaking fluent but accented English, than if he or she was a third generation Asian, indistinguishable if your eyes were closed from a white American. Someone your child marries is part of your family, and having members of your family with a very different cultural background could be uncomfortable.
I suspect the same pattern would apply if the person was black. A middle class black who felt culturally “normal”—i.e., like your family—would be much less of an issue than someone who had grown up in the inner city and showed the fact in speech and attitudes.
I can only remember having dated one black girl, long ago, not for very long. My memory is that she felt more like “my kind of people” than the average white girl.
Left: Recycling is good and worthwhile
Right: Values matter and most people need to work
Libertarian: The (college) education system is incredibly broken, bordering on evil
All answers assume loose, colloquial US standard of Right-Left-Libertarian. If I list multiple beliefs it’s because I can’t narrow it down further. I’m going with broad stuff rather than specific policy positions where possible because I feel like that’s a different discussion.
Strongest as in most deeply, firmly held…
Right: American values and culture are in fact exceptional, and most of America’s failures have been failing to live up to those values, not failure OF those values. This cashes out in a lot of different ways, from being hostile towards attempts to redefine or narrow individual liberties in the name of progress, to thinking that we should balance welcoming and accepting immigrants with ensuring that we remain committed to assimilation and discourage the sort of “multiculturalism” that leads to cultural and community segregation, to a hundred other little things.
Left: Immigration is a good thing, on net. We need some social safety net provisions as part of our government and shouldn’t depend solely on private charity. Gays, Lesbians, and Trans men and women are not inherently threatening to social order or virtue.
Libertarian: The government that governs best, governs least, and is as small and as weak as it can be while still performing its core functions. Note that over time I’ve come to conclude that “small and weak as possible” in my view is still bigger than any doctrinaire Libertarian would agree with, though my solution would be to decrease the size of the polities. I also think that more smaller countries are better than big countries.
BONUS ROUND:
Anarchist: Because the most outnumbered minority will always be the individual, it’s wrong-headed and narrow-minded to see “The Government” as the only threat. Whether it’s a church, a union or guild, a homeowner’s association, or even just a group of like-minded people organizing for power, organized hierarchies are necessary evils and should not be allowed to get too large or too powerful.
German context applies
Right:
the refugee situation, is badly handled, specifically:
Opening the borders was a mistake. No refugees should be allowed to be let in, without all of them being monitored, fingerprinted and the state knowing about their whereabouts at all times (afraid, that part is also not even thinkable, because Nazi-past).
The current system of handling the refugee crisis is a drain on German resources and a potential security risk.
What I’d actually like, but is not exactly a Rightist position, because our Right is too cool and edgy for making all that many constructive propositions:
There should be a points system, that allows and encourages refugees to prove themselves integratable and useful and quickly decide for each one (I’m thinking 6 months max), whether they’re to be sent away or whether they can stay long term as probationary citizens (which I think is common sense, but I’ve never seen anybody suggest it. Our discussion is either shouting ‘Refugees bad’ or ‘Refugees welcome’, and sadly never asking ‘What the hell do we do with them all? How do we ensure, they’re not causing any trouble? Who can stay here long term and under what conditions and who can not?’ This for years now, and nothing ever gets settled.)
[this is really awkward, because our chancellor is supposed to be right/conservative, but stands for the absolute opposite policy here. The new right-wing-malcontent party appears rather scarily racist sometimes and isn’t exactly an overly coherent movement that can be agreed or disagreed with.]
Left:
Some form of UBI should be implemented.
caveat:
[though I prefer a UBI that cuts out all other services and is fairly low, in addition to getting rid of many restrictive land and property use regulations, since rent is the greatest expense for the poor and middle class; having just one major welfare state transfer should at least cut down on the bureacracy and the make-do work; just first guess of best solution, Friedman (the Elder) had this negative income tax-concept, that was some kind of UBI mechanism as well, which I probably would prefer, if I went to the trouble of understanding it]
Libertarian:
tax reform, specifically:
The VAT should be simplified to one averaged rate, instead of two.
The income tax calculation should fit on a beer coaster.
[old campaign promises, that they’ve never managed to implement,
despite being in government for years and years. Our Libertarians are kinda useless.]
Uber should be allowed here. [not sure, if the Libertarians have even demanded that]
[for more context on German politics, read below]
damn, that’s hard for a German. Left, Right, Libertarian is so 1970s.
(we used to have a right/left/libertarian three-party system till 1980,
with the libs almost always being in government as a tie breaker, which I think did
the country much good)
The policy space, that’s under discussion at any given time is rather small. This country is incredibly conservative and unimaginative sometimes. Which is good, because it also means, that we’re not going to invent a new government agency every Tuesday, but I digress.
Today it’s more like Kinda Leftish*, idiotic Super Left, Kinda Right (but really, left, but really what Merkel feels like), Kinda ActuallyRight (Bavaria only, though), priveleged eco-Hipsters, useless Libertarians, Right-Wing Malcontents;
currently less important: Hippy Hacktivists Pirates, that nobody takes seriously (because why would we); some wannabe Nazis, that everyone pretends are super duper dangerous, but don’t actually do much;
Antifa that likes to burn down cars, when they’re feeling particularly ambitious (nothing compared to the ’70s RAF terrorists); some other thing in Bavaria called ‘Freie Wähler’ (right-wing?)
*The 100 year old+ SPD suffers from a complete and probably fatal identity crisis, because they’ve been economically libertarian/austerity in the 2000s and as of yet have not recovered from that (good for the country, bad for the party). Last I’ve heard, the current new promising leadership candidate wants to make feminist porn available in the public TV streaming service. Which is…. a thing….. and a good example of how it alienates all it’s working class voters and seems to have forgotten it’s roots.
Leftist: Methodological individualism and equality of opportunity. I think it’s both morally and practically wrong to pre-judge people on the basis of arbitrary traits like race, gender, and sexual orientation, and I think that all people should be given an equal opportunity to succeed. We may not ever be able to completely accomplish this goal, but we should strive to come as close as possible. I also support a universal basic income, which is generally a leftist idea (although I’ve heard some libertarians and even a few right-wingers support it too).
Rightist: Free-market capitalism. While there may be a few utilities that require some degree of government control (due to perverse incentives, natural monopolies, or overly high barriers to entry), the free-market is simply the best approach for the vast majority of industries. Like Scott, I’m in the weird position of being very pro-welfare, but also very anti-regulation: For instance, I don’t support the idea of the minimum wage at all, and I think it actually hurts poor people a lot more than it helps them. I think we should either get rid of it or lower it significantly (I’ve heard convincing arguments that we need some minimum wage to prevent a race to the bottom), which puts me to the right of most conservatives!
Libertarian: Methodological individualism and free-market capitalism already put me on the same page as Ayn Rand, but aside from that, my general support for civil rights and opposition to foreign interventionism.
Suppose that by some accident you find yourself lost in a very high-crime area. Two of the locals (a ~20 years old male and a female of the same age) notice you and make separate offers of giving you a ride to your hotel. Whose offer are you going to accept?
Neither. But if I must choose, the male. If he meant me harm he’d most likely harm me right there rather than offer a ride. The woman if she means me harm will bring me to be harmed by her family or gang, who would quite possibly justify it to themselves by the fact that I interacted with one of “their women”.
I’m with Nybbler, probably neither. If I have to choose, my answer is that there isn’t enough information provided. I assume you are trying to appeal to some heuristic that men are more likely to be violent or commit crimes, but I already know I am in a high crime area so everyone is likely to commit crimes. I would choose based on visual and verbal cues (the appearance of the person, the way they talked, and what kind of car they drive).
Interestingly, I associate that principle with right wing and libertarian views more than left wing. I think it’s left wing if you make some assumptions about systemic discrimination that requires counter-discrimination to correct, though.
Left: the railways and BAe should be nationalised (British context showing here). These are not industries subject to normal competitive pressures so privatisation doesn’t work well.
Right: no abortion after the first trimester.
Libertarian: legalise all drugs. The war on drugs is a fake war with real casualties.
Left: Income distribution, maybe UBI, limit employers’ ability to regulate what you do off the clock (ie: expand laws prohibiting employers from firing employees for legal off the job activities, restrict drug testing to determining if someone is showing up to the job site intoxicated, not weekend drug use, etc).
Right: Immigration restriction; there might be a genetic component to IQ
Libertarian: While I might not want any kids I might have to be or use sex workers, use drugs, etc, I do not think those who do these things should be handcuffed, strip searched, confined in an environment with a real rape culture (county jail counts), and given a record that makes it hard to find work at McDonalds.
Most extreme:
Left: The BLM protestors are basically correct about the racist nature of policing and incarceration systems in the US; a large majority of offenses that are currently punishable by incarceration should not be. US housing and immigration policy are also deeply and viciously racist. Abortion on demand and without apology. There is no good reason to gender-segregate bathrooms.
Right: Majoritarian democracy is deeply flawed because most people aren’t, *in their role as voters*, cognitively or morally fit to participate in governance. Epistocracy would be an improvement; possibly some form of property qualification for the franchise could be as well; in the meantime supermajority requirements are good and we should have lots more of them. Military coups that overthrow democratic governments are sometimes justified; the 2002 attempt against Chavez was in this category and the US should have supported it, ditto the 2016 attempt against Erdogan.
Libertarian: There is a moral right to violently resist the enforcement of unjust laws. Governments differ from mafias only in degree, not in kind.
That strikes me as odd. Do you regard all the existing norms about exposure, urination in public, and the like as things that could easily be abolished? Those norms are strongly and widely held and having only gender mixed bathrooms forces lots of people to violate them.
Do you feel similarly about the norm against cannibalism? Wastes a lot of good meat.
The exposure and urination norms (which are silly, but yes, likely to be clung to because people cling to silly things) can be easily accommodated by having a row of actually-private Euro-style stalls with a row of not-private sinks outside them. I’ve seen this work perfectly well lots of places including the US (the Slanted Door in SF does it this way IIRC).
The cannibalism comparison is odd, because cannibalism aversion has substantive reasons for it (disease avoidance, avoidance of incentive to kill people) that “modesty” does not.
Making every lavatory single user is indeed one solution, but not a costless one. And I don’t think you should assume norms related to sexuality have no function. They are at least in part a language, hence arbitrary but not useless.
The obvious example is dress. It’s useful to know whether a woman is likely to want to date you, sleep with you, whatever. Styles of dress are one way of signalling that sort of thing. Wearing a wedding ring on a particular finger of a particular hand is arbitrary, but conveys useful information.
One can suggest reasons for the norm against cannibalism, but how strong they are depends on the particular circumstances of the society. You take it for granted that one could not think up reasons for norms under which (for example) a woman letting a man see particular parts of her signals something about her intentions towards him.
Are most of the women you know comfortable with pooping next to their male coworkers? What if they find one male coworker especially creepy, would they be comfortable then?
Myself I would prefer not to poop next to any woman that I’m interested in dating. I don’t think that is silly because if a woman hears and smells some disgusting pooping going on from myself then she is likely to be grossed out and not attracted to me.
This is pretty normal and I don’t think these norms are silly.
“I do not see the use of this wall between the restrooms; let us clear it away.”
@DavidFriedman
Yes, all-stall desegregated restrooms can be a costly retrofit to existing buildings, but as I understand it they are costless or even cost-negative for new construction due to less duplication and superior ability to balance demand as the gender mix in the building changes over time, and many new buildings whose architects would like to use them are prevented from doing so by building codes. If building codes really gave full freedom to builders to install desegregated restrooms, but the market demanded segregated ones anyway, I would roll my eyes but respect builders’ right to build whichever they liked.
The other responses in this thread rather prove my point. If you seriously think that “some pretty girl might be grossed out by my pooping in the stall next to hers and therefore not want to date me” is a valid reason to impose the substantive, material burdens of segregation on others, your moral system is way out of whack. Nor is desegregation an untried fantasy of social reformers: it has been tried repeatedly with no negative consequences observed that I’m aware of. Nor, in fact, are we ignorant of the historical reason why segregation exists– it’s because of 19th C sexist delusions about the weakness and vulnerability of women.
I’m all in favor of keeping the question out of the building code. But in the rare case where the builders go for unisex bathrooms, the only question will be whether the tenants decide as company policy that the unisex bathroom on the third floor is for women and the unisex bathroom on the fourth floor is for men, or their employees make it an informal norm on their own. Either way, the urinals on the third floor will go to waste.
salvorhardin,
Do you think it is silly for a woman not to want to share a bathroom with a coworker that she finds creepy, or that has harassed her in the past? If a woman expressed this concern, would you tell her that she is blinded by 19th century sexist attitudes and her feelings are invalid?
If we’re talking full enclosed stalls that are just small bathrooms, then fine, but that’s not desegregated that’s just going from 2 bathrooms with X stalls each to 2X bathrooms. Those are great set ups and are ideal in my opinion, but they won’t be cheaper than ordinary stall dividers + urinals in the mens + a female bathroom, and hey maybe women want their own space anyway.
Being in a private room with a man that has harassed you before is uncomfortable regardless of whether the room in question is a toilet or no. Are you suggesting to make office coffe rooms, break rooms, or any other rooms where women can bump into their harassers one-on-one segregated?
If safety is the issue, you can make toilets where only the stalls have non-transparent walls. And make the area with the sinks have transparent walls, so anybody can see if there is something threatening happening there.
And install panic buttons inside all the stalls. It could also be useful if somebody faints or feels unstable, and they are standard in disabled toilets.
I think desegregated toilets are great, achieve potty parity and get rid of a lot of the nonsense over transgender women supposedly molesting little girls.
In Sweden, there were plenty of desegregated toilets, and they worked fine. I also saw a swimming pool in the UK with not just a desegregated toilet, but a desegregated locker room with individual stalls to dress and undress. They managed to fit more people this way, and things were easier for everybody.
Which are… what, exactly? Using a little more space to build two restrooms instead of one mega-restroom?
Does the comfort of the people using the restrooms have any weight in this calculation?
My guess is that gender-neutral restrooms are one of those issues that seems pretty pressing in SJW and academic and journalism circles, but has almost no support outside those classes. 95% of the public would react with some version of shaking their head and thinking “what the hell are those guys smoking.” Our society being what it is, that probably means we’ll find ourselves with gender-neutral restrooms as a matter of law and public policy, without any particular consideration for whether the benefits are worth the costs.
My personal experience of non-gender-segregated toilets is that female/male are simply relabelled as cubicles/cubicles and urinals. I’ve not used them enough to know which kind women tend to use (men tend to use the ones with urinals). If building new ones I think it would be silly to not use urinals, for efficiency reasons. Exactly what a system designed around efficiency would look like is an interesting question.
@rlms,
My experience has been that they put a lock on the door, which is nice except that there’s usually multiple stalls locked away by the one person in the restroom, which increases wait times (especially when “urban campers” move in), and my wife complains that “men are filthy, I hate gender-neutral”.
@Plumber
As in effectively changing rooms with several stalls to ones with only one? That sounds crazy and terrible.
Plumber:
I think there’s no workable strategy for having decent public restrooms alongside a large homeless population inclined to camp out in them. The fact that we have spent decades letting homeless people turn public spaces unusable seems utterly nuts to me.
It’s like we’re in the sweet spot of cultural inability to cope with homeless people–we’re too liberal to have the cops run them off/arrest them for vagrancy, we’re too conservative to maintain effective services that keep them in some kind of shelter instead of camping out on the street, and we’re too libertarian to forcibly commit the crazy people.
@rims
Nevertheless it’s what I’ve seen partially or wholey done with some State of California court restrooms, some City and County of San Francisco restrooms, and at many corporate owned businesses.
As far as I can tell, if the restrooms have more than three seperate toilets and/or urinals they’re still being left seperate men’s and women’s restrooms, but the ones with two and three toilet stalls and/or urinals are being converted to “gender neutral”, with a lock for whole restroom (as are the one’s with only one toilet, but those make sense to be converted, unlike the multiples).
Looks like typical corporate and governmental central planning, so ’tis not surprising.
@albatross11
That’s a very apt description!
You’ve stumbled on a pretty deep insight, there. If you wrote an article about homelessness around that insight, I bet you could get it published in some influential forum, like the Atlantic. It would be a week-long orgy of wonkish chin-stroking.
There is some fraction of homeless that prefers the streets to following the rules of a shelter. This is likely because a disinclination to follow rules is correlated with an inability to maintain employment.
I gather the shelters are often not well run, and sometimes are unsafe. And also that trying to make them safer and better run tends to lead to kicking some people out of those shelters, which leaves you with people on the street.
My understanding of the most common rule that causes people to avoid shelters is the prohibition on drugs (and maybe alcohol).
I’m not sure how to remedy that particular issue, since allowing drugs seems like a really bad idea.
Why? It’s an alternative to living on the street where they can use drugs (illegally, but enforced less than in a shelter I presume). If the drug users bother the non-users, segregate them.
There is a significant history of drug users at shelters acting violently or disruptively. “Segregate them” implies levels of enforcement beyond denying them entry that may or may not exist, and is a lot harder to monitor and administer than a straight ban.
Currently, non-disruptive drug users can be at a shelter if they are not disruptive and hide their activities well enough. Removing the ban will make such an arrangement much more difficult for the shelter.
@Mr. Doolittle A simple implementation is that some shelters allow drug use and some don’t, in proportion to homeless people’s preferences or rates of drug use.
What if even drug users don’t like to be around other drug users?
One of my strongest beliefs is that freedom of personal expression (in the sense of a social building block/concept, as opposed to legal construct) is absolutely paramount. Obviously there are exceptions, such as “information wants to be free and nuclear launch codes are information, so here we go”; but restricting freedom of expression in the name of social engineering, no matter how benign, can never end well.
I honestly can’t tell which philosophy this belief aligns with best. It’s tempting to say “Libertarian”, but I do not believe that “money is speech”, and am in fact in favor of a regulated market, not anarcho-capitalism, so that probably doesn’t fit either…
Mine:
Left: Most people on the bottom of society are there substantially because of bad things that happened to them–largely their genes and upbringing and the economic environment in which they live. We should help those folks out using taxpayer money and government programs, if we can work out a sensible way to do it, because you don’t deserve a shitty, deprived life just because you got a bad INT roll.
Right: Most people are going to be happiest in a more-or-less traditional family structure, in which a man and woman get married and raise kids, take them to church regularly, and are involved in their community. It’s important to allow for exceptions, but in both social and government policy, we should be trying to make this the default path for people, and to support it as a workable path for most people. IMO, allowing gay marriage is an example of an attempt to expand the availability of this to a larger set of people. (This has all kinds of downstream implications that don’t track well with political sides.)
Libertarian: Government, law, and taxation have no special moral status–it’s just people. We don’t know how else to run an advanced society or solve some critical coordination problems other than to pretend that policemen enforcing laws are in a different moral category than vigilantes enforcing social norms with violence, but really, they’re the same thing, and subject to the same moral problems. A policeman bashing in your door to arrest you for drugs is in the same moral category as an angry neighbor bashing in your door to beat you up for using drugs. A tax collector demanding $X from you is not morally different from a mafioso demanding $X in protection money–the taxes tend to be spent in ways that arguably benefit society, and we don’t know how else to run things, so we grit our teeth and accept the evil as necessary.
Morally, you may be correct; but functionally, the tax collector solution works out much better, due to the incentive structure and general accountability.
In general, moral arguments are IMO non-starters; morality basically amounts to personal taste, and is thus pointless to argue about.
Left: nationalising railways etc. (in the UK) would be a reasonable thing to do. I don’t think we should kill all men, but a world with no cis men (and somehow no issues with fertility and sexuality) would probably be a significant improvement on this one. Anarchist communes are cool.
Right: American: affirmative action is obviously terrible; British: privatising the NHS would be a reasonable thing to do.
?: maybe ban (or severely regulate) hardcore pornography, restrict patenting of drugs.
Libertarian: general: yay drugs, maybe yay ancap charter cities; British: slightly laxer gun laws would be good.
What does this mean? No man thinks of themselves as male? Presumably humankind would be gone in 100 years, since reproduction would cease. Unless this means something different from what it sounds like to me.
“somehow no issues with fertility” means making sperm in a tube or something.
Maybe it’s something like “the world would be better if everyone became a hermaphrodite”? I’m not convinced that’s true though.
Say hello to Earth Minus One. It’s a timeline a lot like out own, but slightly worse. It’s the place where a few of the things that went right in our world went wrong, and a few more clever and public-spirited people got hit by buses before they had a chance to make a difference.
How does Earth Minus One differ from our world?
It’s probably a post-apocalyptic wasteland following a superpower nuclear exchange, frankly.
Well now, this is supposed to be an only slightly worse world, not a the full-on crapsack. So maybe rather than two uses of nuclear weapons, there were five or six. How might that have happened?
I think the point was that we only just scraped by avoiding nuclear war in our current timeline. Even just randomising things a little means a good chance of nuclear helfire. Making things worse even more so.
if you want a half dozen extra uses of nuclear weapons they basically have to happen very shortly after WW2 when it wouldn’t trigger a multi-nation nuclear exchange.
Kill a few important vaccine developers and the vaccines for polio and a few other diseases might take an decade or 2 to get into general use.
If Frederick Sanger got hit by a bus synthetic insulin probably would have been put back a few years along with the field of genetics.
That’s really not so different from our world. One option is to have WWII in the Pacific go slightly worse, so that the US isn’t able to use the bombs until about January 1946, which is when I think we’d have about that many. Another is for some minor brushfire war to break out in the mid-50s, and Eisenhower to make a point with a couple of nukes. But that world might actually be better than ours.
I think you need to have the Germans last longer as well. Otherwise, the Soviets probably still enter the war against Japan shortly after Germany falls, and Manchuria gets overrun. If that isn’t enough to make Japan surrender without nukes, surely the Soviets overrun Korea in only a few more weeks, which should decisively weaken the faction that thinks fighting on will in any way improve things for Japan.
On the other hand, if both Germany and Japan last longer (perhaps a more isolationist America that provides less help to the British and starts preparing for war later and less thoroughly could produce that result, though for the outcome we’re seeking here the U.S. would have to still have the Manhattan project despite this, which is a little bit of a contradiction), we may get what we want. Making them both longer lasting could mean nukes used to bring on the final German surrender, and then more nukes a little while later to bring on the final Japanese surrender.
Korea, possibly? MacArthur certainly wanted to, and I don’t know enough about contemporary Chinese politics to say it wouldn’t have worked, at least to a first approximation.
Good point re Germany. But I’d not be certain that Manchuria being overrun would actually make them see reason. It was a very near-run thing IRL, and pushed through only because the Emperor personally intervened to make them agree.
In a slightly worse version of Canada, the issue of Quebec independence got violent and stayed that way. An organization rather like the IRA formed, and the government had a hard time suppressing it, in no small part due to significant pro-independence sympathies with in the Surete de Quebec, Quebec’s provincial police force. While the pseudo-IRA isn’t very active any more, it did succeed in driving away many English-speaking Quebecois and some French-speaking members of visible minorities.
In the slightly worse version of South America, Chile and Bolivia have been fighting an undeclared guerilla/terrorist war over the Antofagasta for the past 100 years.
It’s a bleeding sore that leads every American President to take a swing at the Peace Process, but the area is blighted and tensions remain high with regular car bombings and attacks on infrastructure.
It’s easy to imagine that, in a world a little worse than our own (if we handwave that it made it through to the 1800’s identically, which of course it probably wouldn’t), the United States’ civil war didn’t really ever end. Maybe President Not-Lincoln let the South go. Maybe he ordered the place set on fire after the Union’s victory. For whatever reason, it is easy to imagine that the split became long lasting and bitter, even more than it really did.
A Divided States is obviously much worse off, and its impact on the rest of the world would likely be calamitous. The two World Wars, just to pick an easy example, would have been very dif if America’s part in them had been fighting itself.
Harry Turtledove’s Southern Victory series envisions an independent south, and then proceeds to go through the World Wars. This leads to some cascading differences though: since Britain and France come down on the side of the Confederacy (the threat of foreign blockades is why Lincoln eventually has to let the South go), the World War 1 battle lines put the North on the side of the Central Powers and the South on the side of the Allies.
It eventually diverges pretty heavily, with gur Prageny Cbjref jvaavat JJ1 naq gur Fbhgu gnxvat gur ebyr bs Treznal jvgu n cnenyyry rpbabzvp qrcerffvba naq evfr bs Pbasrqrengr Uvgyre sbe JJ2, jvgu oynpxf orvat gur Wrj-nanybthr.
That was a fun set of stories to read, but also serious nightmare fuel for adults. “My name is Jake Featherston, and I’m here to tell you the truth!”
There are some who argue that in our world the Civil War never really ended.
The Earth-Minus-One I can think of is that Stephen Douglas was a bit more partisan, decided to endorse Breckinridge instead of running his own campaign, and the united Democrats pulled off a narrow victory over Lincoln. The result is that it’s the North that secedes from the Union. There are a lot of different ways this can play out, nearly all of which lead to slavery surviving for at least another generation, possibly to the present day.
Is there any reason to think the North would have seceded, though? Why wouldn’t the stalemate over slavery have just continued a few more years, perhaps triggering a civil war a little later on?
What if the civil war had waited till 1890 to happen? My sense is that the North’s advantages were only growing over time, so you’d expect the war to end up the same way. What am I missing?
I’m pretty sure there were abolitionists arguing that the North should secede, although I don’t know how widespread that idea was.
Air pollution in Los Angeles never improved in the 90’s and 00’s due to some efficient technologies not being invented, however the population is slightly higher due to tax incentives leading several large employers to locate there, with the resulting tax revenue being embezzeled rather than put towards water infrastructure. Gang violence increased over that time as well, spilling out to the suburbs and adjacent counties. The national guard was called in, but was in dire straits since most of the units had been rotating in and out of Iraq since the 90s.
Also, they are still focusing on reality television rather than stories with long narrative arcs. There’s one popular shows where contestants compete to see how long they can stay outside in LA in summertime.
Due to some quirk in the production of High Fructose Corn Syrup, obesity is even more of a problem; locally this is addressed by a government funded inhaler program, so school kids can do laps outside despite the smog.
George Washington died between Yorktown and the 1787 Constitutional Convention. Maybe Franklin too. As a result, the convention fails, and North America eventually breaks into a number of at-best-wary and more likely hostile nation-states. A few late Industrial Revolution inventions don’t occur — the threshing machine, the cotton gin, and various improvements to iron and steel manufacture.
End result is North America is a bunch of squabbling nation states. Britain tries to prevent the slave trade through boycott and naval blockade, and this combined with slave rebellions (instigated by Britain and by other North American nations) stops the trade but not the institution. The South consists of poor rural pariah states. Expansion into the upper midwest still happens, but much more slowly. The Great Plains remain Indian territory. The south-central part of the country a chaotic area with escaped slaves, various “Spanish” generals (though Spain is unable to maintain control) with overlapping claims, and Indians.
Europe stagnates; the French Revolution ends with the Thermidorian Reaction but instead of Napoleon (who alas is never born), we get restoration of the monarchy. Spain retains its colonial possessions in name only; the loss of its fleet plus internal squabbles prevent it from actually exercising control.
With the Balkanization of North America and the blunting of the industrial revolution, the world in general returns to the static conditions prior to the Age of Exploration. 1950 looks a lot like 1850, and 2050 won’t look so different either.
The UK signs a peace treaty with Germany after most of their army is wiped out in the early phases of the war. The invasion of the Soviet Union turns into a bloody stalemate, and Europe ends up with a Communist dictatorship in the East, a set of Fascist dictatorships in the West, with a weakened UK hanging on on the periphery. WW2 for the US is basically just us pounding the hell out of Japan. By 1950, there’s a three-cornered Cold War, with the US, USSR, and Germany all pointing nukes at each other. Fascism has about the same level of success at getting imitators/client states as Communism in out world, and so does Communism. Democracy becomes a US/UK/Australia/Canada thing.
So, the USA conquers Mexico and central America in the hopes of gaining a work force to defend themselves from Germany Naval blockades?
Probably, but it’s worth noting that a US that’s just won a war with Japan does not need to worry about German naval blockades. The US Navy can outbuild the German one by a staggering margin basically indefinitely. Economic blockade, maybe, but as per above there’s nothing Germany can actually do to stop us exporting to South America/Asia.
Huh? That’s not a thing that could realistically happen. If all of Europe is German-dominated, then the major shipping lanes are all running north-south along the American coast. The Germans were able to do a lot of damage to those during the “Happy Time”, but we eventually got our act together, and they’re far enough away from Europe to be fairly difficult to actually get U-boats to. And the idea of a surface confrontation is the sort of thing that everyone from Admiral King on down is begging for.
If the US doesn’t enter the war in Europe, I don’t think American democracy has much of a future. It was a pretty close-run thing even in our timeline.
Nornagest:
Why do you think that?
My impression from e.g. Alan Turing: The Enigma (I confess I haven’t read much World War II stuff) is that even toward the end of the war Germany was producing so many U-boats that we were in serious trouble in the Atlantic. Could a few months’ delay have given Germany an adamantine grip on it by the time we did join? Or is there a more pertinent angle of the war you have in mind?
I’m thinking mainly about the era’s political environment. Old-school great-power aristocracy had been (intellectually) discredited and (literally) decimated by the First World War, then a little bit later capitalism and liberal democracy were badly shaken by the Great Depression. A lot of people were looking for alternatives. Communism was one of the big winners in that period, but if you were one of the many people who were disillusioned with the Great War-era alignments but also skeptical of communism, you were likely to end up in a fascist or fascist-lite party, or one of the various minor perspectives like Spanish anarchism.
In the US, the New Deal coalition managed to forestall any major shifts by democratically adopting a greatest-hits version of socialist and fascist proposals, but FDR barely pulled it off, and at the time of the American entry into WWII its long-term success was still in doubt. In our timeline it got a big shot in the arm from wartime propaganda and then from the European victory, but without a clear ideological victory in Europe, I don’t think it would have been stable. The US would still have won in the Pacific, but it would have been harder to sell that as a mandate, and propaganda in that theater didn’t focus on the ideological angle as much.
@Nornagest:
Oh man, I love your descriptions of historical events. You should write a book.
@Nick
No, we were not in serious trouble in the Atlantic at the end of WWII. We weren’t in serious trouble any time after May 1943. If the Type XXI had gotten to sea in large numbers, we might have been, but I even have some doubts about that. And if the situation had been better for the U-boats earlier, it might well have delayed Type XXI production, which IIRC was a response to improvements in Allied ASW.
Bean, thanks. I may be misremembering the book, or the book may be wrong. I’ll check when I get home.
@johan_larson
Leaded gasoline gets phased out later in the U.S.A. and the murder rate doesn’t decline until later, Manhattan island is made into a walled prison, then Air Force One is hijacked by a domestic terrorist posing as stewardess, the President makes it to an escape pod, and lands in Manhattan just before Air Force One crashes, killing everyone else aboard. Police are dispatched to rescue the President. However, Romero, the right-hand man of the Duke of New York (the top crime boss in the prison) warns them that the Duke has taken the President hostage, and that he will be killed if any further rescue attempts are mounted, Snake Plissken, a former Special Forces soldier convicted of bank robbery is sent in….
The prompt said worse, not WAY MORE AWESOME.
Yeah 1997 did have awesome elements unlike 2019 with that mutant destroying Neo-Tokyo, and those Nexus-6 replicants killing those people in the off world colonies and coming to Earth, but at least we have episodes of The Running Man to watch, I think it’s an even better show than the Rollerball show we had in 2018, that new contestant, Ben Richards, is one bad mother……
For one small thing that might have huge impact…Imagine that Henry Wallace was still Vice President of the United States in April 1945.
Would this be the kind of thing that might make the Earth Minus One timeline less immediately warlike (in the late 40s and early 50s), but leave Earth Minus One with a stronger global Communist movement? Would some form of Communism, with all its attendant internal problems, have been dominant in much more of Earth Minus One?
Instead of WW2 being won in 1945 by the US, it lasts until 1946 when Russia storms the beaches of Japan and conquers it. The US was less successful in the Pacific, which gave Russia the opportunity to take Japan. The US retaliates being denied Japan by bombing several Russian locations in Western Europe.
Do you think that’s something that would have been plausible? Would the American’s have been envious of Russia’s success, or happy it was Russian lives being spent rather than American? (non-rhetorical question)
I think that America already opposed Russia ideologically. The rush to drop bombs was partially to deny Russia the opportunity to invade Japan. I could easily see Russia succeeding in capturing Japan causing hostility to mount between America and Russia.
Good point.
Russia and what navy?
I think we’ve been through this before, but Russia had a grand total of two light cruisers and eleven destroyers in the Pacific in 1945, plus some smaller craft. They had no shipyards capable of building more. They had no dedicated landing craft. They had no bases close enough to provide fighter cover or close air support over any Japanese beach, and they did not have the logistical capability to build and sustain such bases. Every explanation you’ve ever seen about how Sea Lion couldn’t have worked and the Nazis couldn’t have invaded England in 1940 no matter how weak the British Army was at the time, dial that up to eleven and apply it to Russia invading Japan in 1946. Greater distance, harsher environment, fewer resources, and as broken as Japan was in 1945 or would have been in 1946, they’d still have had enough machine guns and ammunition and not-quite-starved Japanese soldiers to kill Russian soldiers on the beaches faster than the Russians could deliver them to said beaches.
You could possibly come up with a counterfactual where Russian troops on American ships carry out the invasion, but I don’t think the politics for that work.
Russian armies overrunning all the territory Japan had seized over the years in Manchuria and Korea and maybe Northern China, certainly, but I’m not sure that gets you the end of WWII.
Actually, I’m not so sure about this. Downfall made a pretty strong case that Russia was planning to invade Hokkaido when the war ended, and could have pulled it off. Remember that by this point, most of Japan’s troops were in Kyushu to face down the Americans, their navy was essentially nonexistent, and their internal transport network was in shambles from the bombing. None of these were true of Sea Lion. But at the same time, Russia probably couldn’t have gone further south, and this is rather conditional on the US pounding Japan like it did IRL.
Also, I have to question “no landing craft”. The people who did WITP:AE look to have done their homework, and the Soviet OOB in that game had a bunch of landing craft. I wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t turn up during a quick search, because Soviets, but I’m pretty sure they existed.
That’s a legitimate concern. Maybe Russia retools their manufacturing to produce a navy that can land on Japan. I don’t have an entire plan to produce the effect I’m describing it. I’m just saying it would be a “slightly worse Earth”
The “lack of airbases” strikes me as an especially important weak point in this argument. Airbases can be built. It’s easier with less advanced aircraft (like WWII planes). If they overrun Korea, they can build some around Pusan. And if they overrun south Sakhalin, they can build some there. That they didn’t have airbases ideally positioned in actual history just means it would have taken a little bit longer, because they’d have to build some. The other points still have merit, but I can’t credit the lack of air bases argument, and if the Soviets could establish air supremacy (and they had plenty of oil, and the Japanese didn’t, and they were building lots of planes, and the Japanese couldn’t) that would make a big difference.
Mao lives ten years longer, postponing the Chinese abandonment of communism by ten years. To make it worse, Deng Ziaoping is dead by the time Mao dies and Chen Yun instead becomes the leading figure in the post-Mao elite, with the result that China moves towards something more like a Soviet centrally planned model, less like capitalism. The result is not only that Chinese citizens are much poorer than in our world, but that other poor countries, such as Vietnam and India, are less willing to shift towards something more like a free market system.
Effects on the U.S. are unclear.
@DavidFriedman
I’ll take a guess:
China is not admitted to the World Trade Organization, more manufacturing jobs are retained in North America, but they are less job and business selling cell phones as the higher cost of manufacturing them makes them less of a ubiquitous “must have”, and because of this instead if my being issued a “Smartphone” I still use the old radios we used to have and I don’t read this thread and write this message.
The Velvet Divorce ends up being tense, perhaps not as bad as the dissolution of Yugoslavia, but similar to The Troubles. This issue prevents both countries from joining the EU and Schengen. Poland and the Czech Republic have sour relations over Zaolší. As a result, post-communist economic growth in the three countries is significantly diminished.
scenario 1:
A wild bus appears and drives over baby Bismark.
No strong German Empire. No World Wars.
No Soviet clusterfuck.
No Armenian genocide, no Holodomor, no Holocaust.
Possibly other genocides and other world wars, which might
be more bloody, brutal and/or more nuclear.
scenario 2:
During President Wilson’s inauguration, suddenly a wild bus falls from the sky
and sadly crushing him. Thus no American WW1 involvement (which was a stretch even then).
Germany negotiates a somewhat favorable peace. Everyone is reasonably unhappy
and licks their wounds. Western Europe forms European alliance to rein in
the Soviet Union during Holodomor as a humanitarian mission and ends communism.
German century (yay!).
scenario 3:
All the Manhattan brainiacs die in a bus crash, before they get to work…
Nothing much changes, except a conventional war with the SU breaks out over tensions.
The Japanese get to negotiate a conditional surrender and mellow out a little, anyway,
after having their ass handed to them.
A couple million more dead in fighting, including conscripted Germans.
Many German cities are conveniently already rubble, so small favors.
The US gets their nukes eventually, and ends communism levelling Moscow, killing Stalin.
The Brits get nervous and some kind nuclear disarmament deal is struck and the UN (or whatever) ensures, that noone builds more any more nukes, because they’re dangerous (and nobody has any reason to get involved into an arms race right now). Vietnam wont see war. Some things with China will happen, but it can’t be worse, than what actually happened.
I’m noticing a pattern. Whenever I time-travel to murder someone clever and public-spirited,
the future gets better. That’s odd.
Not sure I’m doing this right.
Obviously, that person is Adolf Hitler.
As he’s killed by an artillery shell during the WWI, other charismatic leader with similarly destructive ideas plays on Germans’ feeling of resentment for the lost war and ruined economics (or whatever Hitler used), but does so 5 years later. So the WWII’ starts in 1944 and both US and Germany have nuclear weapons 2 years later, on the peak of the war. Since those are single free-falling bombs rather then thousands of ICBMs it does not end up in apocalypse and Allies still win in the end. But few major European cities are turned into radioactive wastelands, Berlin and London are among them. Casualties are proportionally, perhaps few times, higher, and the increased rate of genetic disorders continues even until nowdays.
PS: Yes I know that WWII probably was Hitler’s personal fault and would’ve never happened if not for him. My scenario doesn’t violate this, it’s just that there was another leader just like him in all the relevant aspects, but who came to power 5 years later.
A complication is that the Pacific War would probably still have happened on schedule — the reasons behind it don’t have much to do with Europe. That might influence the US to develop nuclear weapons faster than Germany, since they’d have more incentive than anyone else with a realistic shot at it for a few years. (Japan would have even more incentive, but their nuke program was hopeless.)
AFAIK the German nuclear program had all the chances to create first nuclear weapons at the same time or even before the US did, and was only thrown back by the operation Gunnerside in 1943. Without it, and Germany not busy being defeated at 1945, it could plausibly have developed them at 46. Maybe faster, if Not-Hitler had chosen another nation to hate and not so many Jewish geniuses would’ve fled from Germany to the USA.
Ofc this all does not sound very likely. But woah77 above has already suggested an entire US Pacific Fleet worth of ships popping out of nowhere on Soviet navy bases in Japan Sea… with the bases themselves popping out immediately before that. So why not have a little stretch or two and make the world worse-off by killing Hitler?
The German nuclear program was so poorly run that I’m not sure it could have produced a weapon by 2000, much less 1945.
OK, that’s a slight exaggeration, but it’s kind of hard to describe just how terrible it was. There were a couple of fundamental mistakes in physics, most notably discarding graphite as a moderator. I’ve seen three different explanations for that (sabotage, incompetence, and better US tech), and have no clue which one is correct. And there were loads of programmatic mistakes. The US program was ultimately run by a general who was primarily an administrator. The Germans put their best scientist in charge. I’ve seen serious claims that the Japanese program probably would have given a bomb sooner.
And yes, this kind of thing was pretty much inherent in the German war effort. I don’t see it going away unless one of their few competent managers takes an interest.
If relations between the US and Canada were a bit less friendly, trade between the two nations might be less free, to the detriment of both. In such a scenario, Canada would do more business with the Europeans and Asians, but that probably wouldn’t compensate fully. Both nations would be slightly poorer.
What might account for a tenser relationship between US and Canada?
A history of war… well, more than that, a history of a _nasty_ war. Suppose while the US Civil War is going on, a populist leader unites much of what is now Canada and declares not Dominion status but full independence from Britain. And then, following that up, invades the Northern US while the US is busy with Reconstruction. An army led by a general who makes Sherman look kind reaches as far as New York City, burning, slaughtering, and raping all the way. The incursion is repulsed, but the bad blood remains.
You could go more fundamental than that – there was fighting between the US and Canada in the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. Just continue that for a few more years (especially with low level fighting along the border), and antipathy can grow unchecked. That makes your Civil War scenario much more likely, but even that would be unnecessary, because the condition is already met.
54 40’ or fight becomes a reality with the US invading Canada around 1840s and seizing land with Canada also damaging NYC in the process. When the Civil war occurs, Canada allies with the Confederacy to seize their land back. WW1 comes along and Zimmerman’s sends a telegram to Canada along with Mexico. If all three of these things occurred and were particularly violent, I could see a rivalry similar to Japan and China occurring up to today.
The Green Revolution doesn’t happen, or at least is much less effective.
Prohibition isn’t repealed, or at least is repealed much later. At a minimum, organized crime would be a good bit more powerful.
What about the world where Winston Churchill dies early, perhaps during his escape from Boer captivity. Lots of detailed changes, hard to judge the overall effect.
The Dardanelles expedition doesn’t happen, which is a good thing for the allies given how it turned out—I’m not sure if that results in Ataturk’s career going less well. Tanks may get invented later, possibly by the Germans. If something like WWII happens, England may agree to a compromise peace. Lots of other changes. Bean can tell us whether, without Churchill’s influence before the war, the British navy would have been weaker, so more likely to lose at Jutland or equivalent.
No. The drivers for the RN’s buildup were independent of Churchill, and he actually fought the “we want eight” program earlier on. And the margin at Jutland was high enough that it would have taken a big cut to put the British in peril.
I’m not so certain about this. British strategic thought had always emphasized the importance of seaborne strikes on the enemy’s flanks. If it wasn’t the Dardanelles, it would have been the Baltic coast of Germany, or the Adriatic, or somewhere else.
Continuing the weeks-long healthcare trainwreck…
The latest in the thread is,
As pointed out, the marginal value of a dollar is rather different to different people, and my view is that, in the real world, this turns into “maybe it’s good for people to contribute less to their 401k for a few months” for some and “maybe it’s good for people to freeze to death” for others. The first does relatively little to affect marginal consumption among the group it applies to, while the second depresses consumption so much that it means that people die of (to whip my long-dead horse into a merengue) diabetic ketoacidosis instead of hypothermia.
Given that there are people who are priced out of the existing healthcare system, is there a better mechanism for allocating healthcare than price? If not, are all effects that distort the pricing mechanism bad? If so, what’s the most humane way to kill the poors with Type I diabetes and cancer? Because their inevitable fate sounds like an awful way to die to me, and if efficient resource allocation means they shouldn’t get actual medical care then at least they can hope for a relatively nice death.
I’m aware that the above is (probably needlessly) inflammatory, but I don’t think it’s reasonable to pretend that healthcare isn’t an area where time-domain transient effects aren’t both large and potentially disastrous. So, actual serious questions: what’s the best way to allocate healthcare and why? If the answer is the pricing mechanism, should healthcare providers be aiming to maximize profits, as most market models assume? How aggressively should healthcare providers discriminate on price, and how amenable to exceptional circumstances should the price discrimination algorithms be? Is it a good idea to let people sell themselves into indentured labor in exchange for healthcare? What about actual slavery?
It sounds a lot like people are trying to solve 2 problems badly with 1 solution merely because they correlate and interact rather than dealing with them separately and doing a better job of it.
Like trying to solve healthcare by lumping it together with employment and ending up in a situation where people can end up incentivized to switch to a job where they have less competitive advantage and have less to contribute because it comes with health cover.
Or trying to hit 2 birds with one stone and only winging both of them.
If you want to get people to get fit and exercise there’s no rule that you have to link it to medical care. You could just go a little big-brother and write a law fining people for failing to do as much exercise as the local offical party officer says they should.
Or you could pay people a small bit for maintaining a healthy BMI. Target teenagers such that they can make pocket money from being healthy or improving their health from week to week before they reach adulthood and it may not even be terribly expensive with lots of positive knock on effects later in life.
As for healthcare allocation, it comes down to what kind of society you want to live in. If you’re comfortable with a society where people who can’t earn enough just don’t get healthcare: own it and accept lots of people and their progney dying young from fairly preventable things. If you don’t consider healthcare something that people should get if they really need it by dint of being human then there’s no problem.
Your indentured labor and slavery bit is again, mixing in separate issues that aren’t really about healthcare so much as a general issue of what people in a financial hole should be expected to do in the society you want to live in. Do you want debtors prison? Should debts transfer to next of kin like assets to motivate people more? Selling organs you can do without? Selling organs you can’t do without? Lots of things have historical precedent.
Since I am the one who was quoted, I feel like a bit of response would be good. I think the problem is calling everything from immunizations and antibiotics to permanent dialysis and organ transfers, “healthcare”.
Even though I’m fairly libertarian, I think its defensible to have some intervention in the market at those low (and extremely cheap) levels, but when we are talking about state-of-the-art healthcare delivered by expensive, highly trained professionals. Where is that ever a right? We don’t expect everyone to be able to eat at The French Laundry, even though that is technically food.
And that, IMO, is more representative of the system we need to have. Everyone has floridated water, can get vaccinations, there are clinics that can deal with minor things, but yes if you have type II diabetes, sorry pay your own way.
Medical conditions that are the result of chronic and voluntarily engaged in behaviors are not appropriate for health insurance to begin with, and insurance aside, health care costs are not necessarily cheaper for random accidental medical conditions then they are for those resulting from bad behavior.
I do think some kind of out of pocket payment of medical services is necessary to prevent prices from ballooning but I don’t believe the decision to live a healthy lifestyle can be driven much by fear of health care costs.
Also Any program that tries to encourage healthy lifestyles focusing on behavior, perhaps via telematics, would be intrusive and cost prohibitive. Any program that relies on outcomes runs the risk of being accused of engaging in discrimination. [I would imagine, given that a fair portion of health outcomes are heritable anyway]
I’m not sure if there’s anything in my post this is meant to be taking exception to, as I specified Type I diabetes. I agree with the last clause completely.
I mean, the trivial answer would be that one weird thing everybody else does where they don’t price people out of the health care market. This is not in fact all that complex of a problem, nor especially expensive on net. Major cost drivers in the US are the ‘daughter from California’ phenomenon, where some relative demands extreme and extremely-expensive end-of-life care with no particular QOL benefit, and very poor implementation of preventative measures, respectively for the high- and low-SES chunks of the population, and our actively unhealthy infrastructure more generally (e.g. huge sprawling car-based cities vs. European-style dense, public-transit based ones). NB, this does not disagree with that billion-graph RCA post, I’m just observing that economies which don’t treat health care spending as a luxury good also receive broadly adequate health care at a fraction of our cost and with superior average outcomes (although this last is probably mostly environmental).
Arguably, give the existence of liens and wage garnishments specifically and [the set of all loan-enforcement policies] more generally, indentured labor for payment of debts already exists; IDK if that ever applies to health care charges, though.
I think if we didn’t treat health care so differently from other economic activities, a market-based approach would probably work just fine. But we do, so we should stop pretending otherwise and take the obvious economies of scale.
I think starting with price gets the whole discussion started with confusing the issue.
The issue is resources: price is a (variably accurate) proxy for resources.
So there are two questions, that rapidly become four:
1) How many resources do we want to spend on health care
1b) Who’s we?
2) What do we want to spend them on?
2b) By implication, what don’t we want to spend them on?
My opinion is that healthcare resources that could plausibly be used vary so much between people that the answer to 1b ends up needing to be “the whole society”.
Given this answer, I think the early-90’s Oregon Plan is the best option; rank treatments by benefits/costs, and cover as far up the list as the money goes.
One clear answer to 2b is “we don’t want to spend them on things that do no one any good”; the problem is that this is a hard category to define clearly and usefully. Do EMR’s do anyone any good? What about reserve capacity in an emergency room so that trauma cases can be seen immediately if there’s a multi-car accident at 3:00 AM? And then there’s the question of how to value lives and years and health.
Here are five reasonably-typical patients: if only two get non-palliative care, which two should it be?
1) Very premature infant; 50% chance of “pretty much fine long-term”, 25% chance of “will survive but will probably need to live in a supervised environment”, 25% chance will not not survive.
2) Infant with sickle-cell anemia: will have high health care costs and lots of pain life-long, without prophylactic antibiotics, is unlikely to survive to age 1, but will survive with prophylactic antibiotics.
3) 12-year-old with cancer: 50% chance of 10-year survival with treatment
4) 40-year old, has been addicted to opiates for 20 years, has hepatitis and will die within 3 years without a liver transplant
5) 80-year-old, mind is still clear but physical health is poor overall; has pneumonia
The US system is very bad at providing routine care at routinely-manageable cost, but it is superb at providing rarely-needed, very expensive care.
The thing about your dilemma is these resources aren’t totally rivalrous. I can strike the 40-year-old addict easily, and more controversially the sickle-cell infant who will never lead a normal life. But then I look at the 80-year-old who (assuming bacterial pneumonia) probably just needs a course of antibiotics and maybe some sort of temporary breathing assistance; this really costs not much if anything more than palliative care, and the only reason it’s being weighed against the other two is we’ve set some sort of arbitrary resource limit and made a death panel to distribute them.
Right. The nasty and dilemma-making part is that the two people who it’s cheapest to treat now (antibiotics are fairly cheap), and who will almost certainly survive given treatment, are the two who generate the most costs later. It’s cheaper, long-term, to let them die now. My goal was that the expected cost over the next 10 years is the same for each patient.
Quibble :
If you’re talking about intubation, which requires ICU care, and which subjects the patient to other sorts of risks, then this is not cheap.
The econ 101 lesson is that price is determined by supply and demand. But next the step people often miss/forget, is that supply and demand is determined by the regulatory framework the system operates under.
Which is to say, there’s no “natural” price. We are always controlling it, by determining who has the power to control access to resources, even in nominally “free market” economies. Whether this regulatory power lies in the hands of authorities we label “public” or “private” entities makes no difference in this regard.
So if you want to reduce the price of healthcare, and maximize utility, one option would be for the government to no longer choose to implement policies that concentrate wealth in the hands of a few, and instead transfer this wealth to those who have less. The price reduction comes in the form of shifting demand from expensive-but-only-slightly-useful procedures/medications that the wealthy peruse (because the marginal utility of money is so low to them), to cheap and highly effective medication/procedures that the poor can now afford, but previously couldn’t. And to ensure that the money is being used for its appropriate target, the government can place restrictions on this money such that it can only be used for healthcare spending.
The price drops and net utility increases. Its not a radical idea, nearly every country, including the US already does this to some degree (I’m just describing Medicaid and Medicare, really). We just need to turn up the gas.
The definition of demand in this situation is based on the price of the goods in question. A person with zero dollars has zero demand for a Porsche. It does not matter how much they want a Porsche they don’t effect the price of Porches. However if you give a person who desperately wants a Porsche enough money to buy one then they have demand and that demand the pushes UP the price of Porches. Which means that your conclusion here
Is literally false in the econ 101 sense. Transferring purchasing power to people who currently cannot afford health care will INCREASE the price (actually cost, but I will save that for the inevitable “but the Nordics” rebuttal) of healthcare.
In an econ 101 world you get price decreases by increasing supply and price increases by increasing demand.
Can we skip the “but the Nordics” and talk about this now? If it’s predicated on population-level comparative advantage arguments I don’t think I buy the argument that this moves the needle much on price relative to irrational distortionary effects, collusion, and rent-seeking behaviors that markets don’t seem to be able to eliminate.
The shorter answer is that prices and costs are two different things. Prices are reflective of costs with roughly zero frictions, the more frictions you have the more prices diverge from costs.
An extreme, but real world, example. During one period in the USSR everyone got coupons for things they needed, like a loaf of bread, largely (or supposedly) regardless of the value of your work. So bread was “free”, as it cost you zero dollars. However to obtain your bread with a coupon you often had to line up several hours before the bread outlet station opened. The cost of bread in the US was (I forget the actual number, something like 10-15 mins at average wages at one year) a fraction of an hour and the cost of bread in the USSR was ~10-20 times that in terms of number of hours needed to obtain a loaf of bread, but the “price” of bread was infinitely cheaper on the official market in the USSR.
So costs can diverge from prices fairly easily. If we take a country like Norway they have ~ 15% higher GDP per capita than the US, and spend less per capita on healthcare. Using wikipedia PPP numbers you are looking at Norway having ~ 28% higher GDP per capita that the US after healthcare spending (~$50,000 for the US and ~64,000 for Norway). This gap appears to have persisted for at least 20 years (smaller in some years, but generally in the 15-30% higher GDP range), but it is unclear where this money has gone. Summed up since 1998 Norweigans have individually should have had 4-6x thier current GDP in extra spending that Americans (that is not compounded), and its unclear where that has gone. They don’t appear to live in larger houses, own more cars or electronics, eat out more, spend more on travel*, etc, etc, etc**. These numbers are PPP adjusted as well, so they should be taking into account how much more expensive Europe is.
This pattern generally holds across the Nordic countries (I haven’t looked at literally every European country at this level of detail) where it appears that running these systems leads to dead weight loss (compared to the US, not compared to some ideal) in the range of 10-30% of GDP per year.
* some of these categories might show Norweigans spending more than Americans, but the sum of the categories doesn’t.
** One possibility is that Norweigan’s have much higher individual net worth than Americans, meaning they have functionally saved more. This is a trickier calculation for a lot of reasons, but my preliminary view is that the gap doesn’t come particularly close to 4x total GDP, and if they are saving more then it should be compounded, not summed, meaning the gap should be 10x+ of GDP, not 4x over 20 years.
That seems like a wild conclusion to draw. If you could show that healthcare (real) costs are drastically higher than in the US I might buy it, but I don’t see signs of that. In fact, I don’t see clear signs that the losses you’re talking about are deadweight. Just because we don’t know where the money is going doesn’t mean it’s not paying for valuable things.
Deadweight loss in economics is not something that is useless, it is a necessary cost to ensure transactions happen. For example if the US government wants to collect taxes the amount that they have to spend on the IRS to ensure tax collection would be a deadweight loss. The IRS is valuable to the US government but it still requires real resources to run and they only produce a transfer of funds, no productivity of their own, and so they are a loss to the system when compared to a hypothetical where everyone pays the exact amount of taxes required without enforcement.
This does not imply that the money is being wasted, it implies that the system requires these extra resources to function, and that the system then costs more than the prices reported convey.
You could also argue that the GDP PPP numbers don’t reflect reality, but then you can’t really compare US healthcare prices to Norwegian healthcare prices.
You are literally incorrect in the econ 101 sense. It will not increase the cost, because there is no increase in demand. Allow me to demonstrate:
John has $2 which he spends on hamburgers and Jim has $0. If I take $1 of John’s and give it Jim with the stipulation “you can only spend this dollar on hamburgers”, what is the change in total demand for hamburgers? (And just to prove that I’m correct on both fronts, also ask what is the change in the average price of hamburgers?)
Isofar as this changes the marginal value of a dollar for John, demand for hamburgers may decrease, actually. And if a hamburger costs $2, decreased demand drives costs down, but John doesn’t have access to burgers and Jim has worthless funny money. *glances at HSA.*
What if each hamburger costs $2?
@hls2003
Prices would drop to meet the new average consumer’s purchasing power, assuming the seller wanted to stay in business.
You example holds only if John has $2 and spends his money on nothing but hamburgers and does not shift his spending after losing $1 (so that just buys 1/2 as many hamburgers), so you are 100% wrong unless your claim is that rich people and poor people have exactly the same marginal preferences, and that the marginal preferences of rich people don’t change as they are taxed, and that rich people only buy healthcare with their money, and there is zero dead weight loss to taxation.
You wouldn’t want to cause prices to drop to the point where the healthcare industry is no longer profitable (and goes out of business), but I don’t think we have to worry about that for the time being.
Yes, its true that you wouldn’t want to transfer more money from the rich than they would otherwise have spent on healthcare in a hypothetical no-tax world. But maintaining the same level of spending, just distributed differently, would cause no change in demand all else equal.
As hoopyfreud pointed out, increasing the marginal utility of a dollar for the rich would likely cause them to shift to spending less on healthcare, if it changes anything at all. The higher you raise the taxes, the more this becomes an effective tool to lower total costs.
No deadweight loss here, so long as the same level of exchange previously done between the rich with the healthcare industry is evenly replaced by the poor and the healthcare industry. I suppose if total healthcare costs drop, then you have to take into account the loss of the industry becoming less active. But its kind of weird to dwell too much on it since you’d have the same loss if technological/health improvement made the population healthier for some reason, and they stopped needing to buy so much healthcare.
In a competitive market the price of a hamburger would be close to the marginal cost of producing a hamburger, and so the only way to reduce the price of a hamburger by half would be to reduce the costs of producing a hamburger by half. The expected way that this would happen would be a decrease in the quality of the hamburger, meaning the “real price” should roughly be unchanged even if the nominal price did manage to be cut in half.
I should point out that since there’s a limit on how much you can tax without pushing up demand in the process (no more than the rich would have otherwise spent on healthcare), the best way to keep the rich from responding to the taxation by buying additional healthcare (and shifting demand up themselves) is to simply ban private insurance.
“Close”, what does this mean? Who says profit margins always have to be slim?
For “who says”, “anyone who can (1) compare the costs going in and the prices coming out, and (2) replicate the process”.
This means that profits are higher for longer when (1) and/or (2) is harder, and points to larger corporations favoring more arbitrary/heavy regulations (to make (1) and (2) harder).
When it comes to health care in particular, hospitals are larger than doctors, insurance companies are larger than hospitals, and the federal government is larger than insurance companies.
The average cost of a stage 3 clinical trial, last I checked, is $100 million per treatment. If a pharma company expects to sell that treatment ten thousand times, it necessarily has to charge $10000 per treatment just to break even – more than that if it wishes to afford to fund the next new treatment.
I believe this is why baconbits9 mentioned John having to spend all his $2 on hamburgers in order for your claim to work. This doesn’t hold in practice. John, having $2, might spend it all on hamburgers, but if he’s arbitrarily deprived of $1, he may very likely switch to a different purchase. For example, he may instead buy something that offers more calories per dollar, since calories were one of his factors when deciding what to buy with his $2.
The result would be John spending $0 on hamburgers, Jim spending his $1 on hamburgers by state fiat, the hamburger vendor selling half as many hamburgers, and all three parties being less satisfied.
As I think you pointed out earlier, people will still buy healthcare if the cost wouldn’t ruin them and the alternative is dying. That includes the rich. They might buy different types of care, though, including less expensive types, which would mean that the total demand for those types still rises, possibly by a lot if they’re also bought by people who received the rich’s money. (Is this accurate, baconbits9?)
Incorrect on multiple levels. To get this result you need 100% of the decrease in spending by the rich from the higher taxation to be healthcare related. Secondly you need perfect substitution of healthcare from rich to poor. If the rich are spending less on MRI’s and the poor spending more on general doctor’s visits then you have an expected increase in the costs of the goods consumed by the group that you are alleging will have lower costs. Finally these assumptions only get you FLAT, not lower, costs.
This is completely incorrect. You have not yet shown how you get lower total costs, you have at best created a hypothetical world in which costs are flat which rely on unrealistic assumptions. You cannot amplify your cost savings when your cost savings are zero, you are multiplying by zero.
Again false on an econ 101 level. The dead weight loss is from having to set up the transfer system, the only way you get zero dead weight loss is if magic fairies transfer the money, the rich make no efforts to avoid the magic fairies, and the poor wake up with perfect knowledge of how to interact with the healthcare system. And even under the most ridiculous assumptions you still have not given a reason for why costs would be lower, all of these are required just to keep them flat.
@Paul Brinkley
Why is Jim “less satisfied”? He gets free money for hamburgers!
Its a good point. Missing from my original proposal is that you would probably have to ban buying healthcare outside the government system, to keep this from happening. If you do that though, problem solved.
@Paul Brinkley
There’s lots of areas of healthcare that doesn’t have a $10,000 per-treatment price tag, though. You have to ask which produces more utility: poor people having access to cheap, basic treatments, or rich people being able to afford the $10,000 shiny new thing. If the companies charging $10,000 a treatment have to lose out, it may be a trade off worth making IMO.
@baconbits9
I never claimed that the price of any given treatment would decline. I said that the “price drops”- by which I meant the average price of a treatment.
I’m not interested in lowering costs, really. It’s utterly incidental to my proposal. You are the one who keeps bringing it up. Go back and read the OP if you don’t believe me.
Its really simple, econ 101 stuff here. Lets say a poor person has a subsidy of 100 dollars. They value getting healthcare from a provider at 120 dollars. The healthcare provider is willing to accept 100 dollars for their services, but only because they value the opportunity cost for their time at less than that. So the poor person trades their subsidy for healthcare, and there is a net gain in surplus value for the system.
Now, if you were to come in and take away this government subsidy by lowering taxes, then the poor person might only have $75 they are willing to spend on healthcare. And since this mutual beneficial transaction no longer takes place, the surplus value is no longer created.
This, in a nutshell, is why moving from the current system to the free market system would create massive amounts of deadweight loss. You are factoring this into your calculations, right?
Which is wrong. You claim in your OP
Lets say there are two types of healthcare, MRIs and doctors visits. In a large country there are 1 million MRIs preformed on rich patients per year at a cost of $10,000 each and 100 million doctors visits at $100 each. You ban MRIs and tax the rich the $10 billion dollars that they would have spent on MRIs and transfer it in the form of vouchers for doctors visits to the poor.
There is now $10 billion dollars in vouchers added to the payment pool for doctors visits, chasing roughly* the same amount of supply. The price of doctors visits must go up with Econ 101.
This is not Econ101, this is just counting portions of the ledger and leaving everything else out. To get this result you have to assume that the resources are sitting otherwise unused to be obtained by the $100 (but for some reason won’t be sold for $75). In your standard S&D model the person receiving the voucher goes out and bids for the healthcare providers resources. Either he bids the same as someone else and one of them doesn’t get the resources, meaning no net change in utility or he out bids someone meaning a net increase in price of the service.
*You can intentionally create a situation where transferring the resources from the MRIs creates more supply than is needed to absorb the extra demand and then prices fall, but that isn’t an Econ 101 outcome, that is a make up your own numbers outcome.
I think you are talking about the rich substituting a lower cost healthcare good for the one they can no longer afford. This is likely the average outcome, but is not a primary factor in the cost argument and gets into minutia (not the right word) that isn’t necessary to demonstrate that GinT’s position is incorrect.
We’re in total agreement here, honestly. I’ve read and re-read the OP, and nowhere did I say or imply that the price of every possible treatment would decline. I said it “shifts demand from expensive treatments to cheaper treatments”, which causes the average price of treatments to drop. Perhaps I was ambiguous in saying “price” instead of “average price”.
I’m confused by your objection regarding deadweight loss, because this seems so simple. The resources, by which I assume you mean the healthcare, won’t be sold for 75 dollars because they are worth more than that to the supplier. I picked this number out of thin air of course, but for any good there’s a bottom price the for the seller. If for some reason the buyer’s purchasing ability drops below this level (because of a sales tax, price controls, removal of healthcare subsidy, ect), then the exchange won’t be made and the parties will incur deadweight loss.
@Guy in TN
The highlighted bit is actually the core of the objection.
Let’s assume a doctor can reasonably receive 12 patients a day. They charge $100 per visit and only get eight patients per day. If the reason their time is under-utilized (they’re getting fewer patients than they have capacity for) is that potential patients can’t afford $100 per visit, then the doctor stands to make more money by lowering the price. The lowest price for the seller is such when they can no longer increase profits by selling more at a lower price.
This has implications for the idea of giving money to people who can’t afford stuff.
If you’re prepared to accept that a doctor isn’t charging less than $100 per visit because they are already working at full capacity at that price (which means they can’t earn more money by selling spare capacity at a lower price), someone who just got $100 to spend on a medical appointment still won’t be able to see a doctor: the doctor is full already.
If the number of people wanting and able to see a doctor for $100 per visit increases (because they got extra money from somewhere), but doctors are already working at full capacity, one of two things will happen (possibly both):
– you get a bidding war between everyone who wants to see a doctor, which increases the market price above $100, or
– there will be a push to increase supply of medical services (for example, by opening new clinics) to absorb the extra demand; unfortunately this extra capacity has additional costs that the incumbents do not (because they’re starting from scratch), so the minimum price they can offer will be higher than the incumbents; the market price will still rise above $100, although perhaps less than in the alternative scenario.
(Added for completeness: the positive correlation of quantity supplied and price is as econ 101 as it gets – Law of Supply and all that. Intuitively, if people thought it worthwhile to open extra clinics at a $100 market price, they’d have already done so.)
So, what you get is that people who couldn’t afford to see a doctor still can’t (‘coz doctors are now more expensive and you only gave ’em $100), plus you get people who could afford to see a doctor previously, but now can’t (‘coz more expensive).
In short, you can’t even keep the prices flat if you start pumping money into the system – unless there was some non-price reason that you had spare capacity (in which case, you’re addressing the wrong problem).
That’s exactly the opposite of what we would expect to happen – going by econ 101. What’s worse, the people affected would also be among the poor (if not truly destitute) – people who can just about afford the $100 per visit now, but won’t be able to afford the higher price resulting from increased demand at the $100 price point.
To the extent that we might assume rich people use different medical services than the poor, the rich might not feel the crunch at all (unless you specifically target rich-people medical services, as opposed to introducing a general redistributive tax; rich people have surplus income and/or wealth, by definition).
Finally, it should go without saying that you can’t solve the foregoing by doubling down. You gave people $100 for medical services and you got medical services costing $150 and as a result more people can’t afford them than previously? Give everyone $150! Yeah… except medical services cost $200 now, because you can’t simply magic doctors into existence.
My proposal explicitly addresses how total demand is kept consistent, by using taxation and market controls (specifically, banning purchasing healthcare outside the government plan).
Of course in your scenario, when you add more money to the healthcare system, the price increases. Basic stuff. My proposal doesn’t do this.
My proposal works like this (with sample numbers):
Healthcare spending before implementation:
-Poor people pay $50
-Rich people pay $1050
-Total healthcare demand is $1100
Healthcare spending after implementation:
-Poor people pay $50 dollars + healthcare subsidy
-Rich people pay $50 + $1000 in healthcare taxes (which becomes the healthcare subsidy)
-Rich person is prevented from purchasing additional healthcare on the market
-Total healthcare demand remains $1100
The bolded part kinda reads to me like “and we stop the tide from going out”.
Also “what counts as health care becomes highly politicized” and “house price becomes a proxy for doctor quality in a similar way to how it’s already a proxy for public school quality and nearby-job quality”.
These numbers don’t even add up.
If each poor person pays $50+SUB, then they’re necessarily consuming more than each rich person who is capped at $50.
Secondly, there’s $0 allocated to the deadweight cost of transferring all that money over.
Thirdly, it’s ignoring all the aftereffects that will obviously happen, such as the poor not spending all of the subsidy, buying possibly different types of care, and putting a shock on the care system, while the rich respond to the tax by spending a fraction of it on paperwork that makes them not look like rich people in the eyes of that law.
It enriches lawyers and tax transfer officials for approximately one year, and then the state has to figure out what to do with the impending insolvency of the entire thing.
Where is the error?? Don’t just make the claim without pointing it out.
For these sample purposes, assume that there are equal numbers of people in the “poor” and “rich” categories (obviously the subsidy payouts would need to be decline based on whatever the real-world ratio is)
Yes, and? I simply switch the primary consumers from the rich to the poor. Total demand remains constant.
That’s because the deadweight loss from the lack of exchanges between the rich/healthcare providers will be replaced by an equivalent surplus now occurring between the poor/healthcare providers.
@Skivverus
Regulating economic activity is actually really easy. We currently have regulations that say, “you can’t be a doctor without being certified”.
So despite it being a hugely profitable enterprise if someone were to pull it off successfully, what percentage of the healthcare industry do you think is black-market unlicensed doctors right now?
Don’t know about the percentage, but does the phrase “diploma mill” ring a bell?
Is your position is that requiring medical licensing has no effect on the actual medical capabilities of doctors?
Is your position that we should prosecute people for performing CPR without a license?
Regulation certainly has effects; the point I’m trying to make here is that its effects are neither as universal as nor limited to what their wording alone would suggest. Prohibition is one of the canonical examples.
I’m aware that all laws have a less than 100% enforcement rate. But your position, comparing the law to “stopping the tide from going out” seems to imply that they have 0% enforcement rate.
If I say “we should have regulate x”, and your response is “ah, but did you know you will have a less than 100% success rate?”, I’ll be like yes, I know. I can bake that into the equation if that will satisfy you.
One easy way, for this particular example, would be to make the subsidies equal to <100% of the taxation, with the percentage reduction equal to the rich-person black market spending rate.
Make healthcare providers compete on price. The current price discrimination (insured price vs out-of-pocket price) is what is causing the cost disease. So discrimination should go. Obviously the providers make a reasonable profit at the insured rate or else they wouldn’t make those transactions.
The one obvious problem with this is that the insured rate is for a bill that the hospital is reasonably confident will be paid without the need to go to court. The uninsured rate is not.
I’m not convinced that price/markets/etc. do anything medically useful. These may (or may not) bend toward the most efficient price per unit of care – but that’s it.
The difficulty is how we define a unit of care. Physicians want to solve medical problems. Patients want to live healthy lives. Administrators want to build clinics and hospitals. Everyone wants to get what htey want, with a maximal amount of money left in their wallet thereafter. Therefore, physicians, patients, and administrators all define a unit of care differently. Moreso, physicians, patients, and administrators conflate [unit of care] with [price of medicine] differently.
That’s your actual problem – solve that shit for me. All the bickering about price-based allocations and market solutions and efficient distributions and single-payor systems is just meaningless bike-shed noise.
This video is the first explanation of the weird state of housing construction in Chinese suburbs (most major Chinese cities are surrounded by eerie, empty suburbs of uninhabited luxury housing towers) I found somewhat satisfying and also seems an interesting case study of the really weird incentives some seemingly pretty reasonable* policies can create.
*Not that “rural land is collectively owned but can become privately owned if a city expands to include it” sounds reasonable to me, but I can imagine how it might to a formerly communist country (yes, I know it’s still run by the CCP but I don’t consider China a “communist country” since 1978).
Leaving a note here so I remember to come back and watch this video when I am on a machine where I can do that.
@onyomi
Mainland China now seems to fit the definition of “Fascist” to me, while “The Republic of China” (Taiwan) went from a more fascist-ish regime to a liberal democratic republic.
Ironically, the Kuomintang is still officially a fascist party.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_ideology_of_the_Kuomintang
So China is divided between fascist China (officially Communist) and democratic China (officially fascist).
This makes sense somehow.
I don’t see proof of that on the Wikipedia page.
Though many would describe Chiang Kai-Shek as “fascist” vis-a-vis Mao, I don’t think the KMT has ever officially identified with the label “fascist,” but they do call themselves “nationalist.” Certainly the idea that the KMT today is “fascist” (any more than a Democrat in the US might call the Republicans “fascists”) would be more weird to the Taiwanese people I know than the idea that the PRC’s ruling ideology is communism. The official ruling ideology of the KMT is Sun Yat-Sen’s “Three Principles of the People,” one of which is often translated as “Nationalism,” but means something more like “populism” or “rule by the people(s).”
The KMT today is the more economically liberal, relatively socially conservative, China-friendly party, whereas, the DPP is more socially-economically progressive, yet also more “Taiwanese nationalist.”
That the more “right-wing” party is also the China-friendly party, besides being an historical artifact may also point to the PRC today in fact, being more fascist in practice, which I agree seems to be the tendency of communism (to gradually turn into fascism because ethnicity and nation are better Schelling points for collectivism than international class interest).
There was an interesting theory presented in my newspaper (by an opinion writer) that population growth in Africa is a good thing that will create rapid economic growth, because a dense population makes roads and such more affordable, allowing farmers to bring their produce to further away markets.
At first glance this seems plausible. However, it also seems inconsistent with my understanding of why the Agricultural Revolution happened, which is primarily because of productivity growth through land reforms and new technology.
The Agricultural Revolution also first happened in England, which had a smaller population density at the beginning of the Agricultural Revolution (~1750) and fewer waterways than The Netherlands (which makes for a very cheap way to transport goods). Population density did increase more in England during the Agricultural Revolution, but this seems more likely to be effect than cause (although a feed-back effect is of course possible).
Finally, countries like Ghana, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast and Zimbabwe already have a considerably higher population density than England at the start of the Agricultural Revolution. So the theory doesn’t seem that plausible to me.
Does the article indicate a mechanism by which the increased population will cause rapid economic growth? If an increased population can cause economic growth it suggests to me that there has to be a labour shortage, which is not something I’ve ever associated with Africa, where a huge proportion of the population are engaged in subsistence framing (which might simplistically be called a way of keeping a pool of surplus labour).
And it is not transport that stops agricultural surplus being profitable; its the problem of preserving produce in a hot and mainly humid environment. India has a good road network (for a value of good anyway) but has exactly the same problem of farmers not being able to monetatise surplus production die to spoilage and resultant low prices. Transport, unless extremely rapid, will not solve this problem on its own.
All else being equal I’d expect a population explosion in Africa to result in an increase in the pool of surplus labour, so increased subsistence farming, with resultant negative effects on the environment and no discernable positive outcomes on economic growth.
Mostly because roads are expensive and you need enough density of people to pay for good roads.
That only works if the people in question have capital with which to build the roads.
10 people with a million bucks each who want to build a road for their convenience and economic activity are probably going to have an easier time of it than 1,000,000 people on the same land with 10 bucks each.
Or that they pay taxes.
I question the extent to which African countries get tax income from these additional people. It seems quite plausible that a lot of government income is independent of the size of the populace.
Whether you gather the money through tax or any other means: you hit the same problem if you have 10 people with a million bucks each or 1,000,000 people on the same land with 10 bucks each.
You still ultimately need the capital available.
There’s transport improvements other than speed. The refrigerated truck was invented in 1939, for instance. Of course reefers are more expensive to manufacture and operate than ordinary trucks.
Not that I think adding population will help any; that idea is just bizarre.
Agree that this is confusing cause and effect, but I don’t think comparison with the agricultural revolution is helpful anyway. The world is different now.
There’s also the fact that India and China were very densely populated in the 18th century and of course the Industrial Revolution didn’t happen in those places.
Zimbabwe was a major producer and exporter of farm goods prior to the 80s when it was still known as Rhodesia, and was one of the wealthier countries in Africa.
There isn’t a single attribute that causes growth, this much seems clear. The density argument rests on the assumption that the increased population is going to be comprised of productive individuals who will have the means to demand goods, the number of assumptions underlying that are uncountable.
You do not get an economic takeoff until you have a generation which has grown up with an adequate diet and the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic – Which usually means you do not get an economic takeoff until super high population growth stops, because a poor population cannot provide that for 6 children per couple. So no, barring major external shocks to the food supply, do not count on it.
Put me in the category of, “extremely skeptical”. Africa has examples of countries that used to have really awesome roads without the population boom, its just they were run by colonizers, rather than natives. Until natives get as good at government as colonizers, that is going to be what holds them back. And some of the more…pessimistic views on this indicate that the African population boom is more likely to lead to an exodus to Europe/America than an improvement in government.
Counterpoint to Scott’s “Whatever Happened To Environmentalism?” post: I was actually just talking to a woman who was deeply concerned with the current garbage crisis. She mentioned the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and the Kessler Effect, and she was actually complaining about how the debate over whether climate change is real or not made everyone stop talking about the trash problem. So while it’s not exactly common, there are apparently still some people talking about it.
I’m not sure this is a great example. The garbage island has been rediscovered recently, probably as part of the campaign against plastic packaging that is certainly underway in Europe. My favourite example of this (today) being a song called Drive On by a group of very-early twentysomethings whose name I didn’t catch (it was on the radio whilst I was driving). They wrote this inspired by the discovery of said island of rubbish, leading to my cynical thought that I’d probably heard five songs inspired by the same discovery since the 90s…
OK song to be fair, but clearly was a first play (it was in a slot on the UK Radio 1 new music show, and they’ve not updated their playlist for this yet). But proma facia evidence the garbage island is back on the environmental agenda.
How recently? Her Facebook history shows that she’s been talking about the trash crisis for a while (not specifically the garbage island), so either it’s been back on the environmental agenda for at least a few months, or she’s an outlier whose pet cause just happened to come back into the spotlight.
I’d say I’ve been playing Facebook whack-a-mole with people linking to stories about it for roughly a year.
There was recently a story in the Atlantic about how the effort to clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch could end up destroying a rare floating ecosystem.
Generally speaking, waste management is a much more local issue, because living next to an operating facility absolutely sucks. It’s the ultimate NIMBY issue.
And the overall issue of environmental pollutants, which is what the issue with garbage patch is, and is one of the general issues with waste management, has not really ever gone away as an issue. Global warming is just the current iteration of the ongoing battle on that front. And it’s frankly near impossible to get multiple issues to retain head space in the overall social mind. Each new thing pushes the old out of the limelight.
Last thread had a discussion about role models, and someone was asking about female role models.
My pick: Madoka Kaname. Everyone should be more like Madoka Kaname.
Everybody should fail to solve their problems so many times that the universe gets tired of watching it and allows them to simply wish the bad things away? Madoka’s a bit too passive for me to think everybody should be more like her, but as long as we’re listing good female role models in anime, I’ll put forth Inoue Meiko and Ayase Chihaya.
(Retraction: “Everybody” was unnecessarily hyperbolic on my part. On reflection I think I might actually believe that literally everyone should be more like Madoka, but that statement’s inclusion reduced the clarity of a fairly simple sentiment.)
Each instance of Madoka only failed once, with the exception of the final timeline, in which she didn’t fail at all. Unless you’re counting the various deaths and transformations throughout the series as failures on Madoka’s part, anyway, which I don’t think is reasonable — she wasn’t in a position to do anything about them without making a contract, which Homura prevented her from doing.
Now, Homura fails to solve her problems a whole bunch of times, but I did not say that everyone should be more like Homura. She certainly has qualities worthy of emulation — her persistence, for example, is quite admirable. Her judgment, on the other hand…
As for wishing her problems away…I think that’s underselling Madoka’s accomplishment somewhat. After all, half the point of PMMM is that wishes aren’t as easy as they sound. Every girl who contracted with the Incubators theoretically had the ability to wish her problems away, but the situation remained bad until Madoka came along. Granted, she had a unique advantage in that she was sitting on a god-sized pile of magic, so it’s not clear how much previous magical girls could have accomplished by making similar wishes.
(There’s a bit of weirdness with how wishes work — Kyubey emphasizes early on that a girl can wish for literally anything, but either that’s not true or the Incubators are morons. If it was true, then the first thing Kyubey should have done was convince some girl to wish for a perpetual motion machine, and the whole thing would have been done with. It’s a bit of a plot hole, given how careful Kyubey is about avoiding outright falsehoods the rest of the time.)
Even with her power, though, there were a lot of ways Madoka’s wish could have gone wrong, and only a few ways for it to go well. It’s her careful reasoning and her understanding of the situation that lets her see the way out of the situation. She saves countless people from despair by using her head, and I think that’s incredibly admirable.
…and then Homura fucks it all up. But let’s just pretend Rebellion never happened.
My vote for female anime role model is Takamachi Nanoha from Mahou Shojou Lyrical Nanoha. Unlike most magical girls, she embraces her power immediately. She is always kind and tries to make friends with her enemies, but when she is unable to she battles unhesitatingly. She grows up to be a strong military officer, that trains an elite special forces unit, risks her life, saves a planet, adopts a child, and raises her strongly as well. I’d recommend her as a role model regardless of gender.
Yeah, magical girl shows are going to be good places to look for role models in general, seeing as they’re built around young girls becoming idealized versions of themselves.
Everyone should be idealistic enough to think that the world should be a better place, and wise enough to figure out how to actually do that when the opportunity arises.
I’ll admit she’s fairly passive for a lot of the show, but that’s because she spends most of the show gathering information before she makes a decision. Thematically, it’s pretty clear what the show is doing. Madoka has to find a balance between Homura (rational, knowledgeable, but so cynical that she cannot into people) and Sayaka (so idealistic she ignores reality) – balancing rationality and emotion, and finding the one wish that will actually change the system instead of repeating the cycle.
Yeah, yeah, spoilers, this show is 8 years old now, and I am pretty sure every SSC nerd that wants to watch the show has already watched it.
Pretty sure Homura’s wish deliberately made Madoka more passive than she otherwise would be. In the 1st timeline, Madoka is a confident magical girl already by the time Homura comes around. Homura wishes to protect Madoka, and her wish retcons reality so Madoka is not a magical girl when Homura first arrives. She’s also substantially more passive, and this just seems to get worse and worse every time Homura resets the timeline.
Madoka never remains passive, in any time line. She always chooses to be a Magical Girl, and it’s always out a genuine desire to help people. She has a lot of good qualities. Madoka does not boast, she is slow to anger, she is appreciative of the life she has, she is a good friend even when she doesn’t have god-like powers, she’s pretty smart, and she is quite self-sacrificing. She never realizes the costs of being a Magical Girl until the end, but when she does she elects to transcend reality and take the rest of the Magical Girls to Valhalla rather than let them become Witches. It’s a big, eternal, personal cost to bear, because it’s not what Madoka ever would have wanted if she ever had another choice, and that’s why Homura undoes everything in rebellion: Homura did not succeed in saving her friend, and Homura just let her friend take on the entire burden of the universe, which Homura cannot allow.
Madoka’s biggest problem is that she thinks far too little of herself and tends to value her own life cheaply. She was about to sell her soul for a cake, and in past timelines had sold her soul for a cat. Homura correctly calls her out on this all the time. This is not a problem for Madoka at the end of the series, she clearly understands what she is giving up and what she’s signing up for, and she does it anyways.
@Kestrellius
I would suggest putting a bit more effort in next time by explaining who this is and why she is a role model.
I haven’t seen the anime, but looking at the Wikipedia page, I doubt that she is a good role model, unless you think women should follow traditional gendered behavior more. The character is said to be weak and powerless until she gets magical powers, then she finds out that the risk of using magic is extremely high.
It seems to me that magic is a metaphor of risk taking (‘male’) behavior and that the story does more to reaffirm those who are socialized and/or biologically predisposed to risk avoidance and who are envious of the things that risk-taking can bring, that trying to achieve this has more downsides than upsides. So instead of actually pushing these people to be a bit more risk-taking, it may allow them to vicariously experience such behavior, while actually being reaffirmed in their real-life stance that this is far too dangerous for themselves.
Yeah, you’re right. I posted this on a whim; I basically meant it as a reply to the discussion in the previous thread, but, well, it was the previous thread. I should have remembered that top-level comments sort of work differently than replies.
Not quite. I’m going to ROT13 for spoilers.
Fb, jung unccraf vf gung Znqbxn naq ure sevraqf ner nccebnpurq ol n perngher pnyyrq Xlhorl, jub bssref gb znxr pbagenpgf jvgu gurz: gb tenag rnpu bs gurz n fvatyr jvfu naq genafsbez gurz vagb zntvpny tveyf, jubfr ebyr vf gb svtug fhcreangheny zbafgref pnyyrq jvgpurf. Jnagvat gur cbjre gb uryc crbcyr, Znqbxn pbafvqref npprcgvat, ohg nabgure zntvpny tvey anzrq Ubzhen crefvfgragyl jneaf ure ntnvafg vg, bppnfvbanyyl hfvat sbepr gb cerirag Znqbxn sebz znxvat n pbagenpg.
Bire gvzr, gur pbafrdhraprf bs znxvat n pbagenpg orpbzr pyrne. Zntvp vfa’g evfxl fb zhpu nf varivgnoyl pngnfgebcuvp: nalbar jub orpbzrf n zntvpny tvey jvyy, ab znggre jung, rvgure qvr na rneyl qrngu be snyy gb qrfcnve naq genafsbez vagb n jvgpu. Xlhorl’f crbcyr, gur Vaphongbef, frg hc guvf jubyr flfgrz va beqre gb tngure raretl sebz jvgpurf — sbe fbzr ernfba, guvf raretl ivbyngrf gur ynjf bs gurezbqlanzvpf, nyybjvat gur urng qrngu bs gur havirefr gb or ceriragrq.
Ubzhen vf gelvat gb xrrc Znqbxn sebz zrrgvat gur sngr bs nyy zntvpny tveyf — fur’f orra geniryvat onpx va gvzr bire naq bire ntnva, gelvat naq snvyvat gb cerirag Znqbxn sebz znxvat n pbagenpg juvyr nyfb qrsrngvat na vaperqvoyl cbjreshy jvgpu anzrq Jnychetvfanpug, jubfr neeviny vf abj vzzvarag.
Nyy bs guvf vf xabja gb Znqbxn ol gur gvzr fur svanyyl znxrf ure pbagenpg. Jura fur qbrf, ure jvfu vf gb renfr rirel jvgpu, cnfg, cerfrag, naq shgher, jvgu ure bja unaqf. Gur ynjf bs gur havirefr ner erjevggra, naq Znqbxn orpbzrf n pbfzvp cevapvcyr ehyvat bire n fbeg bs nsgreyvsr sbe zntvpny tveyf.
So, as for why I find Madoka such a praiseworthy character? Two reasons.
The first is, quite simply, her empathy and compassion. Her primary motivation throughout the entire story is a deeply-felt urge to help people, especially those who are suffering. It’s certainly not a complicated or even uncommon attribute, but it’s something we could use more of.
The second and more significant reason to admire Madoka is her ability to take the long view and make wise decisions. She can be contrasted with Homura in this way: while Homura is incredibly determined, she has no long-term plan, and her only goal is to keep Madoka alive and non-magical. She cares nothing for the broader situation. On top of that, she treats Kyubey as her enemy — which doesn’t tend to work out well, because Kyubey simply has more resources than Homura does.
Amusingly enough, Madoka’s wish can sort of be viewed as a triumph of Mistake Theory: while Homura views Kyubey as a hostile agent, Madoka treats him as simply another aspect of a terrible situation — one more obstacle to work around. She comes up with a plan to satisfy the objectives of all parties, including Kyubey, which means she doesn’t have to deal with any resistance from him.
I’m speculating here, but I think perhaps Madoka understood that — his amoral nature aside — Kyubey’s ultimate objectives were basically good, and that simply “defeating” the Incubators and ending the magical girl/witch system wouldn’t be desirable in the long run.
So she takes the risk, and she becomes a magical girl — but only after she understands what’s going on, and only after she knows exactly what she needs to do. In the end she is a proactive character; it just takes her a while to get going. On her own, she figures out how to leverage her resources into an act that will save both the universe and the souls of all magical girls across time, and then she puts her plan into action — and she does it all out of universal empathy.
That’s why I think she’s a good role model.
This essay continues to be relevant.
Modesty Blaise. I’m exceedingly fond of the novels– I don’t know whether they’re much different from the comics.
I have only read the novels, enjoyed them.
There is a South Bay meetup this Sunday, January 27th. I have just put it on the schedule for a second time, but since it vanished the first time I am not counting on it showing up this time.
Y’all had a point.
Some months ago I discovered SSC (actually for the second time but this time I stuck with it and commented), and I saw lots of interesting ideas and discussions, and I also say something I found weird, stuff (including early posts by our host) about “culture war”, “social justice warriors”, “Twitter mobs” and the like that I regarded as way overstated if not phantoms.
Well…
….over the holiday weekend a new story apparently festered and spread over the internet about three protest groups meeting and nothing much that I’d consider newsworthy happened (but lots of video!) that I didn’t know about until someone mentioned it in a SSC comment (but it took many other responses before me to I could glean what the hub-bub was about), come my Tuesday morning drive to work the radio was reporting (badly) on a video that “went viral” (apt label!), and since then the mainstream media is now filled with takes on it, but since nothing much actually happened the “event” is pretty much the reporting and the reactions.
A very big part of me wishes that I was still ignorant of this mess and thinks that there shouldn’t have been any reports in the first place, but y’all were right “Twitter mobs” exist and their nonsense gets on the radio.
Lord helo us all!
Yeah, even assuming the worst that’s been said of all three parties, “minimally supervised teenagers harass passersby,” “protesting cultists say terrible things” and “longtime activist is self-promoting liar” are all pretty much commonplaces. NB that the outrage mill is also on Facebook.
A prayer for repentant communists?
Or this was intended as a mail (HELO is the initiating command for SMTP).
Jesus wants you to Get To The Choppa.
Okay, that send up of my typo got me to lsugh
“helo” is obviously short for “heliograph.” God needs to flash us a message.
And for an entertaining heliograph tale …
A Typo that lead to someone linking to a Kipling poem is agood thing.
In this hill I’ll die!
It’s the sort of thing that would have been enormous news in a town with a few hundred or maybe a couple thousand people. Thanks to social media, you get the bulk of people of an enormous society, with the “personal feeling” of a very small one.
This has been a long-standing peeve of mine. Thanks to the internet, local-interest stories become national-level stories. Audiences aren’t adapting well to this.
Local stories appeal to the emotion, but that had been tempered by their happening to people you’d meet in town, and there not being that many of them, so they don’t fill your world.
Now there are thousands of times as many. We’re treated as if we’re supposed to feel for someone in Lincoln, Nebraska the same as someone in Atlanta, Irvine, Boston, Baltimore, Dallas, Denver, Portland, Peoria, South Bend, Seattle, and our local school, and it’s senseless to assume the human psyche can keep up with that moral imperative.
Conversely, 50% of a town of a few hundred hating you is less aggregate hate than 0.1% of a much larger “community” and we aren’t necessarily great at separating gross hate from hate per capita.
Has anyone compiled a ranking of nations by Hating Power Parity (HPP)? Make it happen, econometricians.
I’ve seen it suggested (I think it was by someone one here) that part of the reason people tend to be more worried about crime, despite crime rates being lower than at most times in the past, is that our brains unconsciously interpret everything as if we’re still living in little villages. If you live in a village of 150 or so people and somebody gets killed every week, that’s a major problem and you probably need to do something, fast; if you live in a country of 300 million and someone gets killed every week, you probably don’t need to worry. And yet, our brains are used to living in small communities, so every news story we hear about people getting killed is treated as if it’s in our immediate community.
I believe Wallace Stevens’ “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words” agrees with you.
Does anyone else here think that the “story” isn’t the story? For me the story is everyone’s reaction to the “story”.
Honestly, theredsheep is bang on the money WRT to the meat-and-bones of the whole thing. It’s so much a non-story, it’s kinda depressing we’re still talking about it.
Except…
Apperently there exists a compelling market for this type of story – not what actually happened, mind, but rather what (for want of a better word) the media made out of it. I’m not particularly keen on attributing the fact that multiple, seemingly serious news outlets proved quite prepared to fabricate the thing out of whole cloth to malice on the part of the journalists/editors involved, but instead suspect that it’s simple demand-begets-supply at work. All in a day’s work for Moloch, eh?
Except…
This trend of mindless pampering to market demand for people to hate scares the living daylights out of me. Again, we’re not talking about a fringe group of people known to be bad actors (neo-Nazi’s, say). The surge of bad feeling towards the CCS boys that this story brought was, for all intents and purposes, a mainstream phenomenon. Hating people is apparently a-ok now, provided it’s the right (that is: wrong) kind of people.
This is a good comment.
I have no idea what the media think they’re doing, but it’s not constructive, it’s not good journalism, and it’s having very negative effects on [everything everywhere].
Yeah, that’s basically my reaction, too. An out-of-context photo and a few seconds of video footage is now enough for people across the world to judge you a vicious monster with no place in polite society. And the kids’ school and diocese publicly threw them under the bus, too, so don’t expect the people who should be looking out for you to stand up to the outrage mob, or even to refrain from piling on.
No kidding. We now have cameras in nearly everyone’s hands, all the time, and all it takes is one person shooting your photo while you’re chewing, or swatting at a mosquito, or maybe just having a bad day and scowling at your own thoughts, or otherwise looking awkward– and then posting it on the internet with the worst possible interpretation– and now suddenly you’re held up in front of the whole country for the official Two Minutes of Hate.
If that doesn’t scare the crap out of you, you haven’t thought it through.
Well, unless you’re a cop. Then even video evidence is no danger.
In The Image, Daniel Boorstin coined the term “pseudo-event” for an event that was conducted purely for the media; pseudo-events are the outcome of the news media generating events for themselves to cover. Press conferences, ribbon-cutting ceremonies, and (televised) presidential debates are all pseudo-events. He points out that this is driven by our demand for news outpacing the supply of real events to cover.
Boorstin wrote the book in 1961. Since then, technological developments have changed the incentive structure of newspapers: internet advertising revenue is based off clicks for individual stories instead of selling an entire newspaper or magazine, and more and more people read on mobile, which makes them more likely to read short pieces instead of in-depth investigative work. These incentives have pushed news outlets to sort by controversial and signal-boost the stories that are weapons-grade toxoplasma. And as consumers, our appetite for news has never been bigger: we can scan headlines and as fast as we can spin our mouse’s scroll wheel. Unlike the original pseudo-events, toxoplasma events are not staged for the media’s observation: they are staged for the media’s observation of our reaction to them. So I think the real story is the media’s reaction to our reaction 😉
We know all this. Our host has covered this quite well before.
I suspect that a large part of the traffic that these stories generate is that, after a critical point has been reached (say, the topic goes Trending on Twitter), well-intentioned people like you and me and Plumber all go click on the stories in more respectable outlets so we can be informed about the latest outrage of the day. It’s innocent enough, really. We want to know what everyone else is talking about. But we’re playing right into Moloch’s hands.
I believe that, in this case, the media are largely followers; people increasingly look to each other–or small independent outfits–for information, rather than organized professionals, and the media are hopping aboard on every story purely to retain relevance. If a large number of people are talking about something, it becomes news basically by definition; an outlet that’s ignoring the elephant in the room isn’t so much virtuous as oblivious. It used to be that public discourse had to go through newspapers via letters to editors, and the editors would screen out the wackos and distasteful sorts who might scare off any advertisers. Which is not to say that the old way didn’t have its downsides.
Have an alternative to malice.
The public got fascinated by the story. The public is made of people. Reporters are also people, and perhaps not wildly different from the public.
Also, this kind of thing is cheaper and easier than doing real investigative reporting.
I was summoned.
The desire to remain ignorant of these nothingburger news stories is a good one. You should explore it further.
I’ll just say that the whole thing depresses me, but not for the reasons it depresses most of the people on SSC.
Why is that?
Roughly speaking, two wrongs don’t make a right.
This article captures some of what I find disturbing
If you have ever played or watched sports, you know that some players are instigators. They do dirty, underhanded things the whole game, they pinch, claw, spit, trip. Then when someone gets angry they protest their innocence and make a big show of complaining to the refs.
Yes, there was an explosive over-reaction to the behavior. But that doesn’t mean the behavior was meaningless.
Wait, I’m confused — who exactly is supposed to be the “instigator” in this situation, and how? Trump? Sandmann? The 50% of the electorate who voted for Trump?
Given that Hillary Clinton is still, to the best of our knowledge, at liberty, and given that nobody’s actually complaining about this state of affairs, I’m going to call bullshit on the idea that either Trump or any non-negligible fraction of his supporters wants to imprison their political opponents, with or without due process.
The fact that so many American journos think that enforcing the immigration laws is some sort of extremist outrage is itself a sign of how insular and extreme the US elites are.
I find this incredible, but I’m not sure if anything is gained discussing it any more.
HBC:
Is there any way an anti-abortion Trump supporter could express his views on the national mall that would not be provocative, in your view? I mean, standing there with a dumb look and a MAGA hat seems pretty tame, as these things go.
I guessed at first that you might be bummed over your own epistemic overconfidence, and it made me think better of you. Back to the status quo ante now.
Practically every American politician at present is in favor of doing so, and it has been the majority position since the 1920’s, unfortunately. The disagreement is only on how many of the huddled masses should be locked out, which ones, and how the locking out should be enforced.
While I strenuously disagree with HBC, it should be pointed out that Hillary is no longer a serious political opponent. The election is long since over and done with. If she were to run again in 2020 the “lock her up”s would return.
I do see a fair about of ‘LHU’ on the donald’s subreddit whenever she comes up, which is distressingly often for someone who is gone.
So how many current serious political opponents have been imprisoned? How many Trump supporters are calling for them to be?
“Lock her up!” is nothing more than the political equivalent of football fans’ chants. It no more indicates a desire to imprison people than “We’re gonna SLAUGHTER the other team this weekend!” indicates a desire to commit mass murder.
@The original Mr. X:
It is unsurprising that these chants are “meaningless football cheers” when made by the ingroup but dangerous calls for action when made by the outgroup. I am not accusing you specifically of doing this (I’m certainly not going to dig for examples of you being overly concerned with slogans from the left and I won’t assume that you have done so without checking), but certainly a lot of people on both sides do.
One could cynically argue that serious political opponents won’t exist until the 2020 election kicks into high gear because Congress has willfully reduced itself to nothing more than a soap opera 😛
I’m sure they do, but in this case we don’t need to rely on political tribalism – Trump has been President for over two years now, so we can just look at his track record to see where he stands on the matter. So far, he hasn’t made any moves to lock up any political opponents, and his base hasn’t applied any pressure on him to do so. Based on current evidence, then, I think that anybody who sees a MAGA-hat-wearing kid and assumes he’s in favour of imprisoning Democrats is being more than a little paranoid.
@The original Mr. X:
IIRC Trump wanted the FBI to investigate Hillary Clinton and they basically refused. I don’t know how far Trump would go if both parties and the entire government were mostly opposed to his agenda [the parts that deviate from republican orthodoxy that is]. But my guess is if the representation of federal agencies and congress was closer to Trump’s general worldview we might see a mirror image Mueller investigation where Clinton’s people might have tangential charges thrown at them.
This is my understanding:
Hard core trump supporters do generally believe Hillary Clinton is a crook who rented out the powers of the state department to foreign entities for personal gain and would ideally want to see her thrown in prison or at least investigated. [not that they would trust an innocent verdict]
Hard core leftists generally do believe Trump is a Russian agent [either in a literal sense or in a more soft and technical sense] and in an ideal world would like to see him in prison or at least investigated [not that they would trust an innocent verdict]
One of these beliefs is supposed to disqualify the person in question as a hateful lunatic and the other is a reasonable supposition that is in some capacity being responded to.
My problem with this excusing of the reaction to the maga-hat is that we have more and more exterminationist rhetoric being thrown at certain races of people in general and certain article-of-clothing wearing people in particular… and it being excused on the grounds that the targets in question represent, or are intending to do some more sinister crime.
It’s the doctrine of pre-emptive self defense, writ small.
And I do not mean this in a condescending or sarcastic way, but the red-hat types are simply not of the mind to understand how the act of excluding certain foreign nationals from entry into the united states as an act of violence against them that would at least in part justifiably open them to physical/verbal abuse, doxing, loss of employment, or death threats.
@RalMirrorAd says:
I loathe clinton, but I don’t think that she rented out the state department, and I don’t know anyone who claims she did. At most, you get her accused of using her position and profile to leverage donations for her foundation, but not actually selling american policy. But she did get caught with the emails of the senior state department stored on private servers, including classified information, lied about it, and destroyed evidence that was under subpoena. I know plenty of people with clearances who know how deep and dark a hole they’d be thrown in had they been caught doing any one of those things, much less all of them, it rankles a lot of them to see those crimes so blithely dismissed.
There is a world of difference between hillary clinton getting caught red handed doing things that would get lesser mortals thrown in jail forever, and wild rumors of vague “collusion” that trump has been accused of.
The Clinton Foundation got a lot of donations from foreign entities while she was Secretary of State. Maybe those Middle-Eastern Sheikhs just wanted to support the good work it was doing around the globe, but it’s not unreasonable to suspect there was something a little more sordid going on. Especially since the donations to the Clinton Foundation dried up the moment she lost the election and no longer had power to sell.
Outgroup homogeneity bias at work here, I think. The hard-core leftists I come across generally think attempts to prove Trump a Russian agent are McCarthyism, because that’s something hard-core leftists pattern-match to.
There’s definitely a community that believes that Vladimir Putin has been pulling Trump’s strings since the campaign; I keep getting linked to them in social media by otherwise-sensible people I know. But the people I know who are doing this aren’t hard-left, and I don’t think the people who are linking to them are hard-left. They mostly seem to be ordinary liberal democrats who have gone over into full Trump Derangement Syndrome.
If the actual hard left has a different take on the matter, that’s news to me but I don’t spend enough time with the hard left to be confident in my understanding of their views on this.
@ RalMirrorAd:
Well, have either Trump or a significant portion of his base made any statements to the effect that they’d like to get Clinton and her allies, if only the feds were on their side?
I mean, it’s theoretically possible that in a world where the federal agencies were all full of Trump supporters, we’d be seeing tangential charges thrown at Clinton’s campaign team, but that seems like an incredibly weak reason for supposing that a random MAGA-hat-waring kid is in favour of “imprisoning [his] enemies without due process”.
I’m not sure whose argument this strengthens, but I was surprised recently to see that Judicial Watch’s lawsuit regarding the use of a private email server is ongoing. In fact, last week, they had what they feel was a big win.
The judge finally granted them discovery, allowing them to conduct written depositions of various officials, including Susan Rice: https://www.judicialwatch.org/press-room/weekly-updates/weekly-update-big-court-victory-on-clinton-emails-and-benghazi.
After the initial discovery, there will be another another ruling that they hope will allow them to depose Mrs. Clinton and Cheryl Mills. For better or worse, it still seems entirely possible that people may eventually be sent to jail because of this.
I use the word Hard-left to mean the most outspoken partisans against trump. This might not be an appropriate term because the term at one point would have referred to people who might have been called foreign agents for opposing a foreign policy of containment.
And I only bring up the issue with clinton because -if- the reason people should fear red-hats is because they think a particular politician is a criminal and want to see legal proceedings be brought against them. That same sort of person has a high probability of thinking the president was an agent of or received unlawful assistance in gaining power from a foreign entity.
What we see in our slice of the multi-verse is where one side of this feud lacks the political capital to get a $5B piece of wall built, and the other side is capable of keeping the head of state under investigation for over a year.
So for now we’re stuck having only our imagination to guide us about the horrors of a MAGA dominated government.
I’d say the closest thing we ever got to seeing what a government filled with red-hats would do to a politician was the nothingburger of the Benghazi hearings.
Today I read an article in my local paper that make me somewhat outraged. It is local, but I am curious what folks here think about it. This was the article.
The best thing about my outrage is it is not culture war at all. All parties can be outraged at the government on this one!
In the article, they talk about one county’s officials in our Metro area trying to find out what Minnesota offered Amazon to be the second office in the US.
I am somewhat outraged just that this deal was private. I never tried to find out what was offered Amazon, but it never occurred to me that I couldn’t find out if I wanted to. And then I see in the article that Amazon required a non-disclosure agreement. Really?? Amazon requests that everywhere in the country tell them what goodies they will provide, but the voters can’t be told what they are? Is this even legal? Is it binding on city or state? I have heard that in New York, Amazon is getting a bunch of pushback by folks there that disagree with some of the agreements that were made. Well, yeah, if the people aren’t told what they’ve agreed to, maybe it won’t work out too well when they find out.
The other item of my outrage is even more local. Apparently the Minnesota proposal was made by the group called “Greater MSP.” I guess it is some kind of agency that specializes in corporate welfare or something. They were sued last summer to give up the details. But the judge said that Greater MSP is a private organization so that rules for the government don’t apply to it. What?! Isn’t the proposal about the taxpayers giving Amazon goodies to induce them to move to Minnesota? How can a private group have authorization to do that? It makes no sense.
Maybe this is just an example of a very poorly written article. Why didn’t the journalist ask these questions? Am I missing some obvious thing? This makes no sense to me.
@Mark V Anderson
I see what you mean, whether you’re anti-corporations or anti-government you may find the story upsetting, sadly I’m not surprised as I’ve seen many stories about Eminent Domain being used for private profits instead of public purposes.
@Mark V Anderson
Big business gets all kinds of special tax deals in The Netherlands (and some other European countries), which are secret as well. David Friedman asked in the other OT how globalization harms the masses and benefits the elites & this is part of the answer.
In general, globalization has and is causing a major power shift towards (big) business, where more and more of the tax burden is born by citizens and less and less by companies. Coupled with ways to avoid paying taxes on business profits, this contributes to stagnating buying power for regular citizens and an elite who refuses to contribute enough.
PS. Presumably, the way to try to find out what the deal is, is to file a FOIA-like request with the country, assuming that such a law exists on the state level. Although, in my country the similar law has various exceptions, which allows the government to keep their deals secret.
“Less being born by businesses and more by individuals” — I’m not a fan of globalization as it has come to be known, but Businesses in themselves can’t really pay taxes except through employees, shareholders, or customers.
Might it be more accurate to say that the tax burden shifts from those who hold mobile assets to those who hold less mobile assets?
Yes, the issue is that the tax burden shifts more to the less globalist people, eating up their productivity increases.
In general, this is my criticism of globalism: the globalists offload many and often the worst negative aspects of their desires on the people who don’t want globalism, while simultaneously disenfranchising them as much as possible.
Eh.. That is blatantly illegal under EU law. Examples? Because this is a core principle of the union, and while Vestager has been unusually high-profile about putting metaphorical heads on pikes, “No sweetheart deals for individual companies” is not a new principle, and has been enforced pretty darn consistently.
To get a subsidy or tax break for something specific, it has to be approved at the EU level, and that list is extremely emphatically public.
The official stance of the Dutch (and Luxembourg and Irish) government is that the rulings provide certainty to companies by clarifying how certain transactions are to be judged beforehand and that the same tax law is applied to all. However, this is a lie.
The rulings are kept secret based on the argument that they involve specific information about the business dealings of the companies, which is private information.
Vestager’s approach is like trying to go after each individual buyer of drugs, while leaving the dealer alone. Such an approach is fairly hopeless, because the capacity is not there to go after all buyers.
So your “enforced pretty darn consistently” is actually: ‘enforced selectively and very late.’ Perhaps Vestager will be able to change these practices, but I don’t see much evidence that her efforts are working in that respect.
There is EU law and there is EU reality. The two aren’t as intimate as you might think.
.. She did, in fact, get the Irish to stop their general practices.
That is what the huge jump in reported gdp was about. – Ireland stopped letting companies offshore profits onwards from Ireland to extra-EU tax havens, which meant they started filing in Ireland.
Not sure why the ever living hell Ireland was doing that in the first place, but suspect outright corruption, because it makes no sense from a national accounts perspective. Ireland is still a good place to file, even if you have to actually pay the headline 13% rate.
So, yhea, the Dutch government is likely on the hitlist. Only real question is “Before or after Luxemburg?”
I think the case against an Apple subsidiary in Ireland underpaying their taxes by Euro 13 billion, according to the EU, is part of this? So it does seem that the EU is trying to enforce the sweetheart rules for individual companies bit? At least when there are billions of Euros at stake.
@Thomas Jorgensen
Perhaps, but I’m not holding my breath.
This is hilarious.
Interesting fact: ‘mesmerizing’ comes from the German doctor Mesmer, who thought that there was a natural energy transference that occurred between all animated and inanimate objects that he called animal magnetism.
His treatment would consist of sitting in front of his patient with his knees touching the patient’s knees, pressing the patient’s thumbs in his hands, looking fixedly into the patient’s eyes. Mesmer made “passes”, moving his hands from patients’ shoulders down along their arms. He then pressed his fingers on the patient’s belly, sometimes holding his hands there for hours. Many patients felt peculiar sensations or had convulsions that were regarded as crises and supposed to bring about the cure.
Supposedly, the people he treated became ‘mesmerized’ during the treatment.
Beats bleeding them.
Seriously, if Mesmer’s “treatment” kept his patients from going to “real” doctors, he probably did a lot of good.
I’ve seen a theory that homeopathy became widespread for similar reasons — it was invented in the eighteenth century, when giving someone a bit of water and relying on the placebo effect to cure them (not that that was what practitioners were consciously doing, of course) would probably have been more effective than most of what passed for mainstream medicine.
Was it not here that someone recently linked to an article about Benjamin Franklin and others devising substantial parts of modern medical trial methodology expressly to test Mesmer’s claims, leading to him being run out of town?
And if it wasn’t here, where the Hell else do I go that would link that sort of thing?
I think this is probably the recent article you are referring to: https://publicdomainreview.org/2018/11/20/mesmerising-science-the-franklin-commission-and-the-modern-clinical-trial/. I think it found it directly on that site, although the article got a few votes on HN when it came out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18496764. I didn’t find it linked from SSC, but maybe I missed it.
It’s true that seeing where else it was linked from might be a good way of finding other useful sources. Unfortunately, Google appears to have deprecated their back-link search functionality: https://searchengineland.com/google-officially-killed-off-link-command-267454. Searching by less direct methods, this blog appears to be one of the few that linked it: https://davidmetcalfe.wordpress.com/2018/11/26/liminal-analytics-psi-in-the-news-11-26-18/.
Somebody thought better of their writing prompt, so I’ll make this a top level post (though I won’t be surprised if it gets little discussion as it is a regular topic here).
I’m reading The War on Normal People now, where Andrew Yang argues for UBI on the basis of automation improving jobs and returning some of the economic gains that that produces to the average citizen. I think he makes a pretty good case, for example, with how big an industry transportation is and how disruptive self-driving vehicles will be. Best case scenario, these changes are phased in slowly and technological changes create new jobs to accommodate the average person; worst case they come in quick and represent a new baseline putting most people out of work and wondering what to do and how to survive. At the same time, I’m reading essays from Theodore Dalyrmple in Life at the Bottom about his work with the poor and criminal class in Britain. The worst problems he sees people face do not come from poverty, and in some cases stem from the ease at which they get assistance; for example, the story of a woman given an apartment on the dole, into which she invites her abusive, violent ex, who trashes it, only to be moved to another.
Neither of these authors are necessarily objective, but they do both demonstrably want to help people. I left somewhat pessimistic about what a UBI will do to the recipients character (or at least enough of them to worry about), but also that it may nonetheless be the best option in some form.
I can’t imagine that self driving cars will be more disruptive than what happened in manufacturing and we managed to survive that without a UBI. It’s funny that he approaches this from the left because I just read this article from Bloody Shovel where he discusses Tucker Carlson’s fight against certain parts of the GOP with what he believes should be the overall focus of conservatives:
Of course, Carlson probably doesn’t support UBI but it’s interesting that both are trying to look at the problem and how to fix it.
Wait I’m confused on how that article relates to UBI and poverty, isn’t he arguing more political strategy/framing than the actual policies for poor folks?
Also wow is that article like super questionable:
Uhh.
Not even my “side” but UHHHHH.
—————–
Also further down the page because I can’t help myself:
Either myself and every other gay I know are super atypical, or this is ludicrously off-base and crazy.
There’s a lot of snark and asides I don’t agree with in the article but I do think he’s getting at something important. Basically the economy right now is really not conducive to families and it’s getting worse in many ways. There is an increasing “superstar” economy where good jobs go to a small number of people who live in extremely expensive cities that don’t support family formation and where the rest of the country has unstable, low paying jobs that also make it hard to support families. Based on the description of the book above, the author is basically looking at this and giving a UBI as an important part of the solution. Someone like Tucker Carlson would basically rather see more regulation instead. It’s interesting because that’s generally considered a leftist position but it highlights a growing fracture in the Republican Party.
@dick
That last weird gay sex hangup thing was from another article, to be fair. Though there were other, err, distracting asides.
But yeah I’d have tried to find a similar take or just paraphrase. I understand iffy sources can still have some good ideas in them, but at some point the cruft just gets way too distracting. Like I probably wouldn’t post an article from DailyKos or *checks r/politics* truthout.org here even if it had a nugget of insight, the style would generate way too much heat for the light.
@ManyCookies
I actually deleted that since it was needlessly argumentative, but yeah, I question the wisdom of reading beyond stuff like that. Or of posting it here, actually. Surely even the most homophobic of SSC commenters would consider “gay guys want to screw straight guys and wear dresses” as obviously dumb, right?
@dick I know little about what gay guys typically want (other than that they want to date or have sex with men, by definition). As such, I can’t make a judgement about whether the statement is right or wrong. I don’t see why it would be obviously right or wrong to someone who doesn’t much about gay people.
@Wrong Species & ManyCookies
That take is really quite shitty and seems to be quite unfair to Carlson, whose point is that it is wrong for conservatives to focus so much on a lack of morality on the part of citizens without recognizing how big business and laws that benefit them push people into a individualized life of empty consumerism, which benefits them, rather than allow people to live a good life.
Instead of discussing the article on Bloody Shovel, I suggest discussing the actual speech by Carlson, which has been written down here.
There is no mention of gays who predate on heteros (or gays at all) in Carlson’s speech.
I don’t see how the author can so casually dismiss culture when it is one the driving traits. Yes, we have more direct control over economic policy, but that’s like having a broken tub that you want filled and just leaving the water run. It’s more difficult to fix the damn tub, but all that’s going to happen with the water is continued spilling everywhere BUT the place where you want the water.
Even if you could break Woke Capital and make everyone richer, they are just going to piss that money away. Upper Middle Class makes plenty of money, but they are all convinced they need to go out-of-state, rack up debt, get advanced degrees, take multiple international vacations (per year if possible) and
experience lots of different genitalsdate widely to “discover themselves.” That’s an empty, dead soul, and you’re never going to fill it with money.@A Definite Beta Guy
I think that Carlson’s point is that the focus has been on making ‘everyone’ (actually mostly the elite) richer in the sense that they can buy more shiny toys, but that the things that actually matter in life have actually become less attainable.
Carlson seems to believe that some desires, like women’s desire for men who earn more, are not changeable and that policies should match these preferences.
—
I do agree with you that part of the issue is that the norms have increased/changed so much that far fewer people nowadays are willing to make choices that earlier generations made. However, policies can effect this. For example, you could force down the price of higher education, which would then force universities to cut down on their amenities.
Telling young people to be more moral/smart and forego these nice things that their fellow students enjoy seems fairly hopeless. Removing temptation probably works a lot better.
I completely disagree on education. If we want average people to thrive economically, then we should somehow reduce the importance of university. If you make it cheaper then you just encourage more people to go to it. Those that don’t go to university will be even more left behind than they are now.
That is a issue that should not and cannot be fixed by making universities very expensive.
I think that it is bad all around that young people are burdened with a lot of debt, causing them to put off starting a family.
I don’t think it will fix it but subsidies will make it worse. If universities are free, then having bachelors degree will become worthless.
@Wrong Species
My mother went to college and got a bachelors degree for free, as all U.C.’s and other public California colleges were tuition free in the 1960’s, and her degree wasn’t useless, she got good jobs with it.
Free college would be a return to the status quo of what it was like when I was born, and it worked then, it worked well!
It wasn’t useless because not everyone had one.
A degree signaled high degrees of conscientiousness. A college life was also very spartan, so the cost was low, which meant the price could be, too.
Make college universal, and the signaling effect is greatly reduced. And the 10% of people who can’t still can’t pass college are now signaled, correctly or no, as being the worst 10%.
@Wrong Species
Degrees should have value because of what people had to learn to get it and what they had to be able to do.
If the only requirement is to have money and to show up, then the quality of the education is worthless and should be improved.
The willingness and desire to have a reproductively sustainable society is, in my opinion, cultural at it’s base but isn’t independent of economics. There are people in other countries that are more fertile and are willing to be so at a much lower standard of living. That said it probably comes across as callous for a 1%-er to tell 1st world middle class people that they need to accept a lower material standard of living in order to have kids. [Even if it’s technically a truism]
Carlson wants econ policies to encourage family formation probably because he thinks it’s easier than culture. I’m not so sure but I also recognize that we have no choice in the matter. Sub-replacement fertility cannot continue indefinitely. It will either end because of public policy and shifting attitudes or it will end simply because people who adopted permissive social attitudes will be replaced by those with more traditional ones; either from within the country or without.
Tucker probably opposes UBI because he fears it will bring middle America that much closer to becoming the kind of underclass that was created during the midcentury.
The problem is if that if the middle class tries to spend itself to pretend to be the 1%, it will never have enough money to have kids. I mean, obviously they do not spend money to THAT level, but median family incomes have still climbed except for some pauses, so the family of today should be more financially able to have children than the families of the 1970s, or at least not SUBSTANTIALLY worse off.
Plus, there are still a bunch of relatively well-off millennials who are doing the DINK thing. And why not, when you can live like a 1%er and go to Iceland, and then Thailand, and then Greece, all in the same year?
If you do want to target incomes, okay, but I don’t see what hammering on free trade specifically does for you. That helps out a lot of older folks who are outside the fertility window. You need to help out people in the 14-30 range make money, or at least stay out of horrific debt. Maybe limit credit cards, cut down the student debt racket, employ more young’uns digging ditches, build some stuff out in cheap areas so towns grow up around them, that sort of thing. You don’t need to be making 6 figures if Jack and Diane never got into debt and have a $120,000 3 bedroom home in Iowa where the new Lockheed missile factory was set-up or whatever.
Has an increase in the cost of “essential” goods outpaced that increase in median incomes? Possibly aided by societal “scope creep” of what is essential?
There are a lot of expenses that simply didn’t exist in the 70s (internet and cell phones are the obvious examples, I’m sure there are others). Transportation is more expensive (cars cost more, more complicated designs means repairs cost more and less can be done at home without expert knowledge, fuel costs more).
There is an argument that we are getting more bang for our buck for these things that cost more, but it doesn’t change that the entry point has a higher cost than it used to, so you either get more bang for more bucks (leaving less money for other things) or you get nothing because nothing is available at the older, lower cost.
I would be interested in a thorough analysis of this, and I am sure there have been some, but I don’t know how to find one that can be trusted to be honest and unbiased. I’m not even sure it is possible for such an analysis to be unbiased, because part of the analysis is going to involve weighting the importance or relative value of various goods/services across time, and those weights are going to be influenced by the biases present.
@A Definite Beta Guy
I’d prefer if people weren’t forced to emigrate to lands they’ve never seen in order to have a home for a family.
Pigeonhole principle plus population growth leaves you kinda stuck there, in the general case.
What is even an empty, dead soul?
We’ve survived the manufacturing automation, so far, but not smoothly. Some large portion of the manufacturing workforce has shifted to disability–3.5 million more since 2000. (2% of the workforce for context)
3.5 million are employed as truckers, with many more relying on them in part a at truck stops and other restaurants.
Hopefully this will be like any other technological revolution of the past, but at there’s no guarantee and it seems glib to be sure. Anyone working agriculture could shift to assembly line work with little training. “Learn to code is not quite as easy as that, and more over who’s to say coding can’t in large part be automated as well?
Like climate change, one can certainly be wary of those noticing a problem that can only be solved by what they already wanted to do. But I think the argument that UBI–if it involved curtailing some of the more paternalistic welfare–would be less centralizing. And yeah, I understand the enormity of that caveat.
Just to put this in to context, manufacturing jobs made up a staggering 25% of the labor force in the 60’s. The trucking industry is a drop in the bucket in comparison.
And in 1900, 40% of the labor force was in agriculture. By 1960 it was down to 8%.
The issue with modern automation, and the reason people say “this time it’s different” is the nature of the replacement work combined with the idea of cognitive loading of work.
Replacing farm-hands with tractors and having the unneeded farm hands work on assembly-lines making widgets instead involves work that is simple enough at a cognitive level that the capital equipment can be used by the same sorts of people in terms of IQ/educational attainment.
Now it’s an issue that people that have the cognitive ability for truck driving but not computer coding will find a smaller and smaller number of fields that they are qualified and capable of doing being aggressively automated by the computer coders whose standard of living is predicated on automating the jobs that the truck drivers can do.
This isn’t a problem if you think that job skills and education are purely a matter of training and anyone can learn any thing with enough time and effort. But I think Most people here are wiser than that.
I’m not certain if wage stagnation for non-college educated males is explained solely by the Simpsons paradox of higher numbers of college graduates. If it isn’t then it would still be explained by this phenomenon of cognitive barriers to alternative employment.
Obviously low-skilled immigration and an economics paradigm where “labor shortages” are a word that is taken seriously. wouldn’t help this process along much.
A casual glance at Persian Gulf Petrostates suggests that the potential demand for low-skilled labor isn’t remotely close to saturated in most developed countries. Just to give one example: in the United Arab Emirates, 96% of citizen families employ domestic workers to help take care of their children. How many upper-middle class families in the United States even know someone who has ever hired a nanny?
Granted, as The Nybbler points out below, a lot of this may well be due to regulatory barriers, but that still means that the root problem isn’t automation.
Automation and regulation go together, though. If the fully burdened cost of an employee to do a task is $10/hour, and the amortized cost of a machine to do it is $15/hour, most businesses will hire. If the cost of the employee goes up to $20 due to a change in regulations, the businesses will get the machine and the ex-employee will go on unemployment.
INH5 — I’m a believer in markets in the sense that I don’t believe that lightly regulated markets result in gluts in supply or literal labor surpluses.
What i *do* believe is that automation squeezes low-skilled persons into an increasingly narrow number of fields. Causing their wages to stagnate or even decline.
It’s for reasons like this that you get domestic workers and the “Gig” economy.
It’s not as if ‘domestic servants’ is some innovative product. It’s typically the preview of the very rich. And it’s something that only appears and re-appears at a more broad level when certain segments of the population have are willing to work for wages that a household is willing to pay. This is typically the result of immigration from very poor countries, but if native workers begin to resign to that kind of lifestyle you know something bad has happened.
The link you provided was intended to show how bad things were for bahraini domestic servants. Which makes sense. How low would the compensation of these people need to be
That’s plausible for relative wages. But at the same time, automation is making almost everything cheaper, so the real wage of the low-skilled people might be going up.
@DavidFriedman
Almost everything is cheaper, except housing, education, and a stay at a hospital, for ten years every increase in pay my union negotiated from the contractors went into the health plan costs, plus some more, so our take home pay was actually less despite each hour of our labor costing them more, and I started as an apprentice plumber making $15 an hour pre-tax, and upon reaching Journeyman status my pay was bumped to $45 an hour (before taxes), but a house that sold the year I started my apprenticeship and sold for $2010,000, sold the year after my five year apprenticeship for $850,000, and I went to Open House showings before both sales, and they were no improvements, it was the same house just older, the price had just jumped over four times in less than seven years.
Given the above, I’m shocked that there is so little animosity towards health care workers, especially specialist doctors.
Lots of people hate bankers and programmers but doctors mostly get a pass.
Bankers and programmers seldom directly save anybody’s life, and most people think of them when the economy goes bad or when they run into an annoying glitch, respectively. And, while doctors operate as part of a gigantic corporate structure, it’s their direct interaction with the patient that makes the difference between life and death. Most people never meet the programmers who make their stuff work.
Also, I think a lot of people have a vague idea that the high cost of healthcare is simply the price you pay for cutting-edge medicine; they’re in no position to know that most life-saving drugs used at hospitals are generics invented decades ago, or that a lot of drug research goes into inventing near-identical analogues of existing drugs to play games with the patent system. I don’t know where the cost comes from, myself, but I assume lawyers or administrators are involved somehow.
That is because the doctors are not really the problem.
US doctors are paid more than usual (as compared to medium income) for first world nations, but they also see more patients than usual, so that the cost of the doctor per-patient is in fact, pretty standard.
This may be a good explanation for why US health outcomes are not that impressive – you are overworking/rushing your doctors even more than usual for that profession, and should damn well train a lot more of them, but the excess cost of US health care is not down to greedy doctors.
The two main factors is that US health care has an administrative overhead twice as high – in percentage terms, as best practice. This is money down a void of red tape. (this works out to two percent of US GDP is going to unneeded medical red tape) and the fact that you are bloody terrible at negotiating medicine prices with pharma.
Note that the first factor is not even inherent in private insurance – The Swiss also have a private insurance system, but have about half your admin costs. (in percentage of total spending) the problem is that the regulations regarding private insurance in the US are simply not fit for purpose – Billing and coverage rules ought to be standardized with a 2 tonne sledge hammer so that hospitals would not need to give two cents who your insurer is, it is the same form and the same coverage.
That way they could fire most of their billing staff, and costs would go down.
Problem with that is, well, congress is far too corruptible. Sensible rules are possible, but would get repealed by the next republican congress.
Which is why you see most people argue for single payer – If you get rid of the private insurance companies, there is noone left with financial incentives to rat-fuck the regulations.
Like car mechanics, doctors generate their own demand. We don’t need more doctors, that would just mean even more waste.
Much of that overhead you reference is absolutely necessary to rein in specialist doctors that continuously try to exploit the payment systems. Single payer would save a bunch of money, not by eliminating outrageous insurance company profit (which doesn’t exist) but by being able to impose rates and rules on greedy doctors, who are in fact a big problem.
I am not talking about insurance company *profits* Switzerland has those too. I am talking about wage costs of paper shoveling.
Every private insurer in the US insists on being a special snowflake about what it covers, what its copays are, what documentation it requires, what discounts it has negotiated, and so on. This forces medical providers to have enormous staffs on hand to cross the t and dot the i correctly for each and every patient, or they do not get paid.
The insurers then employ a matching army going over the paperwork they get sent looking for fuckups so they can say “Wrong, not paying!”.
Both of those armies produce no actual value and are completely unnecessary.
The US is, simply, in a very shitty nash equilibrium as far as this goes, because neither hospitals nor insurers can unilaterally stop doing this and stay in business, and also these jobs are utterly soul-killing to boot.
And you are burning somewhere around 2 percent of gdp on this. Not medical care, not insurance company ceo yatchs – on people filling out a storm of paper out of a nightmare Kafka had after a drinking way too much absinthe.
Again, you can have private insurance that does not do this, but only if your government is interested in writing legislation that puts a stop to it.
Or you can have single payer which forcibly reduces the problem to one set of forms.
@brad
We know that this won’t happen, because it’s been tried. Congress passed laws mandating exactly that cost saving lower payment rates, and then waved those reductions every year for more than a decade before repealing them. The US political system is not capable of forcing down prices the way you’ve described for all of the medical industry.
@testing123
I agree that’s true, but *why* it’s true is because there’s so little animosity towards health care workers, especially specialist doctors. This despite the fact that health care cost growth (along with out of control credentialism and rent seeking land owners) are destroying the economic prospects of entire generations.
@Thomas Jorgensen
If doctors wanted single payer health care, we’d have it. How do you square that with your story about how they are innocent victims of malicious paperwork armies foisted on them by insurance companies?
Wrong question. The question you should be asking “Would doctors like it if insurance companies were forced to use a common price schedule, standardized forms and unified documentation requirements?” Because the answer to that is likely “Fuck yes”.
Markets are children of regulatory regimes, if you get them wrong, they do not work.
@DavidFriedman:
I mentioned this before and plumber did as well but the ‘big budget items’ — Housing, Education, Healthcare, throw a wrench in the works. These things will likely eat up any offset to falling or stagnant incomes. This isn’t strictly the fault of the free market [I hate personifying market economies] — There are almost certainly reforms you could make (and I support) that would allow prices in these sectors to fall and provide some, or perhaps substantial, relief. But the political will to carry them out is about as forlorn as the political will to institute certain forms of economic protectionism [e.g. restricting lawful and unlawful immigration]
@Brad
It’s easier to hate institutions then it is to hate tangible people. I think a similar dynamic plays out w.r.t school teachers.
Also, Society has always had a love-hate relationship with doctors. Nurses aren’t paid kings ransoms and speaking in generalizations they often have to put up with a lot of tough work.
It may also be that because much of the cash flow for medical expenses is from patient to insurer, and the insurer is basically faceless and seemingly has no productive role in the procurement of medicine, that most of the hatred towards healthcare prices goes towards them.
@Thomas Jorgensen;
I’m a P&C guy so I don’t have any industry experience with health insurers. Are US health insurers not regulated by the NAIC? [that’s where I got my financial data from] if uniform coverage forms don’t exist couldn’t they institute them? Doing so wouldn’t require an act of congress though it would require the commissioners to lobby each state, but this has already been accomplished in the P&C space.
Also is there any data on Swiss insurers [like expense ratios]? I’m curious.
People hate programmers? Haven’t seen a lot of this myself, outside of maybe the programmers who think they will get rich quick with apps of dubious utility.
Also, doctors don’t have quite the esteem they used to. I think nurses might get even more respect, for putting up with all the same shit (and vomit, and blood, etc.) without the god complex that the doctors stereotype has.
@Randy M
Yes, some people do (or rather they hate the displacement and their bidding up rents).
The nurse practitioners that sometimes substitute for physicians seem just as competent if not more (but since it’s not my trade I can’t be sure), and they certainly seem more attentive, but my perceiving them as more competent may just be that they look like adults while most physicians that I see now look like youngsters.
That is probably fairly localized to specific areas though, I don’t think that sentiment is widespread.
@Thomas Jorgensen
If the common price schedule was Medicare’s, I don’t think it would be.
@RalMirrorAd
Nurses aren’t paid a king’s ransom though the people that go into nursing tend to do a lot better than similarly situated people that made other choices. The big problem there is that there are too many nurses, too many x-ray techs, and so on and so forth. Only specialist doctors make obscene amounts of money (well them, hospital administrators, and Martin Shkreli) but the entire sector is way too big.
@Randy M
People make jokes, but no one votes against their interests. Compare lawyers, for another example.
@Plumber
The kinds of doctors that can be replaced by nurse practitioners shouldn’t exist. And even NPs are over-educated (see out of control credentialism above).
It says The goal of the Right is, again…
How is that even a right-wing goal? It basically says “make people better off” (a goal everyone agrees with) “…at the expense of the rich, if necessary” (a traditionally left-wing goal). It looks like you can make everything sound better to right-wingers if you replace “people” with “families”, as it makes you sound like a right-winger.
Because primacy of marriage and children is right-wing.
@10240
You are missing the implied parts of the argument, which become more evident if you look at how conservatives and progressives tend to help families. Conservatives tend to design their policies for the nuclear family with a stay-at-home parent. Progressives tend to design their policies much more around single moms, double incomes, etc.
For example, one of the conflicts between the more conservative and less conservative in my country that the former want the tax-free part of the salary to be transferable to a spouse, which means that a family with a single income of $50k gets the same tax break as a family with two $25k incomes. The less conservative want the tax break to be strictly individual, which means that single income households are taxed more.
The more conservative politicians/people see this as deincentivizing what they see as a proper family and deincentivizing having kids.
Maybe some or most progressives assume that their ideal society would not render family formation a luxury. At least in the eyes of right wingers they tend to subordinate the direct concern with family formation with other goals which [in their eyes] *do* in fact make family formation a luxury.
— Progressives want economic parity between the sexes, anything a man can do a woman should be able to do [if not better] If at the same time women still prefer men who make more than they do this reduces the poor of eligible men. [The carlson argument]
— Progressives want divorce something that can be easily initiated and make sure in particular a woman who engages in divorce is given full economic protections from any loss of income that may result from the divorce in the form of child support. It’s not explicitly framed this way but single motherhood should be something survivable and not at all something frowned upon.
— Progressives place a higher [relative to right wingers] value on enhancing the economic well being of poorer foreigners. Who obviously compete with the working poor of the first world for jobs.
— Progressives at least culturally are urbanists, and many [present company excluded] support measures to restrict the growth of the housing supply.
— Cradle to grave welfare states siphon resources from working parents and reduces the economic benefits of children in old age.
I can only assume in the mind of a progressive that government transfer payments and social programs would necessarily outweigh any of the above potential issues [or they don’t recognize the above as disincentiving family formation at all and so is a non-issue.]
Worse in the sense of difficulty in transition. Shutting down jobs after people retire and replacing them with automation saves having to retrain the workers versus what seems to have happened during the last recession–people being replaced after lay-offs and then looking for new work in an economy with that many fewer openings.
More productivity is more stuff produced, which is the end result of any kind of work (if we are generous with the definition). More stuff should make people in general better off. The challenge is that the benefits are going to go largely to those who are productive via inventing or funding the machines and programs absent some kind of redistribution. Which is the kind of thing that I used to be dead against for economic theory and moral reasons. Now, I’m largely agnostic on economic matters.
Prices have to drop to zero for people making zero to benefit from the reduction. However (and I should probably finish the book before posting on it, since it looks like Andrew is pointing in this direction at the chapters after the UBI suggestion), I could see an evolution towards personal human service being a high status good. Maybe you google engineers will pay my kids enough to be maids to support the whole clan. Along with an increased focus on things like Youtube, people awarding each other status or money based on creative output in niche communities and so forth.
At the end of the day, I think there will be hard truths for everyone as it is made clear that a lot of human misery is solved by abundance, but a lot of bad behavior is not.
If you’ve never read the short story Manna, it’s thought provoking on the topic, although it does seem rather far-fetched in the latter chapters, the early ones seem plausible.
edit:
He thinks it is relevant too–it’s chapter 14 in the book I linked. 😉 Hey, nothing wrong with getting paid twice for the same words.
Regarding the economics, I’m going to naively assume it will all work out in that if it is ever truly necessary (because machines are so much more productive at everything than people), it will be feasible (because machines will be so much more productive at everything that people).
Maybe you google engineers will pay my kids enough to be maids to support the whole clan.
I’m very dubious about this. See any discussion (such as one we had a while back) about paying for daycare for children while both parents work; the consensus is that this is crazy expensive and should be lower and why don’t we let
babyfarmingMrs Jones mind sixty toddlers in her terraced house happen to keep prices at a reasonable level?Because everyone thinks that childminding is easy, that parents do it for free so why should someone be paid a real industrial wage for doing it? Same with maids: why pay them big money for doing housework, when generations of wives did it for nothing? We already treat stay-at-home mothers as not really working, or not doing a job, so turn “cooking, cleaning and running errands” into a paid job and it’ll be low-status and low-wage.
It’ll be high(ish) status to have a servant, but to be a servant will not be high-earning. If you’re the housekeeper/estate manager for a wealthy family, you’ll probably get paid relatively well, but working for a software engineer household? Not so much.
Depends also on what you think a reasonable salary is to keep an entire clan of dependent relatives; does $50,000 gross a year sound like what you think a Googler would be willing to pay a live-out housekeeper? And that’s a job for “Ultra High Net Worth” family (which Wikipedia defines as having a net worth of at least $30 million, if Googlers are that well-off no wonder it’s so desirable to work there!)
The main question is not “what they will pay out of goodwill” or “what price they won’t grumble about”, but “what the market-clearing salary will be”.
$50K is more than half the take-home pay of your average Googler. Even $25K is about what one could expect to be paying yearly for a studio apartment in Silicon “The Rent Is Too Damn High” Valley. You’re not going to see Googlers hiring full-time housekeepers at those rates anytime soon.
A maid service coming in once a week for a hundred bucks, now, that’s more reasonable, but then you’d have one maid covering twenty-plus households, so maid service can’t possibly be a big part of the local economy.
Can’t, because regulation has made hiring people to do personal services too expensive for “google engineer” pay (unless they’ve raised it a lot in the past few years). Gotta be “Google Senior Vice President” pay and there aren’t enough of those.
What sort of regulation, and how is it enforced? Do Americans typically employ domestic servants in a legal way? In many countries that’s not the norm.
Americans, even fairly wealthy ones, don’t often employ domestic servants. Those that do, who are mostly absentee landlords and the elderly, are more likely to contract with a service that sends gardeners or cleaners every so often than to pay an individual. These services more or less have to be above board, at least as a corporate entity — the people they send might not be, but that’s transparent to the client.
There are exceptions, but they’re rare.
@Nornagest My question applies to occasional domestic helpers (cleaner etc.) too. In Hungary one typically calls the individual directly (not through a service), and pays in cash. A few years ago the government even made a rule that, after registration, it’s legal to employ domestic helpers without paying tax, basically they realized that they aren’t going to be able to collect taxes on that anyway.
To actually be an employer means calling all of employment law down on your own head. Tax withholding, minimum wage, working condition laws, insurance or bond requirements, probably a bunch of other stuff. The paperwork alone is significant. Americans are more likely to hire people (through services or not) for cleaning or landscaping or whatever, but you can’t (lawfully) get a full-time maid that way.
The argument that cheaper goods will offset the pain ignores the fact that the big budget items; healthcare, education, and housing, are basically immune either because of physical constraints or political ones to any potential cost savings from automation and/or outsourcing/offshoring.
The same goods that have gotten cheaper due to globalization will continue to get cheaper with self-driving cars. Millions more people will be unemployable, meanwhile the remaining jobs will increasingly be concentrated in metro areas with inadequate housing and infrastructure which means skyrocketing rents and longer commute times.
Dalrymple gives me a very ‘Dark Star Safari’ vibe. It reminds me of the House of God post on this site. That is, the reason help is not helping is that it is the problem.
I disagree with the whole “we need to think about UBI now because robots are going to put everybody out of work” thing. Instead we have record employment, millions more job openings than we have workers, and the right wants those jobs filled from folks on the dole and the left from mass immigration. There is no glut of workers with nothing to do.
IMHO, UBI matters more as a tool to drive the capital/labor power dynamics toward labor. Shitty retail managers would have to treat you like a human being if you don’t need the job. Not an economist, but my instinct says an awful lot of the dark side of global capitalism would go away if the workers weren’t required to either unionize (good luck these days) or put up with various abuses because the alternative of unemployment is worse.
Setting a floor on the Race to the Bottom, essentially.
@Conrad Honcho
A decade ago I woulds have said “No it’s the plutocrats on the Right that wants that (it was Ronald Reagan who signed amnesty for illegal immigrants into law), but the way things have shaped out lately (“From 2008 to 2018, the percentage of Democrats who said the government should create “a way for immigrants already here illegally to become citizens if the meet certain requirements” grew from 29 to 51 percent, while the share who said “there should be better border security and stronger enforcement of immigration laws” fell from 21 to 5 percent.“) I must concede that you’re correct.
However with our exploding number on disability, and as far as the federal government is concerned, you’re disabled if you have “a medical condition that makes it impossible to work” this “full employment” isn’t exactly the same as previous times of full employment, and millions simply don’t have the diplomas, young faces, and/or strong backs to get hired, but if they had the status of say a judge or tenured professor they could keep working.
There’s also that many employers just prefer to hire immigrants, as a somewhat related anecdote one of my co-workers told me that he was hired back in the early 1990’s as part of an affirmative-action program to hire residents in what was then a primarily a poor and black neighborhood, and at that time many of the old-timers wouldn’t train and work with the new hires because they feared that they were “criminals” (which my co-worker says was true in some cases, he says that he had been one in his youth), and since he “wanted to work, so I asked to be put on night shift, and it was all ‘china-men’ on the crew, and one week they all lined up to go in front of the night shift supervisor so I lined up too, they was giving envelopes to him, and he gave me an envelope, there was $500 in it! The next time they lined up I did too and he told me ‘I can’t have you in my business here'”, it was kickbacks for having the job I told him ‘I got family who’d love a job and would pay you too’ and he said ‘No black or white, they tell, only the china-men go for this'”, in a somewhat similar fashion today H1-B allows employers to have indentured servants who were trained on another countries dime, and other employers would rather have “under the table” illegal immigrants because they’re more docile, I’ll add that since most business owners are Republicans, and with a Republican President and until very recently a Republican majority in Congress that if “The Right” wanted to they could have had “those jobs filled from folks on the dole”, just as they could have started to “build the wall” two years ago. Please remind me why that didn’t happen @Conrad Honcho (I’m not just trying to be snarky, I’m just pointing out that by their actions “The Right” hasn’t exactly matched their rhetoric).
Immigration enforcement the party as an institution is adopting largely against its will. It is not popular with the donors, the chamber of commerce, or the leadership. IIRC it was Ryan’s congress that created those omnibus bills that said ‘no money may go to a wall’ or something to that effect. Obviously once a certain threshold is reached in places like Texas and NC, the republican party [and their leadership] will be rendered impotent. But I guess the idea is to make as much money as they can for now.
Immigration control is very popular with less economically advantaged republican voters and to a lesser extent, independents, and for the most part has been for some time.
There’s a lot difference in of “the right”, from plutocrats to populists.
@Randy M
I’m not even sure it’s useful to speak of “Right” and “Left” as anything other than shorthand for “not Democrats” and “not Republicans”.
Both plutocrats and populists advocate policies that may be labeled at “left” or “right”, which side does Peter Thiel’s fall on, or the 2008 electorate that voted both for Obama and to ban gay marriage?
Obama was explicitly against gay marriage, but no one believed him. If you mean people who voted for Obama but against proposition 8 in CA, those were probably closest to populists. Moderately culturally conservative black church lady types that vote Democrat and especially Obama for identity reasons. If any other group voted for both, it would probably be elite Conservatives who were against gay marriage (duh) but really hopeful the election of Obama would help usher in racial harmony–but I’d need to see proof such a group existed.
has written against democracy specifically, so it’d be farcical to label him a populist. I don’t know much about him, but Neoliberal or Technocrat would be my guess.
@Randy M
Peter Thiel was my example of a plutocrats, not a populist
I’m not sure what your questiion was for? You found a hypothetical group and an individual that borrowed from left and right positions and wanted me to try to tell you which they fit into more?
@Randy M
My question was how useful is it to use the terms “Left” and “Right” anymore.
Oh. It was rhetorical, wasn’t it? Oops.
@Randy M
Sort of, I have a problem pattern matching “Left” and “Right” these days (in many ways I feel like a Rip Van Winkle/Steve Rogers), maybe these things are more intuitive to others.
It’s an well worn argument that trying to fit everyone into one of two camps is going to end up with some that defy easy classification.
I think it’s possible [how’s that for refusing to commit?] that it is more true in the last several years because we are going through a period of transition. Maybe because globalism is kind of new, or at least newly possible, and so people who find that favorable are trying to find a home in an established political party, and likewise the reaction to it.
Or maybe it’s the internet giving fringe voices wider reach. Were the John Birchers a good fit for the republican party? But conflict between them and more establishment voices got less play than now, though more than in days of radio or pamphlets.
It’s at least useful for labeling tribal identification. In the case we have been discussing, someone who considers himself on the left is much more likely to read the evidence in a way unfavorable to the Catholic students and favorable to the Native American than someone who considers himself on the right.
I can see that pattern subjectively in myself. Libertarians are by convention thought of as on the right and have been through my lifetime, despite some of them objecting to it. So if I see some foreign political party described as right wing, my initial response is mildly positive–even though it may turn out that the party (I’m thinking in particular of the FN in France) is right wing in the senses in which I am not (i.e. anti-immigration), left-wing in the senses in which I am right wing (economic policy). Similarly for my response to a party being labeled as left wing.
The collection of ideas labeled right or left is in part a matter of consistency, in part historical accident. Free trade has gone from being a Democratic position Republicans were against to being a Republican position Democrats were against to now being something Republicans, or at least the President, are against and Democrats for.
@DavidFriedman
I don’t know what it says about my “tribal affiliation” but, after “What the Hell are you guys talking about?”, my early reaction was “Leftist media conspiracy? Yeah right, pull the other one, I’m sure it’s a phantom”, which went to “Holy Hell, ‘The Right’ is right, those kids are being slandered!”
As far as I can tell, despite both you and the Rassemblement National/Front National being labeled as on “The Right” their political views and your political views are just about completely opposite in most every way.
Yeah, the flip-flopping of stuff like that is some of what’s causing my confusion.
If it’s easy for immigrants to become citizens, or at least be treated as citizens so far as work is concerned (can’t vote, won’t be deported), they they’ll be head-to-head competition, but they won’t be more docile than citizens.
Once you have enough money to live a comfortable life, extra income has a very small impact on your overall happiness. Things like family and friends and a sense of self-worth and usefulness have a much bigger effect. If people can afford to buy more cheap tat but can’t get a job or raise a family, they’re going to be less happy than if they couldn’t afford as much but were supporting themselves and their family with an honest job.
Even with a not that comfortable life, family, friends and a sense of self-worth & usefulness seem to easily be able to outweigh the impact of more income, for most people.
You would think so, but my impression is that people are glad to work overtime if they get time and a half pay for it.
Sure, because it feels like a good deal to get extra money per hour worked, that you in theory can use to reduce working hours in the future beyond the hours you worked extra.
Except that future may never come…
I also wasn’t talking about what people do, but what makes them more happy. That’s not the same.
This type of writing would be considered the work of a charlatan if it was directed at individual advice. For example:
1. Self driving cars are inevitable
2. They will dominate various industries in short order
3. The main beneficiaries will be capitalists owning them, lots of other people will be pretty much SOL
4. So massively overweight your portfolio towards companies that are working on self driving cars.
This is a straighter line of thinking than inserting the UBI conclusion for #4 and it would be roundly rejected by 90% of people who read it here and with good reason. When you make predictions about a complicated process the default assumption should be that you are wrong. It doesn’t matter how rigorous your research or how impeccable your logic sounds, there are far more ways to be wrong and conditional predictions mean that being wrong in just one part of your line of reasoning will lead you to an incorrect conclusion.
Self driving cars were one example of an automation trend that is reducing demand for service labor just as demand for manufacturing labor and agricultural labor were similarly reduced. Other examples range from self-checkout to legal zoom.
That’s a good point, and solutions to predicted problems should only be implemented if the costs and side-effects are relatively minor if the problem does not materialize. Relative to the magnitude of the problem and it’s likelihood, that is.
The costs and side effects are just as unpredictable as everything else. To predict the costs of a UBI with any accuracy you are going to have to predict the impact of a UBI on economic growth accurately AND economic growth without the UBI accurately over a long time span. We currently know of roughly zero people who can predict economic growth accurately over a long time span
To the commentariat: how do you have the time to post such thoughtful comments here? What is the opportunity cost of doing so?
https://xkcd.com/303/
Yep, exactly this.
Pretty much.
Yeah, this.
Approximately this, along with “I need a few minutes to mentally decompress after some serious brainwork”. But for the “exactly this” crowd, are long compile times really still a thing? It’s been probably a couple decades since I’ve had anything take more than a few seconds to compile, and I occasionally do some fairly heavy(*) coding.
* 10-20 KLOC in C++, but it’s all my code + standard libraries rather than a more complex build.
Builds of my team’s projects at $UNDISCLOSED_LARGE_INFOSEC_COMPANY take anywhere from five to forty-five minutes, depending on the level of compiler optimization, drift between my local repo and source control, whether any widely included header files have been touched, etc. Deployment into a testable environment, if that’s necessary, can then take another fifteen minutes or so.
My team has complained about this, but solutions have not so far been forthcoming.
He’s a Russian! Get him before his team hacks an election!
That’s longer than most of our builds here at Very Big Software Company; one of mine was taking about ten minutes earlier today.
On the other hand, we usually use the rough-and-ready method. The nicer method that’ll install without my babysitting it can easily take 45 minutes.
Aside from just working on a large codebase, deploys, if not necessarily compiles, in many CI/CD environments involve running test suites, including spinning up entire ephemeral swarms of microservices for ETE testing.
There’s a bunch of Googlers here. When I was still working there the build times were terrible despite Devtools working their butts off trying to bring them down. The dependency tree was basically a ball of spaghetti.
My current project is considerably smaller, but still big enough that it takes significant time to build on a single machine, though incrementals are usually quick. We do use distributed compilation which brings build time down to a few minutes for a clean build. Unit and integration tests are what actually tend to be slow, especially since I work on stuff where a lot of setup and repeats might be needed to catch an intermittent issue.
10-20 KLOC is a tiny project. My current project is over 1.8 MLOC of C++ and C.
Right, but if I can compile 15 KLOC in two seconds, then 1.8 MLOC should be no more than four minutes, and that’s not enough time for more than the very lowest levels of goofing off.
If we’re using “compiling” as shorthand for “compiling and unit testing” then yes, that can be tedious and if the testing part is done by a script you can get some serious goofing off done there. And, yeah, runs of serious number-crunching code can easily take hours to days.
2s is short enough to not interrupt your train of thought. A 4min disruption is enough time to get bored, wander off, and come back in 15-20min when you reach a good point to stop goofing off and realize your build finished 10min ago.
That argument assumes compile time increases linearly with LOC. But is that the case with C++? My impression (from seeing these debates on Hacker News over and over) is that header files can cause many recompiles of the same code, so that compile time can grow nonlinearly.
Nick has it right; thanks to C++ header files, compiling is superlinear. So is linking, unfortunately.
That seems like it would only be significant with gratuitous overuse of header files, but OK, if gratuitous overuse of header files gets you more time for roller-chair swordfighting or whatnot, I suppose that’s the new industry standard.
ETA: A bit of googling suggests that the culprit is the increasing tendency to put most of the executable code in the header files, for what seem to me a mix of mostly silly or inexplicable reasons.
Yeah, it’s C++ templates and template metaprogramming. It’s not that most code is in header files, it’s that a significant amount is, and it’s the part that’s most expensive to compile.
I blame Stroustrup.
I’m seeing sources indicating that it has crossed the line to literally most, but yeah, anything more than very carefully selected little bits is probably too much and should be punished by taking away the roller chairs and toy swords and making the coders actually sit through compilation.
Can confirm, building (and testing, and running benchmarks…) takes for.ev.er.
I do a lot of SQL on a lot of staggeringly large databases. Hour long query times are not unheard of.
Thanks to Eclipse, long compiles in Java mostly went away over the last ten years. And Python and JavaScript are mostly interpreted, so they were never really a problem. Those are probably the big three languages right now.
However, for many large projects, it wasn’t so much “make” as it was “make unit-tests”.
Also, every once in a while, I find myself having to do an on-site build, and oh look, customer has a requirement that I can’t bring my own hardware in, and their department “helpfully” provided me with a laptop running an i3 CPU…
I do statistical modelling and complex data manipulation with multi-million-record datasets; some of my programs take days to run.
For my job, it’s “my finite element model is running.” I’ve been (un?)fortunate enough to have a project where the runs can take upwards of 20 minutes. Most of them take less time, though.
Lucky you. A few years back I was running a seepage flux FEM for an unsaturated soil column that took about 8 hours to run, using the best software on the market. It was then that I learned how much partial differential equations hate sudden changes in material properties and boundary conditions.
How about running test cases against your code?
There isn’t an XKCD for that, but it’s in the same bucket.
I’m impressed, I think, that anyone can say with certainty that there’s no xkcd about a topic.
Until I saw the replies talking about code compiling, I didn’t bother to click the xkcd link because I was certain it was the “someone is wrong on the internet” one.
https://xkcd.com/386/ is WHY, not HOW.
I linger after work reading and posting instead of going straight home and my productivity at work has actually gone down since I discovered SSC, thanks for the reminder to cool it!
I banned myself from doing it at work (and knowing that I had avoided such bans in the past, I went all the way and banned it in my hosts file). All of a sudden, I stopped having as much time to comment here.
For me it’s like a mental disorder. In moments when my mind idles (e.g. while walking from one room to another, in between songs on the radio while I’m driving, when I look out the window and see a bird land in a tree, etc.) one of the activities it now defaults to is approximately something like this:
have a random thought --> something I'd like to know more about --> ask the SSC hive mind about itI’m retired. I have assigned myself two hours a day, seven days a week, of work on writing projects. I also try to walk about twenty minutes a day for my health.
That leaves me a lot of free time. The main cost of my activity here is reading fewer novels. A while back, after reading a particularly good one (Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik), I concluded that my time allocation was suboptimal; I’ve read more novels and spent a little less time here (and on FB) since.
Thirty years ago I would have been spending quite a lot time on Usenet, in the same sort of activities I engage in here.
Have you found other novels you’d recommend?
None recently that struck me as that good. I read some David Duncan, and thought Ill Met in the Arena was pretty good. I’m fond of The Paladin by Cherryh.
My daughter bought me an audiobook of Podkayn of Mars, by Heinlein, since she knew I liked it, and I’ve been using it to entertain myself while out walking. But you have probably already read it.
I believe you recommended Sewer, Gas and Electric by Matt Ruff many years ago.
Are you aware that he thanks you in the Acknowledgements section of Bad Monkeys?
I don’t remember recommending, or even reading, that book. It sounds as though it might be fun.
I didn’t know that he thanked me in an acknowledgement section, but I’m always happy to discover that I have done good at zero marginal cost.
I’m nowhere near retired, but I recently came to a similar conclusion and decided to spend more time reading books (mostly novels or history books) and less time on Facebook and Reddit.
I’ve also considered writing up book reviews or “book tangents” with my thoughts on what I’ve read, but I haven’t started that yet.
The effort posts take more time than I feel comfortable admitting, to be quite honest.
Other than that: while I am probably below-average intelligence for this blog, I’m quite a bit smarter than the typical employee at my level, and usually more diligent, so I can accomplish more work in a shorter period of time, and it will be higher value as well. So, in my current job, I reworked all the variance reports. The variance reports have gone from “uhhhh…I guess you lost money somehow?” to “you lost 6 hours on line 6 on 3rd shift Thursday night, because you switched Line 6 and Line 7 to a new product and wanted to synchronize production, and you needed 6 hours to run out Line 7. In the future, you can probably accomplish 2 washes and a short run in 6 hours on Line 6, but it may be difficult to manage this unless you start planning 48 hours in advance.”
SoI typically have lots of extra time to do whatever I want. In my last company, I spent about 3-4 hours a day doing nothing, which is actually quite stressful in an open office. Looking busy is way harder than being busy.
More or less this. I’m really good at what I do, but my ability to concentrate usually run out before the clock does.
I don’t actually post *thoughtful* comments here, but I’m in the commentariat anyway, so. I’m a NEET, and have barely mustered the executive function to do anything besides browse the internet and play videogames in the two years since the last exams I failed. The opportunity cost mostly funges against even less “productive” actions, although there is the possibility of not staying up so late.
God is space. Look at trees, rocks, and clouds.
I can’t code for squat, but Hurricane Michael left my badly-damaged hospital on restricted hours with full pay. Then they laid me off. For a total of like three months there, I had waaaaayyyy too much free time, which I tried to spend productively by writing (things I can do something with, not just posts here). Now I’m employed again, so I won’t be dumping so much on here.
Stay at home dad with 3 kids, through whatever combination of luck and quality parenting my older two get along well, are well behaved and are helpful. #3 is under 3 months old and so sleeps roughly 75% of the time, this combination means I have a lot of short term flexibility.
The opportunity cost is not improving at something other than posting here, or getting in shape or learning some other skill.
So last thread @albatross11 asked:
and since “My son’s former after school basketball coach” only applies to the one guy I have in-mind (do you live near Oakland or Richmond, California @albatross11?) I answered:
and in that spirit, not organizations and individuals as @albatross11 asked for, but what activities and media do you recommend for your son’s and for that matter what for your daughters?
I can’t think of many values that if I had a daughter I’d want her to learn that would be much different than those I try to teach my son (maybe I’d stress fighting to protect your spouse less with a daughter, and stress protecting your kids more, but I’m not sure), but I suspect a different media list would probably be warranted.
What do you suggest for your kids?
For the purpose of skills, or values, or both? I’m a bit skeptical myself about whether skills teach broader values. I’d want my hypothetical kids to do legit martial arts, since it’s something I started doing late that has been really beneficial, but I don’t believe that discipline in it teaches discipline outside of it, and so on. Further, lots of people in martial arts, from super-traditional martial arts practitioners to guys teaching MMA, are super prone to talking about how martial arts teach respect and humility and so on – but it’s clear looking at the top martial artists in the world that this isn’t the case.
In general I agree. But I do think that martial arts is good at teaching one type of humility, which is paying attention and not getting offended when being taught something that on the surface appears condescendingly simple but isn’t. That comes up surprisingly often, and I definitely didn’t develop the skill until I started doing martial arts.
@Nornagest,
That sounds a lot like some of the values that may (if taught well) be imparted with building and repair skills.
Most people’s experience in martial arts involves getting the daylights beaten out of them (or at least easily bested) by people vastly more skilled and talented than they are, and can probably ever hope to be. Of course, that doesn’t necessarily apply to the tiny group of “top martial artists in the world” (until they get old).
I’ve noticed an almost identical effect in American football.
There is a pretty big group of people whose experience in martial arts doesn’t involve getting the daylights beaten out of them at all. The martial arts I did as a kid/teen basically never included sparring (beyond step sparring) or competition and that seemed to match most of the stories I heard from other people. I don’t know if that’s a majority, but it’s certainly a significant fraction, especially if we’re talking about kids’ exposure to it.
My original martial arts training (Judo) would have started about 1955 when I was ten, continued to about eighteen. None of it involved getting the daylights beaten out of me. I wasn’t terribly good at it but it was probably good for me, inasmuch as it was an athletic activity where I wasn’t competing with kids who did for fun what I only did in gym class, hence undercut the “I’m terrible at athletics” intuition.
My next martial art was SCA combat, back when it was just starting–the very beginning of SCA in the midwest, a few years after it had started on the west coast. We were all beginners and I turned out, surprisingly, to be quite good at it. Which was probably also good for me.
Lots of bruises, but nothing I would describe as getting the daylights beaten out of me.
Eh, if you stick with it, you get to a point where there’s a five-fold division: those you can smoosh, those you can best but gotta be careful, those you are competitive with, those you can maybe get the better of sometimes, and those who smoosh you.
Plus, speaking from personal experience, there’s also plenty of talented successful local/regional competitors who lack a certain humility.
This wasn’t my experience with Tae Kwon do, nor my experience with wrestling which is at least close to the martial arts.
“Getting the daylights beaten out of you” may have been the wrong term to use, I’m probably biased since my martial arts experience includes boxing.
However, even getting easily knocked over or tapped out in another contact sport like rugby or BJJ by someone who’s way better than you is certainly something I have found humbling, even though I’m no slouch myself.
I actually feel the same way about music. I can play the guitar well enough not to completely embarrass myself, but I am keenly aware of the difference between myself and a true guitar god — and again, I feel myself quite humbled by the skill of a truly talented player.
Maybe what these have in common is that there’s an element of “all or nothing” to them. A decent mechanical engineer can do pretty well for himself being just…decent. But if you want build your life around sports or music performance, you had better be really good. Top 1% at least. Maybe those guys don’t ever feel humbled — their experience consists of skill and drive overcoming all before them. But the other 99% aren’t like that.
True. For professional performers, probably anyone you see in whatever the major league equivalent is, probably at least top 0.1%. Although someone whose skills are just very good and who has some other skill that combines well with it could become a teacher, coach, etc.
I’d agree that the experience is humbling, but I don’t know that it carries over to some general quality of humility. Legit BJJ schools advertise the kids’ classes with the exact same pitch as the most McDojo-y strip mall dubious lesser-known TMA school: learning this is going to teach your kids discipline and respect and humility etc. Which it might in the context of the martial art, especially if they have the right attitude; I don’t know that it would make them do their homework more willingly.
@dndnrsn
Both, but more for learning an attitude of perseverance and service.
Taking charge of a project involving relevant skills.
Years ago, our daughter was chief cook for an SCA feast (with her parents as assistant cooks, but she was ultimately in charge). More recently, she has several times taken responsibility for feeding all of the people at a weekend event a friend of hers hosts once a year.
Much longer ago than that our son, perhaps twelve or so, was DM for a weekly role playing game. That meant that each week, before the other players arrived, he had to have made all of the necessary preparations for that week’s game. He did.
@DavidFriedman,
Sounds like you have great kids and they had a great upbringing!
I like to explain that, by pure good luck, I ended up with the world’s most wonderful children.
You might think that would be dangerous, because other parents would want to steal them from me. But by further good luck, all the other parents were so prejudiced that they thought they had the world’s most wonderful children, so mine were safe.
You could come to the South Bay meetup this Sunday and meet them.
This is why I’m not having kids. Why would I want to raise kids in the midst of a hostile, alien culture that fights against my values every step of the way, only to have to inevitably give my offspring up to that Moloch to be exploited as more labor-power for the capitalist machine once my offspring reaches adulthood? It is an inhuman system.
That said, I would do my best to help my son of mine to do all of the following:
1. Learn how to use hand tools and (at a certain reasonable age) power tools to make things. Try to acquire raw materials occasionally (lumber, screws, etc.) to allow my son to be creative with this sort of stuff on occasion. Discover the joy of (safely) taking household apart when they are broken, putting them back together, and seeing how seemingly mysterious gadgets actually work. Not only is it enlightening and not only does it build a sense of resilience when confronting new problems, but I highly doubt that fine physical motor manipulations and sensory-based discriminations that are involved in the various skilled construction trades will be going obsolete any time soon, so those will make for good, respectable fall-back careers for a long time. Alongside that, encourage the study of engineering, computer science, medicine, or other practical, yet higher-status hard sciences that have a hands-on aspect (i.e. not theoretical physics). Relevant games that I might encourage: Minecraft, Rimworld, Factorio, Cities:Skylines.
2. Learn history…especially the history of the tradition (one could say “religion”) from which I hail, the Marxist socialist movement. Even if my son ends up being a disbelieving Marxist, my son will be a Marxist nonetheless (sort of like how people can be secular Jews. They don’t necessarily believe in any of it, but they are so steeped in it that they get all the in-jokes, all of the historical allusions, and understand where their believing brethren are coming from…and maybe, with age will come wisdom and an authentic, self-directed embrace of the tradition). Relevant games that I might encourage: Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, Age of Empires 1&2, Civilization 4, Europa Universalis 4, Hearts of Iron 4, Secret Hitler (board game), Monopoly (to see how much success in the capitalist system is a vicious, self-perpetuating cycle).
3. Engage in athletics in a comradely manner, keeping firmly in mind that teams are contrived imagined communities just like nations, that there is no point in getting too worked up over team-nationalism or school-nationalism since class is the only objectively-given affiliation in life, and that the sport is there to cultivate self-discipline, good health, and comradeship.
4. Films and shows are OK in moderation, but I would in general encourage my son to engage in more participatory and creative activities, such as woodworking, sports, games, choir, etc.
5. Role-models: Karl Marx, of course! A great unsung scholar. And Lenin, a man of iron self-discipline and principles. Alleged Lenin quotes: “Learn, learn, learn!” and “Every cook must learn to govern the state.” Paul Robeson (a respectful, yet dominant and unyielding presence in music and politics). Ronnie James Dio (intense, yet humble). And if we are talking fictional characters, then the rock-solid Captain from the film “Das Boot.”
@citizencokane,
You remind me of my Dad a lot!
He had a big picture of Paul Robeson on the wall of his last apartment and while he didn’t completely pass on his Marxism to either me or my brother (were both too Burkean), my brother is registered with the Green Party and I still often view things through a Marxian lens and have been on picket lines, so some of those values got passed on (and I don’t feel much like arguing why not all of them right now), make of that what you will.
Unsung? He gets referenced all the time by scholars. He is one of the most cited sources in scholarship. Here’s an article about it:
http://news.mit.edu/1992/citation-0415
If you have the means, flying airplanes is a good one. Challenging, incredible fun. Develops discipline, good communication, assertive decision making, basic math and science skills.
I will be traveling to Thailand in May. Specifically Bangkok -> Chiang Mai -> Khao Sok Park -> Koh Samui -> Koh Phangan -> Koh Tao
Anyone have any recommendations?
Spend less time in Bangkok and more time in Chiang Mai. Stay in Pai and/or Mae Hong Son. Don’t bother spending more for fancy places to stay. Walk into one of the trekking outfits and take an overnight trek.
Chiang Mai was unpleasantly hot when I was there a few summers ago, consider some of the higher elevation hikes nearby as a cooler alternative. Pedal biking was generally a nice form of transit in Thailand. In Bangkok I specifically recommend the Pier 21 Terminal 21 Food Court. It is a very cheap food court which serves high quality street style food cooked in a safe and insect free way. It was a food court in a mall which is weird, but among inexpensive food it was the best I had in more than a month in Thailand.
If you fence epee or play bridge there are decent expat clubs for both of those things in Chiang Mai (the bridge is pretty good the fencing is maybe closer to subpar than decent).
There is my Thailand travel infodump…
Recently Youtube has been recommending me a bunch of “Sovereign citizen gets pwned by [judge]/[cop]/[etc.]” videos. I watched one or two before realizing these videos are nowhere near as interesting as they could be, primarily because sovereign citizens appear to be mostly just not very smart. Actually I was surprised this was still a thing; I remember first hearing about sovereign citizens a decade or so ago, where there was some kind of feature journalism piece where they followed one around, and he actually came off as rather articulate and well-read in relevant areas (law, civics, etc.) even though he was still a bit kooky, and then I didn’t hear about them for a while.
Anyway, it’s got me wondering what David Friedman or others knowledgeable in anarchist thought think of sovereign citizens.
Not an anarchist, but people of that ilk are so common in our courts that we have a handbook on how to deal with them.
Whoa, really? I wonder how they became so common, and how long that’s been going on.
I used to work for a judge, we got them all the time. Most of them learn about it in prison from as far as I can tell. Its got a lot in common with a get rich scheme, so you can see how it appeals to low-IQ inmates.
Not an anarchist, but on this topic, something to be aware of with sovereign citizen and similar arguments is a lot of the time people didn’t come up with them on their own, but were sold them by someone posing as a tax preparer or whatever. Specifically in the realm of taxes (I know it shows up in other cases in civil-type court) it looks like:
1. your buddy knows a guy who can get you a great refund.
2. said guy pitches you on his scheme, which is about the little-known loophole that you can claim big refunds because something something gold standard something social security or similar.
3. you sign up, pay him money, and he submits your taxes.
4. maybe you get the refund, maybe you don’t, but sooner or later the tax people notice and ask for proof of what’s claimed in the taxes, and maybe ask for their money back plus
5. you go to guy, and he gets you to submit some kind of appeal or whatever, often giving you forms you sign, which are full of pseudolegal gibberish, usually giving you a line about how the taxman trying to get the money back is just a formality and how it ordinarily happens, just wait for the court to vindicate you
6. while the case is working its way through the system, guy disappears, or tries to.
The people who show up in these videos might seem dumb not because they’re the sort of people who come up with wacky legal interpretations – which at least requires reading a few books and so forth – but because they’re the sort of person who get ripped off by the people who come up with the wacky stuff (either believing it or pretending to). Not “sovereign citizens” in the sense of holders of a doctrine or whatever, but rather, people who got it sold to them as a way to save money on their taxes or whatever.
That’s an interesting take, and seems plausible. I wonder how commonly that’s the backstory.
My exposure probably means I would highball the % that were tax-related. Taxes might be an area where it gets used as a scam like that, rather than people in some other legal trouble who read about it and get into it.
Have you read Meads v. Meads? It’s family court, not tax-related; husband shows up and starts doing all sorts of crazy-tax-theory stuff. It gives the judge’s breakdown of the whole thing as background; a bit over the top in places but worth reading.
The fundamental misunderstanding that they have is that they think the law is some kind of fantasy magic system where all you need is the correct incantation. Although there are very rare occasions in small areas of the legal system where a seemingly farfetched result will occur because the law technically requires it, that is far and away the exception and not the rule. In almost all cases judges are not genies that have to give you exactly what you want as long as you phrase it really carefully; most of the time you can’t get that unreasonable thing you want no matter how you phrase it.
It’s definitely an understanding of law as magic. They’re really into true names, as well.
There’s a pretty good fantasy setting somewhere in here. Max Gladstone did “magic as economics” in Three Parts Dead and sequels, and Charlie Stross did “magic as mathematics” in his Laundry books, but I don’t think anyone’s done “magic as law”.
Magic affects someone to the extent the caster knows their true, full name. Revealing larger or smaller parts of your name, or more or less detail (a nickname might give a little bit of name to target, full legal name and they are in your power), would be an important social-rules thing. The more you’re willing to sign a contract with your name, the more of your name you sign it with.
I believe the Bartimaeus trilogy did this, or something very like it.
@nick
one of my favorite book series.
Actually, Three Parts Dead at least (I haven’t read the rest of the series) had magic as contracts.
One important part of real world societies is promises, and promise-breaking on a large scale has disastrous effects.
True names: I’ve noticed that for dealing with computers, sometimes the hardest part is finding the name of the thing your trying to change or get.
I would describe the situation as more as a belief in legal literalism. That is, the belief that judges are required to follow the letter of the law precisely, and if you find some grammatical ambiguity/typo, you win.
The reality is, of course, that actual enforcement of the law is based on a form of soft judicial activism, where tradition, social norms, and not-burning-everything-down prevail.
I mean the general idea isn’t too bad: There are a fair few real incantations that make a big legal difference.
I would never have thought that sending a debt collector a letter , signed for, registered delivery with “I dispute this debt. Only contact me in writing at [this address]” along with some other magic words can, under a lot of circumstances, apparently leave dodgy debt collectors racking up violations fast and can leave people with significant settlements rather than debts under the american system.
But that one’s due to a law specifically written to allow people who may not be legally literate or even particularity literate protection from dodgy companies…
The problem is that they try to invent new magic words rather than picking the ones that have been legally tested and worked.
The legal incantation being necessary and the legal incantation being sufficient are two different things.
If you’re asking for X and the law is generally understood as calling for X, getting the incantation right still makes it easier for judges, etc, to give you X and harder for your adversary(*) to convince the judge that you are a crank who the judge shouldn’t bother listening to. You need to get the incantation right, or you need a charitable judge who is willing to take on some extra work to get you what you deserve.
If you are asking for X and the law is generally understood as calling for Not-X, there is no incantation that will help you.
* You have an adversary, who is trying to deny you what the law calls for you to have, or we aren’t having this discussion. And how vigorously the adversary decides to push the fight, depends on the expected cost and likelihood of victory, which depends in part on whether you can get the incantations right.
That’s a great post, Brad. I hadn’t thought of it that way, but I love it.
Is “I feel unsafe” something of an effective incantation in the realm of college administrators? Something they are bound to at least seriously investigate even if it doesn’t make a ton of sense in the context; or is that overblown?
That’s a good point.
There are definitely some valid incantations in the world of law, in that once you say something, you may trigger an actual legal consequence – “I accept your offer” or “I reject your offer” are some classic examples from contracts case in law school. Both have very specific consequences, and there are many others. “You are hereby on notice of a potential lawsuit and have an obligation to preserve relevant documents and records” is another, but those mainly deal with decisions by the speaker or issues of notice to the hearer.
As Brad points out, the goofy thing about the Sovereign Citizens is that they have a Gnostic belief in the law – that there are secret legal rules that apply, but only if you know them and say them.
Is it goofy to explicitly say “I am asserting my right to remain silent” versus just (temporarily) remaining silent? Are they foolish for believing that there is a significant legal difference between the colloquially equivalent sentences “I want to speak to a lawyer” and “I think I should speak to a lawyer”?
I’m not well versed in legal matters, but I’ve been lead to believe that there are quite a few cases that have turned on the exact phrasing of these two. Am I wrong? If not, how is someone under the sway of a charlatan selling Sovereign Citizen nonsense supposed to know which part is junk is which part is real?
@nkurz
The catch is that the magic words matter when the judges want them to matter. And even then, there’s so many that you’ll NEVER get them all right, so they end up just being an excuse. You can’t control the system that way; the technicalities are merely an excuse for the system to reach the desired results.
As I told a cousin once who seemed to be falling under the sway of this nonsense, if it’s telling you that you can avoid taxes, it’s junk and you will end up in jail. So in that regard, it’s basically the same rules as avoiding any other scam – if it seems too good to be true (i.e. free money) then it probably is.
You’re not wrong that cases have turned on how one asks for a lawyer, although the media pretty badly misreported one such case (State of La. v. Demesne, I think). The defendant conditionally said he should perhaps get a lawyer (something like “if you think I did it, then I should stop talking and you should get me a lawyer, dawg”). In right-to-counsel litigation, the request must be unequivocal, not conditional. The media misreported the Louisiana court as holding that the request was ambiguous because it referred to a “lawyer dog” instead of a lawyer. That wasn’t it; it was ambiguous because the request was conditional (“if you think I did it, then…”) instead of unequivocal. Helpful analysis here at WaPo.
I seem to recall reading sometime that a libertarian organization was distributing cards with simple rules for police encounters. “I do not consent to any searches” was on there, I think; “If I am not under arrest, I am leaving. Am I under arrest?” or something like it may have been on there (“am I being detained”-shouting guy sounds like somebody thought it had more significance than it did). “I refuse to answer any questions and I demand to talk to my lawyer” is always a good talismanic phrase to repeat until such time as you are, in fact, given a lawyer.
@nkurz – that is a very good point, but I’d lean on the “Gnostic” and “secret” parts.
In many other cases: “I request asylum,” “I wish to speak to my lawyer,” “I do not consent to any search,” etc., a clear expression of intent is important, and there are “magic words” that can express that intent specifically and unambiguously but (a) there is no secret and (b) at bottom, it’s not the specific words that matter, it’s just that those words are accepted as unambiguous statements of the underlying intent.
The Washington Post was being overly charitable to the court.
However, that was not the court’s decision; that was a concurring opinion.
The actual decision was that he didn’t make the magic incantations in the _right order_ to _the right daemons_
J Mann
Exactly phrasing almost never matters. There are a bunch of lawyers that for some bizarre reason think you need to write “Comes now the Plaintiff”. No one ever has to, or should, write that.
In contract law the standard is objective manifestation of intent to be bound. “I accept your offer” works, but it isn’t the only possible phrasing that works.
It is true that there are these fourth amendment cases where exactly what the defendant said makes a big difference but courts are at least pretending to try to understand what the defendant meant (i.e. I want a lawyer vs thinking out loud about maybe needing a lawyer). I can’t think of any case where the judges or justices agreed that a statement unambiguously meant to invoke one of the Miranda rights but ruled against the plaintiff anyway because it wasn’t the exact formulation courts had suggested in prior cases.
I don’t know. It’s a long time since I was in college and I’m very unwilling to take the third and fourth hand reports I see e.g. here about what is and isn’t pervasive there at face value.
Likewise, but if true, it is an example of where legal language has become somewhat talismanic. Maybe due to overlapping but unclear jurisdictions, or maybe due to administrators actually wanting to push in those directions and using the law as an excuse. Admittedly I wouldn’t want to take on more responsibility for policing student interpersonal relations in their shoes, but it could be done by some with intentions of righting genuine wrongs.
@Randy M:
There’s something of a difference between “talismanic” and “legally fraught.” Certain phrases are red flags because they invoke specific statutory or evidentiary standards, and thus set off warning bells about potential plaintiffs and liability. For example, in the case of colleges, while I’m no expert in this area, I believe Title IX creates a cause of action when there is “harassment” that creates a “hostile environment” and the school knows but does not remedy it. The phrase “I do not feel safe” is very much on-the-nose for setting up a potential plaintiff’s future case that the school knew of a “hostile environment.” Thus, when schools hear it, their liability radar is pinged – do something, this is a potential plaintiff.
This is a little different from examples like “I accept your offer,” which are basically actions with legal effect, which I consider a closer match for “talismanic.” I suspect a lot of seemingly talismanic language arises because the plaintiff’s bar likes to be able to plead things to a court like “School A was explicitly notified on [date] that the plaintiff did not feel safe in the hostile environment. School A took no action.”
To steal a line from some commenter on Sailer’s blog awhile back: Protesters yell that they feel unsafe while bashing you for the same reasons policemen yell “stop resisting” while bashing you. (Though the magical incantation is more likely to work out for the cops.)
If you haven’t read it, the opinion on Meads v Meads is a magisterial look at the Sovereign Citizen movement (and associated ilk) at the time of the writing (2012). The judge basically turned the thing into a short book (or perhaps a long paper) on what on Earth Sovereign citizens are and what they say and do, and why, in order to give a judgment in a case where the defendant used Sovereign Citizen arguments. It’s from a Canadian court, but it covers similar American groups, and both legal systems share the general principles that, e.g., you have to follow the laws and there’s no magic incantation you can say that gets you out of paying taxes. It’s a great read.
Link: https://www.canlii.org/en/ab/abqb/doc/2012/2012abqb571/2012abqb571.html
That was a great read, thank you.
I had to do a double take when, in the midst of the nonsensical “legal documents” he submitted to the court, he sent a “court order” to a bank ordering them to send him $100 BILLION in precious metals. There is a fine line between “naive individual hoodwinked into thinking he can loophole his way out of a legal situation” and “ignorant enough to think the bank will just give him $100 billion if he asks the right way.”
I do like the ones where the guy just keeps yelling “AM I BEING DETAINED?!?” and the cop keeps saying “yes. Yes you’re being detained.”
I think I’m losing my memory and I want to do an experiment to test this. I’ve got two goals: to find out how my memory stack up against average, and then to see whether it’s getting worse.
Personal context:
I’m in my mid twenties, and since my late teens I’ve felt I had poor long term memory compared to others. Among other things, I don’t recall a number of important stories from my childhood that others feel I should, there are entire papers from my degree that I got good grades in from which now I can’t remember the fundamental concepts from and recently I couldn’t remember without help what I did to celebrate new years a year ago. I worry it may be getting worse (I’ve had multiple concussions in the past few years)
How would you design an experiment to test this? I’ve got some ideas but I don’t want to share them in case it anchors people’s thinking.
If you’re serious about this you should probably start by seeing a neurologist or something.
Seconded. Investigating cognitive decline is hard, but fortunately there is quite an edifice of knowledge on the topic, and professionals who study it for years to practice it for decades. Plan A is definitely to see a doctor.
Plus those professionals have MRI machines, which might be useful in proving or disproving various hypotheses.
I want to do this eventually, however it would be great to substantiate my thoughts before spending the amount of money to see a neurologist. I’m going to bring it up with my GP next week to see if she has any low hanging fruit ideas that won’t constitute a significant financial hit.
I don’t know anything about an experiment to test, but this is my history with my memory.
When I was in high school (probably earlier high school), I rarely had to write anything down to remember it (specifically a TODO or something of that nature, or an event like you describe). In my twenties, while in college, I noticed I had to start writing things down to remember them. Now that I am in my later 20s I have a hard time even recalling things from a couple of days ago (uneventful things, but still). I could definitely see myself in your boat where I would forget something “eventful” from a year ago.
The only major co-founder I can think of is that I am a lot more sedentary now than I was in high school or college, but I had noticed this decline while in college. I assume it is just age but maybe I am wrong.
That’s a part of why I haven’t sort professional help yet. It could be age and a natural decline, it could be a sort of fading affect bias regarding my memory in my teens, it could also be a growing anxiety about my memory causing me to notice it more and interpret forgetfulness differently.
All this is why I want some data to scope out the extent of the problem before I invest in any interventions.
With regard to writing, I have thought to start keeping a journal to try and record life events etc. Even the act of writing things down may help me to keep the common thread of things.
Given you mention concussions, in your place I would follow up with a specialist.
I think this would be an excellent thing to do to both measure and mitigate the problem, and have personally intended to do it many times. :/
Also consider the possibility that you remember as well as other people–but fail to unconsciously fill in the blanks with plausible sounding details that make you look good. The eye and the brain–two organs that wash themselves.
This is an issue I’m having with my experimental design. An idea I had was to track how I remembered various topics e.g. What did you have for lunch this time last week? However if there’s no way to verify it then my confidence in the matter could just be my brain filling in blanks.
As an additional complexity, if I was to try and track some data for verification use then the act of tracking and even just knowing that it’s something that is being tracked may affect how I remember it.
My current thoughts are to write a program that shows me random images of animals from a large set. I do this on a regular basis (weekly?) and I select whether I believe I’ve seen the image before. This is basically an adaptation of short term memory tests I’ve seen online.
I remember seeing an article about how the advent of various recording technologies seemed to make people’s memories worse, but really just shifted the thing their memory was prioritizing. Instead of remembering phone numbers, they would better remember the navigation path to get to the contact list.
So in starting to write things down, your memory about those things will likely get worse, but your memory for where you left the list will get better.
Counteracting this is basically the flash card approach: reviewing the thing to be remembered to reinforce the neural pathways.
I may not remember the details of a vacation because I know there are a bunch of photos archiving it and I know where those photos are, but I’ll remember the trip even better if I’m frequently reviewing said photos/video afterwards.
Reviewing eventful details is a valid strategy. One of the things I’m coming up against though is forgetting smaller things is often more stressful. Things such as a work process I haven’t gone through for a few weeks or what happened earlier in a book that I’ve put down over a busy week. It’s not worth reviewing those.
I started going through a similar decline, especially forgetting names… but then I moved out of the small damp basement flat I was in, into a larger flat above ground with high ceilings and lots of airspace, and the problem almost completely disappeared. I wondered whether I was being poisoned by something.
Could your result have to do with either:
a. Light exposure (perhaps mediated through vitamin D or depression/circadian rhythms)?
b. A mold allergy keeping you constantly in some kind of inflamed/crappy-feeling state? (If you have some asthma, this could easily screw up your sleep. Or allergies could clog your nose, messing up your sleep.).
A reversible environmental cause would be such a relief to me. I should look into common environmental poisons and test for them. Thanks for the tip!
Scott had a few posts about CO2 accumulation a month or two back that are probably worth reading. (Although, somewhat ironically, I don’t remember many details.)
@albatross11
I think it was most likely b. I started having a skin problem when I stayed in that flat and it’s gradually cleared up after leaving.
This was a place where once, when the outside drain was blocked, water piled up against the frontroom windows because there was a semicircular area below ground level where it could collect if the drain was blocked.
Glad I got out of there.