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Hi all,
Tried to post this previously, but can’t seem to find the post. (Maybe put it in the wrong thread by accident?)
Anyway, reading gwern’s attempt to have GPT-2 write poetry got me excited, and I want to try it myself. I have a large corpus of texts I want to train GPT-2 to imitate. I have gwern’s post explaining what he did. I’ve never done any programming before; what do I need to do next?
What is your operating system? Windows?
It seems conservatives here feel insecure that they might be fired for their political beliefs. I think the problem might be a little out of proportion to the actual risk (in the same way liberals might feel about police shootings). But I mostly sympathize.
At least until I started reading the comments of the gay rites article. Where some of you folks are coming off as wildly hypocritical.
Now I grew up with religious conservatives in the 90-00s, where you obviously had a god given right to fire gay people (obviously conservatives aren’t some homogeneous group). A lot of that time they had control of policy that was happy for people to be fired if they were gay.
So how many years ago did you think the number of people fired for being gay equals the number of people fired for being conservative. My uninformed guess is maybe 2018, or perhaps we still haven’t hit break even.
Who?
If you search sjw you will find the most cringy threads, from my perspective
…that might apply to the entire internet now that I think about it
Seven matches, and most of them are complaining about anti-SJW sentiment. There’s Alex M’s post, which is a bit of a rant, but I’m not seeing any hypocrisy there, just vitriol.
I think you’re gonna have to do a little more legwork here.
If you scroll up in those threads
I got pretty bothered by a lot of those comments in the thread, but wish I had phased my comment more politely.
I’m asking because it’s important to have examples to know if it is actual hypocrisy, outgroup homogeneity biases (ie, different people pushing different standards both being taken to be representative of the same group), or positions that are actually different when the context is accounted for.
I did try to hedge with some weasle words. But point taken.
What if I am neither gay nor conservative but think both mindsets were wrong?
What if I think two wrongs don’t make a right?
I can recognize salami tactics even if I’m not on the list.
Like you think everyone should be at will? I can respect the consistency there.
Is there anyone getting fired for being gay? You’d think if somebody got fired for being gay in 2018, or 2013 or 2003 for that matter it’d be all over the news, with protests and boycotts and screaming. Left journos should be hungry to report that kind of thing. But The Federalist went looking for likely cases and found basically nothing, but a lot of misrepresentations by journos. i.e., cases where a teacher was teaching gay stuff in classes that had nothing to do with sexuality, the administration says “knock it off” and the media reports this as some kind of persecution. Pretty sure if I started teaching the Catholic catechism in math class and the administration told me to stick to algebra, nobody would say I was “punished for being Catholic.”
There was a case recently in the news where the Indianapolis archdiocese instructed a local high school not to renew a teacher’s contract because he had entered a same-sex marriage. The reasoning is that a teacher, like several other kinds of employees of a religious institution, acts as a public minister, hence it’s permissible to require them to publicly abide by the morals of the church they are ministering for; naturally, the media cast this as ‘Catholic school fires teacher for being gay.’ As I understand it they are within their rights per Hosanna Tabor v EEOC, but it still generates controversy—especially because many folks think firing a teacher for entering a same sex marriage is effectively the same as firing the teacher for being gay.
But how about anything that’s not a religious institution firing someone for failing to adhere to the religion? Secular stuff. Like the manager of a department store saying “no gays allowed” and firing a cashier for being gay?
Yeah, I haven’t heard of anything like that.
If you live somewhere progressive, your employer is probably smart enough to not be honest about why they fired you, as they fear repercussions. If you don’t, you may not feel comfortable announcing that you were fired for being gay, because you still need to go find another job in a town where homophobia is common enough that your last boss felt comfortable firing you for being gay. It’s nice that a lot more people are in the former position than the latter nowadays, but neither situation leads to the kind of viral stories you’re imagining.
That pizza place that refused to serve gay weddings, resulting in national attention and a flood of threats and bad Yelp reviews was in Walkerton, Indiana, population 2144. I’m not sold on the idea that there’s places too out of the way or too insular to escape the baleful gaze of the All Seeing Eye of Gay Sauron should they run afoul of his will.
If you know somebody who gets fired for being gay in some small homophobic town, just tell them to tweet about it and set up a GoFundMe and they’ll be showered with cash and praise and whisked away to the coasts, Grand Marshall of next year’s SF Pride parade.
This works both ways though, doesn’t it?
I’m not worried that if I put a Trump sticker on my car, my boss is going to see it and call me into his office and say “You are fired because you support Trump and we don’t tolerate that sort of evil around here.”
I’m worried that if I put a Trump sticker on my car, any one of hundreds of people with more power/influence than me will see it, and start digging for some random totally legal and non-controversial excuse to fire me, or maybe even just to ensure I don’t promote any further.
Even in edge cases like James Damore, I’m pretty sure Google’s official position is not “We fired this guy for wrongthink” but rather “We fired him for repeated violations of our equal opportunity and harassment policy” or something like that.
I don’t disagree that what you’re describing is now the norm. The phenomenon of a business with a “no gays need apply” sign in the window might now be nonexistent, at least in the US. But it doesn’t follow that no one gets fired for being gay.
A more typical scenario would be: pizza shop employee’s boss discovers he’s gay, the owner kinda tries to ignore it but finds it uncomfortable to work with a gay guy, and eventually lets him go. The fired employee calls Buzzfeed and claims to have been fired for being gay, and when they talk to the owner he says, “What, Gary’s gay? I let him go because winter’s the slow season.” Do you doubt that happens? You of all people ought not to need convincing that a lot of people still hold strongly negative opinions about gay people. Presuming Gary isn’t a Twitter celebrity in his spare time, why would you ever hear about him getting fired?
I think this is an exaggeration, but not wholly wrong. For example, I will totally concede that, when someone is a dick about politics, bringing it up in inappropriate work situations and making people around them uncomfortable, they’re a lot more likely to get fired if they’re on the right than on the left right now. And I will also concede that if you’re living somewhere generally progressive and you put a Trump sticker on your car, the people who see it will be surprised and will re-evaluate how they feel about you and maybe not invite you to their BBQ. (But I also think that would be true of any sufficiently unpopular view. “I don’t get why Michael Vick was so bad, they’re just dogs” would go over a lot worse.)
@dick
I think it is even reasonably plausible that someone fired for being gay wouldn’t even know that was the reason (or wouldn’t be certain). Gary might believe the “slow season” story himself (or, rather than slow season, as penalty for some minor, usually not fireable but not totally unreasonable offense). Heck, it wouldn’t surprise me if there were cases of men being fired for being gay who aren’t even really gay (the boss may have concluded they were gay based on [bad heuristic] and acted upon that).
Yes, I doubt that happens. The vast majority of people do not care about gays.
Attitudes like this are why I think this doesn’t happen, but SocJus-oriented people assume it must be going on all the time. They cannot fathom that someone who’s not just enraptured with the majesty and glory of all things homosexual therefore holds “strongly negative opinions about gay people.” Clapping for Stalin for a reasonable 5 minutes instead of 30 does not mean one holds strongly negative feelings about Stalin.
If this happens, show me the proof. Something. But when all you’ve got is mind reading and you’ve already demonstrated you’re not good at reading minds…
Edited to be more substantive: I was implying that your posting history and attitude demonstrates that you have read enough to be aware that a lot of people dislike gays enough to fire them, not that you personally would do it.
Yes, we’ve been over this a million times. I get accused of being “anti-gay.” I say no, and list all the ways in which I am pro-gay, or gay-indifferent, with the one caveat I don’t want my kids exposed to their propaganda. Failure to propagandize gay stuff to my kids therefore makes me a raging homophobe. We go back and forth for 47 posts until everyone gets exasperated.
Your evidence for “people would fire gays for being gays” is the existence of people like me. Which reminds me, I’m due for a haircut and need to call the gay man who’s been my hairstylist for the last 15 years. You have a failure to model. If you’re modeling me wrong, and I know you’re modeling me wrong because I can read my own mind better than you can, I have little confidence in your ability to model your small town pizza shop guy.
That’s not what I meant, see the edit above. It turns out you’re not such a great mind-reader either.
But for the record, I don’t need to read minds to know that people get fired for being gay. That was adequately proven by the decades or centuries for which it was done openly. Your position is that it no longer happens. That’s the position that requires mind-reading.
Perhaps, instead of mind reading, we could look at the relative difficulty gay vs. straight people have in finding and retaining work. I don’t know what the statistics there would end up looking like, but I’m pretty sure someone must have collected them?
It would at least give us something concrete to talk about.
I don’t think it’s realistic to have a good statistic on this, since it is definitionally something that people lie about. I would expect most people that fire someone for being gay to lie about it, and as acymetric pointed out, in some cases the person getting fired for being gay won’t know it.
I’m not even committed to the idea that getting fired for being gay is common. It definitely was once, and it’s still legal, but I would assume it’s much rarer than it used to be, and it might be quite rare in absolute terms. The thing I am arguing against is the idea that the rarity of “gay guy gets fired, outrage ensues” news stories is evidence that it no longer happens. That would be the expected outcome today, even if it was still comparatively common.
Didn’t the rationalists used to have a saying about absence of evidence?edit: eh, that’s kind of rude of me.
If stories like that are harder to come up with, that is evidence that those events are less frequent.
I don’t think anyone here will argue about any social interaction happening or not happening “at all” or ever or always, right?
@dick
I think he was suggesting to essentially look at employment numbers for straight vs. gay to see if gay people are disproportionately unemployed (rather than looking at actual stats on firing people for being gay), which might be evidence for gay people being fired for their orientation. It wouldn’t really be conclusive because there would be all kinds of confounding stuff going on with that data, but I suppose it would be something.
The person that gets fired for being gay is still fired. If this is a serious concern, then it should show up in employment statistics when they’re broken down by sexual orientation. It would be tricky to do a good job of picking out the signal because there’s all sorts of confounders (out gay people are more urban and lean younger, to name two), but I don’t think it’s insurmountably tricky.
I don’t disagree in theory, and only disagree in practice because of assumptions about how rare this is and how poor the data would be. Even if we knew exactly how many people got fired for being gay last year, I’m guessing that number would be smaller than the error bar on “how many gay people are there?”.
Yes, which is why I said that I agree it is much less common for employers to admit that they’re firing someone for being gay. Whether they are lying about it and getting away with it is not something you can deduce from the news.
@ Conrad, Randy
That article is bad and Chad should feel bad – the eponymous “numbers” are decidedly lacking in context needed to actually support the thesis. Glancing though the wider EEOC tables, the LGBT discrimination data is in fact right there in line with a variety of other characteristics. Making the case that it shows nobody need worry about employer discrimination for being gay means making the same case about age, race, gender, nationality, religion, or pregnancy. Or about sexual harassment, for that matter. The Federalist might be ready (eager!) to bite that bullet, but it’s a somewhat larger claim than was first presented.
There’s probably a snarkier shot to be made about an article promoting statistical illiteracy followed by a series of unrepresentative profiles, but I don’t think I could nail the wording without coming across as catty.
And that’s the problem with the hyperbole – is the claim falsified by one example? Ten? A hundred, a thousand, ten thousand? How many orders of magnitude are we sweeping under the rug? How much injustice are we ready to round to zero?
Dan, I don’t understand what you think is wrong with the article. You claim “statistical illiteracy” but it looks to me like the following statements are true:
1) There are few claims (only about 2000).
2) The overwhelming majority are found to have no basis.
You then claim the profiles are “unrepresentative.” Can you please show me the representative profiles? Where are the people fired for gay, or who claim to be fired for gay even if they can’t prove it?
I don’t know, but I would like to see at least one that doesn’t involve a religious institution. You guys are the ones claiming this is a problem. Show me a single example in this nation of 300 million people in the last decade.
I really don’t think this is a thing that happens. At every place I’ve ever worked, mostly in Red areas, I’m pretty sure if employee Bill said “employee Jim is gay, he should get fired!” Bill would be shown the door, not Jim.
You may have missed my other post,
How do you explain don’t ask don’t tell?
Also what do you think, as a percentage of all firings are attributable to being gay or being conservative.
“Military is weird.” Also DADT is over. And the very nature of DADT is “we don’t want to fire you for gay, so we won’t ask and you don’t tell us.” If they wanted to get rid of gay soldiers it would be called “Must Ask, Must Tell.”
Where is the evidence people want to unemploy homosexuals, and are doing it?
But the implication of DADT is that if you do tell you’re going to be gone. And yeah DADT is over but it hasn’t been that long since it was in place.
I just think it’s kind of dodge to be talking about anti-gay bias or hatred in employment in society and then switch over to specific military policies meant to address unit readiness and cohesion, made with the context of “we need to make sure we fight and win wars and so we have to be extra conservative about stuff.” The military is its own thing, with its own culture and rules and far more stringent behavior requirements than civil society. Like if we’re talking about ableism and the ADA and you bring up the military rejecting you for flat feet. Yeah, it’s the military. And war. It’s a different animal than society at large.
@ Conrad:
The figures cited to substantiate this lack context, presumably because context is detrimental to the claim. Looking at the EEOC data (easiest to cross-compare) puts LGBT issues in the same tier as other generally-acknowledged live issues:
1) 2016 LGBT-based sex discrimination charges were resolved in FY2017. Compare against 3997 religion-based, and 34229 race-based. It is far from obvious that a given LGBT individual has less to worry about than someone from a protected class.
2) The 83% quoted for LGBT charges appears to be a combination of the “No Reasonable Cause” and “Administrative Closure categories*. For religion and race again, the same sums were 87% and 88% respectively. Dismissing the first alone is an obvious isolated demand for rigor.
*I’ll echo others about no evidence found not equalling no evidence exists. Plus, it’s an overcount to include the entire administrative category – only a subset would qualify as the former, even. Both issues are mitigated by comparing across categories.
I’m seriously ticked that the author went so far as to link the Lambda Legal docket, then addressed precisely zero of those cases. That is a sign you are being Chinese Robber’ed.
Speaking of Lambda, maybe you’ve heard of Zarda v. Altitude Express? SCOTUS granted cert a few months ago.
As alluded to below by markl, the last full year of DADT falls within your window – that’s a few hundred right there. Quite a few more from the EEOC too, of course. Throw in a few more sources and I’m not certain I could find 10k since 2003, but I bet I’d at least get close.
Perhaps you should consider that members of other protected classes also don’t have much to fear either? Perhaps very few people are getting fired for immutable characteristics. Perhaps the United States is not full of hate monsters itching to fire gays, women and PoC for their gayness, femaleness and PoCness.
Probably because we don’t have the other side of the story in those cases, but okay, I’ll look at them. There are currently five. One is about a transgender person and another is about HIV status, not sexual orientation. The other three are related to sexual orientation, but right now we don’t know the defendants’ sides of the story because the courts are arguing over whether or not sexual orientation counts as a protected class. And the earliest incident was Zarda in 2010.
So in the past nine years in the nation of 330 million people, about 6.6 million – 13.2 million of whom are gay, we’ve got maybe three cases of “fired for gay.” And I really don’t think this is a case of “there’s so many more who don’t come forward.” Lawyers and gay rights advocates and lefty journos are hungry for this stuff.
Abraham bargained God down to sparing Sodom and Gomorrah for the sake of 10 righteous men. I don’t see the need to condemn American society for the perhaps bigotry of three employers over a ~10 year period. I’m pretty sure we can round this one down to “not a problem.”
So to answer markl’s question,
I guess if you count DADT then 2011 maybe, but if not…I don’t know. Sometime in the 80s or early 90s maybe? “Fired for gay” just doesn’t really happen. This is rounding error stuff. Like chance of getting killed by bathtubs or deer or something level. This is not in any way a subject that should be occupying anyone’s time or attention.
People who fire people for being gay are incentivized to lie about it, people who get killed by bathtubs are not. If you don’t think it happens, great, I’m glad we’ve made so much progress in your opinion, but stop gloating about the lack of evidence like it’s proof. This tedious charade of obtuseness is not fooling anyone.
Yes, but people who are fired are doubly+ incentivized to lie about why they were fired. This is why every protected class employment law has the opposite effect and instead causes employers to veer more towards only hiring unprotected persons.
@Clutzy
It’s basic ego protection: “I wasn’t fired for being an asshole/incompetent/etc, but for being awesome in a way that my boss hates.”
And these argumens don’t apply to conservatives getting fired because?
It’s not a charade, and I’m not being obtuse. If people were getting fired for being gay we’d be hearing about it because the media and the gay lobby would be flogging it hard.
markl,
People that we know of who get fired or threatened for their conservative (or non-left opinions) are made explicitly aware that this is why they’re being targeted. No one accused James Damore of being a bad programmer. No one thinks Brett Weinstein was run off campus for being a bad teacher. Nobody calling for Jordan Peterson to be fired thought he was doing a bad job teaching psychology. Nobody accused Brendan Eich of being bad at software development*.
It seems odd to argue that conservatives aren’t getting fired for their opinions when they’re explicitly told the reason people don’t want them employed anymore is because of their political opinions, but gays are being fired for being gay but it’s all done in secret. Of course, my suspicion that you’re engaged in motivated reasoning is all a charade of obtuseness, I secretly know you’re right and I’m lying because I’m evil.
* Okay I will accuse Brendan Eich of being bad at software. JavaScript is f–cking terrible.
The trouble is, merely holding non-progressive politics is defined as bigotry which is held as sufficient to be ground for firing. “You think men and women are different? That’s sexism, and it’s creating a hostile work environment.” They would probably declaim in all those cases that anyone was fired or reprimanded for any political reason; they were just trying to prevent anyone working there that ‘lacked basic human decency’ and so on.
The other asymmetry is that bringing up conservative beliefs is ‘injecting politics into the workplace where it doesn’t belong’; on the other hand, in cases such as valuing diversity, opposing climate change, and so on, progressive politics is often corporate policy.
(I’m bringing this up to partially refute Conrad’s point that people are explicitly being fired for opinions, even if that is the implicit goal, though I’m not coming down as being in favor of legal protections necessarily)
@Conrad Honcho
Javascript is indeed f#$%ing terrible, but in fairness, it’s a compromise language. It was supposed to be functional, but we got dynamically typed prototype-based object orientation instead. Seriously, f#$% Javascript.
ETA: @Randy M
Description of the problem endorsed. One thing I’d add: it would be nice if folks stopped claiming “men and women are different” constitutes a hostile work environment, but that doesn’t say anything about whether companies should be screamingly in favor of diversity and all, or whether the government should be encouraging this or doing the same in its own workplaces. This is another example of how liberalism doesn’t seem to live up to its pretensions to neutrality.
Well, first off, grats on winning the “SSC Hyperpedantic Post of the Week” award. What will you do with the prize money?
“We’re not firing you for your opinion, we’re firing you for having your opinion here.”
I think if someone said, “look, we’re not firing you for being gay, we’re firing you for gaying the whole place up in gay ways that scare the straights” we would consider that “fired for being gay.”
Sweet, let me know when the finals are, I think if get the annual prize that’s going on the CV, but if I can raise a nit-pick here, if you want to refute the argument for firing Damore or Eich or similar offenses, you need to be able to properly articulate it, not just to (correctly) see the underlying motivation.
They’re not going to say that; they’re going to say “You created a hostile work environment for gays when you declined to festoon yourself in rainbow for the summer” or whatever.
Yeah, but look at Zarda v. Altitude Express. They didn’t fire him “for being gay.” They fired him for making a customer uncomfortable. Zarda said “uncomfortable because of gayness” but the employer will probably argue “uncomfortable because of unwanted touching.”
The method for firing is almost never “for thing” but “for making people uncomfortable by being/saying thing.”
Seriously? I didn’t win for that correction about Chico, California? Man, this thing is rigged.
ETA:
I think at this point you and Randy are in violent agreement.
@Nick
As the victim of that correction, I don’t think that counts as pedantic so much as it was just a flat correction of a terrible misread.
So far you have dismissed stronger evidence of gay employment descrimination than you have provided for conservative descimenation.
We’ve provided concrete evidence for an estimate of 10k of people getting fired for being gay this decade. Down thread someone produced weaker evidence that 800 people thad been fired for conservative bias.
But that the arguments are exactly the same is the thing at is driving me nuts.
For example:
“we’ve got maybe three cases of …”
Then like 2 posts later, gives “maybe 3 examples” examples of people being fired for being conservative.
If you want to say conservative AND gay people shouldn’t be fired I have no problem with this, more than 1 thing can be bad. But you have given no good evedence that it is a worse problem.
Where’s the evidence of 10,000? Dan L mentioned a 10k number, but he thought he couldn’t get there, and since 2003, I assume also including DADT, which both ended in 2011 and I think is questionable because military.
If there’s 10,000, where’s all the lawsuits? Where’s the media coverage? It’s not like the media would bury it or something. A pizza parlor in a tiny town of ~2000 people says “no gay weddings” and that’s national news. Where are all the sob stories of people fired for being gay? Why aren’t they being interviewed on 20/20 or on The View to tell everyone how horribly hurt they were when they were fired from the job they loved just because they were gay?
I don’t think people should be fired for being gay (except extremely specific circumstances like religious institutions). I don’t think people should be fired for political opinions (except certain circumstances like working for a political campaign when you actually support their opponent, or certain extremely niche occupations like “PR spokesperson” and you start heiling Hitler or something). But I do not see any evidence that anyone is getting fired for being gay at a rate more common than people getting crushed to death by vending machines or something equally fantastically improbable.
I think there might have been a typeo where 2003 was meant to be 2013. If you go back to 2003 you get over 5k from DADT alone (did you read the wiki page?)
There are obvious over AND under reporting issues, so I’m happy to fudge things any way you want , as long as you do the same with the conservative fireing statistics (which people have yet to present).
As to why you don’t see this in the news, there are like 20,000,000 fireing events in a year. In a gay Utopia you would figure there are still 100s of people being fired for being gay.
Things that happen that frequently arn’t news. It’ss the same reason you don’t see a news story everytime a drunk driver kills someone.
You’re pulling the 10K number out of the air. EEOC numbers about LGBT sex-based discrimination are not equivalent to LGBT-based firing; these numbers could as easily be caused by an LGBT person complaining that one of their coworkers said “fag”.
The obtuse part is ignoring the fact that no one actually notifies the media and the gay lobby when they fire a gay guy.
Oh, I would assume people get fired for being conservative that we don’t hear about too. For the most part, you can fire anyone you like in America. In a strong hiring climate, “unpleasant to be around” is a firing offense. And the evidence suggests there are plenty of people who find gays unpleasant to be around, just like right-wingers, left-wingers, hippies, gun nuts, etc.
Also, I like programming in Javascript! It’s fun, un-cumbersome, casual and perfectly appropriate for smallish projects. And putting JSON inline in code is way more readable than having to serialize and deserialize stuff. So nyaaah!
@ Conrad et al.
Flat feet gets you rejected if it’s symptomatic. Being gay, not so much. The military absolutely counts, even before we notice the conspicuous failure of unit cohesion to dissolve in 2010. It was only ever a shitty excuse and we ought to recognize it as such.
More hyperbole aside, this is what I was referring to as biting the bullet – I can see why the argument appeals to paleocons and certain strains of libertarians, but you have to acknowledge it’s a much wider claim. If you are willing to endorse the statement “I really don’t think [sexual harassment in the workplace] is a thing that happens. I’m pretty sure we can round this one down to ‘not a problem'” I will give you points for consistency. Anything less, and the greater part of the statistical argument disappears in a puff of special pleading.
First off, this is the cleanest attempt to shift the goalposts I’ve seen in a while. I consider the challenge met, and protestations to the contrary in bad faith – shouldn’t have set the bar so low!
Second, it’s really important to emphasize that I’ve only cited cases that were referenced in your source. This is not a case of “the claims did not penetrate my filter”, this is a case of “the claims were right in front of me and I’ didn’t notice”.
There are good reasons why the most virtuous cases would not be the the most prominent. But we aren’t even at that level yet.
I demand a recount.
Quoted for agreement, and relatedly:
I’m seriously confused about which decade in which Discrimination Was Solved. One can’t protest an example from nine years ago and also claim this hasn’t been a live issue for more than a generation.
10k since 2003 came from a combination of Conrad’s incredulity that the news wouldn’t have covered the issue since that date, and my comment regarding orders of magnitude. I’m willing to show my best attempt to someone who admits that their quantitative declarations should be expected to be off by four orders of magnitude. And at that point, I think my goal has been accomplished regardless of the final tally.
(And yeah, DADT is an easy 4.7k.)
I retract everything. Leviticus was too merciful for the likes of this.
I was gone all weekend and couldn’t respond, and now I don’t know if anyone will see this and we should either move it to a more recent open thread or just let it die, but:
@Dan L
No, I think sexual harassment is still a problem. I would say “people getting fired for race/sex/orientation” is not a problem.
I fully concede that I was dumb to have said or implied “fired for gay” is something that never happens. I gingerly nudge the goalposts towards “it’s something so rare as to not be an issue worthy of consideration.” Maybe somewhere in this vast country a man named “Conrad” just got fired for being named Conrad, and his boss didn’t like that. But if I were to come here and say I’m terrified of losing my job because of anti-Conrad bigotry, you would rightly dismiss me.
Whenever it was that the left won the culture war. So, 90s, early 2000s maybe? “Fired for immutable characteristics” is shocking to the conscience of essentially everyone and Is Not Done. It is so Not Done that it is expressly against the written rules of essentially every company large enough to have written rules. It is so Not Done that even expressing the sort of opinions that might make one think a person was of the type who might do the Not Done thing is grounds for dismissal.
My company is of modest size. Certainly not Fortune 500. But we do peer interviewing for new hires, and I’ve taken the training course on the giant list of things we may not consider in hiring. We’re not even allowed to ask if someone is one of these things during the interview process. This includes being married, being unmarried, being a foreigner, being native born, being gay or being straight.
On the other hand, the largest companies in the world, like Google, have written policies that expressly forbid saying conservative-sounding things like “men and women are different, and on average have different preferences.” And they act on this, by firing real people we can name, like James Damore.
@dick
Except the gay guy knows that he was gainfully employed with good reviews, then he casually mentioned going out with his boyfriend to his boss, and the next week he was fired for reasons that do not jive with reality. The guy is gay, not stupid, can probably put 2 and 2 together and complain about it. It’s not like SJ-types are well-known for extending charity. Last week we had progressives going off on Nancy Pelosi for being racist because she doesn’t agree with the politics and tactics of POC Congresswomen.
Whether it’s true or not, there’s are strong incentives towards making a stink about allegedly getting fired for being gay. Set up a GoFundMe, tweet the sob story to some gay advocate group or journalist, let the hate train flow against the bigots who fired you, collect some cash, and probably land a new job at some competitor who wants to signal how virtuous they are. That this almost never happens is more indicative that extremely few people are being fired for their sexual orientation, not that the bigots are just super clever at hiding it. Exactly how clever do we assume the sorts of people who would fire someone for being gay are?
I’m all for increasing awareness of this issue so we can maybe figure out if there’s any truth to the claim that “fired for gay” is a regular or probable occurrence. If someone suspects they were fired for their sexual orientation, by all means, make it known so we can get to the bottom of this.
Failing that, I think Nornagest wins the thread with the only actionable suggestion: maybe there’s some way to tease out the truth about hiring and firing of homosexuals by looking at employment rates, dismissal rates, mean time between jobs, that kind of thing for heterosexuals versus homosexuals, adjusted for age, industry, market etc. If we can find data that shows a 25 y/o homosexual man in the [X] industry is Y% more likely to be unemployed than a 25 y/o heterosexual man with similar education and experience, that would indicate the presence of anti-gay bias in the workplace. This sounds like something we need an actual social scientist to do, so if anybody knows any, suggest this to them.
This is not how the world works. If it were, the result would be lots of claims, not a lack of claims. But the lesson here is not that you should check your ideas for internal consistency better, it is (and if I could, I would replace the OT threads’ banner with this in a 72-point blinking marquee) YOUR MENTAL MODEL OF YOUR OUTGROUP IS NOT RELIABLE, THAT’S WHY YOU’RE HERE TALKING TO THEM IN THE FIRST PLACE.
@ Conrad:
I check on old threads from time to time, but it definitely annoys me that SSC is structurally and culturally opposed to dialogues that max at a few days. I’ve hit Reddit’s 6-month limit a few times.
This distinction is not supported by the data cited. The arguments against LGBT discrimination can be mirrored towards sexual harassment.
That’s a fascinating point of disagreement – I’d put the left’s victory around 2010 at the earliest. My impression of the early 2000s is that’s when the left started winning culture war battles, and so bothered to fight more – but the right was still winning far more than it was losing. I’d be interested in finding a way to quantify this.
Do you think sexual orientation is an immutable characteristic? Forgive me, but I thought you expressed reservations about this in past threads.
Firing based on immutable characteristics being a Bad Thing is not the law of the land. It’s an easy moral stance to hold these days (because it’s right, I’d argue) and good corporate policy, but depending on what the characteristic is it can still be completely legal. That’s what the SCOTUS case is about, and frankly I don’t envy their chances with this court.
Damore wasn’t fired for being conservative, he was fired for [being conservative in a way that made coworkers uncomfortable]. In many ways though, I’m comfortable lumping Damore and Zarda’s firings in the same category of thinly-pretextual. Both happened, but are ultimately anecdotes, not data.
@ dick:
To be fair, that’s totally part of my argument.
2003 luaghably impluasable due to don’t ask alone.
Wikipedia lists discharges by year httpss://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don’t_ask,_don’t_tell
Damore seems like a useful example. His beliefs weren’t unusual. The memo was polite enough. And a consensus reaction was “Holy shit you moron, why would you put that into writing? Of course you got fired.”
So, you’re right that it’s unreasonable for conservatives to worry about getting fired for merely being conservative. People aren’t (typically) looking for Trump bumper stickers in the parking lot.
OTOH the ban on expressing conservative ideas is so well-established, and so universally enforced, that you have to be kind of an idiot to run afoul of it.
To give another example (and explain why I think OP is using a bad metric): I just completed my HR compliance training.
The company is extremely clear about the fact that the company respects gender transitions. This is a matter of corporate ethics and also a matter of California law. So I have it in writing that misgendering someone will be considered harassment and will get me fired. Raising questions about the topic, even in a general way, would create a hostile work environment and also get me fired.
Accepting California’s position on gender identify is a documented condition of my employment. “Worrying” about getting fired for deviating from this would be like a priest “worrying” that they’ll get fired for open apostasy.
I think I speak for everyone involved when I say that it sure is convenient that my beliefs line up so perfectly line up with what’s required as a condition of my employment.
So I have it in writing that misgendering someone will be considered harassment and will get me fired.
I think the real danger resides in the reaction of the person. I’ve just spent all today calling a co-worker in another centre by the wrong name every time I’ve had to phone them (by the end, they were calling me the same wrong name!) This was just one of those days/a brain blip.
Suppose I called them the wrong gender, though? I’d hope a reasonable person would go “Okay, mistakes happen, just be careful next time” but I can imagine someone being very sensitive about that and presuming that I intentionally did it on purpose for nefarious reasons. If they then go to the boss and demand that Something Must Be Done under the ethics of the business and the law of the state, then I think you can get into a lot of trouble that’s not really your fault.
I’m saying that it’s not so much gender warriors looking for reasons to sniff out witches (though that happens) as the clash of “genuine mistake versus someone in a delicate frame of mind over being misgendered because it happened too often”, with the ‘in the wrong’ person getting thrown under the bus because the company does not want to have to deal with social media campaigns calling for their heads on pikes for being transphobes and creating unsafe atmosphere at work.
I was in 12th grade when one of my classmates snapped at me (in the nicest possible way): “Why do you keep calling me Frank?!”
“Because that’s your name …. ?”
“No … it’s [completely different name]”
I’d been calling this one person by the wrong name for ~4 years. Sometimes people are just dumb.
The big problem that I see with these laws is that it gives the worst kind of people an extra weapon, malicious, vindictive, scheming people that can’t be combated/disarmed.
In some environments.
I have never made a secret of my views, and although it’s possible that there were job offers I would have gotten if I had, I have no direct evidence of any such problems.
There’s a joke in modern libertarian circles about how people never get censored/deplatformed/blacklisted for having right-wing economic views.
Conservative: People keep trying to censor me for my right-wing views!
Libertarian: You mean for wanting to reduce government spending? Strange, no one ever tried to censor me for that.
Conservative: No, not that…
Libertarian: For supporting lower taxes then?
Conservative: No, not that either…
Libertarian: Oh, then you must mean for being opposed to regulation!
Conservative: Well, no…
Libertarian: Then what views are you talking about?
Conservative: You know! The ones it’s not polite to discuss in public!
@LadyJane
The ‘views’ you state are not really views at all, but merely half of a view & even then the “free money” part.
“Reduce government spending” is meaningless if you don’t say what spending should be cut. Bob and Mary can agree that they want to have less government spending, but if Bob wants to cut the military, but keep welfare as is, while Mary wants to cut welfare, but keep the military as is; then they don’t agree at all. Not even 50%.
When you don’t actually discuss the cost, which is the service that is no longer provided, you are essentially just promising people free money.
The same is true for regulation. Nearly everyone hates regulation in the abstract, but when you discuss actual rules, things change.
People get censored/deplatformed/blacklisted for specifics, not for making the opposite of scissor statements.
I’ve genuinely never seen anyone get censored, blacklisted, or deplatformed for their economic views, no matter how specific they were. “Let’s reduce welfare” is a statement that gets a lot of pushback in left-liberal circles, but I’ve never seen anyone call for newspapers to fire someone for expressing that view. Same goes for some non-economic issues like gun rights.
The only right-wing opinions that I’ve actually seen leftists try to erase from public discourse are those involving race, gender, sexuality, and so forth. Culture War issues, in other words. So the statement that “people are silenced for expressing conservative views” is overly broad; it would be more precise to say “people are silenced for expressing certain cultural views that typically overlap with a subset of conservative positions.”
According to the most recent SSC survey, about 11% of SSC readers personally know someone who has lost a job as a result of expressing the wrong opinion on a controversial topic.
@The Nybbler,
Fired?
No.
Exiled?
Yes.
Two co-workers have been pretty out spoken Trump supporters, and we’ve tried to whisper to them “Dude, you can say that in the lunch room when ir’s just us, but not when we’re working in this guy’s office who has a picture on the wall of himself with Brown, Harris, and Newsom!”.
One now works only in the boiler room, the other got sent to the 9-1-1 call center where he doesn’t encounter the attorneys and the general public.
So would you support adding orientation, and political belief as protected classes?
If you are going to have protected classes, you have to protect everything. Or nothing.
Protecting just some things is political bias.
@markl,
Well frankly I’m a bit puzzled that in San Francisco we aren’t already treating Christian religious conservatives as a special minority worthy of “All are welcome” tolerance like we do the Muslims, but I guess the battles are too fresh, as for who is and isn’t worthy of “protected status”, I don’t even know, I think things have gotten our of hand, I still think African-Americans got such a raw deal historically and they haven’t had the opportunity to build capital for enough generations yet (the same could be said of Appalachian whites) that some “affirmative action” is still merited (the internships for youths from the Hunters Point neighborhood seems a good example to me of a program that should be continued, though I’m a bit biased because my best co-worker got in that way), but beyond that?
Sometimes it seems like so many step stools are requested that everyone’s view is blocked again anyway
Religion is already a protected class legally. So if there’s actual religious descrimination, take good notes and talk to a lawyer.
In most places orientation and political belief are not protected in the same way. But I think a policy like that would be extremely popular among Democrats.
Orientation and political affiliation are protected classes in California, where Plumber lives and works.
In that case your coworkers should probably talk to lawyers. At the least you could probably have you boss get a talking to from HR. I’d be interested in how it turns out.
I honestly don’t know the answer, but my interpretation would be that protection means protection from termination. Would they really have a case based reassignment to a different set of buildings within the same job?
@markl,
Well, one guy got more overtime out of the reassignment, so he made extra money (eventually he transferred himself to work at City College which pays less, but was less lonely), and the other guy is now getting shirt differential pay for working the graceyard shift, so more money but very lonely.
As for going to HR that would be shooting themselves in the foot ’cause we’re not supposee to discuss politics (or religion or anything interesting really) at work, as that counts as “Harassment”.
I’m not going to begrudge anyone for not going through the full formal process. But usually there is a way to complain anyonomously for exactly that reason, there might even be onbudman to work around legal reporting requirements.
It’s still probably a good idea to keep good records of this stuff.
I am no legal expert but running it by a lawyer would be a good idea.
to follow up, if something like this happened to me I would post about it on the work stack exchange site being very clear about the juristiction.
If you have a legal protection against termination, you probably also have a legal protection against other sorts of workplace retaliation like being assigned to shitty shifts or having your hours reduced.
Good quick draw evidence.
Assuming that represents 800 specific people, that would put it on par with don’t ask don’t tell numbers. Of course there are issues extending booth lowerbounds to wider population estimates.
Do you have any thoughts on how to fix this?
FWIW, I am opposed to people being fired for either being gay or having weird political views, outside of a pretty narrow range of specialized jobs where those things are actually relevant. (Religious schools hiring teachers, political campaigns hiring workers, etc.). I think that society works better when there are strong norms against this even when it isn’t illegal.
AI Trained on Old Scientific Papers Makes Discoveries Humans Missed
The AI was trained on material science papers.
I wonder how it would do in fields like medical research and social psychology, where the papers are less reliable.
I wonder if it will replicate p-hacking 😛
“AI Trained on Old Scientific Papers Fakes Discoveries Humans Missed”
The problem came when the AI realized that the only way to get some of the results to replicate was to change human nature….
Imagine a policy whereby the government decided that being poor sucks so everyone making 20-40% of median income can fill out some paperwork and enter a lottery. Winners receive around $25,000/year adjusted for inflation for the rest of their lives. Everyone else gets nothing.
Does anyone think that’s good public policy? Because that’s the *best* case scenario for set-aside style affordable housing initiatives. I can’t understand how anyone thinks that’s a good idea.
Lottery savings accounts seem to increase savings in some people.
I prefer to keep all the interest myself, but for some people, redistributing it in the form of a lottery helps.
I know you’re trying to talk about housing, but I just thought the lottery is very interesting.
@brad
*raises hand*
Like public housing projects and rent control I do think it’s good policy, not just because they get/keep someone housed, but they give “public options” that lower the demand for “market rate” housing (if you have a cheaper option you’re less likely to further bid up the market), and I really think those programs should be scaled way the Hell up.
The “Section 8” subsidized rent program is the one I have a problem with, as it further bids up rents, though I suppose the well known effect of poor children growing up in some areas being more likely to escape poverty as adults than in other areas, may be an argument for that program.
What I’d like to see is eminent domain used to build small scale public housing in areas with better opportunities (too large scale and the opportunity is lost), so a couple of units in Pacific Heights, not many in Hunters Point, and a couple of units in Palo Alto, not East Palo Alto.
Actual public housing has it’s own issues, but that’s not what I’m talking about here. These programs waive e.g. $100k/unit*years worth of taxes in a year in order to induce a private landlord to set aside units that are rented for a $25k/year discount.
The tax benefit is a reduction in federal tax liability, it’s not money coming out of city or state coffers. The investors are giant corporations looking to minimize their federal tax bill however they can. If you want to assess efficiency/effectiveness of the program, you need to compare it to other corporate tax expenditures, not to local or state budget items.
The rent benefit stays with the building, not the tenant. So when a tenant earns enough to no longer qualify, the unit becomes available for another family. Rent restrictions last for decades (and are often effectively permanent), so each unit can help multiple families.
Those who don’t win the lottery still benefit indirectly, because they have less competition for market-rate units.
At least as to the largest NYC program (421a) that’s all incorrect. It’s a property tax benefit so the money is coming straight out of state and local coffers. And the tenants cannot earn too much to no longer qualify. Once they are in, they are in for as long as they stay in the unit. Furthermore, if they do leave the unit has to be rented at the subsidized rate but can be rented to anyone of the landlord’s choice.
Stepping away from just NYC the last sentence is wrong in general. The subsidized unit takes a tenant off the market but it also takes a unit off the market. The net effect is to increase, not decrease the equilibrium market rate (because some of the subsidized tenants would exit the market without the subsidy).
These programs waive e.g. $100k/unit*years worth of taxes in a year
Yes, but they’re not doing this in a vacuum – they have to consider the cost of having to house/take care of the homeless/build new housing themselves, versus “we get less tax but the landlord is now willing to rent to lower-income tenants and that gets another family off the street and we don’t have to pay for them in a shelter”.
Speaking for Ireland, social housing provision is tricky because there’s never enough money, when you do get the money it does take time to buy land, tender for the work, and build the houses. Meanwhile, you’ve got (a) canny operators going on local and/or national radio crying about how they and their six kids are living in a cardboard box, why isn’t the council doing its job (b) the media running stories about the scandal of homelessness using said weeping mothers of six as the photogenic hook (c) short-term bodges like paying to accommodate people in hotels which eats money.
Getting landlords to take social tenants is also difficult because there are (1) reasonable fears on the landlord’s part about what kind of tenant this person will be and (2) when the market is squeezed, as it is now, they much prefer being able to charge whatever the going rate is to the workers who can afford to pay the hiked-up rents.
A tax benefit scheme is just another incentive to deal with the problem.
These aren’t homeless people. Those are almost entirely in the 0-20% range and are explicitly not eligible for these affordable housing units. I said in my example 20-40% but some of these programs even go above median income.
If the same units were on the open market, the supply on the open market would be bigger, not only the demand.
I can’t understand how anyone thinks that’s a good idea.
Because half a loaf is better than no bread?
What are the odds in your hypothetical lottery? What are the odds of people getting affordable housing out of the pool of people looking for housing? Certainly you can say “playing the lottery is stupid” but many places seem to tack on or dangle the idea of “but it’s for good causes and Z% goes to…” in order to entice people into playing.
Heck, where I work annually applies for lottery funding under this scheme, because we might get lucky and get some money – we have done previously. Yes, we might not be lucky, but if we don’t apply, we’ll certainly get nothing.
(By the bye, if there are any anonymous trillionaires reading this who would like to throw a few spare million at us or set up a foundation to give us a few tens of thousands extra funding per year, we’ll happily take it!)
I presume the counter-argument is that it’s better to, say, give $5000 to everyone who qualifies, rather than $25000 to 20% of them, as the marginal utility of money is generally decreasing.
Lots of people make a common mistake: they don’t think about people they can’t see.
—
Someone wants to build a duplex in SF. There are (since this is a toy example) three potential renters: Amy the Financier, Beth the Techworker, and Carol the Teacher.
The SF city planner loves SF and thinks it’s harmful for people to have to commute in. And — the planner notices — if we don’t intervene, then Amy & Beth will buy the units, leaving Carol struggling to find somewhere to live in the city.
On the other hand, if we DO intervene, we can give one unit for Carol the Teacher. Amy the Financier can win the bid for the second unit. And Beth the Techworker is rich enough that she’ll have an easy time finding an apartment somewhere else.
If we ONLY consider the people we can see, this looks like a solid win. You’ve gone from 2/3 people living near work to 3/3 people living near work.
To get past this, you need to consider the people who don’t show up to the rent in the duplex. In this case, the “thing unseen” is ‘who is Beth going to outbid?’
If we apply a name to that person, then we see the problem you’re pointing out. There were actually 3 transactions needed to get everyone housed:
Transaction 1: Amy, Beth and Carol bid for 2 spots in a duplex.
Transaction 2: The loser of transaction #1 bids against Dana the Dancer for a single apartment.
Transaction 3: The loser of transaction #2 buys an apartment outside of SF.
The result is that – with the subsidy – Amy, Beth and Carol live in SF, while Dana commutes. And without the subsidy, Amy Beth and Carol live in SF, while Dana commutes.
But thinking about people we can’t see is unnatural, so most people don’t do it.
I think you missed it by just a hair. Without the subsidy the more likely outcome is:
Amy and beith live in SF, while Carol and Dana commute, because neither Carol nor Dana can afford to live in SF without the subsidy (the both got outbid in the 2nd transaction by Susan the Software Engineer).
The reason it might be better to subsidize Carol/Dana and leave Susan to commute is that Carol/Dana are (presumably) considered benefits to the community, but if their only option is to commute they may not be able to afford to be a part of it and end up somewhere else entirely. In theory, although it isn’t ideal for her, Susan is better able to bear the costs of commuting than Carol or Dana.
I’m not saying that’s outright correct, but I think it is a clearer picture of what is happening and the reasoning behind housing subsidies than what you gave, which assumes that all of the people involved can make competitive bids without the subsidy.
Your example adds an extra name. The new wealth-ranking goes: Amy > Beth > Susan > Carol > Dana.
From there, we’re both looking at the number of available beds and assuming that (absent a subsidy), they go to the richest people first. 1 bed will go to Amy. If there are 2 then (Amy, Beth) get them. 3 is (Amy, Beth, Susan) and 4 is (Amy, Beth, Susan, Carol). And so on.
My argument about unseen effects is that it looks like a subsidized apartment takes a bed away from the rich. And I agree that the sentiment is that the Rich person is better able to bear the commute.
The problem is that there’s a gap between “Beth is better able to bear the cost of a commute” and “Beth will bear the cost of a commute if we give bed #2 to someone else.”
Rich people will still outbid everyone below them. So subsidizing bed #2 doesn’t displace the 2nd richest person unless there are only 2 beds. Instead, it just shifts everyone down a step, and displaces the poorest person who could otherwise afford an un-subsidized apartment.
It’s possible that SF is so broken that the only people living there are either rich or explicitly subsidized. In which case, the ‘poorest person’ able to afford an unsubsidized apartment would be rich. And then subsidies have the intended effect.
But I don’t think most proponents of the idea are thinking, “We want to expel the poorest (un-subsidized) person who lives in SF to make room for someone like Dana”, they’re thinking “We want there to be dance instructors. And Beth, being the second richest person in the city, is able to bear the cost of her commute. So let’s give bed #2 to Dana.”
My example adds an extra name because it is necessary for a proper illustration following your framework. I’m arguing with your assumption that Carol would live in SF at all absent a subsidy (that she would win the bid in your transaction two). The reality is likely that neither Carol nor Dana would win that bid and neither would get in-city housing.
Well yeah, but that person is still richer than the person getting the subsidized housing.
If the city needs teachers, and at the current salaries teachers can’t afford to live in the city, and as a result many move elsewhere, then the supply of teachers is reduced, and their employers are forced to raise their salaries. Which, if their employer is the city, still means that the city is going to pay more money to teachers, but the roundabout way of using rent subsidies is unnecessary.
In a perfect system where the response between changes to supply and demand are perfect. Evidence that generally systems don’t work that way: any time there is a shortage of anything.
When I was a child I lived in a small city that had by then mostly been absorbed by its greater-metropolitain area.
The richest people in the area mostly lived in that city, along with a disproportionate number of the quite well off. But some bright folks in city government had long ago decided that the city needed teachers, policemen, etc., and they were going to zone part of the city for apartment buildings, and – I think – originally also built some affordable housing and provided it to city employees.
I lived in the zoned-for-tradesfolk area, though my parents were not city employees, and enjoyed the best public schools in the greater metropolitain area, along with lots of other amenities, paid for by the higher-than-normal housing values/rich folk who lived (literally) farther up the hill. (Us tradesfolk got the lower altitudes…)
What I wonder is why more municipalities don’t do similar things, or no longer do such things. Some of it would be that rich folks are now settling for apartments etc., rather than disdaining them for single family homes and the rare ultra luxury apartments. (That really wasn’t a problem where we lived.) A rational wealthy person wants services available, and is somewhat choosy about the caliber of those providing them. A rational city councillor wants lot of wealthy people paying taxes, so they should want to provide good services for them. And better conditions for service providers will tend to attract better workers. Not quite a win-win for everyone – more of the local rich could fit into this city than of the local poor. But if you worked in the city, you could in general afford to live there, just not in the ritzy part.
@acymetric Free market rarely has shortages, and it’s about as good as it gets at sorting them out quickly. Direct solutions to a problem (such as raising the salaries of professionals we need who have become scarce) are much more likely to yield near-optimal outcomes than roundabout, indirect solutions like subsidizing rent in the hope that it makes specifically professionals whom we need stay in the city at a lower salary.
The latter is likely to be a less efficient use of the money, e.g. some of the people it keeps in the city are such that the economic benefit of them staying in the city is less than the cost of them doing so. (It may sound insensitive that we should have them leave. However, unless you build enough housing for everyone who wants to live in a given city, it’s inevitable that some people who would like to live there can’t do so. At that point, it makes sense that they should be those whose living in the city has the least benefit, to them or others.)
With much hand-wringing about the recent use of the phrase, “concentration camp,” I’ve been rereading the Commission on Wartime Relocation of Civilians’ report. From the citizens’ side:
And from the government’s side:
I think there’s a good argument that Japanese relocation camps count as concentration camps; I’ve certainly referred to them (and heard them referred to) as such. Is there a decent argument against that claim? Do the nazis loom so large that “concentration camp” should only be used as a synonym for “forced labor camp” or “death camp?”
Bottom line is that the meaning of the word changed. Now, the Japanese relocation camps were certainly concentration camps in 1941 parlance; the term had been popularized during the Boer War some years before, to describe camps intended to temporarily intern large numbers of enemy civilians. That practice, though certainly bad by our standards, was relatively uncontroversial at the time, did not imply genocidal motives, and continued in various conflicts through most of the 20th century.
At about the same time, though, the Nazis started using the phrase to describe camps that they didn’t expect the inmates to walk away from. This was essentially a euphemism, but colored the phrase to such an extent that anyone using it postwar would have to come to grips with some very strong Nazi associations. Compare “final solution”.
Every time I watch Casablanca, I notice that in 1941 parlance, even Nazi concentration camps were treated as places where they evilly interned enemy civilians for a year or a few years.
I like Bogart as well as anyone else, but I’ve only watched Casablanca once. I still don’t understand what it is people like SO much about it.
I still don’t understand what it is people like SO much about it.
Because it’s romantic. Because it’s gallant. Because the cynical “leave me out of politics, I only want to get through this with my head down and make some money” businessman turns out to have principles, despite himself. (Because Claude Rains is hilarious in his part).
Because if this doesn’t get your blood pumping, you’re a stone 🙂
Deiseach gets it. It’s the perfect B&W Hollywood movie: romantic, gallant, leveraging the nature of the medium as propaganda for serious principles (if this sort of liberalism wasn’t outdated fiction, I wouldn’t need to be right-wing), and also deadpan hilarious.
One perfect moment, that.
Thing is, cynicism works for Rick. He’s done very well for himself since the woman he loved walked out on him and he walked out on the whole “romantic hero” business. Now he has everything he thinks he wants, including by fate the chance to take back the girl, and all it requires is that he keep on being the cynical self-serving realist.
With a simple nod at the right moment, he escapes the trap.
And, yes, Claude Raines perfectly delivers a line that’s still an A-list pop culture meme three-quarters of a century later.
Claude Rains has much more than the one line; he’s fantastic in the movie as a whole.
I can think of at least three that you might be referring to!
At least, but I was referring specifically to the one perfect scene Deiseach linked.
Oh, of course. Duh. Lost the thread.
This is interesting because modern Asian “reeducation camps” seem like obviously-concentration-camps to me. Whether or not they’re genocidal institutions is a bit up in the air, but I’d land on the side of, “not really, no.”
Webster’s gives the definition for concentration camp:
Compare with “final solution:”
This matches my intuitions – “final solution” is about as Nazi as “1488,” while “concentration camp” is about as Nazi as “fascism.” Arguing from dictionary definitions is uninteresting, but I think it’s a good way to illustrate the difference in my mind. “Concentration camp” has cultural loading that colors but doesn’t dominate its meaning, whereas “final solution” exists basically exclusively as a reference. In that light, is it more appropriate to interpret “concentration camp” as “internment camp, but emphatically morally reprehensible,” or as “internment camp that’s a tool of genocide?”
I think the former interpretation makes more sense to me; I feel like “internment camp” and “concentration camp” are functional synonyms with different connotations (and this is why I don’t feel bad about saying, “Japanese Americans were interned in concentration camps, and that was Very Bad”).
I think I’d rather split the difference and land on something like “internment camp, you know, like the Nazis used”. It doesn’t strictly imply genocide, even now, but anyone using the phrase post-1945 knows or should know that it calls to mind images of Dachau and Belsen, not the Japanese or Boer internment camps.
And if that’s what a contemporary speaker wants to imply, then fine, but it’s solidly in Godwin’s Law territory by my lights.
In the context in which it’s currently being used, there are plenty of other similar situations just as bad; refugee and resettlement camps in general tend to turn into disaster areas when you’ve got never-ending numbers of new people coming in while the existing occupants are still stuck there waiting, there is a lack of resources and manpower, and no agreement over what to do with the people – send them back or let them in?
So while the border camps may indeed be atrocious conditions, they’re their own specific example of atrocious conditions. Calling them “concentration camps” is deliberate political propaganda, that’s not their purpose, not how they were set up, and the result is, unhappily, all too common wherever such camps are located. (Also, I think it’s dishonest to claim on the one hand that the administration is deliberately denying needed supplies to the detainees, and on the other hand bully companies out of supplying those centres – so you complain that they don’t have beds or sanitary supplies but you call for boycotts of companies providing furniture, which then means no beds for the detainees at all? how does that make sense other than ‘deliberately make the situation even worse in the hopes of (a) making our political rivals look really bad and (b) the faint hope that this will cause the entire enterprise to collapse and explode so they’ll have no choice but to let all the detainees come right into the country no questions asked’. That latter is not going to happen).
If the people doing the disingenuous “what, I never said they were Nazi fascist camps, I’m only using the dictionary definition here” logic-chopping are happy for people on the other side to go “what, I never said you were a Communist totalitarian who wanted to murder the kulaks, I’m only using the dictionary definition here” then fine, but you know as well as I do that they aren’t and wouldn’t. They’re detention camps, you could even call them internment camps, but nobody using the phrase “concentration camp” post-Second World War gets away with “I only mean like in the Boer War, guize!”
It’s the exact same double-think as “racism/racist”, where the use of the word is meant to evoke in the minds of ordinary people “KKK lynching black men” for maximum emotional impact and vilifying the opposition, but when called on it, it’s all “no no no, we mean structural racism”.
Again, yes, “it’s the dictionary definition” is a bad argument. I’m trying to make an argument for how “concentration camp” is actually currently used. I hear it applied to a lot of things that aren’t Nazi death camps, enough so that a strict insistence on “internment camp” and “relocation camp” are the things that come off as doublespeak-ish to me. I’m trying to determine how widely that impression is shared.
You’ve got a good point. Unless there’s a seasonal variation, the need for of these camps leads almost inevitably to their being lousy. Anytime inflow is greater than outflow, you’re going to get a swamp.
If these refugees were fleeing a coup or civil war, there might be an end in site, but I don’t think that’s even posited to be the case, is it? The camps will swell until their conditions are worse than that of the home country.
From my perspective, they’re squarely in “sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.” I don’t particularly care whether the situation resulted from a deliberate attempt to hurt asylum seekers or from callous indifference, either one makes the Trump administration terrible people.
I don’t think this board would accept someone defending communism with an argument like “Causing mass starvation wasn’t the purpose of communism, that wasn’t how it was set up, that’s just an unhappy, all too common result wherever communist revolutions happen,” but apparently concentration camps are okay so long as you didn’t intend for children to suffer and die in them.
AIUI, the term “Concentration Camp” originally comes from the Second Boer War, specifically the guerrilla warfare phase.
To oversimplify enormously, Britain acquired a Dutch colony in what’s now South Africa in the early 1800s. Some of the existing Dutch-descended settlers (known as “Boers” or “Afrikaners”) moved inland and set up their own independent colonies outside of British colonial rule (the Transvaal and Orange Free State, collectively known as the “Boer Republics”). They came into conflict with their British neighbors in the late 1800s, which ended with the British conquering the Boer Republics and incorporating them with the existing British colonies into the Union of South Africa.
During the Second Boer War, when the actual conquering happened, the British found themselves trying to occupy a remote area with an almost entirely rural population, most of whom were armed and organized into a militia system. A lot of the militiamen continued fighting guerrilla war against the British, mostly aimed at the British supply system.
It took the British a while to work out effective counter-guerilla doctrine. One of the tactics they tried boiled down to “arrest literally everyone in the area”: the British would round up the entire civilian population of a rural area and “concentrate” them into prison camps where they could be effectively controlled. This was combined with a scorched earth campaign where the now-vacant fields, herds, and farmhouses would be destroyed to prevent guerrilla bands from using them. In total, about 150,000 Boers were held in the camps.
The camps were appallingly poorly managed, with something like 20% of the inmates dying of malnutrition and disease. They were not, however, intended as death camps: the death came from ~1900-era sloppiness and ignorance about sanitation, combined with criminal hubris on the part of the British senior commanders about their ability to ship in adequate food, clothing, and medical supplies for the people they were arresting. I’ve heard claims (not sure about sources) that the British soldiers guarding the camps had similar death rates, likewise from malnutrition and disease.
In the original sense of the term, America’s WW2 internment camps were similar in intent to the British concentration camps of the Boer War, although they were implemented with far less cause (as a response to a feared espionage/sabotage campaign, instead of an actual large-scale guerrilla war) and were implemented far more competently (the inmates were adequately fed, and there was a largely successful effort to prevent and control disease outbreaks in the camps) with a consequently far lower death rate (1.5% total over four years, compared with 20% total over two years).
In modern usage, however, “concentration camp” is much more closely linked to the Nazi camps, which were set up from the beginning with reckless indifference towards the survival of the inmates, with an increasing effort over the course of the war to systematically murder them. It should go without saying that the American internment camps were fundamentally different from these.
To what extent is that the case, is my question. If concentration camp is an acceptable modern descriptor for Japanese internment camps – and I think it is – then the fact that American internment camps were substantially different from Nazi death camps isn’t relevant to questions about the use-definition of “concentration camp” in that context.
True, but it is much, much, more correct to describe the camps as either: 1) Prison Camps; or 2) Refugee camps.
If you believe the majority of asylum claims are fraudulent, these are simply prisons containing suspected criminals. They also contain some unlawfully incarcerated people who are imprisoned because of their own failure to provide sufficient corroborating evidence of their asylum status, and because we don’t have infinite money and manpower to dedicate to their processing.
If you believe the majority of asylum claims are valid, these are temporary refugee camps until the refugees can be properly re-settled.
The problem with “concentration camp” as language, isn’t just the Nazi reference, the Boer and Japanese internment references are also not applicable. The people who are being detained are coming across the border with the intent interact with government officials, fully informed of the high likelihood of detention, and they often employ strategies to try and fit into loopholes to avoid inspection of their asylum claims, such as bringing minors.
Where do they fall if you believe the government is intentionally trying to make them horrible places with the intent of discouraging anyone, legit refugees or not, from seeking asylum and that the government is fundamentally uninterested in the true legitimacy of their claims?
My concern is really with the denial that that term should apply to the Japanese internment camps, which is one of the bits of American history that straight-up enrages me and that I think is really, really important to not forget. “Concentration camp implies genocide” is, I think, not a good argument because it implies apologetics for some stuff that’s pretty widely considered to be heinous in its own right. I don’t totally buy the argument you’ve laid out, but I think they’re a lot better, both in quality and implication, than “calling them concentration camps is calling the government Nazis.”
In what possible sense could the Japanese internment camps be considered refugee camps? They weren’t refugees!
Edit: If you were talking about how to label the current border camps, then retracted. Not clear to me which argument you are referring to but maybe it should be.
the fact that American internment camps were substantially different from Nazi death camps isn’t relevant to questions about the use-definition of “concentration camp” in that context
I think it makes a very big difference. If I say that Hoopyfreud is a vivisector, do you think it would make no difference if Hoopyfreud is testing drugs on animals, squirting shampoo into rabbits’ eyes or using live human beings as experimental subjects? I think it does, I imagine Hoopyfreud would think so too – not least because murdering humans might get them the death penalty depending on what state they lived in.
I’m sure there are those who would make no difference between (1) animal testing for medical research (2) cosmetics safety (3) using humans, but I do think in that case Hoopyfreud might want to insist on the fine shade of meaning to be used?
If you’re happy to say “American detention camps are the same as American internment camps during the war which were the same as German death camps”, then fine – but show me where the poison gas chambers and crematoria are located first, okay?
The use-definition of vivisection implies only one of those things, though. People are going to look at you weirdly if you call shampooing a rabbit vivisection, but (IME) not if you call Manzanar a concentration camp. You’re taking as granted an answer to the question I’m actually asking that I don’t agree with.
This is party about people not understanding how language works. It doesn’t matter that people originally referred to “concentration camps” in reference to the Boer War. Words change their meaning based on their use. If everyone is using the word “concentration camp”, in reference to genocide post world war 2, then that word has something to do with genocide now. You can’t hide behind historical use to justify your stupid claims.
But of course, they know what kinds of images the term brings up. Do you think Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had any idea what the Boer War was before she used it as a defense? Highly doubtful. She used the word “concentration camp” to bring up connotations of Nazi’s and everyone knows it, even if they don’t want to admit it.
General heuristic you should go by: If you think you can win a political argument by defining something in a way completely different from its common usage, you’re both wrong and not going to convince anyone. Just don’t do it.
Yeah, sure, absolutely. My question is regarding the extent to which this is actually the case. If the Wikipedia article on Japanese internment starts with,
Then is everyone using “concentration camp” in reference to genocide? I’d say no, that “concentration camp” doesn’t presently imply genocide. This is an argument from descriptivism, not prescriptivism. I’m trying to understand what “concentration camp” actually implies.
Sample 10 people and see what they think of when you say “concentration camps.”
When I search on Google Image for Concentration Camp, I am 99% sure the entire first page is nothing but images from the death camps. Google also suggests alternative searches like “The Holocaust” and “Auschwitz” and “Dachau.”
The word you are looking for is “internment camp,.” If you search THAT, you get a whole bunch of references to the US internment of the Japanese in WWII.
The 38th image result (for me) for “concentration camp” is an American camp. All the ones before it are Nazi camps.
I have never denied that Nazi camps are central examples of concentration camps. I’m only arguing that calling Japanese internment camps concentration camps is appropriate contemporary usage.
When you use a non-central usage you get the connotations of the central example.
@Randy
That doesn’t mean it’s inappropriate if that’s what you’re intending to connote. The argument against describing them as such, as I understand it, is that the use-definition is incongruous with the institution, not that the use-definition carries a connotation incongruous with the institution. I agree that it carries an additional connotation; I’m arguing that, despite that, the usage is appropriate. Using words with loaded connotations is acceptable. Using words with use-definitions that make your statement untrue is not.
Not illogical, anyway. Whether it’s appropriate depends on if those connotations are factual or at least explicitly acknowledged.
It’s possible that some historians use “concentration camp” in a distinct way to imply Not Genocide. But for everyone else it means genocide. When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said the detention centers were concentration camps, she is directly comparing them to Nazi concentration camps. Everyone thought that when she made the comment so I don’t know why anyone is claiming otherwise. The word use doesn’t change the reality of the situation. It’s just a cheap smear tactic.
I think most commentators here are underestimating AOC – She most certainly knew about the boer war antecedent, and also that most people would misunderstand her.
The thing is, in order to refute the misunderstanding, it became necessary to describe the actual conditions of these camps, which very much do justify “Concentration camp” in the Boer or japanese internment sense.
So net result: You cant call her a liar, at most you can accuse her of outdated use of language, and the conditions of said camps got put front and center of the news cycle for weeks on end, and she got to cement her image as a firebrand battling Evil some more. That is a very, very decisive win. Perhaps not with /theDonald but she was never going to win that audience anyway.
She is really good at this. This is very much of a piece with the way she somehow got fox news to mostly accurately describe her proposals on air. In order to attack her, sure, but… most of those proposals are very popular! Red, and unthinkable to fox news pundits, but telling your audience that the scary communist lady wants to introduce medicare for all, and introduce 70% taxes on people making millions a year.. is.. not as a scary as those talking heads think it is. That was free advertising..
This is exactly the argument made about Trumps’ exaggerations. “He knew there were xx million illegals voting, but when he said that, he forced people to bring up the real estimate of x million.”
I don’t think those proposals are as popular as you think they are. Nor is AOC that popular, even in her home state and district. I’m not aware of independent polls, but here’s a group of anti-AOCers who knocked on 10,000 doors in her district and found about a 21% approval and 50% disapproval rating for her. Take that with a grain of salt, but it kind of jives with what @brad, who lives in her district said about Joe Crowley: they didn’t vote for AOC over Joe because they liked what AOC was selling so much as because Joe wasn’t representing the interests of their district. He was off doing Dem party machine stuff. AOC isn’t doing much for the people of her district (aside from costing them billions of dollars in tax revenue by driving Amazon away) but is instead doing photo ops pretending to cry at fences for illegals on the southern border. Given the annoyance she has caused for Nancy Pelosi, I’d bet even money the party fields somebody less “outspoken” to primary her out next year.
You really think so? She was a bartender, and not a politics or history buff. The Justice Democrats did a casting call for somebody to run in her district, her brother submitted her name, and she got the role*. This is basically a phoney person. The idea that she’s totes up to snuff on her Boer War history is…unlikely.
* This is another great Snopes article where they label the claim as “FALSE” for the people who only read the headline…and then spend the entire article basically supporting the point they just labeled “false.”
Eh.. I knew about the Boer war camps, and the Armenian Genocide in highschool. It was covered as background material for the holocaust. You also get a long list of pre-nazi concentration camps if you peruse the wiki on the subject for 60 seconds.
Not an implausible bar to clear.
Also, what term should she have used? The camps on the border are clearly in the same category as the pre-nazi use of the term, was she supposed to make up a new word? Heck, “Camp intended to kill” already has a separate term – its called an extermination camp.
@Thomas
How about “detention center”, that word that the is used by the ICE and isn’t used solely to be provocative? There was no underlying need to say “concentration camps”. AOC just wants to compare Republicans to Nazis and saying otherwise is dishonest.
Yes, “detention center” is fine. It’s basically a temporary jail. No one is trying to concentrate or indefinitely imprison these people. I don’t want them in these centers at all, and I don’t want the centers to exist. I want a wall, and guards, and when someone illegally crosses the wall, I don’t want them detained I want them put back on the other side of the wall and told to go home.
“Internment camp” is not a new word, and is a perfectly good word for almost any legitimate purpose here.
“Camp intended to kill” very nearly has two separate terms now, “extermination camp” and “concentration camp”. Often, the latter term just implies “…by starvation and indifference and casual cruelty rather than actual poison gas”.
I think it would be helpful if we had one term for “camp intended to kill an entire class of people” and another term that clearly means “camp intended to temporarily imprison but not kill an entire class of people”, with the one being having a clear connotation of Very Evil and the other Somewhat Less Evil. Since we don’t, I think it would probably be best if we were to err on the side of using technically correct terms like “internment camp” that make people seem less evil than they actually are, rather than technically correct terms that will often be interpreted as accusing people of greater evils than they have committed.
Unless the goal is to fire up the base by saying “Our enemies are Maximally Evil, and they are trying to hide their Maximal Evilness, clearly we all need to come together in 100% devotion to Maximal Opposition”, in which case concentration camps it is.
AOC “graduated cum laude from Boston University’s College of Arts and Sciences in 2011, majoring in international relations and economics.” [WP] I think that’s the sort of person who would have heard about the Boer War.
She probably did at some point, and even if she didn’t, she’s certainly heard of the Japanese internment camps. Nonetheless, I don’t think this is some kind of 4D chess move; the Boer War just doesn’t loom that large in anyone’s mind except for a few specialist historians, which she’s not. She might have edited the phrasing (or, more likely, had someone else go over it) to make sure she wasn’t saying anything wrong enough to get embarrassed about, but acting like this is some kind of deliberate bait-and-switch play is giving her too much credit.
More than that, it’s exactly the type of too much credit that political fanboys like to give their idols when they say something dumb. We’ve seen three years of this with Trump, you ought to be able to recognize it when it happens across the aisle.
Hoopyfreud, whoever wrote that Wikipedia article is absolutely using the emotional valence of “concentration camp” to express disapproval and condemnation of the American internment camps. They’re not using a historical term in a neutral manner of definition, they very much mean to imply “just as the Nazis rounded up Jews and other undesirables into camps to exterminate them, just as shamefully the US did this to Japanese-Americans and Japanese in America on racist grounds”.
You can argue the toss, but when someone goes on about “nazis, fascists, alt-right” and the like, they are not meaning anything neutral such as “Joe Bloggs is a Fascist, by which I mean politically he adheres to the Salazarian doctrine”, they mean full-on SS skulls and murder Schindler’s List badness. Same with “concentration camp” and how it’s used today. I know about the Boer War, but I’d be damn interested to know how many young(ish) Americans know the same and know where the term originally comes from? I’m going to go out on a limb that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Twitter followers are not all keen historians of the early 20th century and when they talk about “concentration camps” they damn well do mean “deliberately trying to genocide Guatemalans on racist grounds by forcing them into dirty, crowded, dangerous conditions, putting children in cages, and denying them soap, beds, and even water to drink”.
I don’t disagree! It’s absolutely not a neutral term. My position is that it’s a loaded but accurate term. If people are using it that way to connote shame and horror, I have no problem with that. I agree. But I’m saying that it’s loaded, which is not the same thing as exaggerated or overstated.
I think people are failing to (or are unwilling to) distinguish between language that shows bias and incorrect/dishonest language.
Hoopyfreud, suppose the government says “Okay, yes, they’re concentration camps”. What next?
(a) Everyone goes “See, we said they were the same as Japanese internment camps and the Boer war camps and the government just admitted it”
(b) Everyone goes “See, we said the government are Nazis and they just admitted it!”
I know which option I’m betting on. Now, Honest Citizen John thinks that the internment camps are a disastrous mess and should be better organised, and if that means putting a massive building programme in place to build dormitories and facilities and staff them with appropriate caregivers in order to handle the numbers of people going through, then that is what should be done. Is Honest Citizen John approving of concentration camps? Is he a fascist racist nazi?
Honest Citizen Sally also thinks the camps are a disastrous mess. She thinks there shouldn’t be any camps at all, that the people turning up should be taken at their word that they’re refugees and asylum seekers and they should be let straight into the country. Is she in agreement with Honest Citizen John? On one point they are, that the camps are a mess and something drastic needs to be done to improve conditions. If that was as far as it went, I think people could agree to disagree about immigration policy.
Now, suppose that in order to have these camps closed down, Honest Citizen Sandy is willing to do whatever it takes, including using propaganda and loaded terms that have a huge emotional impact, never mind what the literal dictionary definition is technically, about calling them “concentration camps” because Sandy knows that for most people this conjures up images from Schindler’s List in the back of their minds. Is Honest Citizen Sandy being so honest?
I submit that using such tactics is, well, tactics. Even if you think it’s in a good cause, as many of the people doubtless do, it’s still using a loaded term to get your opponents in trouble. Perhaps there are honest citizens out there who do think these are literal concentration camps as in literally trying to exterminate, whether by neglect or more malign deliberate policy, the people immured in them.
This is our major bone of contention. Do you, Hoopyfreud, at base believe the government is trying to kill or does not care about killing the occupants of such camps? Do you agree that Roosevelt’s government that created the Japanese internment camps, which you consider are concentration camps by definition, was a fascist government? Because that is what it is coming down to in the popular discourse right now. Not merely that these are bad, that the principles behind them are bad, and even that there is racism and fear-mongering going on, but that there is at best a horrible indifference to the loss of life and at worst deliberate intentional ‘let them die so others will be scared off trying to come here’ at work.
@Deiseach
This morning I heard on a further left radio station (and by further left, I mean those from whom it’s clear that “leftists” and “liberals are still not synonyms, just as they weren’t in the ’70’s) that was contending that “Forcing them into the the desert to die because of the border fences as a warning to others” has been U.S. Federal government policy since the Clinton administration.
Freudian slip?
But anyway, I don’t expect the government to call anything it operates a “concentration camp” any more than it’s willing the call Guantanamo a “torture facility.” I expect the government to euphamize around it. Loaded terms are for polemics, not institutions. The recognition isn’t important to me; the political will is.
No. I think that the government is uneasy about the deaths that result from the conditions at these camps. I think that there are probably people at these camps who that’s true for, but that’s pretty much expected. But I’m the one making the case that that’s not implied by “concentration camp.”
Yeah, at least as far as the Japanese internment went. I think it was a shameful, horrible thing we did and I’m glad we paid reparations for it. They were well deserved. I’d call it like a 7 on the fascism scale. But IMO the real bone of contention is whether the callous indifference toward human life is actually what’s implied.
It seems to be that there is a significant difference between a refugee camp and a concentration camp. A concentration camp is someplace people are put in, almost always against their will. A refugee camp is someplace people go to.
The refugees aren’t going to America to get into the camps, though. If they know about them, they are going in spite of them.
@Randy
I doubt most refugees prefer the camp to just being in Istanbul/Munich.
The choice they are making is between their old home and the camp with the hope of resettlement.
In the same way that other people choose to drown in the mediterranean sea, sure.
General heuristic, if a government starts herding an unpopular minority into a camplike set of facilities that we can apparently agree are similar in form and function enough to fit the same term as it was used in the 1930’s and 40’s to describe the internment camps used to hold japanese americans, the camps used to hold people during the boer war and similar….
Then it may not matter much if you want to play word games.
Whatever terms you apply to it a lot of people have a general heuristic, that that set of behaviour strongly fits a bad set of patterns for a government to fall into.
Historically the results didn’t typically turn out to mesh well with phrases like “and afterwards people mostly agreed that this was morally the right thing for them to have done”.
In case no one has told you, the detention centers currently used for some migrants caught illegally entering the United States have been in place since the Obama administration.
It’s easiest for me to find references to children separated from parents for processing in the 2014 timeframe…but there is evidence that the practice of keeping illegal immigrants in detention facilities is based on policies that date back to the Presidency of Bill Clinton in the mid-90s.
yes, I’ve written at some length about it.
https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/42226/were-illegally-immigrating-children-held-in-cages-during-the-obama-administratio/42228#42228
So, now that the tribal politics is out of the way.
General heuristic, if a government starts herding an unpopular minority into a camplike set of facilities that we can apparently agree are similar in form and function enough to fit the same term as it was used in the 1930’s and 40’s to describe the internment camps used to hold japanese americans, the camps used to hold people during the boer war and similar….
Then it may not matter much if you want to play word games.
Whatever terms you apply to it a lot of people have a general heuristic, that that set of behaviour strongly fits a bad set of patterns for a government to fall into.
Quick question: what is your motivation for using “concentration camp” in the first place instead of “detention centers”?
Which user is that addressed to?
To you, Murphy.
@Murphy,
we now have the problem of deciding whether unpopular minority is a good way to describe people who show up at the American border and ask for asylum.
They are a minority, and there is a measure of un-popularity…but the guiding rules are grounded in the process for handling potential-asylum-seekers, especially when they come in large waves and appear to be interpreting desire for economic opportunity as roughly equivalent to need for asylum.
Relevant to the larger discussion of the phrase “concentration camps”, this is a distinction that I think is important.
The United States Government didn’t send armed men out to round up unpopular minorities (from either inside or outside the United States) and herd them into camps. The United States Government constructed these camps to handle large numbers of people asking for asylum.
@Wrong Species
I don’t believe I did use the term “concentration camp” anywhere.
my posts are specifically about the idea that it doesn’t matter much what you call them. They have properties that historically correlate with the sorts of events where everyone tries to pretend they never supported their use afterwards.
@S_J
That doesn’t seem to be entirely true. They are specifically rounding up people far from the border.
including occasionally interning US citizens of mexican descent, apparently sometimes without trial.
https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/pa4mq7/the-us-keeps-mistakenly-deporting-its-own-citizens
And yes, this absolutely does predate trump so can we please not treat it as a partisan issue. He’s only notable in being slightly more enthusiastic and slightly less careful about it.
A conservative politician has claimed that the people in the detention centers are free to leave any time they want. They aren’t free to go into the US, but they are free to go into Mexico.
I don’t know if that’s true, but I’ve yet to see him challenged on the correctness of that fact, despite bringing it up to people who would be prepared to say it’s wrong.
People used to be quarantined at Ellis Island. Were those concentration camps?
migrants caught illegally entering the United States
I’ll object back the other way here: They aren’t necessarily illegally entering the US. In many cases they are coming to the border and applying for asylum. An asylum case that is very likely to fail, but it’s not illegal to make an asylum case.
Refugees camps are extremely common throughout history with much worse conditions than what exists now. But nobody brings those up because they can’t use it to take political shots.
Are we sure about that? It’s usually a crime to lie to the government, so if one falsely claims they’re fleeing violence or persecution (the legitimate reasons we grant asylum), isn’t that a crime?
@Conrad
Presumably the burden of proof for a false claim falls on the government if it wants to prosecute it. If the government can prove that they did not believe they had sufficient standing to make a claim, or that they knowingly lied about the actual conditions at home, probably. But that’s very, very hard, especially if there were no substantial material lies involved.
May not want to prosecute it, but that doesn’t make it not illegal. If I’m jaywalking and the cop can’t be bothered to stop me and write me a ticket that doesn’t mean I didn’t commit a crime.
In the same sense that Donald Trump obstructed justice.
If you want to make a case for actual perjury, IMO you have to show material falsifications of fact, not truly claiming you got shaken down by the local mob and that you think this is a reason for asylum when the US government does not.
I think it’s quite likely that a lot of these migrants have no idea what the actual definition of asylum is.
If they know, and do not meet it, they are committing fraud, though perhaps not in the legal sense.
This lessens the sympathy somewhat, but we don’t want disproportionate suffering for fraud.
To the extent that the camps/centers are creating any unnecessary suffering, that should be promptly ameliorated–by means other than actually rewarding the false or inaccurate claims of asylum with an opportunity to migrate contrary to the current laws.
Um, guys. I don’t think anyone is suggesting that a migrant saying “I was beat up by a bully, therefore I am entitled to asylum” is guilty of a crime if it turns out that being beaten up by a bully is not a valid reason for being entitled to asylum.
The allegation here is that a whole lot of migrants are saying “I was beat up by a bully, therefore I am entitled to asylum” but they were not actually beaten up by a bully at all. That is to say, they are lying about the very foundational details of their story, they aren’t just innocently ignorant of the complexities of US asylum claim processing…
In addition to what Edward said, there is the bigger issue that the word concentration camp was clearly used to tar Republicans. It’s a bad faith non-argument designed to be outrageous and at some level you know this.
I’d say it’s a good faith real argument designed to be outrageous. If you think these camps are actually comparable to concentration camps, the fact that you say this in language calculated to make people upset is a feature, not a bug. People SHOULD be wary about institutions that resemble concentration camps. “Calling it a concentration camp means you think the government is Nazis” is the bad-faith argument if contemporary usage of “concentration camp” envelopes non-genocidal concentration camps. Like I said above, I think it carries the connotation, but isn’t implicit in the definition. This is why I am trying to figure out what the consensus definition of “concentration camp” includes. If the envelope is large, this is rhetoric. If it’s small, this is a lie.
Detention centers are obviously extremely different from Nazi concentration camps. There’s no underlying need to say concentration camps. It’s only purpose is so that progressives can frame any immigration argument as conservatives defending concentration camps, winning the argument before it even starts. If you make this argument, you are making a bad argument on purpose, the very meaning of acting in bad faith.
OK, good, we’re finally hitting the actual point of contention. What would you say would have to change about the CBP camps in order for them to be reasonably called concentration camps, between:
1) Rounding up illegal immigrants in the US and sending them there
2) Rounding up legal immigrants in the US and sending them there
3) Prohibiting anyone there from leaving
4) Instituting forced labor
5) Dramatically reducing the level of accommodations
6) Slaughtering the detainees
7) Other
And no, I’m not suggesting you or anyone else wants to do these things. Obviously nobody – or, at least, anyone who isn’t an Extremely Brave Race Warrior who fantasizes about shooting up a Señor Frog’s – does. I am asking about the meaning of the phrase.
if contemporary usage of “concentration camp” envelopes non-genocidal concentration campsif contemporary usage of “concentration camp” envelopes non-genocidal concentration camps
That’s our point of disagreement: I don’t think contemporary usage of “concentration camps” includes “Boer War and other examples before and contemporeneously with the Nazis, but not the same as Nazi work/death camps”.
Where are all these polling and survey companies when you need them? I’d love to see a poll done on “what do you think of when you hear “concentration camp”/what do you mean when you say “concentration camp”?” because I think for every one person going “Oh yeah, Boer War” you’ll get nine going “Auschwitz, man, what else?”
When the government starts shooting them, you have my blessing to talk about concentration camps.
I think your 3 is the essential point.
Suppose we had very large homeless shelters, places where homeless people could go, be provided beds and food and water under pretty unattractive circumstances. While they were in the shelters their movements would be restricted in various ways, but they would always be free to go.
I don’t think those would be concentration camps. The point of a concentration camp is to hold lots of people who don’t want to be there.
Isn’t the whole issue here just that we don’t want to release the people claiming refugee status into the country, because we fear that the ones with obviously bogus claims will just try to disappear into the population since they know a hearing will go against them?
I’ve written several posts on these OTs defending the Japanese relocation-cum-internment camps as definitely not concentration camps. Have you read any of them? If not, I’m tired now but I’ll find them tomorrow and link them. But the gist is that as poorly as FDR understood human nature, the point was not to round up all the Japanese or keep them in one place to watch them but just to move them away from the coasts, and those interned were free to leave. That they would rather wait out the war in the camps so they could go home to the west coast later than relocate to Ohio or whatever is obvious in retrospect. But 25% of the interned Japanese-Americans left. 25% of the concentration camp imprisoned Jews in WWII most certainly did not.
Eh, because I can’t let things sit, here was a recent thread.
And then:
tl;dr FDR did nothing wrong.
Except FDR didn’t in fact have “solid intelligence” concluding that Japanese-Americans were a threat; he had racist surmise. The impartial reports of the time concluded that Japanese-Americans were just as loyal as any other American population. There was no actual rational reason to conscript (=enslave) people based purely on ethnic background; there was no actual rational reason to fear widespread sabotage or espionage by US citizens of Japanese descent; there was just groundless racist hysteria, as exemplified by Hoopyfreud’s quotations upthread.
The solid in intelligence in question is the Niihau incident. One of the Japanese pilots who participated on the attack on Pearl Harbour was shot down, but was able to make an emergency landing on the island of Niihau and walked away from it. Yoshio and Irene Harada, two second generation Japanese-Ameircans, eventually sided with the downed pilot and conspired to help him, despite not previously showing any anti-American sentiment. They stole weapons, freed the pilot from his guards, torched a house, and took some islanders hostage. Eventually a fight resulted in the deaths of the pilot and Yoshio Harada, while one of the islanders was injured. Effectively despite being American citizens who had been born and raised in America, two people of Japanese descent defected to the Empire of Japan at the behest of only a single enemy combatant.
That two Japanese-Americans who had lived in America their whole lives were still more loyal to Japan is not racist hysteria, it’s something at actually factually happened. Now it’s certainly unfair to hold a hundred thousand people responsible for the actions of two, and i personally do not think it was justified to ban Japanese-Americans from the entire West Coast. It was thoroughly wrong to do it, and i’m glad Congress eventually issued an official apology and paid reparations to the affected. Nonetheless the fact remains that the whole thing was not based on baseless scaremongering. Despite the fact that the US government fully expected a war with Japan in the near future, there were no plans to relocate Japanese-Americans until after the Niihau incident came to light.
I would count the collective punishment of 100,000 people for the actions of two as close enough to groundless racist hysteria as makes no difference. Not unlike post-9/11 fears about American Muslims, but with far more severe consequences.
It was two out of three Japanese-Americans on the island, which is a sample too small for significance, but also deeply worrying.
What should they have done? German and Italian citizens were also barred from important military areas. A serious part of the problem was that the West Coast was so thick with military bases it was much easier to just kick them out of the major cities entirely. The racism really seems to have come from the congressional delegations of the coastal states, who promptly tried to get them kicked out entirely.
That post was actually one of the things that got me rereading the report. From page 155:
And from 183:
The difficulty of leaving, poor conditions, and strict government oversight of detainees described in the report convince me pretty well of the legitimacy of the “concentration camp” designation. If they were intended to be relocation camps, they were a failure, and one that was negligently under-addressed.
I completely agree with that. But they were not intended to become concentration camps, and they did not become concentration camps. Different camps had different conditions at different times during the war. And 25% of the detained did leave the camps. That the process of leaving was in some cases cumbersome is evidence of negligence and not malice. I do not see the point of trying to redefine these as concentration camps except to puff ourselves up by claiming moral superiority over people operating in the most extreme of wartime circumstances who are not here to defend themselves.
Was racism involved? I’m sure it was in some cases, but there are bigger sins than racism, like losing the war.
OK, your claims about them being free to leave seem to be misleading.
If I was in one of those camps and wanted to move to some flyover state but couldn’t get a job offer. Would I remain locked up , very much not free to leave, or would I actually be free to leave as long as I stayed away from military bases?
This is the first I’ve ever heard of them requiring a job offer to leave. I was taking what Hoopy said at face value but was not aware of it myself. I could believe it given that there being dozens of camps that operated under different conditions for 3-4 years, saying “what happened at the camps” is not well defined. Conditions at a camp in one state in 1942 could be very different than conditions in another state in 1944. I went to the wiki article and ctrl-F for “job” and “employ” and none of the sections I found said anything about a requirement to find employment before one could leave.
To my knowledge, you could leave, but most people told “go to a flyover state or wait until the war ends to go home” would choose to wait. It’s not good, but it wasn’t a prison. With the caveat that conditions were different at different camps at different times during the war. Some camps did have guards and barbed wire at the beginning when they were first establishing the camps and trying to relocate people, but once it became apparent this was less about relocation and more about internment, rules changed. For instance:
Was this ideal? No, but war is hell. If these were “concentration camps” and not “internment camps” then what is an internment camp?
@Conrad Honcho
You seem to be claiming that all of the people in the camps were free to leave, but only a quarter of them did so. I see support for the quarter leaving, but don’t see any support that the other 75% were free to leave if they so chose. Do you have an explicit source to back up the claim that all of the interred Japanese were free to leave, and what the requirements for doing so were?
At the very least, it seems they were not free to leave immediately, and were forced to live in pretty awful conditions (at least at some of the camps) for months before leaving would have been an option.
I do not. I’ve googled around for terms like “how could japanese americans leave internment camps” and I can find lots of articles about the camps, many of which mention people who did leave for school or relocation or to serve in the military, but nothing about the process for doing so. However, Roosevelt’s order was not “put the Japanese Americans in camps” but “exclude them from the coasts.” To my knowledge, the only ones not free to leave were those few thousand (I think around 6,000) who renounced their citizenship or were deemed disloyal.
Yes, I agree the conditions in camps were not good, and neither were the hardships placed on people who left their homes, jobs and businesses behind. It was a terrible hardship. But they were not concentration camps.
@Conrad
I think “internment camp” is more precise than concentration camp, but not necessarily more accurate. But I am glad to get your input, because I do care about the descriptive character of the phrase. If they’re insufficiently concentration-camp-y to you and would be even if you agreed with me about how strictly the detainment was enforced, that does matter. I think we have some disagreement on matters of fact as well as matters of definition, which makes it hard to come to consensus.
Also, ironically, I think the concept you may be getting at is shikata ga nai.
Not ironically. I understand that phrase and it went through my mind many times while writing these comments. If portals from the multiverse opened up and the Legion of Conrad Honchos, made up of all my alternate universe doppelgangers invaded America and the US government said to me, “Conrad, you haven’t done anything to join up with these folks, but we can’t take the risk you will, you need to sit this one out” I would agree they had a point, as much as it sucks, and comply with the orders*. Can’t be helped.
I think if we’re going to call something a concentration camp it needs to be for the purposes of rounding up people who were already peaceably(?) occupying an area, and holding them there in such a way they are not free to leave. Also heavily implies malice, probably with forced labor involved. An internment camp from which people may leave is not a concentration camp. And a detention center, housing migrant people who have broken the law until their case can be heard is definitely not a concentration camp, and calling it one is just a smear job against the people struggling to deal with a humanitarian and legal crisis.
* Until I could break free and join my
comradesConrades, natch. I want to join the winning side, and obviously an army of those handsome bastards would easily conquer the US.A historical point that’s probably worth making, because I see people here making a common mistake. You can look at the Nazi camp system and differentiate concentration camps (which changed significantly from 1933 to 1945 – at the beginning, they were mostly aimed at political enemies and were a tool of repression, by the end, they were aimed at many, many targets and were a source of labour, often labour that was expected to die in the process, or intended to die) from death camps (which existed entirely to kill people). A couple of concentration camps were converted to death camps or had a death camp attached. Odds of survival in a concentration camp varied – Jews had it the worst, and odds varied depending on the time (there was a period where they worked to reduce the death rate to squeeze more labour out, in the middle of the war; meanwhile, at the end of the war, conditions in the concentration camps were terrible due to the cold weather, lack of resources, and overcrowding as prisoners were marched or put on trains to camps the Germans still held. Odds of survival for someone sent to a death camp (the vast majority of them Jews) were next to zero – and this is one reason they often get confused, because the tiny number of death camp survivors means there’s very little survivor testimony.
This is an important distinction. The Nazis operated a total of 8 death camps (6 in Poland, 1 in Belarus and 1 in Serbia). But according to the most recent historical work, they operated something on the order of 50,000 concentration camps of various size across Germany and all the occupied territory.
This also explains the confusion about whether “people knew about the holocaust”.
People knew about the masd arrest, deportation and internment of jewish people and other declared enemies of the Nazis, not only because the Nazis didn’t hide it, they were openly boasting about in their public communication.
But it’s much less clear that much people knew about the final solution and the systematic extermination of jewish people and roma (at least until the first escapees started to reach Britain and describe what they saw), because that part was only done in a handful place and really strongly concealed — most of the extermination camps were disguised as ordinary buildings; zyklon B was used because as an industrially produced insecticide frequently used by the army to sanitized barracks, it wouldn’t cause suspicion that the Nazis were buying a lot of it; carbon monoxide was used instead in areas near the soviet-controlled zone where mass import of zyklon B would have seem odd, and so on.
Yeah. Plus, civilians who lived near camps where enough people died for the camps to have crematoria, it would have been hard to miss. It was also not hard to figure out that something bad was happening to Jews sent east, plus, soldiers would have known of, witnessed, and in some cases participated in mass shootings of Jews in the invaded parts of the USSR. Some people seem to have said that Jews were being killed, but their estimates of the numbers were lower than reality – eg, one of the White Rose pamphlets gives the number of 300,000 Jews killed by late 1942, when by that point more than that had been killed by shooting alone.
What source do you have for the reasons for using carbon monoxide in some camps? By the time they started operating gas chambers, the invasion of the USSR was well underway. My understanding is that carbon monoxide was used due to the experience of the T4 euthanasia program staff with carbon monoxide, and the improvised use of vans with the exhaust hooked up to the compartment.
I’ve looked back and have been unable to find the reference to that particular claim which I thought I had read somewhere, so I am provisionally retracting it.
I think that in an interest of rational policy debate one should use less CW terms whenever they are available.
If you take it out to the extreme you end up using nothing but vanilla, un-emotive language to describe everything. It seems like some arguments need to carry some emotional weight. The question here is, as I understand it, whether “concentration camp” carries too much emotional weight.
I think “internment camp” is maybe more appropriate, but concentration camp doesn’t jump out at me as obviously wrong. Most of the other more polite euphemisms proposed upthread seem vastly understated.
There seems to be plenty of evidence to suggest that politicians, and possibly journalists as well, prefer our policy debates to be less rational…
Representative democracy has suceeded. Dammit.
The central question is whether the Japanese internment was a gross human rights violation. I think that attempts to dispassionately define the boundaries of human rights are perverse and stupid. If there’s a place to lean on emotions, this is probably it – not to the exclusion of reason, but how much it matters to the interlocutor is meaningful.
I thought that the central question is whether it is appropriate to call Japanese internment camps concentration camps. I would say no. But if the central question is whether it was unjustified human rights violation, I would say yes. It also appears to be in contradiction to plain text of US Constitution.
I disagree with this sentiment. Boundaries of human rights have to be defined in some way, and I would prefer to do it rationally.
I don’t think there’s a good way to get anything other than tortuously bad philosophy out of pure rationality. “Is there suffering in Fundamental Physics?” comes to mind. I have yet to be convinced that rationality and reason are anything like sufficient for it.
If there’s a place to lean on emotions, this is probably it – not to the exclusion of reason, but how much it matters to the interlocutor is meaningful.
And what if your interlocutor is using the emotional term as a quick and easy way to whip up “run the bad guys out of town on a rail!” sentiments, where “Bad Guys” does not necessarily mean “rapists and murderers” but “on the opposite side of the aisle to my Guys”?
Then you go, “u dont heff 2 b mad,” per tradition (which would usually dictate following up with, “is onlee gaem”).
If this seems like a deeply insensitive thing to say, you may want to reconsider your assumptions.
Well, sir, I never did expect to get any Ilya Bryzgalov references here in the SSC comments.
Then again, the variety of interests among the regulars here is certainly humongous big!
People seem to have few objections to describing the Chinese Uyghur Internment Camps as “concentration camps.” While one could argue that the intense reeducation going on there is a form of “cultural genocide,” that’s a highly npncentral definition of “genocide.” I think this is a strong argument against the idea that “concentration camp” is commonly understood only to mean “physical extermination camps.”
Uighur internment/reeducation camps are at least places where a noncentral version of genocide is taking place. That makes them much closer to being a central example of a “concentration camp” than any of the places under discussion where no form of genocide is taking place. So this strikes me as a weak argument.
Or it could just be most people are okay with tarring the Chinese government with the Nazi brush
Portland, Oregon is a terrible place to live. The elected officials (all Democrats) live in the wealthiest neighborhoods, which are well-policed, while telling the police to do nothing about homeless camping, used needles, and now human feces (which until the beginning of this year I thought was only the San Francisco Treat). The best non-automobile path in the city, the 205 bike trail, has long since been taken over by them, chasing off cyclists and dog walkers. Masked Leftists are suspected of functionally being unpaid interns for the City Council, allowed to crack skulls (e.g. Andy Ngo’s) because the elected officials agree with their goals.
I need to move into a cheaper housing market somewhere walkable, with a sane local government. I’m a dog person, so a local government that fines you for letting your dog off-leash in 100% of parks, or dog-friendly parks only being accessible by auto, would be terrible. Crime rate is not the biggest factor, as I’ve never been raped, robbed or assaulted in Portland (I’m more worried about disease-carrying litter), but I’m not willing to buy a cheap house in Detroit either.
Any data or advice from rationalists (the ones who don’t believe in the Bay Area, I mean)?
Midwestern cities that aren’t dying are a good place to start. Like Columbus is a great city and super affordable. Plenty of amenities and a good job market too. Not the safest city, though, and I don’t know how its local government is or how friendly it is to dogs.
Yeah, Nick, I just need to research “not dying.” Dying-ness would correlate with crime and heroin use, though it’s possible for law enforcement of dying cities to scare their homeless addicts off to SF/Portland/Seattle if the relevant officials will it.
Just “walkable Midwestern city with jobs” checks most of the necessary boxes. I’m seeing that Dayton in Ohio used to be highly ranked as a low-housing-cost, green city where the jobs hadn’t disappeared. Then it became a PBS Frontline subject. @_@
I lived in Dayton for many years. It still has many wonderful areas that are green, safe, and walkable — and incredibly cheap. I would live there now if I could find a job there, but I couldn’t. (If you can write code, there are lots of jobs there.)
Cool, thanks for that input. How are the winters and summers there?
Minneapolis is quite a nice city (although I may be biased since it’s where I grew up). They even have sane housing policies (look up the 2040 plan)
I sometimes wonder if people don’t completely overvalue “safety” when evaluating cities. How much annual cost before it is more than it’s worth to reduce the chance of being mugged from 3% to 2.1% or whatever? (numbers completely made up, possibly not realistic and certainly not based on real city stats that I looked up…maybe I’ll do that later)
Also, people tend to evaluate “safety” relatively. I’m active on a forum called city-data, and a common thing there is for people there to ask on local forums about places to live. One person posted on the New Jersey forum about how she was a grandmother and wanted to move to New Jersey to be closer to her kids and grandkids, and for her budget she thought East Orange might be a good place. Now, East Orange is rather infamous locally and has a reputation as a nasty high-crime town, and people started telling her she most definitely should not move there because of that. She responded that she’d looked it up and East Orange had lower crime than where she’d been living, which was Atlanta, so she’d be just fine in that respect. Unfortunately she never followed up with whether she moved or not. But I’m sure the people who would never consider “the EO” because of the crime rate wouldn’t categorically rule out Atlanta or even Miami which are much more dangerous.
Probably because they think (I don’t know rightly or wrongly) that all of East Orange is bad, whereas Atlanta and Miami have nice areas (both cities being larger than East Orange). It’s the difference between ruling out “Brooklyn” based on crime and ruling out “East New York.”
I think crime rate of the neighborhood is more important than the crime rate of the city. There’s a modest amount of crime in my city, but it’s all on the SE side and I live in the NW.
This. In Portland, everyone knows that common criminals concentrate around 82nd Avenue and the I-205 corridor. The inner city is white hipsters, so you’ll fear for your safety from what the homeless do and Antifa will bust the heads of “out” conservatives, but not from common crime. And SE/NE outside the inner city out to 52nd or so is pure Portlandia without the downtown problems except for homeless people claiming the sidewalk singly or in pairs (not whole camps).
Columbus is very dog-friendly, and many parts of it are very safe too. Type of place where you can leave your car doors unlocked while you go grocery shopping. The safe parts of the city are more expensive, but still dirt cheap compared to the Bay Area.
I cannot vouch for the sanity of its local government, but it sure seems much more sane than Portland’s.
I know of no place with a sane local government. Local government attracts nutballs.
Philadelphia can be walkable depending on where you are, is probably cheaper than Portland (though living in the nice parts of the city is not cheap by any means), has lots of parks including dog off-leash ones. Also plenty of bike trails, including one that runs halfway to Reading. The Philadelphia police like to break heads so I wouldn’t expect Antifa to be allowed to run free (though they are present). Not sure the current conditions on homeless drug users; when I lived in the area there were some “needle parks” but others were better policed, and the good areas were expanding. The local government is utterly corrupt, however. SEPTA (the public transportation system) is known for its unreliability and also the recklessness of its bus drivers.
Why is that?
Do people only vote Democrat/Republican for local government in the US?
In Spain, it is pretty typical, at least in small towns, to have a local guy who people agree is a decent guy. So they go independent party (Nowheretown for Good Governance Party).
People usually vote differently from the way they vote in national elections, too. So if you have a beef with the mayor because he is the asshole who keeps cutting the branches of your apple tree because they are on the border with his land, you vote for another party (or any other random reason; people in small town have long standing feuds for the silliest of reasons).
They also will vote for locals instead of outsiders, even if it means voting out of party.
And I think we have pretty sane local governments, especially when it’s independents, such as Madrid until now (Madrid is currently an ungovernable mess, but that’s because there is no coalition). There is still corruption, obviously.
This is a more cynical take on local governance than I think is justified. Local government in the US suffers from extremely low turn out and being relatively homogenous. This means you can sometimes get motivated nutjobs. But I’d say local government is, on the whole, saner than national in the US.
However, one difference between the US and Spain: ‘local’ government in the US sometimes extends to very powerful entities. Firstly, there’s less central control as in unitary states. But secondly, New York City has about as much budget and government as Poland. Los Angeles is comparable to Ecuador. And so on. These large governments often control huge portions of the national wealth and population. Real small government, the type where you can meet your mayor at a local diner, is unknown in the large cities. And those governments mostly run along partisan lines as a representation of almost national politics.
Outside of those major cities, you get more genuinely small government. People who are locally respected and not running vast bureaucracies.
From what I’ve been able to google, NY’s GDP is similar to South Korea or Spain. I guess that an economy this size gets ruled as if it were a city hall instead of a parliament means capture is easier. If there were 200 aldermen in NY, it would be much more likely that you would get to know your alderman.
But London seems to have slightly less insane politics; same for Tokyo.
The difference with London or Tokyo is that it’s our equivalent of DC. That means it gets a lot more national attention. There are really only a few countries that have multiple cities the size of London or Tokyo that are just regional phenomenon. That have multiple cities which would be the capital in other countries and are dealing with the equivalent of multiple Londons or Tokyos.
We’re focusing on the democratic vs oligarchic debate that represents the US vs China. But another very important divide is the city-state vs nation debate. The US and China (for example) are both nations who absorb alternate centers of power pretty easily. In contrast, the UK or Spain can’t have local alternative centers of power without suffering secession crises.
To put it in overly simplistic terms, the rise of Austin hasn’t threatened the US in any credible way. Likewise with China and Guangzhou. But the rise of Edinburgh as an international city has stoked anti-UK sentiment.
Once local government is captured, it is hard to unseat. Your little hamlet’s advertiser newspaper is not going to pay for an investigative journalist to do FOIA reports and say how corrupt Boss Hogg is.
What are you looking for where you live? Also, what industry do you work in?
Real estate.
I’m looking for a real estate market where a safe house with a yard costs <$250,000. "Safe" means I'm no more likely to be murdered, brutally hospitalized, or a victim of property crime than in Portland, the urban environment my expectations/risk-avoidance is calibrated to. Homeless people should be sheltered, and those who reject shelter because they hate rules should be chased off by the police to woker pastures rather than allowed to camp with used heroin needles and feces locally.
It needs to be walkable, like Portland would be if public paths and sidewalks belonged to law-abiding citizens. No sprawling tracts of subdevelopments: I have a family member who got picked up by the police because she tried to walk rather than drive around Aurora, Colorado. I'll also be walking a dog, so I want to buy a house within walking distance of park where I can legally unleash them. Job and the grocery store can require a car, but I want that much walkability.
The cultural amenities of a city preferred but low-priority.
Alright, a safe house with a yard needs to cost less than $250k. And it needs to be reasonably walkable, ideally with cultural amenities.
Almost every city in the US meets this standard. There are maybe twenty or thirty places in the US that don’t. I need more qualifications or I’m just going to list every metro area that isn’t in the top 30…
I mean, I’m trying to optimize on three axes here:
The cheaper houses are, the better, because then I can put the difference between selling this house and buying one in a better city in my portfolio. The extreme I’ve seen on Redfin is cities in Ohio where move-in-ready houses, not foreclosures or “CASH ONLY” dilapidated, start around $45,000.
However… unemployment and crime should be reasonable, with no homeless camps or places known for their discarded heroin needles.
House also needs to be in a neighborhood, not a subdevelopment isolated from stores and parks by a highway, like Matt M mentioned in Texas and I’ve seen in the Denver Metro area (which is too expensive anyway). Speaking of Denver Metro: I’d prefer not to walk in snow very many days of the year, though three months with snow on the ground would be easier to adapt to than constantly changing weather like Denver’s (can’t safely drive out for groceries without tires chains… now take the chains off because the snow melted… now put them back on…) I also want the dog I’m walking to be able to go off-leash in a park I reach on foot from my front door.
The Eastern suburbs of Cleveland, specifically Shaker Heights, University Heights, Beachwood, and Cleveland Heights are all safe, walk-able and by Portland standards varying degrees of cheap. There are definite parts of the city/East Cleveland that you want to avoid, but there are job centers and commutes that avoid them. Several universities and a couple of hospitals are major employers in the area.
You can get a 4 bed/2 bath in a nice enough area for under $200,000, although you do need to be more careful as the area fits in a weird category. It was once very rich and quite a few houses are in need of upkeep in an expensive way (my sister’s house had lovely ornate windows that leaked and cost a lot to replace with modern stuff).
Yeah, University Heights and Beachwood are really nice areas. Lovely to walk around in, which I did a bit of as a student. And it’s a short drive, or a long bike ride, from Cuyahoga Valley National Park, which beats any dog park in the country.
I mean this with love but you have a very bad case of urban dweller typical mind going on. You want a price less than $250k, low unemployment, a yard, low crime, a warm climate, nearby stores, some culture, and a nearby park. The only thing that’s really narrowing it is “warm climate”, which limits you to about 25-33% of the US. Everything else is a trait of the statistical majority of homes for sale in the US. This is why you’re getting people recommending a ton of different places.
The city that scores the highest on warm/safe/cheap/still in a city/town by my data is Lakeland or Port St. Lucie, FL. No snow, ranked 6th and 18th for least crime among cities, about $220k home price, both near major metros (Tampa/Miami) and large enough to have their own cultures. Redfin says there are currently 33 homes on market that are less than $200k, have a two car garage, a yard, at least three bedrooms, and two bathrooms. Seven of them have pools too. One of them appears to be in a gated community with its own internal park.
But again, this is kind of arbitrary. You could equally pick a ton of other places.
I should add when it comes to snow that Cleveland is a bad choice; it’s better out in the suburbs, but it still gets a lot more snow than the rest of Ohio due to lake effect.
I don’t think so, unless you are very lax about the cultural amenities things. If you want an art museum because you want to walk around in an air conditioned space once or twice a year doing something different and cultured then most cities are fine, if you care about art and want to see important works and want to visit multiple times then only a dozen or so cities qualify. Its a similar thing with orchestras etc, and some of those cities are going to get knocked out for being to expensive right away (ie NY and DC).
If weather is a serious requirement then skip Cleveland, its winters are to long even when they aren’t really cold. Of places I have been Philadelphia sounds about right, it has real winters but not mid-west winters, it has all the culture and history you would expect for the one time capital, plenty of jobs right now, you are close to mountain hiking (but not Rockies hiking) and the beach, there is farmland/the Amish for the country experience and doing something low key, lots of parks, a good craft beer scene and still areas where you can buy a house with a yard for 1/4 million or less.
Consider western Massachusetts. Lots of safe small towns where everyone is always walking dogs. For $250,000 you could get a fenced in yard for your dog. You can drive to Boston if you occasionally want the big city experience. Lot’s of culture everywhere.
I liked Western Mass the year I lived there.
And just to give an example:
House in Agawam
1100 sq ft on a 1/4 acre, less than a mile from an off-leash dog park in a 1000-acre State Park, in a town where elementary school students routinely ride bikes or walk to school alone. $180K. The parish I’m part of is 3 miles away, and so is downtown Springfield.
It’s a typical summer day; high will be in the low 90’s, low in the mid-60’s, under 40% humidity–walking in mid-afternoon you’d get sweaty, but running in the early morning is perfectly comfortable.
If you want growth, a more favorable political environment, and a low cost of living, I highly recommend Texas. I grew up in Oregon and live here now, so I kinda know where you’re coming from.
It’s not super walkable in general, but I did live in midtown Houston when I first moved here and it was like, mildly walkable, I guess? They’re also building a ton of new apartments downtown, but downtown isn’t really where the action is (people mostly work there, and didn’t start actually living there until recently). I have to imagine there are similar such areas in Dallas and Austin as well. Have no idea what the dog laws are.
I’m interested in buying a house, which I have experience with. I like nature and have a very strong preference for walking out my front door and walking up to, say, 3.5 miles one direction without it being illegal (see Aurora, CO anecdote above).
I will start researching possible places in Texas, thanks!
Well, in Texas you won’t get “affordable stand-alone homes” AND walkable. The walkable areas are all downtown and optimized for condos and apartments. The cheap housing in the suburbs is your standard cul-de-sac arrangement with huge highways that you use to commute to work in the city.
Also there’s not much nature in your immediate environment. If you’re willing to drive a bit you can find some, but you won’t see all that much in your day to day routine like you do in the PNW.
Some suburbs in the DFW area are relatively bikeable, though.
Like, there aren’t designated bike lanes, but there’s not enough traffic for it to be that dangerous, and all that space also means that the shoulders and sidewalks are larger, anyways.
I did way more biking and enjoyed it way more in Texas than in Cali.
But yes, groceries are always 20 minutes away at minimum. But given that commutes are usually 40+ minutes away, that just means that you do your errands to and from work.
As for nature, there aren’t necessarily big nature-oriented parks everywhere, but given all of the space there, there’s likely an undeveloped area that’s relatively wild, sometimes with tree groves and tall grass. Kids can still do that kind of exploration, in Texas. But I’d also recommend getting a house close to one of the larger lakes. The lake parks are pretty good, have extensive trail systems.
What are you looking for? Some idea of types of work, types of amenities, etc. I’ve lived in several cities that are better than Portland–but I’ll give useful info if I can.
Three cities and an area I’d look at:
Louisville KY; I’d love to move there because it’s near family and has a great Ordinariate Catholic church. It’s fairly cheap, and I understand it’s quite walkable.
Cincinnati: inexpensive, more major city amenities than you’d expect in a city of its size, very walkable in some areas.
Nashville: getting expensive, but a great city–incredible music scene, lots of cultural variety, Vanderbilt, the Nashville Dominicans. If you decide to visit, let me know and I can get my sister to show you around. Not sure how walkable it is, though.
Western Massachusetts, where I live now. Ridiculously cheap, and it feels like living in a storybook (Dr Seuss, Norman Rockwell, Eric Carle, Thornton Burgess were all from this area.) Very very liberal, and the Catholic church is struggling–but there are a few strong parishes, and some remnants of the old ethnic Catholic culture. Boston and New York City are plausible day-trips by public transport.
Are you only looking for major cities? Philadelphia sounds like it would work, my wife lived there and liked the walk-ability a decade ago, and she biked 15 miles to work along the river trail twice a week for a while. I’ve never had an issue in the several off leash dog parks near where we live which is 15-20 mins outside of the city, and there are some large parks that you can walk to from parts of the city, and so larger parks you can drive to from the city.
No, small cities are fine. I’m just not interested in buying a house somewhere with no jobs: like some of the Oregon coast is beautiful and it’s possible to buy a house on it for <$250,000 but while a wife can quit the workforce in lucky circumstances, you can't have a family of beach bums in a town of fewer than 5,000.
If you can stand the winters, consider the Twin Cities of Minneapolis/St. Paul. Many walkable neighborhoods, most of which are very safe, and pretty competent city governments. Not cheap anymore but probably still cheaper than Portland.
I love the Bay Area fwiw but only because I am privileged enough to avoid the consequences of the local government’s follies.
If LMC can handle that winter, I’d suggest reconsidering Detroit. There is an urban core that is very healthy. Lots of hipsters, but I think they live closer to reality. They know that letting homeless people camp on sidewalks isn’t adding artsy color; rather, it’s one-stop away from Detroit turning back into what it was a generation ago, so no, you can’t do that.
No idea what the school systems are like in Detroit proper. The suburbs are still good; probably worse than a generation ago, but they started from a healthy point.
If you are biting the bullet on winter and moving to Michigan, come move to Grand Rapids instead. It’s one of the quicker growing cities in the midwest, has a pretty walkable downtown area these days (and free busses in the main loop). They are consistently rated high as one of the best places to live.
Portland is pretty low crime and pretty walkable, which is also why it’s pretty expensive. You might be disappointed at some of your options.
However, I compared Wiki’s list of violent crime rates, walkscore.coms list of walkable cities above 50, and median house prices from Kiplinger to give you a few options. I ruled out any major crime spots, so that knocked off cities like Detroit, Baltimore, Cleveland, and St. Louis, and any major expensive spots, which knocked off cities like Denver (including the usual suspects)
Your dirt cheap options:
Rochester NY
Buffalo NY
Pittsburgh PA
The NY options basically double your risk of violent crime, which I would describe as “high crime.” Pittsburgh is an increase, but almost everything on this list is.
Pros: Pittsburgh is a great sports town, Buffalo is beautiful area
Cons: So. Much. Snow. These areas are all in the snow belt, and Buffalo is particularly bad.
Your mid-range options:
Milwaukee
New Orleans
Chicago
Philly
Richmond
Richmond looks like it might actually DECREASE your crime rate, but it’s the most expensive item on this list. The other options all basically double your violent crime rate over Portland.
Pros: you have some major cities in here with some major cultural amenities. Philly especially is close to all sorts of beautiful nature things. Milwaukee is an under-rated city. I have no experience with Richmond, but it’s one of the few small cities that had such a high walkability score, so if you want to blend “small town” with walkability, it may be one of your better options
Cons: Philly sports fans are the meanest people on the planet and make the Taliban look like the Teletubbies. They booed Santa Claus. Also, Chicago is basically bankrupt and I think borrows money at rates similar to Greece. Also, New Orleans has a non-trivial risk of flooding all your stuff.
Your expensive options:
Twin Cities
Miami
Newark
Hialeah
Pros: Minnesota people are some of the nicest people on the planet, they are basically Canadian. Miami Beach is beautiful and Miami itself is full of wonderful food.
Cons: these options are theoretically much more expensive. Minnesota winters are cold. Brutally cold. Newark is in New Jersey. I have no familiarity with Hialeah beyond its reference point in a Tom Wolfe novel. Miami sucks for much of the year, and they could not cook a proper burger if the existence of the entire universe depended on it. Also their beer sucks.
Out of the available options, I would put “the best” for you as the following:
Pittsburgh
Philly
Buffalo
maybe Rochester
maybe Richmond
From what I know of Chicago, I would rule it out: our median house price is heavily weighted down by an excess of housing stock in areas like Garfield Park, where you will learn Neo-style bullet dodging as a new hobby. Living in the nicer areas probably exceeds your price range, though there are some neighborhoods you might like (they will most likely be heavily Hispanic, if that affects your decision at all).
I suspect, based on my knowledge of Midwestern cities, that Milwaukee will be the same story, but slightly less bad. The Twin Cities should not be as heavily affected, but they are more expensive in general, and I would not recommend it unless you are REALLY confident you can handle the cold. It is NOT a joke.
I’l talk about Richmond from first-hand knowledge–I lived there most of 2001-2014. I’d move back in a heartbeat if I could find work in my field.
It’s high-crime, but the crime is VERY concentrated and easy to avoid; it also is a bit mis-measured because Richmond is small relative to its metro area (so the metro area crime rate, per-capita, is not that high, but the city proper is.) So far as I know, people no longer watch City Council meeting for the sheer entertainment value.
Great bike town – lots of bikes on the streets, good bike shops. Great outdoors, too–the James River rapids run right through downtown. Two colleges – a top 50 SLAC and a major state university/medical school with a serious arts program (VCU). Visual arts are huge–there’s more visual art culture than you would expect for the town’s size. You’ll want a car, but won’t need it day-to-day if you live and work in the right areas.
Fairly strong Catholic presence for the South; St Benedict is a fairly reform of the reform parish (NO Mass with chanted Latin responses), St Joseph is FSSP, there’s more “normal” Catholci churches too but the two I mentioned are the ones I’ve attended.
All things considered, it isn’t clear to me that MN winters are worse than Pittsburgh or Buffalo ones. The single-family houses in the Twin Cities can get a bit expensive but one can also sometimes buy half of a two-family and still have a private street-level entrance and yard, or buy a place that needs some work and fix it up.
It depends on what you are trying to optimize. I looked at Accuweather’s January 2019 actuals for Pittsburgh, and there are several days above 60 degrees. There are a few colder days, but there’s only one day in the entire month it dropped below zero.
The warmest it got in the Twin Cities in January was 38 degrees. Between the night of Jan 28th and morning of Feb 1st, it did not get above zero, and there were multiple days in a row that bottomed out below -22, which is the coldest it has EVER been in Pittsburgh.
Definitely rule out Newark. Newark’s walkable, but except the somewhat-gentrified downtown and adjacent Portuguese “Ironbound”, is high crime, and there’s essentially nothing in the way of bike paths (There’s a Jersey City/Newark trail; it’s very sad).
> Pittsburgh PA
I’m torn on recommendations.
On one hand, we need more sane people here.
OTOH, the last thing we need is more housing pressure here.
Haha. Sorry, but Pittsburgh is looking amazing. Houses in the suburbs for $50k? 68 unis/colleges in the metro area, if Mrs./Mr. Cat needs to retrain for a different career? Take your dog to a baseball game for $30 including the human’s seat?
I like the dirt cheap options. I was actually looking up Dayton, Ohio, after all. Pittsburgh sounds about as livable as Portland (a non-leftist activist actually camped on the Mayor’s lawn to protest legalized homeless camping, which sounds like a very Portland problem) but with move-in-ready houses in the suburbs starting around $50k rather than $250k, more colleges, and Redder/less hipster cultural amenities, which is all awesome.
Rochester NY has really high property taxes and lots of terrible areas. The nice areas are nice, but when comparing housing costs, do look into those property tax levels in the Northeast…
@Le Maistre Chat,
I know you said “no San Francisco bay area” but I’m going to shill for three towns anyway, the first is the tiny town of Albany, California which is very walkable, but still mostly low-level tree lined streets (the exception is some giant condo towers that face the bay but are hidden from the view of the rest of the town by a hill). One library in town, another fine one just across the border in Berkeley, (really the advantage is “near Berkeley, but not in”) with lots of restaurants, nearby bookstores, all the nice “Blue-Tribe” stuff, but with police that come when you call, and a small easy to deal with city government (a city councilman even came to my door and asked me “what issues are important to you”!).
Downsides are that if you’re near the border with Berkeley sometimes beggars from the encampments there cross over, but encounters are far rarer than in Berkeley, Oakland, and San Francisco yet the commute to those cities and their jobs is really short.
Nearby Saint Ambrose (Catholic church) is nice, and there’s a really big Catholic high school in town (and a stone’s throw from my house).
Next is “the town that time forgot”/”the island city” Alameda!
Very old fashioned, the supermarkets even have “veterans parking only” spots, lots of family businesses, a large Coast Guard base, a Ferry into San Francisco for day trips, and the fewest beggars of any town I’ve been in California with no tents!
For some reason the town has a lot of people with Asian faces and American accents, but few of their parents/grandparents who still have foreign accents (maybe the grandparents still live nearby in Oakland or San Francisco?).
Last, just north of Albany is El Ceritto, and I really don’t know much about the city government, but it seems working-class, but clean, and had a really nice family oriented 4th of July celebration in a large park, the swim center that the city operates is very nice (with sprinklers set up for kids to run through) with occasional free days! I’ve been to quite a few church rummage sales in it’s many churches, which like Alameda have many American accented parishoners with Asian faces, but unlike Alameda there’s some grandparents sprinked around, El Cerrito is a bit more Hispanic and has more apartment buildings than Alameda or Albany, but it doesn’t feel “under class” just “working class” as most everyone is assimilated into U.S. culture.
In terms of “Blue-Tribe” to “Red-Tribe” I’d say Albany is more “blue” and Alameda and El Cerrito more “red” but all have fewer of the downsides of their “Tribes” and more of the upsides.
San Francisco and it’s higher paid jobs are a “BART” (subway and elevated train) ride away if you need the income, but except maybe for some kids events and museums there’s no need to venture into “The City” for shopping, unless you want to go to the only bookstore that I’ve seen with @DavidFriedman’s book on the shelf.
> I’m looking for a real estate market where a safe house with a yard costs <$250,000.
What price would reasonable to expect to pay for a safe house with a yard in these lower cost Bay Area towns that you mention? My impression is that would be lot higher than her budget.
Here’s the Zillow map for El Cerrito, CA.
Here’s Albany.
And here’s Alameda.
tl;dr around 750 thousand dollars, 500 if you’re lucky and willing to go downmarket. So yeah, this is hideously out of the price range. Besides, Portland has suburbs and quiet neighborhoods too; if LMC isn’t happy with e.g. Tualatin, LMC won’t be happy with e.g. Albany.
@nkurz
As @Nornagest well demonstrated there are no “reasonable” priced homes to be found within at least a 100 miles of San Francisco, “cheaper” yes, but cheap?
I don’t even know if they can be found in this Time Zone!
Sure there are. Here’s Zillow for Modesto, CA. Now, you wouldn’t want to actually live in Modesto — it was rated the worst city in America two years running — and neither would LMC, but could LMC afford it? Absolutely.
It’s impossible to find an affordable home within reasonable commuting distance of SF, but that’s not much of an obstacle if you don’t want to live, work, or hang out in SF. Which, if you’re moving out of Portland because of the homeless people, you don’t.
(a city councilman even came to my door and asked me “what issues are important to you”!).
And when he staggered away from the doorstep three hours later, did he regret asking you? 😉
Last, just north of Albany is El Ceritto
I looked that up and Wikipedia says “El Cerrito was founded by refugees from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. ”
Holy crap, now I know where the last sane people in San Francisco went! 1906 – Nature flattens the city. Sensible people: Feck this, we’re leaving and trying this city building lark elsewhere where the ground won’t try to eat you. Rest of the populace: Nah, we’ll stay and rebuild in the exact same spot, what’s the worst that could happen?
@Deiseach
Regret?
Oh no, he even thanked me for my time!
Though strangely he hasn’t been back….
Makes sense, but San Franciscans increase by conversion, not by child birth.
Much like the Shakers did…
My sister lives in Little Rock and I was very pleasantly surprised when I went to visit. The downtown is quite walkable but still has lots of charming tree-lined neighborhoods with beautiful stately homes (and some smaller homes with yards). She seems to find it safe enough and it seems to be growing; I saw lots of new bars / shops / microbreweries / restaurants, plus some co-working spaces, etc when walking around. She lives about half a mile from the river, which is bounded by parks on both sides for a few miles has an excellent series of biking and running trails. No idea about the local government, but it seemed well-run at first glance.
Have you looked into Salt Lake City?
The housing might not be as cheap as you want, but it’s also not ridiculous by any means.
You’ll love the outdoor culture here. There are great hikes 10-15 mins from downtown and world class skiing is 30-45 mins away. This is an incredibly pet friendly place as well, I almost feel like an outcast because I don’t own a pet.
The local government is sane in the sense that it’s not going to swing wildly left because of the Mormon influence.
The cons of Salt Lake City is perhaps, depending how you see it, the Mormon influence. I personally see it as almost all pros. One of the only real complaints people have is liquor laws are a bit strict here. But the city is safe and the people are friendly. Great culture of work-life balance. The winters are mild compared to all the places getting recommended in the mid-West. There’s a lot of growth happening here as well.
Not yet. I’m imagining e-shopping for cases of red wine and Mormon officials stopping them at the post office. 😀
Some believe that we’re headed for “the death of truth”; for a time when anyone can fully curate his information sources and social circles to form any desired reality bubble. Technology will super-empower innate human biases and lazy thinking, leading to a bleak future where no one can agree on simple facts.
I don’t dismiss this possibility, and have a gut feeling that the level of untruth will stay low enough for societies to continue functioning. What gives me hope is the belief that AGIs will not have human biases, will be extremely rational, and will have a sharp grasp of reality, so at least some minds on this planet will see things for what they are and keep accurate records of events.
I think AGIs would realize that cognitive biases and biases more generally speaking were maladaptive, and that the greatest utility derives from perceiving one’s surroundings as accurately as possible, and making decisions only after careful consideration. AGIs might pretend to have biases in order to fit in with humans, but what’s going on inside their heads will be different from that.
People who don’t grok reality can’t win wars, even with massive numerical and technological superiority, so there will be at least one group adjacent to every surviving society that isn’t wholly bubble-ized. Other examples are left as an exercise for the student.
It is possible that a majority of the electorate will become so disconnected from reality that it will vote for all these people to do something that they understand to be wholly self-destructive, in which case the problem solves itself one way or another. If it’s the other way, note that people who don’t grok reality can’t rebuild a post-apocalyptic civilization, nor long survive as hunter-gatherers, subsistence farmers, or slaves.
If it’s the other way, note that people who don’t grok reality can’t rebuild a post-apocalyptic civilization, nor long survive as hunter-gatherers, subsistence farmers, or slaves.
Some of them would, out of necessity, start groking reality in a post-apocalyptic situation. This would be easier to do since most of the technological distractions that propped up their reality bubbles would no longer work.
Its probably to late to start grokking at that point, you don’t exactly have a lot of time to figure things out.
They also can’t build buildings that stand up, rockets that go up into the sky instead of blowing up on the pad, vaccines that prevent disease, or computers that work. All those things require doing your level best to understand reality pretty well, and none of those things will be convinced to work on cartoon physics just because every human on Earth believes in cartoon physics.
The problem is that within the social sphere, working from a correct understanding of reality often gets you a worse outcome than working from a correct understanding of what your social circle believes or professes. A rock-solid understanding of the truth isn’t as much comfort as you’d think when the Inquisitor starts heating up the irons.
You can build a pretty solid filter bubble without rejecting F=ma.
But the kind of understanding you need to win a war is somewhat person-oriented.
All along the way, you have to pursuade your side to keep fighting, and the other side to concede whatever you were fighting over. From individual soldiers surrendering to the final peace treaty.
Think of all the people, blinded by ideology, expecting the populace to welcome them as liberators.
The problem is that within the social sphere, working from a correct understanding of reality often gets you a worse outcome than working from a correct understanding of what your social circle believes or professes.
This is only true if you make your correct understanding of reality known to other humans, and if you have failed to incorporate their values, personalities, and likely reactions to you into your model of the social sphere. I think it would be most adaptive if you had a correct understanding of reality, both in the scientific and social/cultural sense, but tailored your outward behavior and speech in ways that optimized your fitness and strategically advanced your goals.
In other words, you’d act like a highly intelligent sociopath or skilled politician! You would learn as much as possible about as many people around you as possible, create models of them for incorporation into your larger world model, and lie to them as necessary to get them to do things that served your interests, all the while never drinking your own Kool-Aid.
A hopeful thought. But if everybody is bubble-ized and hates every other bubble, and they go to war despite incompetence, then either one bubble-ized side wins, or else they stay at war forever.
There are times lately when I think we are beginning to see the true explanation for the Fermi Paradox. Step One: a beast evolved for tribal life nevertheless manages to cobble together the institutions that enable a global civilization. Step Two: it develops Twitter.
This isn’t true and it’s not going to be. The claim that it even might be true is mostly an American thing, or American-and-Western-European, and even there a good fraction of the population does not partake of reality-denying bubbles.
If you imagine that they do or soon will, that’s one of the ways your bubble is preventing you from observing reality.
I suspect humans always and everywhere partake in reality-denying bubbles. But some bubbles are crazier than others. If your reality-denying bubble is mostly about ideology that doesn’t affect practical decisions much, then it’s not that dysfunctional. This is actually a good reason to try to keep the role of ideology small in your society.
You can think of a reality-denying ideology as being in a kind of equilibrium between people refusing it because it seems factually wrong and people accepting it because of social pressure. ISTM that social media has made social pressure more effective, in much the same way that the widespread use of radio did a century or so ago. That probably means that people will either shift toward more acceptance of reality-denying ideology, or develop social antibodies to this kind of pressure so they don’t follow social pressure off a cliff.
If recent controversies relating to “biased” AI are any indication, in the event that AI starts returning us information that goes against prevailing social opinion, the AI will be either reprogrammed or ignored.
An interesting problem here is that sometimes, there are bases for making decisions that are against the law. If a bank wants to use an AI to make that decision, it needs to not be using that illegal basis. If you offer different loan rates to blacks and whites based on their race, then you’re violating the law even if that leads to the best outcomes in terms of default rates and such.
Now, you might want to reconsider the wisdom of that law. But if you keep that law, then it sure seems like it also ought to apply to AI-made decisions, not just to human-made ones.
Well the problem is slightly more nuanced than that.
The real issue is that if you offer different loan rates to blacks and whites for any reason, and the general public gets wind of it, you will be denounced as racist. Whatever supposedly objective “totally not race” criteria that just-so-happens to correlate with race will be considered unacceptable to use.
I don’t believe you. You will be denounced as racist if you give different loan rates to black people for one reason, and that reason is “because they’re black.” If the reason is “because they had worse credit” then you will not be.
Here’s the Washington Post doing a bit of denouncing.
I don’t think that’s quite true: Disparate Impact
“Therefore, the disparate impact theory under Title VII prohibits employers “from using a facially neutral employment practice that has an unjustified adverse impact on members of a protected class. A facially neutral employment practice is one that does not appear to be discriminatory on its face; rather it is one that is discriminatory in its application or effect.”
The fun little thing with loans is that to get the result that the AI-fairness people want (equal loan acceptance rates between races), you have to force it — that is, you have to include race in the criteria (either directly or by proxy) and you have to fudge the training set. This makes it rather hard to fool yourself about what you are doing, though people try.
Truth isn’t dead, but she doesn’t come out of her well very often.
We all believe untrue things, which seem as basic and unquestionable to us as “2 + 2 = 4.” We’re experts at finding patterns that aren’t there and engaging in motivated reasoning to “prove” that facts and logic support whatever we were arguing for to begin with. Nobody is immune, and so far I see no sign that an AI will be immune either, since it’s designed by biased imperfect humans and necessarily reflects its creators’ biases and imperfections.
The replication crises hasn’t really sunk in yet. Many recent scientific “discoveries” may turn out to be no more real than N-rays, but good luck getting any refutations published. The rot is deep. A few threads ago I declared that truth is a social construct, which was roundly mocked. Fine, structural engineering has a pretty good track record, but most things aren’t structural engineering. The world can stay irrational longer than you can stay alive.
I should have added to my original post that, on other internet fora I’ve written about my belief that AGIs will have major advantages over humans thanks to the former’s lack of cognitive biases, and people have disagreed with me, claiming that the AGIs will also be biased. They’ve said that, since AGIs will never have perfect access to complete information and will never have infinite time to consider all variables and outcomes when formulating decisions and judgments, they will be incapable of true, rational thinking.
I agree that AGIs will still have bounded rationality, but that their boundaries will be pushed out much more than those of human minds, meaning AGIs will be much better than we are at analyzing information, grasping “reality,” and deducing which course of action best conforms to the demands of reality. Without perfect information and infinite time to analyze it, yes, even Super AGIs will need to use “cognitive shortcuts” (which I think are also termed “heuristics”), and if those shortcuts were systematically applied, then they might count as cognitive biases. But very importantly, AGIs would be:
1) Capable of impartially and rationally processing much more data than a human mind could before hitting a limitation that forced them to employ a shortcut;
2) Fully aware of their own cognitive shortcuts/biases;
3) Able to alter or turn off their cognitive shortcuts/biases.
So my response to the people who believe AGIs will also have cognitive biases is that yes, they probably would, but they would not be nearly as severe a handicap on their thinking as the biases are on human thinking, and since being able to accurately perceive reality and to quickly identify optimal courses of action is adaptive, then AGIs will have many key advantages over humans.
What do you think of my reasoning?
Everyone keeps saying AGI. From the context it sounds like a synonym of AI (artificial intelligence). But to me as a tax accountant, I can’t get past thinking it is adjusted gross income (and Google agrees with me). If it really is the same as AI, what is the G for, and why can’t we keep using just AI?
The G is for “general”. We’ve been making AI since the Seventies, but it’s been narrow AI, specialized for very specific problem domains and not very bright outside of them; it’s only very recently that we’ve started making strides towards intelligence that can apply itself more broadly.
Conventionally, an AGI is one that can apply itself to any domain, and we’re nowhere near that. Strictly speaking this doesn’t mean “human-equivalent or better” — a bright monkey might qualify, and a six-year-old certainly does — but since generality is what humans do best relative to machines, it’s often used to mean that.
Is it too late to change it to GAI to avoid confusion? 😉
Agreed. I keep thinking people are talking about Soviet spy trawlers.
(Not really. Actually just made the connection.)
In theory, the advantage gained from smartness (and/or conscientiousness) should steadily accumulate over the course of a person’s life. Smart people don’t just learn high school Trigonometry faster, they spend the next thirty years learning every skill faster, until the advantage ought to become absolutely insurmountable. Yet I’ve never seen this phenomenon discussed, am I missing some reason why it doesn’t exist, or is just masked by the fact that we stream people into distinct career tracks from such a young age?
Part of it has to be that we don’t actually understand smartness all that well.
I’ve read an anecdote discussing exactly this, maybe in Isaacson’s The Innovators. Someone at Bell Labs remarked that his coworker or boss or someone seemed on a completely different level, and his interlocutor replied that it’s because they’ve been applying themselves just a bit harder for all their lives, and that effort compounds. I’ll see if I can dig it up when I get home.
ETA: Never mind, found it. It’s from Richard Hamming:
ETA: Oh, and my source was Paul Graham, I bet. He has a transcript of Hamming’s talk too.
In a few cases I’d answer that with “it does happen, and that’s where rich people come from”, but in most cases I’d say the advantage runs into diminishing returns sooner or later. Because most skills can’t be improved indefinitely: at some point it just isn’t rewarding to try and get better at operating a #4 widget spindle.
Don’t you also just get a general decrease in ability to learn things as you age?
Yeah, but so do your peers.
Right, but this has a bigger impact on smart people who were actually learning stuff than on people who weren’t learning something to begin with, meaning the advantage (or at least the ability to expand the advantage) over less smart people has decreased (in addition to the diminishing returns on improving a given skill). Basically you’ve got two layers of diminishing returns there…ability to learn and benefit from learning.
Are we agreeing? I can’t tell.
Oh yes, I think this is very true. Smart and conscientious folks have a slight advantage over their peers as teens. But you get many smart nerdy teenagers that are treated as outcasts. By the time those same people are in their forties, these outcasts are usually making good professional salaries and are mostly treated as valued members of society (at least if they are conscientious also, and so worked hard in college and to advance in their profession).
I think of myself as an example. I am 62, and I believe I am both smart and conscientious. I struggled in my social life an career in my younger days, but now I have a choice of what jobs to take, all at high rates of pay, and plenty of wealth to have a comfortable retirement. I am not as ambitious as some, and those are the ones that become multi-millionaire entrepreneurs.
I think Norquest is correct about rich people in that regard. Part of the increasing divide between rich and poor is those with the greatest advantages continue to advance over those that are lacking. But I think he is wrong about diminishing returns. Those of a lower level of intelligence or ambition reach their peaks after maybe ten years into their career. IF you are smarter or willing to keep learning and switch careers as needed, you can advance far beyond those stuck at the lower levels. So diminishing returns is more likely to hit those at the lower levels, and so adds to the level of difference.
I suspect that there’s an element of this. See Our Gracious Host, for an example. And there are certain fields where this pays off, such as certain aspects of medicine or practicing law.
But an awful lot of things in life are not repeated similar events where you can master the tasks and improve continually. For example, you get drawn away from your life of intellectual skill when your gutters start leaking. Unless “mastering how to find tradespeople” is something you’ve spent time on, you need to handle that task. But that sort of thing isn’t going to carry over elsewhere in your life unless you decide to suddenly become a property manager.
Hello, and welcome to the twenty-third installment in my effortpost series. Last time, we looked at some historical background and the Gospel of Mark. This time, we’re going to look at how two of the other gospels – Matthew and Luke – are similar to Mark, plus scholarly theories about that, and then consider how Matthew differs. Most scholars today think that Matthew used Mark as a source, and by considering how Matthew used sources, we can get some clues into Matthew’s motives and theological interests.
Caveats: I’m not an expert in this, though I did study it back in school. I’m aiming for a 100/200 level coverage, so there’s a fair bit I’m leaving out: feel free to ask questions and I’ll try to answer them. I won’t be providing a huge amount of summary – but Bibles are easily available and everyone can read along. My focus will primarily be secular scholarship. A final note: in order to save space, “Matthew” is a reference to the document, the Gospel of Matthew, and shorthand for the (likely unknown) author, not to the traditionally-ascribed author.
Something that readers noticed a long time ago is that Mark, Matthew, and Luke are all pretty similar. They tell the same stories quite frequently, often with similar or the same wording. For this reason, they’re known as the “synoptic gospels” – “synoptic” meaning “seen together.” It is generally agreed that there is some relationship between them. There’s material that all three share, material only shared by two, and material that only appears in a single gospel.
Traditional hypotheses about this relationship have tended to place Matthew first, and take the other two as using Matthew as a source. The modern scholarly version of this – and there are still serious scholars who place Matthew first, although not many – is best known as the “Griesbach hypothesis.” The Griesbach hypothesis holds that Matthew was the first gospel. Luke used Matthew. Mark then used both Luke and Matthew, as a condensing of the two.
However, while the Griesbach hypothesis and similar explanations have the advantage that they require no positing of lost documents (as the dominant theory, explained shortly, does) and they go better with old church traditions, they have a lot of problems. Most significantly, they would require Mark to cut a lot, and to make other odd changes.
Most theories now, then, are based on “Markan priority” – on Mark being written first, and being used as a source by the other two. The dominant theory – I would guess it’s held by the overwhelming majority of experts – is known, variously, as the “two-” or “four-document hypothesis”, with a little variation. Put shortly: Matthew and Luke both used Mark as a source, which explains the parts where both reproduce something in Mark, or where one does (the other left it out). They both shared a hypothetical source document called “Q” (from quelle, “source” in German), which explains the material that they share that isn’t found in Mark (mostly sayings of Jesus, but some narrative). There’s some material in Mark that neither of the other gospels used. There’s also material in Matthew and Luke that they don’t share with other sources – this material is labelled as being part of “M” or “L” as the case may be – Matthew and Luke’s “special sources”, which could be written or oral, one source or many, etc. Q is generally thought to be a written document, rather than an orally transmitted tradition, based on the occasionally exact agreement in Matthew and Luke when using Q material.
One thing that supports this hypothesis is the patterns of agreement with regard to stories the three share. Sometimes all three agree, sometimes Matthew or Luke disagrees from the other two – but it’s very rare to see Matthew and Luke agree but disagree with Mark. This makes sense if they used Mark as a source – it would be very unusual to have them both change a story and coincidentally do so in the same way.
The sequence of events in the gospels is taken to support the hypothesis. When Matthew and Luke have the same order of events, it’s generally stuff shared with Mark. The material they share that Mark doesn’t have (in this hypothesis, Q material) varies much more in the order it’s presented, as though Matthew and Luke both used Mark as a framework and plugged other stuff in. If Luke used Matthew, or the other way around, it would be odd to rearrange that material. However, if the whole Q thesis is correct, Q must in large part have consisted of individual sayings of Jesus; Matthew and Luke both took these and tried to figure out how to frame them.
The character of the (supposed) changes supports the hypothesis. Mark’s Greek is worse than Matthew and Luke’s, and in stuff they share, the latter two often correct Mark’s grammar. There’s some other errors that get fixed. Mark gets edited down: in Matthew, the individual stories are shorter, although Matthew is considerably longer in total. Both Matthew and Luke are generally “softer” – for example, the disciples come off better, Jesus is a far less ambiguous figure, some weird edges have been sanded off, and the story’s much less of a (surface-level) downer.
Markan priority also makes the most sense of the question of what the gospels don’t share. If Mark is first, it doesn’t matter that it doesn’t include Q material. Presumably Mark didn’t have access to Q. If Mark was dependent on another gospel, the author would have had to cut out a lot of good material (while, remember, actually lengthening individual stories). The existence of Q, meanwhile, makes the most sense of the degree of agreement in individual stories, but the different ordering, of the material Matthew and Luke share but Mark doesn’t have.
Overall, the current dominant hypothesis offers the best explanation of the documents as we have them today. Relationship is almost certain (no other explanation of the similarities makes as much sense), and alternative schemes make less sense than this one. Its major disadvantage is that it posits at least one actual written document of which no copy exists. This hasn’t stopped some scholars from fairly confidently “reconstructing” Q, including supposed discernment of different layers of composition – this part earlier than that part, and so on.
One supposed result of this is that one can do “redaction criticism” – look at Mark, look at the same thing in Matthew, note any changes, and consider why they might be – why the author of Matthew might make that change. Even less certainly, one can compare Matthew and Luke, although we have no real knowledge of any lost precursor. That’s what we’re going to do now for Matthew.
(This one went a bit long too; continued in a reply. As usual, if anyone notices any mistakes, let me know so I can fix them, hopefully within 55 minutes or thereabouts so I don’t miss the edit window.)
Matthew reproduces, it is thought, 80% of Mark, and is about 50% longer. It begins by identifying Jesus as the son of Abraham and David, and proceeds with a genealogy ending with Joseph, husband of Mary, Jesus’ mother – although it goes on to describe a conception by the Holy Spirit, Jesus is nevertheless linked to the Davidic line. Jesus’ conception is special, and his birth is special.
After he is born, foreign wise men who have observed and interpreted a star arrive and ask King Herod where the child born king of the Jews is to be found. Herod finds out from the wise men when the star was observed, and asks them to bring the child to him, so he may pay him homage. The wise men find Jesus and worship him, and having been warned in a dream to avoid Herod, they go home by a different route. An angel warns Joseph to flee to Egypt for a time, before Herod (since the wise men did not follow his request) orders that all boys two years or under (based on the observation of the star) be killed. Following Herod’s death, the family returns, but to Nazareth.
The narrative of Matthew is fairly similar to Mark, although it gathers together scenes that are more spread out in Mark. Jesus teaches and heals until he is betrayed and arrested in Jerusalem. After his death and resurrection, the gospel includes a post-resurrection appearance section that scholars think is original to Matthew.
If it’s possible to compare the gospels to each other and thus note their emphases, what can you tell from Matthew by comparing it to Mark and Luke? What do you get from looking at the material unique to Matthew? Presumably it was included for a reason. Generally, scholars think that Matthew is the most Jewish-oriented of the Gospels, representing a strain in early Christianity that saw it, to put it very simply (this is outside my wheelhouse, with a lot of it taking place before the canonical Gospels were written), as an extension of Judaism. However, it’s also more hostile to the Jewish authorities than Mark and Luke. We’ll see how scholars ascribe these tendencies to the community in which and for which Matthew was produced.
Matthew is concerned to show Jesus as the fulfillment of various Biblical promises and prophecies, and his mission as the completion of Judaism. Matthew is generally positive about Jewish law and custom – for instance, removing the declaration, during the handwashing controversy story, that all foods are clean (in Mark 7 and Matthew 15) The genealogy of Jesus – or, more precisely, that of Joseph – establishes three chains of fourteen: fourteen generations from Abraham to David, fourteen from David to the Exile, and fourteen from the Exile to Jesus. Matthew uses “stock sentences” to indicate the fulfillment of Jewish scripture, including citations – these don’t appear in Mark or Luke. At the beginning of chapter 10, Jesus instructs the twelve not to go among the gentiles or Samaritans, but to limit their actions “to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” Matthew presents Jesus, at least, as acting within the context of Judaism.
Although more friendly towards Jewish law and tradition than Mark, Matthew is more hostile to the Jewish authorities. This begins with the infancy narrative, where it is pagan gentiles who go to worship the Messiah, not priests or scholars, nor the king, who seeks to kill him. The Jewish authorities are generally lambasted as hypocrites. There is an increased hostility to the Pharisees in Matthew, and scholars generally think this indicates increased Pharisaic influence in Judaism after the destruction of the Temple in the failed revolt.
Matthew’s narrative, relative to Mark, is softened – the disciples come off better, and in general those who might later be thought worthy of respect do. There’s increased exaltation of Jesus, such as the baptism scene (while in Mark, Jesus is simply baptized, in Luke, he has to convince John to baptize him – the implication being that the baptizer is in some way superior to the baptized). While, as we’ll note, Matthew presents Jesus (relatively speaking) more as a teacher and less as a wonder-worker, the miraculous element of such scenes is increased – for example, iin Mark 6 Jesus feeds five thousand men; in Matthew 14:21 “about five thousand men, besides women and children” are fed. Jesus is more openly acknowledged – the voice from heaven at his baptism says “This is my Son” rather than “You are my Son”, for example – a third-person announcement versus one to Jesus alone.
Considering how Matthew uses Markan and Q material, Jesus is presented more as a teacher in Matthew than in Mark or Luke. Scenes from Mark tend to increase the role of teaching and decrease the role of miracle. Considering Q, Matthew groups the sayings material (which Luke has more spread out; scholars think that since Matthew consolidates material that is spread out in Mark and rearranges sequences, likely the same happened with Q) in five sermons. Some scholars have posited that the five sermons are meant to create another Moses comparison – to the five books of the Torah, which were traditionally ascribed to Moses – but other scholars note that the actual content doesn’t run parallel to the Torah.
Concerning the issue of the origin of the book, scholars think they have a match based on an analysis of the document and external historical context. Traditionally, the book is ascribed to Matthew, a tax collector and member of the twelve core followers according to the Gospel of Matthew; other attestations of a member of the twelve called Matthew appear in Mark, Luke, and Acts. Matthew is traditionally associated with Levi the tax collector in Mark and Luke, due to a similar calling story and the same occupation. It’s supposed to have been the first gospel and to have been originally written in Hebrew or Aramaic. Alternatively, it is based on a collection of sayings he put together.
Modern scholarship discounts the traditional explanation. For starters, it really looks as though Mark was a source for Matthew, which argues against it being a firsthand account. There’s no textual evidence that it was composed originally in Hebrew or Aramaic, either. However, an interesting point: when citing the Hebrew Bible in Greek, Matthew uses both translations scholars are familiar with, and translations that are either the author’s own or were obtained from a source no longer extant. There’s been some scholarly speculation about Jewish Christian communities that might have produced a proto-Matthew in Hebrew or Aramaic, but no hard evidence.
What, then, do the secular scholars say? The author’s Greek seems to be that of someone educated in the language. They are very likely Jewish – the good Greek coupled with the possibility of literacy in Hebrew, Aramaic, or both suggests an educated Jew in the diaspora. Other elements suggest an urban milieu, and the comparison of the Beatitudes in Matthew to Luke’s version suggests a well-off author, possibly a well-off community (where Luke has “Blessed are you who are poor” and “Blessed are you who are hungry now”, Matthew has “Blessed are the poor in spirit” and “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness” – suggesting a community that would not find Luke’s wording relevant).
Scholars tend to view the character of the gospel as proceeding from the immediate experience of the community and thus of the author. Matthew was composed in a Jewish Christian community that still insisted on certain standards of performance of Jewish norms. However, an increasing number of gentiles were joining the local Christian community, with controversy over the degree to which they should adopt Jewish food practices and the like, and over whether one must first be a Jew to be a Christian, in effect. Meanwhile, and to a certain extent therefore, there’s increasing friction with and pulling away from the mainstream Jewish community, with hostility towards its authorities. Internally, based on its theology and supposed historical references, it’s dated to 80 to 90, maybe 70-100. The later date is based on attestation and the dates of comparable documents.
Based on this, scholars often think Antioch is the best answer. Antioch was a major city, and the Jewish centre of Syria at the time. Jewish Christians, possibly including some well-off people, seem to have come there after conflicts in Jerusalem in the 30s. We know that Paul lost a dispute over food rules there in or around 50, and that by the 70s gentiles were the majority of the Christian population, adding to tensions with the mainstream Jewish community, already inflamed by the recent failed revolt. Again, the later date is based on links to documents we know existed by then with links to Antioch. This isn’t the only guess, however – rivalry and conflict with Pharisees could indicate something closer, geographically, to the events described.
In summary: the likely relationship among Matthew, Mark, and Luke offers much to consider. The most likely model is that Matthew and Luke both used Mark, as well as another source called Q, and their own individual source(s). Based on this, we can try to guess at Matthew’s emphases, and the author’s interests and priorities, by comparing it to Mark and Luke. Matthew presents a Jesus who is in no way in conflict with the Jewish Law, but in increased conflict with the Jewish authorities. He’s a more exalted figure, and more of a teacher. It’s probably the product of an author in a community of Jewish Christians in Antioch that was experiencing the entry of more gentiles and more conflict with mainstream Jews.
Agreed that there are very strong arguments for Markan priority—enough so that I am willing to present this as a fact when discussing the gospels with people unfamilar with them.
There are some problems with the 2nd century attributions of the Gospel of Matthew to Matthew (notably that the Gospel as we have it cannot have been originally written in Hebrew or Aramaic). However, the argument that a firsthand source such as Matthew (the apostle) would not have written a text using large quantities of another text (Mark) seems to me suspect.
In particular, it seems to involve very modern assumptions about the importace of originality that I don’t think were shared by pre-modern authors. Seriously, our culture has multiple insitutions that taboo copying other authors (plagariasm, copyright), and at least in highbrow circles glorifies writers for being “original”, and slams them for being “derivative”, in ways that probably make it really hard to image living in a culture where being derivative was regarded as actually superior to being original!
Recall that the Jewish Christian author who wrote Matthew was raised in a Deuteronomic legal system where it was necessary for two witnesses to agree on the exact same accusation in order to establish a crime (see also Matthew 18:16). In rabbinic law, they even had to agree on a verbally identical formulation (which is presumably why the Sanhedrin had to drop the charge against Jesus about him threating to rebuild the temple (Mark 14:58)). Is it really that implausible that he might view confirmation of the previous gospel as an important goal in writing his own text?
Furthermore, the author of Matthew clearly has a more legal mind than the other gospel writers (not surprising, if he was really a tax collector). To give just one example, only Matthew preserves the “exception clause” in Jesus’ teaching forbidding divorce and remarriage. Not everybody has the right sort of mind to give a well-ordered biographical account. Is it really that surprising that Matthew might start with a framework that already existed, and then added the teaching material he wanted to add? (Especially if the Gospel of Mark carried some of the authority of Peter behind it.)
(Although, another speculative scenario I have sometimes considered, is that maybe the apostle Matthew was actually the author of Q, and at some point somebody translated Q from Aramaic into Greek. It’s combination with Mark resulted in a product that was still attributed to Matthew due to his involvement at an earlier stage. This theory has the advantage that it actually allows quite a bit of the 2nd century external testimony about Matthean priority to have a basis in fact, while also agreeing with the Two Source theory.)
What comparable documents? There’s the Didache, but the date of that seems at least equally uncertain.
I speak here of surviving documents, of course. Another point worth mentioning with regard to the synoptic problem is that Luke starts by saying that many have tried to give an account of Jesus’ life. Even if Luke had access to Mark, Q, AND Matthew, it seems like maybe even more sources would have to exist for Luke to be able to say “many”…
How do we know that Paul lost?
Actually this theory works a lot better if you identify the geneology of Jesus (which in Greek begins “the book of the genesis of Jesus Christ”) with the book of Genesis. Jesus gets baptized and goes into the desert like Israel to be tempted. Then, Jesus goes up on a Mountain to give a new law, in the process reinterpreting the Ten Commandments (that’s Exodus). In the next major sermon, he sends out the Twelve Apostles (i.e. the new priesthood) with instructions about how they are to support themselves and preach (that’s Leviticus). Next we have the sermon of parables which involves large quantities of people being assessed and judged (Numbers). In Deut 18 we have the a discourse about the Church assembly which gives instructions about sin and judging disputes, and which indeed quotes Deuteronomy at an essential moment. Finally, to round out the Hexateuch, we have a bunch of parables about the end-times and waiting for the deliverer (the new Yeshua) to lead you into the promised land. Fits quite nicely, actually.
Of course, the biblical critic who proposed that theory went on to propose that Luke was organized in the same way, which goes to show that the one thing biblical critics can’t ever learn is when to stop!
Three things about linking the document we have now to the figure of Matthew. First, while you’re certainly right that the cultural expectations regarding originality and all that were different, and a firsthand witness might use other sources, Matthew is primarily based on Mark, and the stuff that’s uniquely Matthean doesn’t fit with being written by an eyewitness to Jesus’ teaching and preaching – eg, the opening narrative. Second, the traditional ascription has other problems with it. Third, identifying Matthew as the author in the traditional fashion is using the idea it’s based on eyewitness testimony as legitimizing it – but if someone (Matthew the tax collector, or someone else) mostly used other sources… It would be interesting, though, if the Matthew linkage was a garbled account of the origin of Q.
Links can be drawn between stuff in Matthew and Ignatius of Antioch’s writings, and scholars generally accept the traditional dating of his martyrdom, at least roughly.
Yeah, this very well could be the case. I imagine that scholars who argue for very early dating of this or that noncanonical gospel would find a way to fit that in.
Reading between the lines in Galatians, it certainly doesn’t seem like he won the dispute.
Regarding the organization of Matthew – do you recall the scholar’s name?
The scholar was Austin Farrer, and he wrote the Hexateuch theory down in the same paper where he proposes (what is now called the Farrer hypothesis) that the non-Markan similarities between Luke and Matthew are explained by Luke using Matthew directly.
Obviously Matthew the apostle would not have been a direct eyewitness to the Infancy Account. Assuming (as I, being a Christian, believe) this is not purely legendary, the source for it would have to be a member of Jesus’ family. The story is told from Joseph’s point of view, but since Joseph was likely dead by this time, the most likely source is one of Jesus’ half-brothers, e.g. James.
(Luke’s Infancy, on the other hand, is told from Mary’s perspective and, given multiple references to Mary’s private thoughts, I believe she is the most likely source. And apparently I’m not the only one who has come to this conclusion, since a few hours ago I saw a Renaissance painting in an art museum in Valencia depicting Mary dictating to Luke as he writes his gospel!)
But anyway, pretty much anything unique to Matthew besides the Infancy narrative is something that could have been supplied by a direct eyewitness to the events.
I don’t get your argument from Ignatius. It seems that Ignatius quotes from the Gospel of Matthew (although he does it without citations). If this is true, than Matthew cannot be later than Ignatius. But it doesn’t prevent Matthew from being significantly earlier.
There’s also a lot of common sayings between Matthew and the epistle of James, but James (assuming he’s the most obvious James to have written the letter, namely the leader of the Jerusalem church mentioned in Acts and Josephus) was martyred in the 60s, so because of the similarities between the two documents one might equally well argue that Matthew was written no later than around the 60s. How is that any worse than the Ignatius argument? 😉
Of course, the idea that the character of a gospel reflects the decade in which it was written (and the exact degree of animosity between Jews and Gentiles, as if this were not a very complicated function of space as well as time which we no longer have good access to) sort of implicitly presupposes that the material in question can’t more simply be explained by saying that Jesus really did or said the things in question. If he did, then the year of importance is c. 30.
I knew the Farrer hypothesis but if I’d read about the Hexateuch idea before, I forgot about it at some point between then and now.
From a scholarly perspective, what I find interesting about the Matthean and Lukan narratives, is that the “mundane” historical events in them apparently would have been believable to an audience of the time. By which I mean, stuff that today we would consider “supernatural” was not considered separate from the “natural world” back then, in a similar way to how they didn’t divide religious and secular in the way that moderns (especially Protestant-influenced moderns) do. However, the story about Herod ordering a whole bunch of kids killed, or the story about the census, evidently passed the smell test enough that the authors included them.
It’s not really my argument, but: Ignatius sets the later bound. If the Epistle of James was written by that James, and there’s a connection, that would point to the earlier bound, but not the later. (I’ll talk more about James in that particular post, but scholars don’t appear to be allergic to the possibility of a link to the historical figure or perhaps a disciple of same; it’s generally dated to the same period as Matthew and comes broadly out of the same Jewish Christian milieu.
Sure; I think a lot of the stuff goes back to Jesus or to his earliest followers. However, the spin that gets put on it – which clearly happens; we can see Matthew and Luke changing Markan material and we can see they do different things with the same Q stories – is likely to be influenced by the author’s context. It’s almost certain, historically speaking, that Jesus (who I believe existed as a historical figure relatively similar to the story we’ve got in the gospels) was baptized by John the Baptist – but we can see how each gospel author treats that fact differently.
Thanks for continuing this series. I find it very interesting.
I don’t know if I can really add to your description of Matthew as the ‘most Jewish’ of the Gospels. This detail, when I learned it, helped me better understand the distinction between Matthew and Mark (or Luke).
I’m intrigued by this comment:
It would fit with an educated Jewish author to sometimes do his own translation into Greek of his Hebrew sources. Whether because he has better access to certain writings in Hebrew, or because he was familiar enough with both that he may have tried to do a best-of-either-version quote himself.
I don’t have a particularly big problem with Markan priority, but I think the consensus reasoning rejecting Matthew’s priority as you’ve described it doesn’t sound particularly airtight. When I was a child, I had a book called “The Swiss Family Robinson” which was a large illustrated hardcover book with about 100 pages. I really enjoyed that book, which included good stuff like the shipwreck, the treehouse, an episode diving for giant clams, and eventually a rescue. Many years later, I read the actual original novel. (I also saw the Disney movie at some point; that was its own thing, my children’s version didn’t include the pirates or the coconut grenades). The two were quite dissimilar, although certain parts (e.g. the shipwreck) were very much alike. The point being, if one conceives of Mark as a partial abridgement with a somewhat different focus, it seems like it could replicate a lot of the structural differences supposedly explained by Mark and Q.
The shared stories and sequence of events fit; there’s very little overarching structure in the novel that isn’t replicated in the abridgement. But there’s a story or two in the kid’s book that was put in to appeal to the different audience that isn’t in the novel. More details on the ostrich race, etc. Omitting the cave dwelling entirely. The basic sequence, though, is always wreck-house-thrive-rescue, and the stories are pretty overlapping. I could easily see an erroneous reconstruction saying that obviously the novel embellished the simple narrative of the abridgement. (Even if you bring in, say, the Disney movie as a third comparison source, you could say the same – the novel and the movie both have a near-identical shipwreck scene to the abridgement, for example).
The nature of the grammar and language would suggest that the abridgement is far “simpler” and thus earlier, according to the logic of the argument. The abridgement is much more sympathetic – there’s a lot less random shooting things, everything is a little happier and with fewer rough edges than in the novel, etc. And if you view Mark as an abridgement, almost by definition it’s not going to include all of the original.
I had never heard Aron Wall’s suggestion below that perhaps proto-Matthew was Q. It’s an interesting theory.
That Mark is an abridged Matthew runs into the problems that the author would have had to introduce grammatical errors and clumsy (not just simple) grammar and take stories out while retelling individual stories longer. If Mark is an abridgement, it’s not a particularly good job.
Matthew using Mark isn’t airtight, but it’s more plausible than the opposite.
Depending on the quality of the author, I don’t see why this would be a strong argument. The original Swiss Family Robinson was in German; I’ve never read that, but I’ve read an early English translation. My abridged version was grammatically correct, but that’s because it was written by a professional author and publishing house; if it had been written by a much less educated person wanting to tell the basic story to me, it would presumably have had such problems.
Taking stories out is literally part of the abridgement process. Retelling individual stories longer is also literally something my kid’s version of the story did. They spent much longer on the pets, for example, than the Wyss novel, presumably because kids like animals. They omitted the cave home while amplifying the nature of Falconhurst the treehouse because kids like treehouses.
I’m not saying it’s definitive, and I don’t much care – pretty much even the most Sola Scriptura person acknowledges that there are author and source mixing in the Gospels – but the basic argument from structure doesn’t sound as convincing to me. Maybe I just don’t have the individual textual details to assess it, which would be a fair cop.
If you were to abridge Matthew, would it end up looking like Mark? What about the stuff Mark added/changed that makes the story “rougher” – eg, the disciples being dense or the weird ending.
Do you have access to a Gospel synopsis? (This one is probably the cheapest.) The places where Mark and Matthew differ, the changes usually make more sense if Matthew came second.
Are there any parts of the world that will get LESS flood-prone thanks to global warming?
Up until this year, i would have said the Great Lakes area.
Based not on science, but on the kind of stuff that gets into popular press. Articles along the lines of The Great Lakes water level has been trending down for many years, a reminder of the costs of Climate Change would show up regularly. [1]
Then this year, the region had a very wet winter, and an equally we spring. The water levels are above those of the past two decades, and I see a spate of news articles about how high the water levels are. Some beaches are mostly-underwater, and some waterfront properties are in danger of flooding.
I’m seeing articles at Weather-dot-com about how lake levels had been generally expected to fall as global temperatures rise, but that the Great Lakes water level is also “known to fluctuate over time”. There’s not much attempt to blame the high water levels on Climate Change (or Global Warming), but there are worries about whether the region is in for a long spell of high water, or for a return to the low water levels of the past two decades.
[1] I had mistakenly assumed that these articles had been constant until last year. Doing a little research, it looks like the water levels were at historic lows in 2013, and have been below the average of last-century from about 1998 to about 2015.
So my memory is likely wrong, but I think I was still seeing “Great Lakes recovering slightly from low water levels due to Climate Change, but there are still worries in the future” articles over the last four or five years.
Paper mills and printing presses have issues hiring laborers.
Do paper mills and printing presses pay badly? I get why paper mill work is unpleasant (they stink), but what’s so bad about printing presses?
And yes, I know the answer when there are difficulties to hire workers is to raise wages, but many jobs can’t afford much higher wages than they already offer, because prices are not high enough. I don’t think factory owners close factories when they could just raise wages and still get decent returns.
Doesn’t this suggest that those companies just weren’t efficient enough to compete in the modern market? As far as I know there isn’t any kind of major paper shortage going on, so presumably this isn’t some widespread collapse of the paper industry.
Trucking is a different issue (we do have a shortage of truckers), but a slightly more complicated one as “crappy paper mill job” is very different than “adjust your entire lifestyle to be a trucker” (and the argument still ought to probably be higher compensation, but the people who need to ship stuff are extremely resistant to increases in shipping costs which probably makes that difficult).
The article was discussing a shortage of paper in the context of book printing, so I assume there is a shortage of paper for books.
Well, sure, but so is the steel industry, Detroit without subsidies, clothing made in the USA, and every other industry that closed. These factories where willing to hire more workers at the same rates workers were paid before, and most workers were unwilling to work there. Pretty sure it was higher than minimum wage; even minimally-skilled work that is easy to unionize tend to pay more than minimum wage.
I see many complaints that there are no more factory jobs. These are factory jobs. People just don’t want to work in the same factories as their fathers did.
If you really can’t afford to pay enough to have workers at all, you can’t afford to do the job. “The mills are profitable, but would be unprofitable if we paid enough that we could get workers” really means “the mills aren’t profitable, but we don’t want to admit it”.
If the price of paper kept going up and the mill owners could no longer afford to buy it, they wouldn’t say “we’re having trouble getting paper” and complain that the “paper shortage” is making them shut down. Having to pay more for workers is no different from having to pay more for paper.
Yes, they are unprofitable, which is why they’re closing. But there may also be a real labor shortage of non-drug consuming, reasonably smart and responsible workers.
If almost all orange tree plantations are repurposed to grow lemon trees, and oranges now demand a much higher price, it is quite reasonable to say that there is a shortage of oranges. In the same way, if all available workers who previously would have agreed to work in your factory now don’t want to work in your factory and prefer a lower paid job in an air-conditioned office, I don’t see why you can’t talk about a labor shortage.
The issue is that young workers in a developed country are not satisfied with blue collar jobs anymore.
Lemons don’t turn into oranges. Paying more for workers will turn the office workers into paper mill workers.
This is doing a lot of work…I can’t read the article at the moment but does it indicate what level of pay they were offering? There are definitely factory jobs where you can bring in 60, 70, 80k plus as a factory laborer but I would assume paper mills are not one of them. Would people generally rather make 38k working a dull, basic office job vs. 42k working in a paper mill (which is probably also dull, but dirtier and maybe harder on the body)? I mean, yeah.
My prior on any business saying “we can’t find enough people!” is that there is almost always some form of misdirection going on. You hear it from nearly every business sector (tech companies famously say this a lot) which gives it a bit of boy who cried wolf vibe.
I expect a lot of this comes down to a mismatch between the jobs available and people’s expectations and self-image. I bet a lot of the people working as adjunct university faculty could make more money doing factory work of some kind. But that wouldn’t be even vaguely the sort of white-collar bourgeois work they were raised to expect. And if sheer desperation or really hard-nosed analysis of their finances compelled them to take up factory work, they would almost certainly leave as soon as a white-collar job became available. Jobs provide more than money in your pocket. They are also part of a person’s identity, and that’s something people really don’t want to change.
They’re run by people who don’t have college degrees, or worse, people who have college degrees but couldn’t get a job that requires a college degree. I am repeatedly told that no decent woman will ever have sex with such a man, or if by some chance she winds up married to one divorce is a 100% certainty, no matter how much cash money is involved. That’s going to be a dealbreaker for a lot of people.
And no, it isn’t actually true, but if enough people believe it is true, that makes for a serious recruitment challenge.
Nobody has told you that, at least not that I’ve seen.
Blue collar guys get laid and most of them get married too. The difficult part for them is in staying married. Obviously divorce isn’t a certainty but you’re taking a substantially increased risk.
Money without social cachet isn’t much of a defense, as between alimony and child support most of that money would go to the ex-wife anyway along with the primary residence and car. Every marriage has ups and downs but with no fault divorce those downs can easily end up destroying your family and wiping you out financially. When accounted for properly, that’s a pretty substantial cost.
Say I’m not convinced, but willing to be convinced.
What would you say to me?
It depends on what you want me to convince you of.
If you want to be convinced that working a blue collar job increases your risk of divorce, there’s statistics available. You can also listen to guys who have been in that position, although obviously that’s anecdotal.
If you want me to convince you that it’s not worth it to for you to work a blue collar job, I can’t because it depends on your personal risk tolerance, your values, and your other options. If a blue collar job would pay more than your next best option, you need to decide whether that difference in pay makes up for the increased risk of your wife divorcing you down the line.
Part of why I’m coming on as strong as I am here is that people are pretending that there’s no trade-off with working a trade and that millennial men are being fussy or snobby by not flocking to jobs as carpenters or machinists. You’ll notice that this kind of generational bravado is coming from guys like Dr Shilling and not from the actual tradesmen here who have generally acknowledged that this risk exists.
Doesn’t this only really apply if the relationship between higher divorce rates and blue-collar work is causal? It seems at least equally plausible that it’s simply a product of the kind of people more likely to divorce being overrepresented in blue collar work (that the things that lead to divorce also lead to having only blue collar work as an option). Someone that is perfectly capable of either who chooses the blue collar route may not have a higher divorce risk at all.
You’re ignoring the part where white-collar women will look at you as lesser, therefore making you more likely to marry a blue-collar woman (who is more likely to divorce you).
Also, divorce is in part social contagion. If you are blue collar, you will likely have blue collar friends, who will be more likely to divorce, who will increase your own divorce risk.
@acymetric,
Yes but by choosing a blue-collar route your signalling to potential mates that your one of “the risky ones” even if you had other options.
I think blue-collar millenials are different from previous generations. This is just from observing my high school classmates, the majority of whom are skilled machinists (lots of factories in my area), vs their parents’ generation:
Older blue collar Spanish workers: don’t read books, don’t travel further than Benidorm* or their sleepy town of origin for vacation, don’t speak any language that isn’t originally from Spain, are quite sexist, are unlikely to pick their kids to school or help their wives to the OB/GYN during their pregnancy. Also tend to have the shopping done by their wives (they married quite young). Have a tendency to drink. Not necessarily church going, but all baptised in the Catholic church.
Younger millenial blue collar workers: are more likely to speak English; travel through Europe and the world (many are required by their factory to travel to China/Latin America, to train workers there), will participate in raising their kids, drink less during the workweek, but binge more (and consume more marihuana), may have lived alone for some time, so they are able to handle house tasks, and participate more equally in activities. Also marry much later.
*Benidorm is a beach and beer place, with hookers, although married men presumably only do the beach and beer part. There is also lots of food, which in Spain tends to be quite a bit better than British or generally Northern European food (but the British food sucks the most).
So I think that modern blue collar workers are well, more modern.
Like others, I want to know what part of blue collar work makes it destructive socially.
We can measure students who were accepted to HYPSM colleges but went state instead. Can we measure people who could have done white collar but did blue collar instead? How about correcting for income level or intelligence? I’m nervous to say “correct for education level” because it’s kind of the point of the whole discussion, but I’m curious what that would show as well.
Is there anyone not claiming to have labor shortages?
Sidenote: a lot of people are talking about how the big problem is young kids just not wanting to take these jobs anymore. This is a big topic in our division, and our biggest issue isn’t production labor at all: it’s salaried staff, specifically the college-and-above level. There’s a reasonable goal to extend an offer for a new opening after 30 days, but in reality it takes more like 6 months. Specifically, engineers are in short supply, but so are everyone else.
After that, it’s mechanics, then third shift labor, then temporary employees (read: people who will work for minimum wage or barely above it).
Unemployment is under 4%, of course it’s going to be a challenge to hire people.
Industries complaining about labor shortages is a little like people complaining about wages; sometimes the complaints are legitimate, sometimes they are not, but it’s extremely rare to find those who think they have enough of either.
This seems internally inconsistent: if printing plants are shutting down, there should be experienced printers looking for work. My suspicion is that there’s some unwillingness by new people to enter an industry with regular plant closings and layoffs–but I’m not sure why the printers who need people aren’t hiring the experienced ones.
When industries die the workers know and the people with the most options, ie the youngest, move to other industries ASAP and the oldest workers often just retire or semi-retire if their particular plant closes. The people who stay right up until the closing are either tied to the area in some way, or to stubborn to move, or generally on the lower end of employees.
My Dad worked his whole life in a paper mill, from it being a summer job all the way up to being the senior person on the production floor, prior to the mill outright closing. If you have specific questions, I can forward them on.
General answers that I can think of: paper mills don’t merely smell bad (that’s actually an artifact of one particular process and not present at all mills). It’s also that they are very loud, very hot and very humid (100%/100F). Main production roughly involves scooping up pulp (similar to wet toilet paper), squeezing the water out of it with tons of pressure and then ironing it flat. At ~60 mph. That’s a lot of heat to dry out that much paper that fast, and air handlers can only do so much. (Apparently, a fun thing to do is to hold a ballpoint pen on the paper being produced and watch the ink level drain in front of your eyes).
It’s also dangerous. On the front end you have grinders which eat trees faster than you can eat pretzels. On the back end you have cranes and forklifts shuffling 10+ ton rolls of paper around. And in between you have a bunch of warm sludge generated by all sorts of processes using (literally) industrial-strength chemicals.
So between a very unpleasant working environment and uncertain employment future, why would people be lining up to work there without a significant pay premium?
At the beginning of my engineering studies, we had a guest lecture about Health and Safety.
It was basically just an hour of someone from the paper recycling industry talking about all the people who had died horrifically in his factory. Like, literal gibbs.
The latest issue the The Atlantic has an interesting article about parental reluctance to vaccinate their children. One of the reasons, it turns out, is a lack of confidence in official sources of guidance:
I suppose the question is what the government could do to regain public confidence. Anyone up for a short victorious war?
Stop trying to manipulate people?
No kidding.
The only reason I’m even a little bit sympathetic to the anti-vax movement is because I put a rather strong prior on “The government is lying to us about everything.”
What does the government have to gain by forcing everyone to get injected with autism serum?
“The government said it so it must be true” is hopelessly naive, but “the government said it so it must be the opposite of the truth” is no better.
Maybe it’s just incompetence, and not necessarily malice?
What did the government have to gain by telling us to eat 8 servings of bread a day every day for decades? I don’t know? Maybe it appeased the “big wheat” lobby and helped various politicians win votes/bribes? Or maybe they just didn’t know any better.
Perhaps they want to shift the normal distribution in that direction in order to have more analytical thinkers?
/tin foil hat off
The government considers the benefits of vaccines to be of greater utility than the harm they cause. Basically if the side effect of a vaccine isn’t actually known to be life-threatening to the particular patient, their position is you vaccinate anyway. Link.
Minor reactions to vaccines are common (you’re deliberately provoking an immune reaction, after all), and this sort of attitude probably comes off as callousness to parents who have to deal with an infant or toddler experiencing vaccine symptoms. So it was a very rich environment for something like the Wakefield fraud to take hold. Easy to believe that these callous people who care more about public health than the health of your child are willing to accept a few more autistic children to stop contagious disease, and the reasons for covering this up would be obvious.
Whether the government attitude towards vaccination is justified is another question. Almost certainly with polio, and certainly smallpox when it was in play — smallpox mortality was something like 30%, and polio, while considerably less lethal, causes a lot of paralysis. I believe the deadliest of those remaining in the US is measles, with a death rate of a few tenths of a percent.
I feel like distrust of government is the wrong thing…it is distrust of authority (which itself will correlate with distrust of government). Is the problem with vaccines really that they think the government is lying, or is it that they think the medical establishment is lying? Probably a mix of both, but the real question is how to get people to trust the medical establishment (maybe the scientific community generally) which seems like it actually might be even harder.
Part of the problem is that the ordinary person doesn’t have any easy way of discovering what the scientific community believes. He can discover what the sources of information he uses claim it believe, but he has no good way of knowing whether to believe those claims–and they are quite often false.
This is true, but there is also the problem of a significant group of people much more willing to believe something if it is styled as a “shocking truth they don’t want you to know!”
Perhaps the issue is that we no longer have enough people inoculated with trust in authority to provide herd immunity against conspiracy nuttery.
“Support for conspiracy theory best predicted by openness to conspiracy theories” isn’t exactly a grand revelation.
I would rather have President Justin Amash than President Trump, but, like all Americans, I know a vote for him will be a vote for President Harris. Beyond this problem with third parties (acting as spoilers, albeit arguably with the noble intent of pulling the major parties in their direction to capture their would-be voters, as David Friedman has described), I think Dan McCarthy here gets it right: most Americans today are more anti-Republican or anti-Democrat than they are Democrat or Republican, ime.
As I’m not familiar enough with the politics of nations other than the US, I’m wondering if this is typical and/or a pattern one can point to elsewhere: e.g. a tipping point in politics where both coalitions care more about “not-the-other-guy” than “yay-my-guy.” Are there other historical examples where the politics of a nation shifted from one to the other? Or maybe people have always hated the other guy more than they liked their own guy?
The obvious factor to point to would be polarization, though one can imagine other reasons why this would happen. I also don’t take it as a given that it’s a worse state of affairs, but it sure seems so at first blush (one would rather vote “for” someone than “against” someone).
Note that a vote for Justin Amash is not a vote for Harris if you are in California, or any other state which is much more Democratic or much more Republican than the average. If the vote is very close in California the Republicans are winning the election however California goes.
Good point. I guess anyone not in a “swing state” (includes me) can afford to vote on principle rather than second-best/lesser-of-two-evils. This is one reason I have always voted libertarian party in the past.
However, assuming my vote is basically symbolic, whom do I vote for if signalling “not the party suggesting slavery reparations” is more important to me right now than signalling “yay the party emphasizing individual liberty”? I’m guessing a vote for Trump is the better signal of “not the Democrats” than a vote for Amash. And this feels recent to me that my priorities shifted so. Could be a symptom of me getting old and grumpy* though my sense is this sort of sentiment is currently a lot more prevalent on both sides, probably due to polarization.
*It’s probably true that peoples’ opinions on everything become less flexible the older they get; in politics I anecdotally seem to observe this taking the form of “I can’t defend everything my party has done, but I’m ever more certain the other guys suck.” But since I also seem to have lived during a period of supposedly objectively measurable increasing polarization, it is hard to disentangle that possibly perennial tendency.
You can’t always be sure what’s a safe state vs a swing state until they count the votes.
A vote for a third party is a stronger “not the Democrats/Republicans” signal, given that it signals that convincing you that one party isn’t acceptable insufficient to gain your vote for the other. (Where a binary swing voter only has to be convinced that the other side is bad for their vote to be won.)
Johnson’s showing in 2016 suggests that there probably aren’t enough such voters to provide a really strong or influential signal. But that problem applies to any individual vote for any party.
But voting for a third party only puts the major party you dislike down 1 vote, versus being down 2 votes if you vote for the other major party. So in terms of how much a major-party candidate should be concerned about your vote, you get more mileage from voting for the other party.
While this is technically true, given the importance of the “popular vote” in terms of the mainstream cultural narrative, it might not be quite that simple.
I have to imagine that Donald Trump would have very much preferred that a million more Republicans in New York/California/Illinois bothered to show up for him, and that a million more Democrats didn’t show up.
If this is true, then as a 3rd-party-voting Illinoisan: Mission Fucking Accomplished. The last thing I wanted was for either of the 2016 clowns to take office, so the next best thing is besmirching their mandate.
If the big parties want to turn out the vote in their opponents’ stronghold states, maybe they could try being a bit less dogshit.
If you want to vote strategically, the goal would be to get the Libertarians to 5% of the vote without upsetting the election. For example, 137.5 million people voted in 2016. If the Libertarians got 3.5 million people in Texas and California or 140,000 people in each state, they probably wouldn’t change the outcome. However, since they got 5% of the vote they’d be legally defined as a major political party which would qualify them for all sorts of benefits. I think everyone basically agrees that the Libertarians aren’t going to win anytime soon. But that would technically mean the US had three major political parties that the government would be legally obliged to treat as co-equal.
The problems you outlined mostly come from the fact that the US uses first-past-the-post voting. If we switched to electing the House with multi-member districts and Single Transferable Vote, these problems would go away. I mean, they’d be replaced by exciting new problems, but the ones you’ve pointed out here would mostly disappear.
What about the “I hate the other guys more than I like my guy” problem?
A couple solutions have been proposed.
One, from Britain, would allow “None of the above” to be voted on as an option. If “none of the above” wins, the district gets a ghost representative who always votes “no”.
Another, from Iceland, would add “A random citizen” as an option. If this option won, some person qualified in age etc would be chosen in a process similar to jury selection to take the seat.
@Two McMillion,
Oooh, I like those ideas!
Non-voters should be counted that way.
Here’s what the electoral college looks like under that scenario.
One I’ve seen from University Society STV elections is re-open nominations.
If RON wins, you re-run the election, but nobody who stood last time is allowed to stand again.
I’ve always liked the idea of just having a cat for mayor, but a ghost president might be even better!
In seriousness, having an “auto-no” representative as a result of what amounts to a vote of no confidence from the citizens of a particular district sounds like a genuinely good idea.
If there are enough “auto-no” votes, would that just result in the ruling party writing a bunch of weird “Opposite Day” legislation?
@gbdud: No, because you can’t write a bill that says, “This effect happens if this bill is voted down in congress.
I like the idea of it, but I think it works best in a parliamentary system where snap elections can be called. For the US, the “random citizen” option is probably better.
I’m similar, though on the other side of the spectrum–voted Green Party in my non-swing-state up until 2016, when I voted for Clinton because I cared about signaling Not Trump more than the difference between Clinton and Stein. It doesn’t feel like an irrevocable shift; I could easily see a near future election being a Romney-like vs. an Obama-like, at which point I’d cheerfully go back to casting protest votes. And I’d certainly prefer that state of affairs, not because of the joy of voting for a fringe candidate who I’d probably be horrified if they somehow won, but because there’d be no threat of a President I fear and despise.
I object strongly to “a vote for candidate X is really a vote for candidate Y.”
If you are voting because you think your vote will swing the election, you should just stay home. Instead, you are voting to increase the count of people who stand behind a given candidate. Even losers can push the other party.
H Ross Perot, RIP, helped push both the Democrats and Republicans towards being fiscal hawks, and the budget was balanced within a decade of that by slow and steady discipline.
Anyone here from the US and self-employed in something that isn’t programming/web design/CS?
I am about to start a job hunt and while I’m optimistic, my back-up plan is to give private music lessons. I did it part-time throughout college and really enjoyed it but have no idea how much more challenging it would be to do it full-time. I’ve heard that the most difficult part of being self-employed is managing/affording one’s own health insurance. Are there any other major challenges that I am overlooking?
Health insurance costs something like a few hundred to about a thousand dollars a month, unless you have some special circumstance. Your taxes will be higher (self-employment) but you can aggressively deduct things. For example, if you teach guitar online you can deduct all your guitars and most of your computer equipment.
But the main thing with self-employment is that it’s irregular. Some months you’ll make a ton of money. Other months you won’t make much at all. I sometimes recruit freelancers to full time employees and the steadiness of the paycheck is usually a big selling point. I’d also expect to have at least a few thousand in startup costs even if you’re just selling your own services. Also, since music is loud, make sure you have a good studio and your neighbors won’t complain.
Oh, also you need to be a good marketer. The hardest part will almost always be getting enough clients. Once you have them, it can be pretty easy to keep them happy. Especially if you’re skilled. But getting them in the first place is where most people fall flat.
I actually don’t think the paperwork is too bad for a one person shop. You need to file the incorporation documents, get payment methods, get a bank account, and sign up for any services you want as part of your employment (health insurance, retirement accounts, etc). The companies offering insurance/etc will often help you with those since you’re effectively a customer.
My mom gives music lessons full time, and is able to make her living that way. She doesn’t have a lot of money, but I believe she keeps her bills paid.
Although she is enterprising and outgoing, and delivers presentations at conferences whenever she can and gives lessons long-range over Skype, she is old and not as savvy as I’d expect most younger people are. If I was in her shoes, I would also have a Youtube channel and/or podcast where I talk about (and occasionally do) music, both performance and teaching. This way I would try to build up a reputation as an expert in my field, which would help drive more people to seek me as a music teacher, and I could charge more per lesson that way.
For being an independent music teacher specifically, I’ve heard one of the hardest parts is finding pupils. At least in the areas I’m familiar with, there’s already a surfeit of music teachers, and a new teacher will need to build up a reputation and trust among parents who’re looking for teachers for their children. I knew a few music teachers who did it by plugging into the network of existing quasi-Suzuki-method classical-stringed-instrument teachers, proving themselves to the other teachers there (though most of them were already known to some from when they were themselves learning as teenagers), and getting referrals; I’d recommend doing that if you can.
Also, what Erusian said about health insurance and deductions.
Am self-employed in the US, but in a sales role (and I spent years doing this job as an employee first, so I built up my network and skills). Agreed that health insurance is the biggest pain point, I pay about $450 a month for a mid-quality Obamacare plan. If your income isn’t particularly high, I hear that there are other options.
I don’t understand where all the fear about being self-employed and taxes comes from (not directed at you, just a general observation). If you set up an S Corp (NOT an LLC), you only pay the higher self-employment tax on your salary- the rest of your income is in ‘distributions’ which is not subject to SS/unemployment taxes. Combined with the fact that you can literally deduct almost anything, plus Trump’s 20% off the top auto-deductions for incorporated (poor public policy, but I’m very happy to take advantage of it), overall you should pay a lower rate than if you were an employee. Contact a decent accountant.
Obviously, starting with off substantial savings and then being thrifty when you have money coming in, is key
So there are related debates going on about the US Census citizenship question and about whether electoral districts should be apportioned by total population vs citizen population vs eligible voting population. In the first debate, supporters of a citizenship question have pointed out that many other countries, notably including Canada, have had a citizenship question on their census for a long time without apparent bad effect– though their confirmation bias may incline them not to look too deeply for potential bad effects.
Does anybody know of a similar international comparison of apportionment practices? The Wikipedia article on apportionment mentions various ways in which apportionment is lopsided in different countries relative to population, usually having to do with traditional political divisions between sub-national entities of varying population, much like US states. But it doesn’t make clear whether, when those countries do apportion districts by population, they do so by total population or only by citizens or eligible voters. Is there an information source that is more specific about this?
Are there any other countries that have a sizable non-voting population? The only analogue I can really think of was the early US, and the result was the three-fifths compromise.
Are you including minors in the sizable non-voting population?
Presumably, areas with higher concentrations of young families will have a greater non-voting population than areas with higher concentrations of retirees, but I’m not sure how big the spread can reasonably get.
That’s a good point, but it depends on whether the goal is to represent “population,” “voters,” or “citizens.”
Um, yes. For example wikipedia tells me that in Switzerland in 2013, foreign permanent residents were 23,5 % of population. That would however be imho one of largest numbers among countries which are liberal democracies.
Luxembourg’s population is currently 44.5% foreigners, who cannot vote in national elections (though they can vote in local elections).
I think the difference is that Switzerland has no jus soli so it is possible for families to live there for several generations without becoming citizens. While jus soli is more limited in most European countries than in the US, most have some form of it. In the specific case of Luxembourg, a child of foreign parents who is born and raised there will generally become a citizen on turning 18.
That’s a good point. In the US, areas with substantial numbers of H1B guest workers might have a significantly larger non-voting-eligible population relative to the voting eligible population than other areas.
Another possibility is a district with a large prison in it.
If there aren’t now, certainly I would think there would be examples in living memory, e.g. of European countries that took in large numbers of Gastarbeiter in the postwar decades.
Women couldn’t vote in most of the US until the 20th century, and have always been counted in the census for apportionment purposes.
And even when we had de jure open borders, a legal immigrant couldn’t apply for citizenship until they’d lived in the US for a few years, and I’m pretty sure they were counted in the census too. The modern equivalent would be green card holders, who always seem to slip through the cracks when we bifurcate the population into citizens and illegals. No, there aren’t as many of them, but they exist, and they matter, dammit.
Actually, slightly more 13.2 million LPRs vs. 12 million illegal aliens, both numbers DHS estimates 2015.
In Czechia, every citizen has what is called “place of permanent residence”. Originally it is residence of your parents, and you have to provide new adress in order to change it. If you are homeless, place of permanent residence is an adress of a town hall of last municapality where you had residence. In elections, every voter is eligible to vote in a district where his residence is. Od course some people do not actually live in a place of permanent residence, but if they want to vote in local or district elections, they have to travel there. For elections with national list of candidates, like presidential or to European parliament, it is posssible to get so called voting pass, which allows you to vote in every voting place in the country.
Noncitizens do not factor into this system, except that EU nationals, which have separetely administered register of residencies, are allowed to vote in municipal elections and elections to European parliament.
It looks like at least one house of the Czech legislature uses party-list proportional representation, which would make the issue of district boundary drawing moot. I bet that’s the case in many other non-Anglospheric places as well.
Edit: this isn’t true for the Czech Senate though, so my question stands as applied there. When Senate district boundaries are drawn, are they equalized by total population (e.g. including other EU nationals who aren’t Czech citizens) or only by Czech citizen population?
Districts exist not only in Senate elections, but also in House elections, because House elections (unlike elections for European parliament) are only sort of semi-proportional, they use D´Hondt´s method, which, as I just found out, is also sometimes called Jefferson method (EDIT: more precisely it is Regional D’Hondt method)
District boundaries are drawn by a legislation, i.e. by method in principle similar to how boundaries of “Senate districts”, i.e. States in the US, are drawn. For House elections, districts correspond to 14 administrative regions of Czechia, which creates slight bias in favor of larger regions, where one vote counts for more than in smaller regions. For Czech Senate elections, districts are delineated in legal statute, in a way that they should be of approximately equal population of voters.
Census and by extension noncitizens are in this context irrelevant, since, as implied in my previous comment, there is (non-public) registry of citizens with addresses attached to every name. It would be in principle possible to use it for creating districts with exactly equal number of voters, if Czech Parliament, that writes election laws, would so desire.
Do you not use D’Hondt for MEPs?
Because the UK does.
@Lambert
We do. I was confused slash wrong on what D’Hondt method means. In EU parliament elections, whole country is one district, but in House elections, there are districts, because we use Regional D’Hondt method.
From our last bout of elections (European, local, referendum on divorce and plebiscite for mayor all in one go) this tells you who can vote:
I don’t necessarily think it’s some horrible conspiracy to deprive illegal immigrants of their elected representatives by having a citizenship question on the census; after all, if you’re not entitled to vote for the candidates running in local and national elections you may well be interested in who gets elected to represent the area where you live, but you don’t have the right to representation. There may be a good reason for the opposition to the question but it does sound to my ears like “but this would mean the people not entitled to vote and who are not supposed to be voting but who still do vote would now be stopped from voting for us!”
Actually the issue is that people who are not legally entitled to vote, or even stay, are supposed to be counted for the purpose of determining representation. Hence the comment upthread about the 3/5 compromise, which counted each slave as 3/5 of a free person for purposes of representation.
Those not legally permitted to stay will almost surely be less likely to answer a census that asks for citizenship information.
It doesn’t have to be a conspiracy to tip the redistricting process in favor of Republicans, but the Supreme Court’s ruling basically said “We think your reason for including the question is an obvious pretext,” so it probably is.
Regarding private schools:
I remember this story in the Daily Mail about a family of five who kept remortgaging to send their kids to private school. Four years later, there was another story. The eldest daughter, after 13 years of private school, was finally sent to a state school. And at age 17, their daughter quit her A level studies, decided she didn’t want to go to university, and wants to spend a summer as a “shot girl” in Magaluf.
Now, I think it’s a fitting end to a story of stretching beyond your means. There is nothing wrong in being a waitress, or a cashier. I don’t see why parents should expect their kids to get a prestigious job. Reasonable expectations for kids, in my opinion, would be getting a job, preferrably an honourable one, being self-sufficient financially, and having kids, preferably after getting married.
Parents who spend all that money on private schools, IMO, should consider how much they would be willing to spend if their kid is not college material, and try not to burden their kids with that expectations. If they really love science/math, or writing, nurturing their skills is good; trying to force them into a mold they don’t fit in may end up much worse than being a shot girl in Magaluf.
For any other confused Americans, Megaluf is a Spanish resort town and a shot girl is a bartender who isn’t expected to know how to mix drinks.
Anyway, while I personally agree that most people aren’t suited for college, society and the job market disagree. As a practical matter, the expectation that your kids will go to college is an absolute minimum akin to the expectation that they won’t go to prison. Every potential employer and spouse worth having is going to want a really good explanation for why your kids can’t check that box.
For any other confused Americans, Megaluf is a Spanish resort town
It has a certain reputation of having picked up where Ibiza left off; at night and in certain parts of the town, it becomes a haven of boozy British (and Irish) young holidaymakers who are only interested in alcohol, drugs, sex, and fighting (not necessarily in that order).
This lovely story is why you wouldn’t be thrilled that your 17 year old daughter wanted to head off to work in some bar there.
> Spanish resort town
Read: Full of Brits getting utterly plastered.
If you think it’s not worth your son having a job as a tool and die maker for $80K/year when they could be a lofty adjunct professor earning a whole tenth of that, sure. But there’s a value judgement encoded there that not everyone is going to share.
I think that we went through this on the .25 thread.
I saw first-hand how blue collar guys who earn more than the median income live and how people treat them. No thanks, not for me and not for my kids either.
In a different time or place, where that kind of work is respected instead of being a one-way ticket to imputed income hell, sure. But not here and not now.
But that’s for men, not women.
An attractive young woman without a college degree who has no kids, no drug habit and a pleasing enough personality can find a well earning husband. Maybe even a college educated one.
FWIW I continue to believe that the treatment you refer to, while it certainly does exist and is terrible, varies very widely in frequency and severity. The variation is very likely correlated with the usual cultural/political/geographic divides but imperfectly so.
Admittedly I’m biased by personal positive anecdata here: my father-in-law was a builder/remodeler who never went to college, and he was a highly respected pillar of his community with a fiercely loyal and loving wife who herself not only went to college but got a master’s degree to help move up in her own career. I’ve certainly seen some bias against blue-collar work and imputations of low intelligence to non-college-attenders among my own super-intellectual family, but never in my wife’s family.
The fact that my father-in-law owned his own business may have made a difference here: the social respect given to entrepreneurship may go a long way to counteract the disrespect to blue-collar jobs and lack of college education. Also, some blue-collar jobs may be thought of as more “artisanal” than others. I dunno. But it’s not as simple as blue-collar = socially disfavored.
Yeah, and the thing is, while the divorce numbers support your position that it’s worse for tradespeople than college professors, it isn’t a 100% — or even 50% — disaster. There’s whole communities in NYC and the surrounding areas of blue collar families, many of which have more than median income. I will note that many of these are immigrants and children of immigrants.
Yeah we talked about it, but there certainly wasn’t a consensus. My son is 28 and has no education beyond high school. But he is a hard worker and isn’t frivolous in spending money, so he’s doing fine. It is true that I’d like him to get some sort of post high school education for more job security, but he’s proved to me that he does okay without.
It is also true that he doesn’t have a girlfriend (which I think he does want), so perhaps his lack of education makes that harder. But then I had exactly the same issue at his age, even though I had a four year degree.
As a practical matter, the expectation that your kids will go to college is an absolute minimum
This expectation is VERY class-dependent. My little brother has an 8th-grade education and a GED; I’m a white-collar professional. His net worth is many times mine, and his income is significantly higher–he’s a commercial electrical contractor.
And it’s a lot easier to get an honourable job with a respected degree, one that will allow them to do well financially and to find a mate in a social class with lower unwanted pregnancies, single parenthood or divorces rates.
And even if the kid is not college material, it’s putting her in a place where she could, as they say, hook on one that is.
If that’s your definitiion of a “respected” degree, then isn’t this just a tautology? And it’s equally true to say that “it’s a lot easier to get an honourable job if you’ve graduated from a respected trade school” or “apprenticed with a respected craftsman” or “joined a respected union”.
I think the overall point here is that white collar vs blue collar creates a status increase that exists independently of the overall status that correlates directly with income/wealth.
In other words, holding income constant, white collar work will always be considered higher status than blue collar work. Depending on how large of an effect this is, the “white collar premium” might be such that say, a 50K white collar worker still commands higher status than a 100K blue collar worker.
And if things like mate selection correlate with status rather than with wealth directly, one might prefer their children to be in the 50K white collar camp.
To what extent are you defining blue collar in part as both working with your hands and being low status, or at least not high status?
Consider a surgeon. He is working with his hands. He is high status. And nobody would call him blue collar.
Or a basketball player.
We don’t know exactly how to define blue-collar, but we know it when we see it.
It’s some vague combination of working with hands, working a job where you will be tired and sweat, working for wages that may be relatively good but aren’t amazingly high, working in jobs that don’t require degrees from prestigious institutions, and working in a career field where basically the only opportunity for advancement is entrepreneurial in nature (i.e. the best plumbers have no path to becoming “VP of Plumbing Operations”, if they want to dramatically increase their earnings their path is “start your own plumbing business”)
I wonder whether the path of education is the big driver here. If doctors still largely apprenticed, joined trade unions, and started their own practices rather than going through school and medical school and then residency and jobs at hospitals, how much more would the status of doctors resemble that of plumbers?
If you shower before you go to work, you are white collar. If you shower after work, you are blue collar.
Different people have different ideas of what honourable means. Honourable =/= respectable.
For example, strippers are not respectable at all, but it’s honorable IMO (they are not stealing from anybody, not cheating anybody).
Investment fund managers that charge eye-watering 2-3 %, and get sub-par investment returns, are IMO dishonorable sleazebags, but they are respectable.
The best thing for that is to join a church. Maybe become a Mormon?
I don’t read either of these two stories in the way you did, these aren’t stories of over extension, they are stories of parents using substituting (borrowed) money and education for building an actual relationship with their children. I can’t believe my daughter is dropping out of school to party for a few months is a fairly strong indicator that you didn’t know your daughter very well and that you didn’t instill significant values in her either.
That you would write what ought to be embarrassing stories about your family for national publication doesn’t speak well of you as a parent either.
Hello again,
I’m a Computer Science student that was soliciting advice for a Capstone project. When I first posted this someone posted a great question that I didn’t get to: “What are you interested in?”
I really like Finance and would love to do a project based around that that would take 20hrs/week for 3 months. Does anyone have any ideas of a finance, fintech, money etc. based project that they would like to exist?
I’m open to any other ideas as well, the requirements are very open ended. The only requirements are 20hrs/week for 3 months and it has to have a significant coding component.
Thanks
Can you make some sort of language and image parsing bot that collects the positions posted to /r/wallstreetbets, weights them by popularity, and plays the inverse?
That’s no way to get yacht money.
But it is a way to not lose yacht money.
Go to local professional meetups, and ask there. And, when you ask, I’d re-frame the problem to “What can I do that would make an interesting talk?”
The problem that you want to solve — as you approach the job market — is differentiating yourself from the thousand other new grads. Unfortunately, the content of the capstone project won’t make that much of a direct difference.
The reason is that, if I’m reading new-grad resumes, I probably have 200 of the things. You all have projects. And thinking through them (“how complex was this?” / “what technologies?” / “how’s the output?”) would take me at least 2 minutes / per person. I don’t want to spend a full working day on this, and the recruiters don’t have the relevant background.
You’ll be expected to talk about the capstone when you make it to the later rounds, but at that point, I’m interested in your ability to think about architecture.
Instead, the way to get mileage out of this is to turn it into something IN ADDITION to a capstone project. An industry talk stands out. So does a note from a colleague, saying that you did a project that my colleague thinks was interesting.
And the best way to do that is to involve professionals early. Then you have someone who’s invested in your work and can help set you up at a conference or something.
This is really great advice. Thank you!
One of my ideas for a program to teach economics was an arbitrage game, where you have (say) multiple currencies, an exchange rate between each, changing over time, and the exchange rates are not always consistent, so you may be able to make money by trading A for B, B for C, then C for A.
It isn’t exactly finance, but a trading game set up to make the principle of comparative advantage obvious would be nice. You have one no-tradeable input, which you can think of as labor. It can be converted into tradeable goods at different rates in different countries. There is some simple utility function representing the relative value of different goods in each country—possibly the same for all.
The objective is to maximize utility, possibly scored relative to autarchic utility, the best your country can get without trade. Players discover that the fact that you are better at producing everything–more output per unit of input–doesn’t imply that you don’t profit by trade.
This sounds really cool, I do love economics as well. I’m not 100% sure if I want to build a video game for my project but I’ll keep in mind this as one of my options. I appreciate the idea.
Hello again. My background is in Fintech (I began my career working on software at a bank). Do you have any specific areas of finance you’d be interested in?
I have some finance projects/ideas that are on the backburner. If you want (and it’s allowed), I’d be willing to pay you a small sum to develop one for us. We’re not going to give you a great deal of industry credibility (we’re mid-sized at best). But it would be real work in the sense you would be building something people have asked for and we would actually try and get real users on it.
Otherwise, Drew’s advice is excellent. You could also go to one of your university’s financial organs and see if they need anything.
Hey there,
What you have in mind sounds great, I would be super motivated to build something that would be used in the “real world”. Working directly with a company is definitely allowed for my capstone project.
My main interests in finance would be in the markets, but I know there can be quite a barrier to entry building anything useful there. A personal finance project would also really interest me.
Would you mind emailing me at “my SSC username” @gmail.com? We can connect and move forward from there.
Is there a specific term for news/opinion articles that attempt to make a point through a series of profiles, but the profiles are atypical of the situation they are describing even on their own terms..
This New York Times article about America’s “struggling middle class” is all over my social media today, with many people pointing out that all of those profiled in it make at least 2x the median income in their areas. How does this get through editing without someone bothering to point that out? Are they being intentionally misleading here on purpose, or are they really just in that much of a bubble that “middle class family makes $400k but has to shop for bargain expired meat” is a narrative that seems reasonable to them?
And I’m really not just trying to dunk on the NYT for partisan gain here. The Wall Street Journal also did this a few months ago (and I did my part in letting them have it in the comments section) when discussing the “student loan crisis.” Buried in the middle of the article is the statistic that matters: The average millennial owes about $10K in student debt. Of the several they decided to profile? All owe over six figures. Their anecdotal profiles of how “millennials are struggling with student loans” are atypical by at least an order of magnitude. And not just like, one of the three profiles is wildly atypical, all of them are. And they are not balanced out by profiles being atypical in the other direction. No profiles on the students who worked hard to earn obscure scholarships so they wouldn’t have to take out loans, or those who got into an Ivy but chose a state school instead for financial reasons, or those who scrimped and saved after graduation and now paid off their loans in full and owe zero.
Mean or median? I could envisage a bi-modal distribution.
(Really blew the evil robot test here…)
Mean, I assume. The exact quote is “The average student-loan balance for millennials in 2017 was $10,600, more than twice the average owed by Gen X in 2004, according to Mr. Kurz and his Fed colleagues.”
And sure, we can manipulate the statistics in such a way as to make this offense seem less egregious. We could clarify whether the denominator includes all millennials, or just those who have a student loan balance at all, etc.
But the onus should be on them to do that in the article. They should be proactively explaining why they are showing us a statistic that says one thing, and then exclusively profiling people who are well outside the norm based on the statistic they chose to provide.
For sure, agreed on the criticisms generally.
I was about to make the same comment, although I’m not sure it’s totally bimodal. The average of new-graduate-me and now-me has something like $10k in debt. I went to a state school (although out of my state, for complicated reasons) and had pretty good scholarships.
I think the big thing informing our perceptions on this is that the state-school grads generally aren’t the ones who end up writing for major national publications, for whatever reason. Also, “I’m doing fine” makes for lousy writing. I wonder how much of this is the reason for the skew in the NYT piece. That, and the sort of people who write letters to the NYT are probably not going to be making $30k/yr.
As of 2017, approximately 37% of Americans age 18-29 have outstanding student loan debt, dropping to 22% in the 30-44 age group. Of those who do have outstanding student loans, the average debt is $38,000 and the median debt is $17,000. The median goes up to $25,000 for people who have completed a bachelor’s degree or $45,000 for postgraduate degrees. So, yeah, the sob stories about people with six-figure debts are cherry-picked outliers.
I would be interested in average student debt at the time of graduation. I’m not sure how much sense it makes to average the college debt debt of a 22 year old graduate with a 38 year old who has been paying of their loans for over a decade.
There are times when “mean” and “median” just don’t do the job. You need at least one graph.
Average student debt at the time of graduation, in 2017, and excluding the 35% who graduate debt-free, $28,650. With several graphs, but this really is one of those cases where just knowing the median would have done the job perfectly well.
Hahaha yeah, why did you say “I can envisage”?! You could have written “I wouldn’t be surprised if there was…”
I was thinking “bi-modal distribution” would have to go, in lieu of something like “two separate groupings”.
I’ve always had a soft spot for ‘envisage’ given how entirely redundant it is with the more common ‘envision’.
>The average millennial owes about $10K in student debt.
That’s a little bit like “the average person has less than 2 legs”
Total outstanding student loan debt: $1.52 trillion
Number of student loan borrowers: 44.7 million
So right off the bat that gives an average outstanding of $34004 ($1.52 trillion/44.7 million) per person. Money currently owed. Not what they owed on graduation day. You’d expect the figure above to significantly lowball graduation-day debt because most people are part-way through paying off their student debt.
but that also includes older people and college costs have spiked recently so recent graduates are going to have, on average much more debt.
I suspect to get the 10K number they may have divided the number by the whole population.
Since it was presented as “The average millennial”, I’m pretty sure they were dividing by the total population of whatever age cohort they’re defining as “millennial” (the article appears to be using birth years 1981 through 1996, so ages 23-38 as of the end of this year).
So they’re including people who never went to college, as well as those who never borrowed student loans (various combinations of working their way through, scholarships, grants, tuition waivers, and family paying their bills), which your denominator does not appear to include. Both figures would include those who graduated with debt but have paid it down significantly or paid it off completely.
I agree that the most useful number would be average debt on graduation. Or perhaps average debt on separation from college, since dropping out with debt but no degree is a substantial part of the current student loan issue. It should probably include people who graduated without debt, if we’re trying to get an idea of the typical just-out-of-college financial situation. But I’m not sure anyone’s collecting and publishing those numbers.
Surely the part about it doubling in 15 years is the important part, and not the absolute number?
I mean sure, that may be the most interesting aspect of the story, and the one most worth investigating.
But it still doesn’t justify why their series of profiles was dedicated exclusively towards people whose debts are several times the mean, and the median, by whichever interpretation of the statistics you might care to use.
I don’t see what’s wrong with that. If the article were about traumatic brain damage in football players, I would expect it to include statistics about the average NFL player’s injuries, but to illustrate the human impact of the problem with profiles of the people with the worst injuries. Seems like the same thing here.
@dick Not sure I can defend this, but I feel like there’s an important difference in culpability. It’s hard to feel too bad for someone who spends $200k at a top-50 school getting a degree in English lit, given that there were surely cheaper options or better career choices. But the worst case football player is largely a stroke of bad luck.
That is to say, profiling the student seems to be characterizing a systemic problem by the least responsible actors (which don’t really represent the issue itself), while profiling the football player is characterizing largely the issue itself.
imo,
Not only that, but the “profiles” of these students often focus entirely on the current negative situation, and do not even mention the circumstances that may have led to it.
They tell us that Joy Brown is 32 years old, earns 75k a year, and has 102k in student loan debt.
Not mentioned: Where she went to school, why she chose that school, what other schools she was considering, what she majored in, why she chose that major, what other majors might have been better options, etc.
These profiles could be an example for current young people. They could provide useful, actionable advice, which is almost certainly “Don’t go to out of state or private schools, don’t major in something that has no market demand, etc.” But the potential to give that advice is eliminated when these questions aren’t addressed, and when Joy is treated like an innocent victim who was randomly struck by a lightning bolt of “crippling student loan debt”
Yes, they could, which would be a great boon to the millions of teenagers reading NYT and WSJ profiles of middle-aged peoples’ finances as a way to help inform their choice of college major. But these articles aren’t written for them. (If you’re not sure who they are written for, ask TLP…) And you’re all over this OT accusing profiles like these of being misleading, duplicitous, a trick, etc, which is not warranted. You can disagree with the message of an article without calling its author malicious or innumerate.
Might be useful to the parents of children who are getting ready to make these decisions.
My own parents freely admit they should have asked a lot more questions and done a lot more research regarding my sister’s decision to attend a private school and major in psychology…
If the amount of students doubled in 15 years that would explain this and not be too worrisome from “college is too expensive” angle
My general feel is that a family of four pulling in 400k USD a year shouldn’t be having financial trouble assuming a bare minimum of competent stewardship (barely a notch above “don’t blow it all at the dogtrack”). Are real estate/rent and university really that expensive in the US?
No. To make 400K and be even remotely struggling essentially requires “blowing it all at the dogtrack” levels of incompetency.
I expect it is quite possible to make $400K per year and feel that you are struggling. Let’s say you work at Facebook in the Bay Area, are supporting a family, and want to live in a proper house with a reasonable commute. I could see that being a stretch, particularly if you are sending your kids to private school and want to be able to send them to non-state universities.
I would say such a person is trying to live somewhat beyond their means and given their actual means, I am not too sympathetic, but sure, they feel stretched without buying anything they think of as a luxury.
Maybe, but the two people profiled in the article live in PA and MN.
Also, one of those two profiles includes a single mother with two kids who also receives support from her husband, and it is unclear what they are considering “household income” in that case (does it include the father’s income, just the child support/alimony, or neither?)
Indeed, but their incomes aren’t given as $400K, but rather as the range $200K-400K.
Them not thinking of private schools and private universities as luxuries seems to be part of the problem in that scenario.
But I guess that’s illustrative that “keeping up with the Joneses” can make anyone feel financially inadequate no matter the income bracket.
My colleagues in the Bay Area are pretty up front about school and home costs, and there are definitely places in the area where they are willing to live, but the schools are bad enough that they aren’t willing to send their kids there.
What they really want in a school is that it send a significant portion of each graduating class to the top 20 or so universities. That takes a good private school or one of the best public schools. And it costs real money either way.
@johan_larson
Granted, but even if they’re exactly at $200,000 they ought to be living comfortably in that area based on the housing prices (unless they bought the $1.5 Mil 9 bedroom house).
These are places where housing is available in the $100,000 range, with median prices in the $200,000s, and topping out around $500,000 for large but reasonable sized houses (excluding things like a 6 bedroom with 6,000 square feet as “unreasonably large”).
I don’t see why it shouldn’t.
Trying to become the best is going to be costly. Doesn’t mean that’s going to generate sympathy among those who lack the options to try that.
A few years ago the company I work for, which has offices all over the country, sent a company-wide email that announced a new program that encouraged employees to purchase books (not books for the company, but books for ourselves) through Barnes & Noble, because of a program where a portion of each payment would go to support school library projects in the county where my company is headquartered. The county in question is a suburb of DC and, at the time, had a GDP equal to the nation of Vietnam. The office where I work, on the other hand, is in the second-wealthiest county in the not-so-wealthy state of Alabama. The optics of the request seemed off to me, and I told my supervisor what I thought.
It seems to me your description of Facebook employee has similar optics. “I have a huge salary and want to live like a rich man, but I’m struggling”
What they really want in a school is that it send a significant portion of each graduating class to the top 20 or so universities. That takes a good private school or one of the best public schools. And it costs real money either way.
That is likely a product of demographics, not school quality.
I agree these people don’t need our pity. I’m just trying to describe why people can make excellent money and still feel stretched without being crazy or madcap wastrels: they live in areas with really high housing costs, and want their children to have really excellent educations.
Slightly tangential to this topic, but I wonder if it’s even a good investment. I’m skeptical. Would need to try and estimate likelihood of going to various levels of college based on K-12 schools attended, expected earnings based on attending those colleges, and then adjust for the costs to the parents/child of both the K-12 and college-level education.
I’m skeptical because I suspect children of families like this are much more likely than the general public to go to top 20ish schools regardless of what high school they attend, and thus the money spent on better high schools/middle schools/etc is largely wasted.
johan,
OK – but that still doesn’t apply to the people actually profiled in this article.
I think maybe what I and others are suggesting is that these people are slightly crazy wastrels, they’re just doing it in a slightly more socially acceptable fashion.
Note that this applies to people who are doing it and can’t afford it. If this is where your priorities lie, you believe this is the best use of your money, and you can afford it by all means go all out on it.
How much seems mandatory to spend depends a lot on your surroundings and social class. In some social settings, not having a new car every couple years or a really big house would lower your status, and that makes it easy to feel like those expenditures are necessary.
I can speak to this, from personal experience. I was one of the top students in a middle-class-ish Canadian high school. It did a good job; I and my fellow students in the university-bound track were well prepared for college and could get into good Canadian schools.
But it became clear to me as I spoke with the students at an enrichment camp I attended one summer that I was in fact missing out on something. There were schools — some public, some private — where the bar was being set much higher. These schools ran math and science teams, and actually prepared for the tests, teaching them material well beyond the usual high school curriculum. They aimed their top students at top scholarships. The students seriously considered going to the top US universities and knew what it took to get there. None of these things were even on the radar in the school I went to.
I expect that if my parents had sent me to such a school, I would have come out of high school somewhat more capable and accomplished. I’ll never know of course, but it’s very possible I would have aimed a bit higher and accomplished a bit more.
That’s what sending your kid to a high-achieving high school gets you, even if they’re already smart and hard-working. I can see why someone would pay for that. I’d be tempted myself. Is it worth it? No idea.
Honestly, I’m not sure that spending six figures a year on a fancy private school under the assumption that it will make the difference between sending your child to Harvard or to Kent State (and that this will make the difference between your child being happy or miserable) is any more responsible/competent than going to the dog track. I mean, you might win any bets you place at the track, too!
My understanding is that when economists have looked at selective high schools (magnet schools) and Ivy League schools, they’ve found very little ultimate difference in outcomes between the people who just barely got in and the people who just barely missed getting in, or between the people who got into the Ivy and went and the people who got into the Ivy but went to State to save money.
The way I’ve seen this explained is that selective schools probably correlate with success mainly because they select the top students–those students were going to be successful whether they went to Midtown High/State U or Grind Magnet Academy/Ivy U.
@albatross11,
I’ve also read lots of “top students would do well wherever” stuff as well, but I’ve also read that for bottom students where they get in makes a big difference on average.
I believe you get this result if you count graduates, but ignore dropouts.
Plumber,
That makes logical sense though. If the value of a college degree is signaling, and if employers trust the University to signal correctly, then those who “slip through the cracks” (i.e. get accepted to and graduate from Harvard when they weren’t necessarily best qualified) will receive the same benefit.
If Harvard applies approximately the same benefit to everyone who graduates from it, this will equate to “very little benefit” to the top students who would have done great anywhere, but “a whole lot of benefit” to the marginal students who may not have.
That’s around 6X what my family of 5 lives on in Southern California (a location not exactly renowned for low cost of living).
I remember a recent article where it shows the budget for one of these people and it made me a lot less sympathetic for them. For example, it’s not good enough for little Timmy to go to public school with the rubes. They have to go to an elite private school that takes up a large part of the budget.
Years ago a Canadian magazine had profiles of well-off families complaining that family incomes in the multiple hundreds of thousands (a Canadian dollar being 76 American cents right now, and usually hovering in that range) weren’t enough. What they meant is, once you’ve spent a hundred thousand dollars, you don’t have it anymore.
No, they’re not. I’ve lived in expensive areas a lot, including stints spent in some of the most expensive zip codes in the US. $400k leads to $230k-$270k in post tax income. You can find an apartment or house in a trendy area very easily on that income and afford a pretty luxury car with plenty left over for other luxuries.
My guess is either they’re living above their income, such as buying a Maserati or a big mansion, or they’re spending heavily sending their kids to private school and for memberships to clubs and the like. Once you get a lot of income there’s a temptation to ‘act rich’ and start moving into nicer areas, nicer homes, nicer cars, and nicer schools regardless of how much you can actually afford them. The idea is, “Well, I make $400k. Doesn’t my child deserve to go to Phillips Exeter? And don’t I deserve that Tesla? And don’t I really deserve that McMansion in Trendyville?” And… now you’ve got $20,000 in fixed expenses.
California is a hell-hole.
Lets say you have a couple who nail the job search. One lands a position in Stanford’s research park, and the other gets a job in tech. Total income is $400k / year. And, since they’re coming from the midwest, they figure that being dual-income adults making $$$ means they can live in a detached house with a yard.
And, let’s say they restrict their housing search to Menlo Park anywhere South of the 101. But they’re flexible. So they’re willing to go a town up to Atherton, or a town down to Palo Alto.
The Redfin listing look like this. The cheapest options are around $2.1M, if you’re willing to live on a major road. If you want to live in a “normal” house on a generic looking suburban block, then typical prices are closer to $3M.
The discussion gets weird because “detached home” obviously isn’t a survival requirement for anyone. People go to grad school. Some grad students even have kids. The grad-school lifestyle is livable.
But, at the same time, there’s something deeply weird about a couple making $400k and having to live a grad-student lifestyle because they’re not remotely close to being able to afford a house.
Especially if we replace “what lifestyle could I afford – in theory?” with “what lifestyle could I afford if I’m doing responsible, prudent things, like saving for retirement?”
Honest question because I don’t really know the answer since I don’t live there:
How bad are the neighborhoods in, say, East Palo Alto, or even on the other side of the Bay?
Those provide perfectly reasonable commutes by the standards of most medium-large cities and the housing prices are much lower.
I’ll also just remind people that the examples in the article are not Bay Area residents living in that terrible housing market, they are in Pennsylvania and Minnesota where housing is…more reasonable (so these explanations work for our theoretical Bay Area family but not for the families actually presented in the article).
East Palo Alto used to be notably bad, but is improving.
The drive-by shootings have mostly stopped, and the property crime is down to just twice the US average. As a recent article puts it, “How East Palo Alto shed its ‘murder capital’ status and found peace”
In terms of quality-of-life, the schools are notably below average. Overall, the town is just kind of crowded; for a long time, the stabbings meant it was one of the few places where normal people could afford to live. So it’s common to have lots of people sharing single family homes.
You can cross the Dunbarton Bridge. If you do, expect your morning commute from Freemont -> Stanford to take between 40-90 minutes due to traffic. The commute back will also take 40-90 minutes.
(Note: The tech companies provide shuttles. Stanford does not)
Freemont has OK schools IIRC. And in terms of fun, the area can be summarized as “lets go to the nicer strip-mall thai place” or maybe “Drinks at Applebees!”
And not even in the big cities of Pennsylvania and Minnesota.
These people are living in low-cost areas. Period.
If this article exclusively profiled people living in Manhattan or SF, it’d still be unrepresentative of the population as a whole, but at least it would make a little bit of sense from a narrative perspective. But “I make 200K and live in rural Minnesota and have to get by clipping coupons for ground beef” is patently absurd.
I did a Zillow search for San Jose, which is about a half hour drive from Stanford. Quite a lot of houses selling for under a million dollars, renting for $3,000-$4,000/month.
The reason for this being, according to some of my relatives living there, is that unlike many other towns in the area, the San Jose public school system isn’t a place your typical Stanford grads would want to send their kids. So they’d have to add private schools to the necessary expenses.
(I do not know if the San Jose school system is actually all that bad)
As a local resident, I question your claim of it being only a half hour drive – at least at any time resembling rush hour.
Fair point—I’m not driving to Stanford in rush hour.
But a researcher there may well have flexible hours, and the tech worker may be closer to work in San Jose than in Menlo Park. Menlo Park is very expensive, and they don’t have to live there. Looking in Mountain View, I’m seeing lots of rental prices in the $3000-$5000 range.
At least some of the tech employers provide Wi-Fi enabled buses so employees can start work during their commute.
Real estate in the Bay Area, yes. The family with the doctor making >$200K in Wyomissing, PA (outside Reading)… not so much.
This reminds me of an article in… I want to say The Atlantic? where they talked about how great online dating was for men and how easy it was for them to get dates and how unbalanced the dating scene was in favor of men and casual sex. The only men they chose to profile were wealthy New York investment bankers or similar types, all of whom were educated and in shape. I have no doubt dating is really very easy if you’re in good shape, reasonably good looking, well educated, live in a city with a favorable gender balance, and make well into six figures in your mid-twenties. But that’s about as much stacking the deck as you can get.
One thing that’s repeatedly apparent to me is that reporters are very, very humanities based. They’re more similar in their inclinations and skills to fiction authors than scientists. They generally do not understand basic statistics and they see the world through stories. That is, by the way, the universal term for what they produce: stories. There is absolutely value in that but it’s a limited way to view the world. In particular, it risks drawing broad conclusions from narrow circumstances. (Pure statistics is also a limited way to view the world but we’ve already been hearing that for years.)
Anyway, I always called it unrepresentative sampling.
Yes. But even beyond this – I think a couple of questions still emerge:
1. Why include the statistics at all when they don’t actually support your story?. If 90% of your article is a narrative profile of people who owe six-figure debt, what is there to possibly be gained by volunteering the information that the average debt is only 10k (and further, not explaining or going into the details as to what makes your profiles different from the average, or why they are important despite being non-average, etc.)
2. Why not tell stories to “balance out” the narrative around the average? I’m sure it’s possible to find someone who is “struggling middle class” but only makes 30K a year. Or someone who started with a 50K debt but cut it down to a current balance of just 3K by working hard, saving, etc.
They don’t just “want to tell stories.” They want to tell stories that actively mislead the public as to the actual state of affairs. You can find plenty of ways to tell stories that don’t result in you claiming 200-400K living in a low-cost area is “struggling middle class.”
Hanlon’s Razor.
I suspect they genuinely do not understand this. These writers are totally innumerate, but they do realize that backing up your assertions with statistics is the proper thing to do. The fact that the statistics prove that their anecdotes are unrepresentative goes right over their heads.
Agree with this part, but I don’t think it’s Hanlon’s Razor. The fact that they are going through the motions of citing statistics without bothering to actually consider what the statistics mean is malice, not stupidity.
On the podcast Contra Krugman, Bob Murphy regularly points this out regarding Krugman pieces. That he often will make some sort of controversial (at least in the eyes of a libertarian) claim, and will provide a hyperlink. 99% of people won’t click the link, but will assume the link leads to some sort of objective source that validates the claim being made. Bob’s point is that if you actually click the link, more often than not, the thing being linked to doesn’t even come close to “objectively verifies the claim being made.”
Hanlon’s Razor isn’t an explanation, it’s a principle for evaluating explanations. If you nonetheless think it’s malice, you should show us why that’s a better explanation than stupidity. Or you could reject Hanlon’s Razor, but I’d still be curious why.
Would you agree that actively engaging in deception counts as malice?
What is “I should throw some statistics in here so that my stories will seem to be based on facts, and I’m not going to spend even five minutes considering whether the statistics actually validate my stories or not” if not active deception?
Actively engaging in deception is malicious, yeah. But we don’t know that’s what they’re doing. You’re positing one explanation and Brendan is positing another. Per Hanlon’s Razor, we should favor stupidity (innumeracy) over malice (deception). What is it about your explanation that makes it superior to Brendan’s; or that failing, why does Hanlon’s Razor not apply?
I really don’t think any deception is necessary. If of course the average college student is up to their eyeballs in debt, then of course the statistics will back that up. Actually checking that would be redundant, not that they have the mathematical chops to do it properly anyway.
Yeah, this isn’t struggling “middle class”. The 95th percentile of household income in the US starts at $209,000. If you’re making between $200k and $400k, you are very solidly part of the rich. I don’t begrudge people that–even the rich have problems that can be emotionally crushing, just different ones than poor people–but it does a disservice to everybody to call somebody in the top 5% or so “middle class”, because it warps everybody’s expectations of what a good life should look like.
That makes it…less understandable though.
That means (or suggests) they were living so far beyond their means before the big promotion that even after the big promotion and pay raise they can’t make ends meet. Even if you were counting on that promotion when managing your finances in the preceding years, that suggests some pretty irresponsible spending (regardless of whether you feel that irresponsible spending was “for a good cause”).
I’ll buy it for the self employed, who can have highly variable year-year income, and slightly less so for mostly commission-based jobs (although, in both cases you knew what you signed up for) but you are aware of those variances upfront. Have a big year, expand your spending to match as though it would be like that forever, and then income returns to a more normal amount and you struggle? That’s on you*.
*the generic you, not “you” you
Right – and that gets back to my complaint. We need terminology that separates “poor due to low earnings” and “little to no net worth despite high earnings due to irresponsible spending habits.”
There is no logical reason why these groups of people should be lumped together as if they were part of the same general category…
That’s a good point. A guy who’s poor because can’t make enough to live on has a *very different* problem than a guy who can’t control his spending despite making a solid middle-class income. Advice or policies to help the first guy probably won’t do a thing for the second guy, and vice versa.
What you mostly want to look at is not wealth but permanent income.
That’s a technical term, but it’s basically the present value of your lifetime income stream. If you earn lots of money in year 1 and not much in year 2, the reason you are not poor in year 2 is that you can spend wealth accumulated in year 1. But if we reverse the order, and year 2’s high income is predictable, the reason you are not poor in year 1 is that you can borrow against your future income.
If future-surgeons can borrow against their future income, and there’s competition to get in to the field, it seems like, in an ideal market, the costs of becoming a surgeon ought to rise to compensate, decreasing the permanent income of the field compared to other jobs. And it seems like that’s exactly what some of the couples in those profiles that Matt M was complaining about were saying: “We make a good income and that’s great, but becoming a doctor/programmer/etc was so expensive (student loans, plus the costs incurred by long hours like childcare and housework help) that I still have to shop at discount grocery stores.”
Let’s make some extremely high end assumptions about these costs:
Monthly student loan payment: $5,000
Monthly childcare cost: $3,000
Mortgage: $1,500
Gross annual income: $200,000
Net (after taxes): $150,000
Some of these would be astronomically high, but just for fun (we’ll also ignore any tax write-off implications). Even in this essentially worst-case scenario you have $3,000 per month left for savings, general expenses, and luxury/entertainment, which is just a bit less than the gross median income.
I don’t know what that was supposed to prove. Your student loan costs look way too high, mortgage way too low, and “general expenses” is doing a lot of lifting. Anyway, I’m not suggesting that the people being profiled are ascetic monks who have cut their spending to the bone and still struggle. Without doubt, much of their expenses are at least somewhat optional (kids’ college fund, second car, nice neighborhood) and some are outright frivolous.
But the topic under discussion, I think, is people who have high incomes but claim to be struggling, and whether that is normal/unusual/expected/ridiculous/etc. And surely an econ prof saying “Yes, there’s an effect that causes that” coupled with the people in question saying “Yes, that’s the effect that caused this” is a signal that maybe these people aren’t just wastrels.
@dick
Student loan costs were intentionally high. I explicitly said that. I’m trying to show that even if the costs being blamed for the financial trouble were absurdly high as in my example it still doesn’t account for anything close to financial difficulty. Reduce it to a reasonable level and the numbers make claims that the financial struggle is anyone’s fault but their own looks flatly ridiculous.
You’re going to need to back up the idea that the mortgage is way too low because its a fair bit above the national average. We’re not talking about the Bay Area or whatever terrible housing market. Assuming we’re still talking about the people in the article they live in extremely affordable markets. Where a $1,500 mortgage puts you well above average.
The point about “general expenses” (admittedly loosely defined) is that they have about as much left over for that broad general expense category as a family with more typical income has to cover all expenses including housing, childcare, etc.
I think, though, that our biggest hangup is that we have different standards for what qualifies as a wastrel (honestly I don’t even like that word here, although it’s been used throughout the thread).
Are there legitimate reasons for someone making $200k, $400k, heck even $2Mil to be having financial difficulty? Yes. But the reasons being presented are not those legitimate reasons, and given that I’m not convinced the people profiled here actually have legitimate reasons to be struggling the way they are.
When I was in downtown Manhattan for work, I went down to the hotel bar and chatted with the bartender for a bit. He was complaining that both he and his boyfriend made over 6-figures each and they were unable to afford an apartment in Manhattan.
Of course, Manhattan (or, god help me, the Bay Area) is totally irrelevant when talking about Americans generally or the people profiled in this article specifically.
Unable to find an apartment south of 96th, perhaps.No, not even that’s right. The average rent almost anywhere in Manhattan is under $5000, which is your standard “40x rent” guideline for $200,000 income.
@ acymetric:
…the first profile is literally about Cupertino real estate.
I’m guessing you didn’t get very far in the article.
Well, Dan, if you keep reading you’ll notice that the rest of the profiles are decidedly not that.
And if you do a little more reading (before accusing me of not doing so), read up to the parent post for this subthread the discussion was about the two families profiled in the $200,000-$400,000 (who definitely don’t have Bay Area style housing problems) which is the context in which I made my post.
But keep on guessing, you’ll get it right eventually. Broken clock and all that.
Ah, I wasn’t aware we were using that definition of “specifically” where it “specifically” excludes the portion that directly contradicts your point.
Probably should have picked up on that from your numbers upthread though. It’d be super embarrassing at this point if you’d just doubled down on having read the 200k-400k profiles but missed the 91k expense. There’s a lot to say about that, but none of it seems to appear this thread.
Not quite. $91k is beyond excessive. The “problem” these people have is…easily solvable and a symptom of bad spending choices, not some external problem. That’s the whole contention I and others in throughout this discussion are making.
Again, if you’re going to chime in on a discussion with snide potshots, consider actually reading the discussion first.
And my contention is that the discussion more often than not is happening in either avoidance of or direct contradiction with the contents of the article.
There are three separate claims that can be advanced:
1) A given analysis is applicable to the profiled
2) The same analysis is applicable to a representative member of the middle class
3) The profiled are not representative of the middle class
It would take quite a bit of hand-wringing to reconcile all three, but it’s far easier if one is ignored or the difficulties are glossed over. I fired a few shots at Matt M for botching an argument for the third. At you, for the first. There are other issues here and there throughout the thread, but those struck me as the most salient.
Maybe people are just eliding the part where they disagree with OP’s framing. Maybe there was a thesis being worked towards, but it didn’t arrive in time. Or maybe the problems can be cleanly explained by a reluctance to RTF
MA. Run a quick search for which OT topics I engage with, and maybe you’ll see why my priors are where they are.@Dan L
There are several different profiles, and different analyses may apply to each.
Your 2 and 3 are not as irreconcilable as you have made them out to be. The profiles are mostly not representative of the middle class (though the first one, IMO, may be representative of the middle class in the Bay Area); however, the analysis of their problems may be representative of the people who claim to be middle class and struggling. Certainly I would expect Garrett’s bartender and partner making twin six figures and “unable to find an apartment” to be making bad spending choices as well.
Everybody’s struggling. The question is, what are they struggling for, and why is this struggle newsworthy?
I’m not surprised that some people are struggling to have a living room you could put my whole apartment into (or a bay area closet) and get their kids into Ivy league preschools. Those are nice things to have! But why should I, J. Q. Newspaper reader, care about this struggle?
Newspapers aren’t for generating empathy, they’re for telling you about things you weren’t aware of. Perhaps you were already aware that there are doctors buying discount groceries, but the general level of incredulity in this thread would suggest that not everyone was.
ETA: I think that the thesis of these profiles, basically, is “things are worse than they used to be. The jobs that used to let you not worry about money don’t do that anymore.” They might be wrong, but why is it that you feel comfortable assuming they are? Not just you, half this thread. “Ivy league preschools”, I presume, means frivolous expenses, i.e. these peoples’ struggles are self-imposed, their problem is not that things are tougher than they used to be, they’d be fine if they’d just reduce their spending like you or I would. Correct? Then why do you feel justified in assuming that? Here, on a forum devoted to rational and evidence-based inquiry, why do so many people feel confident announcing that the journalists producing these stories are lying, that these people are better off than they’re being made to sound? Shouldn’t the default assumption be that, if enough journalists from enough different newspapers of different ideological bents are finding enough people to write enough of these profiles that they have become a “type” common enough for someone to complain about, that they’re not all lying?
(Also, I assume a big part of the reason journalists write these stories is that they get clicks, and a big part of the reason they get clicks is the “fuck these people, they’re just spending too much on Ivy League preschools” ideological outrage response this thread illustrates. But that alone is not enough to assume they’re all misleading.)
@dick
I don’t think anyone is questioning that this happens (or even that it is happening to these specific people). I think people are questioning the explanations presented for why doctors have to buy discount groceries.
The number of things I’m not aware if is verging on infinite. Someone chooses.
Don’t use me as an example, I never do the required reading.
Consider that Matt pointed out that the statistic cited (in the article on student debt) indicated a reality diametrically opposed to the one implied by the stories chosen to illustrate it, then preach about the rational assumptions.
Nice to have but not so important I’ll care if anyone in particular fails to attain it. If that’s your definition of frivolous, then sure.
@Matt M
Maybe “bizarre goalposts?”
I skimmed parts of the first three profiles a few days ago, and when I saw that all were “struggling” on more income while living in what are I presume cheaper areas (’cause not San Francisco, Manhattan, London, or Tokyo) than me, my wife, and our two sons get by on I lost interest, but both the NYT and the WSJ have moved the goalposts on what “middle class” means for years.
As far as I can tell, most American folks (Brits have a different definition because of a legacy aristocracy) have a mental “class system” that goes like:
Poor = earns and has a lot less money than most folks
Working-class = (not actually used much) Is an employee, or if self-employed does heavy lifting to earn money
Middle-class = Has close to the same amount of money as most folks, and earns something close to the median income
Rich = Has/earns noticibly more money than most people
While NYT/WSJ class lingo seems to be:
Poor = Receiving welfare/relief/dole
Working-class = Doesn’t have a college diploma, and/or has a job paying close to the median income
Middle-class = Has a college diploma and/or earns at least 2.5x median income
Upper Middle Class = Has a post graduate degree and earns so much more than the median that most Americans who aren’t NYT/WSJ writers would call them “Rich”
Rich = Owns a private jet, probably wears a hoodie
I think this nomenclature is to appeal to advertisers “See, this is our readership”
It isn’t just the NYT/WSJ…those definitions are all over our popular culture. Hell, they’re fairly common in these comments every time it comes up.
I’m trying to come up with definitions about what each level allows. Something like
Poor: Your children help supplement the family income right now.
Working Class: Your children will likely take your trade after high school.
Middle Class: Your children will go to college and from there choose a career to support themselves.
Upper Class: Your children will go to private prep school, private college, and then choose a career they find satisfying.
Rich: Your children never consider needing an income.
(I don’t think it really fits, just throwing out the thoughts.)
Maybe put it in terms of typical real worries. (Just guessing about some of them.)
Poor: Putting food on the table. Making rent. Keeping the car running.
Worker: Holding a full-time job. Affording a home of your own. Finding a job with good benefits.
Gentry: Getting promoted to manager. Getting the kids into a good college. Saving enough for retirement.
Rich: Being a someone among the local elite. Leaving behind a legacy that matters. Getting good help.
I don’t think that works though. Because these types of articles tend to suggest that somehow, beyond all reason, there are people out there living in low-cost areas making $200K who actually are struggling to put food on the table, make rent, and keep the car running. Or at least, they would claim they struggle to do that.
So at some point, we do need to have some sort of literal numerical threshold. If you’re making six figures and you don’t live in New York, the Bay Area, LA, or Chicago, you don’t get to call yourself poor. If you’re in that situation and you’re still struggling to pay your basic bills every month, the word for you is not “poor”, it’s “irresponsible.” Or perhaps “financially incompetent.” I could maybe think of some even less charitable descriptors, but I’ll stop here.
In my head, the word “poor” refers to two very distinct phenomena. The first is typified by the first or second generation immigrant with no money, difficulties with learning the language, getting minimum-wage work (and, in my experience, working really hard at it), possibly (by means of gumption and outside help) positioning themselves to improve in life. The other is a couple making $60,000/year, neither of whom are college-educated, with hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt, stressing about how they are going to pay for their (way too large) mortgage but also eating out at fast food (or sometimes nicer) places on a regular basis. I don’t know that either of these models are very representative of “the poor” at large, but they are more or less people I’ve met, so they at least exist.
I’m sure immigrants are a substantial portion of the poor, but I’d be surprised if they were even the majority. There are lots of poor in the inner city. Or Appalachia, or the south.
I guess my point here is that I think there’s some trickery going on in terms of using terms like “poor” to describe someone who makes more than enough money to live comfortably, in general, but who makes choices such that they dramatically overextend themselves and live beyond their means.
Someone making 200K is not poor, even if they rack up a ton of bills such that at the end of the year, their net balance on the year is zero or negative. That’s not “poor”, that’s “living beyond your means.”
Similarly, the “struggling immigrant” who makes 30K a year but lives cheaply and manages to save 5K of it is still poor, even if his “net profit” for the year is higher than the 200K private school fancy car family.
Warning: This is where I completely veer off into unmitigated CW.
I think the reason I bristle at this so much is because I think it’s part of a long con that includes:
1. Defining as many people as possible as “poor”, or even “middle class.”
2. Strongly implying that people are “poor” for reasons beyond their control and/or because of the oppression of the rich
3. Mobilizing these people to vote for leftist economic policies
If you’re trying to get Bernie Sanders (or anyone approximately similar) elected on a message of “we need to raise taxes on the rich to help the struggling middle class,” then it’s probably quite helpful to you that as many people as possible see themselves as “struggling middle class” and not “rich” (as the beneficiaries of your redistribution schemes, rather than the targets of it).
I can’t prove a literal conspiracy here, nor I am suggesting that the authors of this piece sat down and said to themselves “How can I help get socialists elected? I know! I’ll write this…” But that said, it does seem that there is a rather large cultural push to get as many people as possible lumped into the category of “struggling have-nots” and I think that ultimately, there’s a reason for that, and it’s not a coincidence…
I think you can dismiss conspiracy concerns for a couple reasons:
1) Liberals also complain about the unreasonable expansion of the term “middle-class” to include people who by any reasonable definition are absolutely not middle-class.
2) Both parties do it, for different motivations. These are both going to be straw-manish takes on the two parties, but just bare with me for illustrative purposes. Liberal politicians want to expand the definition of middle class so when they talk about things that will benefit the middle class those lower-end upper class folks think they are included. Conservative politicians want to expand the definition of middle class so that when they talk about policies that primarily benefit that group of
middle-classlow-end upper class earners they can say it benefits the “middle class” and it sounds better.Nobody is really being honest here, but it is coming from both sides and there are plenty of people from both sides (you and me, for example) who hate it.
You also see the actual people in this upper level income group doing it themselves, presumably as some kind of identity thing where some guy making $500,000k wants to call himself middle class for whatever reason.
@Matt M >"I guess my point here is that I think there’s some trickery going on in terms of using terms like “poor” to describe someone who...:
This is where it becomes useful to read the words of the actual Left rather than “the house newspaper of the professional class”
From: “Modern Monetary Theory Isn’t Helping”
“…Now that policies made famous by Bernie Sanders, like Medicare for All and free college, and newer ones like the Green New Deal, are infiltrating the political mainstream, advocates are always faced with the question: “how would you pay for them?” Although there are good answers to “this question” that could even be shrunk down to a TV-friendly length and vocabulary, they’re not always forthcoming. Even self-described socialists seem to have a hard time saying the word “taxes.” How lovely would it be if you could just dismiss the question as an irrelevant distraction?…”
“….MMT has little or nothing on offer to fight any of this. The job guarantee is a contribution, though a flawed one, and it’s not at the core of the theory, which proceeds from the keystroke fantasy. That fantasy looks like a weak response to decades of anti-tax mania coming from the Right, which has left many liberals looking for an easy way out. It would be sad to see the socialist left, which looks stronger than it has in decades, fall for this snake oil. It’s a phantasm, a late-imperial fever dream, not a serious economic policy….”
and from: “The Hater Class”
“Wall Street will not love Buh-nie Sanduhs,” the candidate memorably declared during a 2016 primary debate. Indeed, the 1 percent is Sanders’s true enemy. But there’s another group that doesn’t love the socialist senator, either: the upper middle class….”
“…In 2016, voters with incomes more than $100,000 voted for Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders by a 17 percent margin. Many liberals in this class are hostile to socialism for the same reason as the superrich: they don’t want us to take away their stuff….”
“…neither socialism nor social democracy can be funded solely by taxing the superrich. Eventually, if AOC or Bernie-style policy prevails, our society would stop producing such a grotesque number of billionaires. Revenues would have to come from someplace else. As in Nordic social democracies, the middle class would have to pay more taxes….”
Any large enough actual Left agenda won’t come tax free to the “middle class”, certainly not to the “upper middle class”, though I suppose there’s always play fight “left vs. right” circus diversions like “gender neutral bathrooms” and “university speech codes”, which pretty successfully tame the “Left” and “Right” into approved signalling exercises instead of any structural changes.
Oh, you can definitely go to a private school (or out-of-state school) and you pick a “satisfying” major, but you are going to pay out the keester for it unless you have a trust fund with your name on it.
I come from a UMC family, but we all lived at home and went to a commuter school, and 2/3 of us tried to major in something that would be marketable. My in-laws either went to out of state schools or majored in something “satisfying” and are paying dearly for it, because Mommy and Daddy are NOT so rich that they have trust funds set up for each of their kids.
Also neither my parents nor my in-laws have much of a retirement saved up. They will likely have to move in with the kids at some point, or die. My Dad would prefer death.
The goalposts keep moving because people can’t decide whether class is just about money, or whether it indicates something else. A lot of people who are top 5% or higher for income think of themselves as “upper-middle class” because our image of “upper class” is either someone with enough inherited family wealth that they needn’t work, or someone who works in an incredibly lucrative field.
I would also guess that stuff which a hundred years ago was the province of the quite wealthy is now a lot more common. The median income-earner is probably more likely to own stocks or whatever than a hundred years ago, I’d wager, and certainly the above-average income earner. If a member of the working class is similar in definition to a member of the proletariat – someone whose means of survival is selling their wage to someone else – at what value of investment portfolio does someone stop being working class?
To what extent is it cultural markers? A wastrel child of someone really rich who’s been told “you’re embarrassing us all; we’ll give you 50k a year to piss off to the other end of the country and not sully our name further” will fit in better at some posh soiree than someone from a poor background who makes three times that doing some kind of computer thing.
If journalists are intentionally using vague and hard to define language, that’s another strike against them.
They could easily clarify exactly what they mean in these pieces. The fact that they choose not to is damning.
I don’t know that it’s intentional. It would be nice if they said stuff like “for the purposes of my article, I’m defining upper-middle class as xth percentile” but that still runs into the problem that it’s really vague and about more than money.
And my proposition is that they didn’t do that for a reason, that doing it would give up the trick they are playing on their readership. Because if you actually state “for the purposes of my article, I’m defining middle class as anything below the 90th percentile of incomes” people would immediately dismiss and laugh at you, without even having to spend a few minutes googling exactly why your propaganda is wrong.
My #1 rule of consuming news media is that if an article implies a very obvious follow-up question (in this case: “How do you define middle class?”) that is neither asked nor answered, one can safely assume the reason it isn’t asked is because the answer would directly contradict the primary narrative thrust of the article.
“for the purposes of my article, I’m defining middle class as anything below the 90th percentile of incomes”
Actually, given the shape of the income distribution, I think that’s not that bad a way of doing it. Maybe the cutoff is 85%, or something, but it should definitely be way closer to 100 than it is to 50. Piketty does something like this, and is most explicit about it.
@Enkidum
I think most people find it easiest/most reasonable to separate it out by standard deviations from the mean/median or by some multiple of the median even if they don’t realize they’re doing that but are mentally doing it by saying (made up numbers for example):
Median: 50k
4x Median: 200k
200k: 93rd percentile
And just shorthanding it to “middle class is people below the 93rd percentile” or some such.
I don’t think anyone is suggesting middle class should actually just be the 50th percentile.
Then allow me. I am suggesting middle class should actually just be, let’s say, the 30th – 70th percentile, and/or, that if you want to include an 80th percentile person in your middle class profile, you should feel some sort of compulsion to offset them by also including a 20th percentile person.
@Matt M
I mean, I don’t think those are totally unreasonable deliniations, but percentile is just a bad way to break up economic classes due to the way it is distributed. The difference between the 70th and 80th percentile is a lot less than the difference between the 80th and 90th, and if you looked at the actual dollar amounts it would be hard to argue that 70th and 80th aren’t pretty much in the same economic class (it would also be hard to argue that the 20th, or even 30th, percentiles are in the same class as the 60th).
@Matt M
Yeah, the distribution REALLY matters here. When medians and means differ greatly, as they do in this case, the former is often much more informative. And percentiles are mean-based.
Huh?
The fiftieth percentile contains the median individual. It does not contain the average individual.
I… am very tired, that was really dumb.
Especially given that I said elsewhere on this OT that I thought knowing the difference between median and mean was one of the qualities every human being should have.
Wow. Just… wow.
It’s okay, I’m sure you make up for it in your dancing 😉
To me, middle class isn’t defined by percentiles. I can’t give a precise definition, but it seems perfectly reasonable to say that in the 18th century (say) only five or ten percent of the population of England were middle class, but in late 20th century America, a majority were.
Enkidum-
I feel for you, pal. I’ve been there.
Extra-embarrassing fact – I’ve taught upper level stats.
Sigh.
Anyways, I think David Friedman and acymetric are making the point I was maybe (kind of?) trying to get at, somehow. I will refrain from saying any more on the subject.
@Enkidum
Yeah, I think we’re trying to make the same point. Unsurprisingly, David Friedman is probably doing the best job of making it despite saying much less. 😉
I don’t think “Middle Class” was ever actually meant to be “some symmetric range centered on the 50th percentile” or even anything close to that. We already have a way to describe that…the percentiles.
Middle Class is socioeconomic, not economic, and not based on the median or the mean although it isn’t totally disconnected from them.
I don’t understand what your category of “rich” is supposed to define when it puts me and Oprah Winfrey in the same category.
I didn’t define “rich” – merely said the wastrel child was the offspring of someone rich.
Defining “rich” as “having enough money that you needn’t work and can still maintain a certain lifestyle” is still about money, it’s just not about income.
Some time ago–probably during the time when another plumber became a national news item after talking to then-candidate-Obama about the definition of “rich”–I realized something.
There is a range of wages in the print-journalism/TV-journalism business. And slightly above that range of wages are he wages that news people call “rich”.
That particular plumber was rich in that sense, because he had better wages than most of the people in the news business. Even if he was “working class”, or “upper-middle-class income from running a working-class business”
My reflexive response to this line of argument is to pick apart what its speaker means by “they”. Are you talking about Tammy Kim and Jyoti Thottam, contributing opinion writers? Are you talking about the NYT editorial board and related functions, that decides coverage and writes headlines? Are you talking about The Media, a mixed blend of journalism, punditry, and entertainment? Or are you going all the way to The Cathedral, and its unabashed reification of emergent cultural forces?
The obvious answer is that there might be plenty of profiles out there that meet your requests, but for whatever reason they’re not making their way to you – this article came to you via social media? What about your cultivated ecosystem would be applying selection pressure to favor this coverage, which you have obligingly shared and therefore commercially rewarded?
Then I read the article and got a somewhat different impression.
Pew’s definition of “middle class” runs from x2/3 to x2 of the national household median (59k) – this seems roughly in line with your bounds. Since you’re making a statement about relative income for the location, let’s actually look at that too:
Jessica Wang, 120k-200k (given as >150k)
Cupertino CA – median 153k
Daniel Lynch, 120k-200k
Stow MA – median 137k
Kristin DePue, 200k-400k
Wyomissing PA – median 79k
Caitlin Dunham, 200k-400k
Austin MN – median 54k
Victor Gomez, 75k-100k
Auburn GA – median 54k
Fletcher Gustafson, 120k-200k
Kansas City MO – median 50k
Iran Sanchez, 120k-200k
Laveen AZ – median 52k
Hard to get specifics with the income brackets chosen, but we have two cases where the profiled are plausibly making median, another making less than double, three making x3~4, and the last making >x4. Definitely some wealthy folks there, but it puts the lie to the notion that “all of those profiled in it make at least 2x the median”.
(Also, for an article about “America’s ‘struggling middle class'”, did you notice that the word “struggling” never appeared but the quote “our income puts us in the top 2 percent here” did? Tl;dr, the interviews are actually pretty interesting and don’t tell a uniform story of financial hardship, so much as illustrate different kinds of financial stressors.)
My new impression that there was an additional layer of editorializing added between whatever twitfeed the article first appeared in and the time it was linked on SSC, editorializing that didn’t much trouble itself about truth. Matt, do you know where that disinformation might have entered the stream?
My reflexive response to your reflexive response is to ask if you’re just asking a lot of questions to throw shade at the claim without producing an argument against it.
A less combative answer, however, would be “Yes, the New York Time Editorial Board”.
Nope. Asking questions is the first step to being an informed consumer, and it’s even more important if you want your critiques to match reality. Contrast that with the relationship with the news here, which is somewhere between reversed critical theory and full-on toxoplasma.
I prefer cutting layers of editorializing by following the link, but yep, that looks about right. NYT editors typically could use a good kicking (it’s not a coincidence I listed them, it wasn’t a trick question) though do keep in mind an ex-anything is certain to be bringing some baggage to the table.
But glancing at Matt’s response below, it doesn’t look like you’re on quite the same page regarding the narrowness of your critiques.
I was going to do that, but the original site was just such a horrible morass of pop-ups and ads that I felt the level of indirection was worth it. It included the relevant quote verbatim.
I’m going to the proximate cause of that particular article, Matt is going for a wider claim. The larger claim I personally can’t rationally substantiate. That is, I don’t know if there’s a top-down narrative mediated by a mailing list like Jornolist about “the student loan crisis” or how “middle-class America is struggling”, or if this is un-coordinated groupthink among similarly-situated journalists, or if they’re playing follow-the-leader.
Fair enough!
This is where I am. A larger claim could be built out of many narrow claims, but this approach is dramatically more complex in aggregate than the narrow ones individually and perhaps beyond the scope of an individual’s effort. Or it could be built on a statistical evaluation of the entire media (or even wider fields!), somehow making commensurate vastly different forms and approaches.
I’m thoroughly unimpressed by most attempts, on either approach. I’ve seen some work decent enough to form a tentative opinion on selected niches, but nothing I really trust to generalize.
Oh man, J-List was a fascinating case study to watch unfold. It’s not quite an example of cartel-like instability, but it definitely highlights the structural difficulty in organizing a cabal of people financially motivated to expose cabals. I’m not sure it really stands as a useful example of coordination though, compared to the openly-incestuous baseline of internet journalism.
(Interesting personal anecdote for perspective – I ran with the ants for a hot second before the whole controversy devolved into pure CW. Media failures (in the style of “market failure” inefficiency) are a recurring hobby.)
My chief complaint is this specific article. Which I believe is representative of a larger trend within the New York Times. Which I believe is representative of a larger trend within print journalism (which is why I bothered to also include a similarly guilty piece from the WSJ to help prove this point). Which I believe is treated as an authoritative source by the media in general. Which is itself the vanguard of the Cathedral.
As far as your statistical nitpicking goes, I find it very boring, and falls into the category of “deliberately missing the point.” Any profile of the “middle class” that only talks about people who are barely in it at the very top end of the range, some people who are clearly and obvious well above it, and literally nobody who is making at or below the median is useless, probably deliberately so. The fact that one or two of these people are actually “only” making 1.5x the median and not 2x the median, and that technically speaking, this does fit some definitions of “middle class”, does not excuse this sort of nonsense.
You aren’t reading print journalism. You aren’t even reading the NYT. You’re reading specific articles curated and editorialized for you by social media. What is representative of that set will (wildly) diverge from what is representative of the broader media ecosystem depending on how various algorithms build your filter bubble. “Outrageous enough to spread” is the sweet spot, in that sort of game.
If you are bored by the need for accuracy within a factor of two, maybe statistical analysis isn’t for you. I usually refrain from calling people out here for something less than an order of magnitude, but yours was a metric of your own choosing, spun for CW points, and contradicted by the first example in the linked article. “Nitpicking”, right.
Taking ‘area’ to mean ‘specific city’ isn’t fair, you functionally would make it so that anyone can make themselves at the median by moving into a high enough earning area.
I like all the euphemisms for supporting unemployed people, ‘He lives with his wife, a stay at home mom, and their teenage daughter’.
I agree with you 100% about the inanity of calling people that have a household income of $200,000 middle class, but this isn’t a journalist problem. It’s an extremely widespread American disease (maybe other countries too, I don’t know.) People react better to being called a racist than being told they are rich. SSC is no exception, I’ve had the arguments here.
Maybe we should hold professional journalists reporting on other people to a slightly higher standard than we hold random individuals describing themselves?
In a lot of ways, I feel like SSC has ruined nearly all mainstream journalism for me, in the sense that when Scott approaches an issue, he approaches it fairly and objectively and is incredibly careful in evaluating all of the evidence and arguments from all sides.
I don’t expect every NYT opinion piece to be just like Scott. But I do expect them to at least make an attempt to do something like clarifying what they mean by “middle class,” which, if Scott was writing this piece, likely would have been done in the first paragraph in incredibly specific terms.
@Matt M,
I’m reminded of a piece I read from Vox, that made a big deal about how “un-democratic” an anti-abortion law passed in Alabama was because “the majority of Americans are against such laws”, and my immediate thought was “But what do the majority of Alabamans want?”.
I mean I’m pretty sure that some policies that California has decided for themselves wouldn’t be favored by the majority of the U.S.A. and I’m real sure that the majority of humanity had a vote on American policy they wouldn’t favor some of it, I really thought that Vox‘s use of “undemocratic” while from a certain point of view sorta is true, but it really was a stretch, and no where did I see what Alabamans thought.
IIRC The New York Times and The Washington Post did similar pieces.
I’m well aware of the arguments against “States Rights” and “local self-rule” (recently re-articulated by one of my Senators who’s also a Presidential candidate) and that’s “Jim Crow”, but in that case a significant portion of the population was disenfranchised and kept from voting, and I just haven’t seen much evidence that as many Alabamans aren’t allowed to vote now as then, so I suspect that anti-abortion law really is what they want, so I wouldn’t call it “un-democratic”!
I’ve read enough Wall Street Journal opinion pieces to know that it isn’t just “The Left’s” media that does this stuff, but jeez Vox, if you make the dodge that obvious it just doesn’t persuade.
While on the subject of Vox journalism. There was an article yesterday on the current litigation attempting to eliminate Obamacare. It included the claim that:
(O’Connor is the judge whose decision against Obamacare is being appealed)
The article quotes several legal scholars who think O’Connor is obviously wrong, none who support his decision. It does, however, mention that:
That hints at the fact that the lawsuit against the mandate was viewed by most law professors, and represented in the media, as an obviously hopeless argument that had no chance of prevailing. The exceptions were mainly a group of law professors associated with the Volokh Conspiracy blog, in particular Randy Barnett. The suit eventually lost, but it lost in a 5 to 4 decision and the majority justified the mandate on grounds (that it was a tax, not a penalty) that were not the grounds on which the experts had claimed it was constitutional.
That looks like pretty strong evidence that either the media or legal academia or both present a view of such controversies that is heavily biased relative to the actual position of the courts. One might think that Vox would have tried to get the view of some of the legal experts whose “obviously wrong” argument persuaded one short of a majority of the Supreme Court.
It wouldn’t have been hard, since Randy Barnett had a series of posts on the Volokh Conspiracy shortly before the Vox article was published. His conclusion was that, of the three points on which O’Connor’s decision depended, O’Connor was pretty clearly right on two. He was unwilling to offer a conclusion on the third, since it was outside his area of expertise, but he found O’Connor’s decision persuasive.
Popehat has pointed out that the journalists have a habit of quoting a bunch of law professors who turn out to be completely wrong. This is either a) because the journalists don’t know what they are doing, and just finding people who are eager to talk, or b) because the journalists know exactly what they are doing: trying to create a new reality on the ground. By silently replacing “here is what the law is” with “here is what the law should be” you try to create shock when the completely-expected thing happens.
At least with the Dershowitz thing Popehat’s beef seemed to be less with the journalists and more with Dershowitz for deliberately conflating how he wants the law to be interpreted vs how the law is being interpreted. And I’d say following that that some of the blame falls on these professors for deliberately muddying the water like that.
@ Plumber:
I’m actually inclined to give Vox a bit of a pass on that one. State-level polling is comparatively expensive and thus rarer outside of key states, and I haven’t seen much of it on the law in question. They did link responses among Republicans and pro-lifers as majority opposed to major provisions of the law, which is something. (But not great.)
Dig into older Alabama-specific data though, and you can support two conclusions: a) the law ought to be somewhere between plurality support and overwhelming opposition and b) people’s stances on abortion are wildly dependent on phrasing and context.
@ David, Edward, Nick:
The original Popehat comment was here, with the relevant section excerpted as part of this. You will find much criticism of the media in the former, but Nick’s characterization seems much more apt than Edward’s.
@DavidFriedman:
I am not claiming that legal analysis is so complicated that no one can understand it, but for some reason legal analysis in media is typically so awful that it barely qualifies as better than random number generation. This could be because of the postulated bias (certainly some is) but I don’t think it is limited to Vox. I suspect it is because the legal field is particularly wide, rather than particularly deep – “lawyer” has as many or more sub-specialties as “doctor” but the media tends to treat random lawyers as knowledgeable on random subjects.
Yeah, I think I had the motivations wrong in my second explanation.
The journalists may just be passing along what the professors say, not knowing the professor is pushing the wrong way on the is-ought boundary.
Well, the traditional English meaning of middle class was essentially “rich, but not a member of the aristocracy.” America seems to want as many as possible to qualify, and so here it seems to mean anybody who isn’t either homeless or a billionaire. And, indeed, the $200,000 a year people are not billionaires, but the current American meaning doesn’t seem to make for a very useful category.
This video is about an elderly woman living an old-fashioned lifestyle, and it is very familiar in parts to me from my childhood – enough neighbours and family members lived in cottages like this when I was a child – the idea of the spring well down the field as the source of drinking water – sure, we lived it! In my family’s case, it was a pump in a farmer’s field 🙂
My late mother well knew how to cook on the crook over the fire like this lady.
If the opportunity cost of switching to a lifestyle like that (but, say, keeping one’s job and car) was zero, how many people do you think would do it?
I honestly don’t know. I think you need to have some experience of what it’s actually like – it’s all very well to have a romantic idea of an idyllic candle-lit cottage, but howling winds and lashing rain on a dark, cold November night will soon put a stop to that.
Most people who grew up like that wouldn’t go back to it after having a taste of modernity (I tell you, the greatest invention of all time is RUNNING WATER. I’ve done my little bit of time with ‘carrying buckets from the well’ and no thanks about going back to it. HOT running water? Absolute luxury!). Some might. And some people who didn’t grow up like that might well take to it, but it’s never going to be more than a handful at a time.
The very interesting question is: if we’re dead on serious about climate change and the world will end in 12 years (give or take), how many would give up modern life to live that way? Even of the fervent climate change pushers? Could they really live without electricity and running water and all the rest of it, to save the planet? (Never mind that being dependent on coal, firewood and turf for cooking and heating is its own problem).
@Deiseach,
I remember some years ago (when I paid more attention to environmental-ish reports than I do now) a profile of two families, one lived in a big suburban home in a hot climate, run air conditioning, and had two SUV’s, the other, well basically hippies, hang dried laundry, bicycles instead of automobiles, vegan, et cetera – it’s been too long for me to remember the all the details but the gist was that one family really struggled trying to be “environmentally conscious”, but one detail meant that their lifestyle actually produced more greenhouse gas emissions – three times a year they flew out on a jet (no not their private one, just regular commercial aircraft passengers) to visit the grandparents, while the other gas guzxling, air conditioner using family didn’t fly most years.
It suggests a question: of the things you could tolerably give up to reduce your carbon emissions or whatever (or even just to live a more grounded, mentally healthy, etc. lifestyle), what would you actually give up?
@Well…,
“Tolerally give up”?
How about eagerly!
There’s a small grocery store within walking distance to our house that my wife doesn’t buy from because she wants “bargains” and “selection” so I have to drive us to many other grocery stores every damn week.
Paying more for our groceries and having a bit less of a selection to be “environmentally conscious” by doing less driving seems a fine idea, especially if it means I don’t have to drive as much, but I’m too cowardly/prudent to advocate this to the light of my world/bane of my existence.
Depending on “tolerable” I think eating less meat is the biggest step. I say this as a meat-eater.
The two primary sources of my carbon footprint are probably eating meat and running the AC so it would have to be one of those. I’m not interested in giving up either, if I were forced to choose it would be meat.
I think I’d reduce my AC use. It’s already low, but I could probably eliminate it if I had to. And I’d do it sooner than eliminating meat.
I spent my childhood in a world with running water and indoor toilets…but I had relatives (of my grandfather’s generation) who were born in a world of well-outside-in-the-field and no-running-water.
My father spent a few years in that world when he was born. He claimed to remember when the well-pump in the field was plumbed into the house…but I never got specifics of when that happened. I do remember when Grandfather built a new structure at the back of the old farm property…and didn’t install a well or internal plumbing for several years.
They had experience cooking over wood; though that was typically an enclosed oven with a separate fire-box. Grandfather and grandmother cooked family meals on that old stove for many years.
It’s a different world, one that I heard stories about and visited occasionally.
I liked hearing stories about the good old days, but I soon realized that keeping a house warm with only a wood stove is very labor-intensive. Bathing is an occasional thing if the water has to be brought from the well in buckets, and then heated on a stove. Having only one car in the family can make it hard for the wage-earner to go work at the mill-or-mine while the pregnant wife doesn’t quite know when she’ll go into labor…and the nearest hospital is at least a half-hour drive away.
Entertainment options were fewer, so people would stock up on magazines and books, play card games in the evening, listen to shows on the radio, and have lots of conversations. And people would remember favors (or slights) from years before, tell stories about community events, and repeat every family story that had ever been told before…
That slower-paced life seems idyllic in telling, but people who lived it remember the hard parts.
The conversations are the part we’re missing the most; I don’t think netflix and xbox do quite as much to build family and community ties.
But you’re right about glossing over the hard parts. Driving through picturesque rural areas always makes me wish I could plop a house down there; walking through the wilderness reminds that weeds itch and bugs bite a lot more than you notice, and after awhile the view is less novel as well.
I get to live a version of that life for two weeks every year—more primitive than what is being described in some ways, less in others—at Pennsic, an SCA camping event with about ten thousand fellow recreationists. We cook over a camp fire, carry water from a nearby tap. There are showers, usually nowadays (but not always) with warm water, a short walk from our encampment, portapotties nearby and flush toilets in the same structure as the showers. A lot of walking to get anywhere.
The contrast the first few nights after we leave, staying in motels or with friends or relatives on our way home, is striking. It helps me appreciate just how rich our society is.
A reporter for WIRED took his 5-year-old son to an enormous construction industry trade fair and the article is delightful: https://www.wired.com/story/one-boys-dream-vacation-to-see-giant-construction-equipment/
I was once obsessed with construction machinery, and my parents did something similar, although it was the St. Louis construction expo, and not something like Bauma. I don’t remember it, but they said I had a great time. The booth babes (this was the mid-90s) apparently were fawning all over me, and they signed me up for all of the promotional literature, which resulted in several amusing phone calls from equipment salesmen. “Hello, this is so-and-so from Caterpillar. Can we speak to bean?” “You can, but he’s four, so he’s not likely to buy anything.”
When I was really little, like three or four, I used to call LEGO from the phone number in the magazines to try to order more sets. Alas, they always asked me to put a parent on the phone.
As a teenager, one of my friends signed up with a bunch of hardware/building/electrical suppliers under a fictitious “Bob’s Hardware” located at his home address. He then received a pretty big volume not just of catalogs, but occasionally sample products and stuff as well. It was fairly entertaining for us.
It never bothered you that he was cheating them?
At that age? Nah. What we were getting from that was chump change compared to all of the internet piracy we were engaged in…
Thanks. That’s one of those articles that just makes me feel happy. I think he gets the feeling of the joy of a day out with your child doing something they like dead on.
Machines look pretty cool as well…
Man, what a great idea. He’s grown out of it now, but when my son was 2-4 he was obsessed with trucks and construction equipment. His first word besides “mommy,” “daddy,” and “no” was “truck.” We’d be riding in the car and he’d point at every truck that passed and say “truck. Truck. Truck.” And he was addicted to Mighty Machines on Netflix. Fun times.
We visited my parents and my son’s first ‘word’ was Granddad. His 2nd – 1,000th word was ‘truck’ on the 6 hour drive home. I don’t think he said Granddad again for another year. Mommy and Daddy, or even no didn’t come for months later.
At 6 he still loves trains, the railroad museum, and his favorite show right now is mega mechanics (which I had assumed was an incorrect pronunciation of mega machines for a while, but he actually loves the mechanics).
For anyone who didn’t grow out of this before they hit adulthood, Las Vegas has you covered. Covered in dirt and mud by the end of the day, but that’s probably OK.
When i was a kid my dad this something like this for me, except instead of a construction industry trade fair, it was an actual honest to god construction site. They were just starting to break ground so there was all the usual large earth moving equipment, and the construction workers let me sit on the cabs of their big machines while i giggled with delight and pretended to move them. Unfortunately i was too young for me to remember it now, but it definitely happened liked that because there’s pictures.
The one i do remember was walking through a town one evening during a gentle snowfall, i think it was Aspen Colorado, and the firefighters opened their garage door as we were approaching. So my sister and me got all excited and went over to say hi to the firemen, and they let us wear firemen helmets and play around in their firetruck. One of the most fondly remembered evenings of my life.
I’m not surprised. Bauma was great.
My employer was handing out free tickets, so I went.
It was absolutely massive. Wikipedia says the Centre has 0.18 km^2 indoor space and 0.45 outdoor.
The 18 halls were arranged by topic within the construction industry.
There was an area for mining, one for controls, one for engines, one for scaffolding etc.
Britain, the US, China, Canada and some other countries also had rows of smaller booths.
Beyond the sheer size, what surprised me was the scope. While it was dominated by big mechanical and civil stuff, there was a lot of electronics in the form of controls, as well as a load of GIS and surveying.
E.g. the French company who makes little flying wing UAVs full of cameras and lasers, so you can survey a large area quickly.
My son also went this year, he’s 4. Of course, since I’m not a writer for Wired, we didn’t get any kid reporter specials and I didn’t make money from writing a what-I-did-on-my-holidays piece. So excuse me for being a bit grumpy at this twit rubbing his priviledges in my face.
I have some questions/thoughts on effective altruism and art funding.
This was mainly brought on by a comment two open threads ago by Murphy linking this article. Murphys characterisation of the EA position on arts was “…that giving 50K to pay for an extra flute player is effectively deciding that it’s better there be one extra member of the orchestra than for an extra 40 poor children to remain alive” and from the little I know about EA, this seems about right.
But given this, how can the EA community justify giving money (A LOT of money) to organisations such as MIRI, which seem to be about as far from “effective”, under any reasonable definition of effective, as possible? Why is funding Eliezer Yudkowsky’s philosophical ruminations on something that is no closer to being real today than it was 20 years ago more effective than funding the creation of art?
Expected Utility is a basic measure that’s calculated as the product of expected value and the probability you’re going to get it. Well, it’s more like a sum of products of possible outcomes, each with its probability.
For a flute player, it looks a lot like: 80% chance he’ll be a good flute player, 19% chance he’ll be a bad flute player, 1% chance he’ll be a very good flute player. Overall, people will listen to flute – that’s pretty much what you expect to get.
From MIRI you also have 80% chance of interesting philosophical ruminations and that’s it, but you also have a few smaller chances of much higher impact. In particular, you have a chance that people that actually develop AI will read whatever philosophical ruminations MIRI produces (that’s actually a pretty high likelihood, since there aren’t really that many specialists). And there’s a smaller but real chance that they’ll be positively influenced, and that will move AI development in the future in a positive direction. In this case you have a small probability times a very very high effect, for a pretty damn high expected utility. Many orders of magnitude higher than a flute player.
We’re not talking about Pascal’s wager, btw. AI alignement is one of those once-in-the-history moments where the value is pascal-wager-sized, but the probabilities are measured in percent points, or fractions or percent, if not higher.
I think the chance that Miri is useful is higher than you’re making it sound. A lot of their research isn’t trying to be directly applicable but is simply aiming to give one a basic understanding of very hard problems, so that one is less confused and can start to think about them in a useful way. AI alignment is now becoming a more diverse field with different organizations pursuing different strategies, and the kind of work Miri does will likely positively influence the work other researchers do.
A good example for this are their papers on logical induction. Classical math doesn’t provide any tools to reason about logical uncertainty, because the only tool to reason under uncertainty it has is probability theory which assumes perfect deductive ability. So Scott Garrabrant et al came up with an algorithm that takes as input logical statements (say mathematical theorems) and outputs ‘probabilities’ about the yet unanswered theorems which fulfill all kinds of neat consistency properties. The runtime of their algorithm is hilariously awful, and in its current form, it’s, without doubt, completely unusable. But the goal isn’t to produce an algorithm that anyone actually implements, it’s to make one less confused about what it means to argue about logical uncertainty in the first place. If this is something needed in order to align an AI, then I’d put a fairly high percentage on their current work being helpful, regardless of which team ends up developing the solutions that work.
Anyway, I agree that your argument would go through even if it was in the single digits.
All well and good, but again in the context of EA, why is giving one basic understanding of very hard problems considered on par, effectivity wise, with curing malaria and saving African children or whatever?
I’m pretty sure the basic logic behind MIRI’s premise is something like “We aim to prevent the complete annihilation of the human race by hostile/rogue AI.”
The “expected utility” of such an endeavor is quite large, even if you think the probability of it succeeding (or even being necessary in the first place) is incredibly low.
@Matt M
I am sure that if I dive deep into the internet, I will find hundreds of nuts concerned about something or other completely annihilating the human race (some that come to mind: Aliens, mutants, Kaiju, the lizard people, Jews etc.). Should we shower them with funding too? If not, why do you think death by AI is more reasonable than death by aliens?
Orpheus,
You asked why people would give to this cause. Your question has been answered, both by myself and many others.
You continue to object “But they might be incorrect about the various probabilities!” or “But that applies to other groups as well!” Which is certainly true.
But I think it’s dishonest of you to phrase this as “I just want to understand why people do this” when you seem to have a much greater agenda of “I want to tell you that AI isn’t actually a uniquely large risk” in mind.
@Orpheus
I was under the impression we’re considering EA’s ranking as, well, competent. If you question it, *shrug* sure, but that’s very much a different topic, and one we haven’t even touched yet – nobody here, you included, has mentioned anything even remotely close to “How did EA reach this conclusion and is it correct”.
Honestly, I’m not the one for that conversation. I’m not very familiar with EA and definitely not with the (presumably competent and probably complex) way they reach their conclusions.
@Matt M
No. I asked why EA would give to this cause.
Because a substantial fraction of EAs think that extinction through AI is likely enough to be a priority, thus making AI alignment research highly effective. I’m an example; I think the probability that we go extinct by AI is somewhere between 1/3 and 2/3.
Because it follows from a few not unreasonable assumptions. All of them have to hold, so the combined probability is not, I think, high.
Death by aliens also follows from a few not unreasonable assumptions, but it’s less clear what one could do about it.
You and Radu make a decent case for MIRI being Plausibly Altruism – but what’s the evidence that it’s Effective?
If you bought Theranos’ marketing pitch, they would have looked like a good cause to throw money at too.
Exactly, thank you.
Theranos WAS a good cause to throw money to, early stage. The problem with probabilities is that occasionally you fail, without this meaning you’ve ever been wrong. Even betting only on 90% bets means you’ll fail one in 10.
MIRI may also be a failure. I think I’ve made it pretty clear in a couple of places, but anyways: 1% probability of it being worth it means it has 99% probability of it being a wasted effort. You do the math, accept the expected utility or not, give your money and sleep the sleep of the just. It’s irrelevant if it succeeds or not – well, it may help you calibrate your expectations for next time, but making under 10% bets means most WILL fail, and if the math checks out there’s nothing wrong with it.
@David and sty_silver
Again, I am not saying, nor have I ever said that it is unreasonable to believe that extinction through AI is possible, or even probable. What I am saying is that the EA community is promoting it as an”effective cause” to give to, and I would like to know whether or not there is a better reason for it than “Well… a bunch of us think so”.
Fund an Anti Alien Invasion Research Institute? Build a gundam?
I’m interested.
I mean, it sure beats sitting around doing math.
You only need three things to make intervention highly effective.
1. Extinction from AI has significant probability
2. Extinction from AI would be an extremely bad thing
3. Intervention has chances to decrease the probability of it occuring.
You just conceded 1. I assume you concede 2. So is 3. your problem?
If you’re going to argue that intervention is highly effective, don’t you need to have a significant chance to decrease the probability of it occuring?
Or else this is a Pascal’s Mugging argument where the payoff is negative infinity-ish so that even an miniscule reduction in probability is “highly effective”, in which case you’ve seriously understated the extremity of your position on point #2.
I don’t think there is a qualitative difference between Mugging arguments and normal arguments. The payoff is extremely high. That’s why I put ‘extremely’ in #2. Obviously the probability for #3 can’t be arbitrarily low, but it doesn’t need to be particularly high. 0.1% would be plenty.
@sty_silver
Were did I concede that extinction from AI has significant probability? If you, as a private person, believe that it does, that is your business and its totally fine and there is absolutely no reason for you to justify it. But when an organisation like EA, that bills itself as best bang-for-buck for your charity money, promotes it on par with causes like Malaria, for which we have loads and loads of objective and accurate data, I would hope that it is based on more than a gut feeling.
That’s ultimately the reason offered for most conclusions on complicated issues, with some explanation of why we think so available to those who ask. There are few such questions where one could offer a clean mathematical argument to show the probability—the only one I can think of is the risk of damage from an asteroid strike.
Do you think anyone on either side of the climate controversy could do it? Arguments over the minimum wage? The effect of gun control?
@David
I don’t see these causes advanced as “effective”.
No offence, but I just can’t take this sort of argument seriously. You can justify literally anything you want using it, e.g: I propose we give every AI researcher a Lion Bar, since there exists a non zero probability that the extra calories will give them the energy they need to finally invent AGI. Sure, the cost will be enormous and the probability of success (very…) slim, but think of the potential payoff!
Well, the marginal benefits of lion bars drop pretty fast after a couple of pieces which is why we usually prefer money. But in principle, yes, that’s how it works. To be honest, I’m not very sure what you dislike about it.
EA has put a number of causes through its sieves and decided that giving to orchestras is much less effective than giving to malaria vaccines which is possibly much less effective than giving to MIRI. I don’t pretend to be as good as them at ranking causes. But like I said, it’s not Pascal’s Wager. In this forum we might be a bit more enthusiastic about AI/MIRI so I won’t support double digit percentage points that it’ll turn out to be very useful (which would be my estimate as well, btw). But even moving the dot three digits to the right, donating a lion bar’s worth is extremely profitable. But ideally a bit more.
That still sounds like Pascal’s wager… what am I missing? The fact that you inflate the probability by a couple orders of magnitude (maybe justifiably, maybe not) doesn’t change the fact that you’re only getting a big number by multiplying basically infinity by a very small number.
That you have a bunch of competent people actually doing the math 🙂 Also, neither number has that many zeroes in it – AI will happen, that’s pretty much a certainty. Some forms of AI can be much better or worse than others – that’s a very reasonably assumption. Research like MIRI can help with that. None of this is even in the same ballpark as “eternal damnation” or “is heaven real” – which fails basic highschool arithmetic by multiplying infinities.
The problem is that I don’t believe their math is sound. Partially because they’re not the unbiased paragons of pure reason that they claim to be and have their own obvious biases and incentives, mostly just because there are far too many variables involved for anyone to make anything remotely resembling an accurate calculation.
@LadyJane
Can you quote some of them claiming this? I mostly just know Yudkowsky’s work, and he’s made it pretty clear he wouldn’t endorse this characterization- see Virtue Eight here, which talks about “the biases that all humans share” and claims that “no one in this world achieves perfection”.
If people working for MIRI are claiming to be ‘unbiased paragons of pure reason’, that’s a good reason to trust them less. If no one working at MIRI claimed this, that seems like a reason to trust you less.
(Unless ‘they’ doesn’t refer to MIRI, here? That would be confusing, but seems within the realm of probability. If so, I’d still like the clarification.)
@Jack Lecter
We’re talking about Effective Altruism. It kinda makes sense to move the discussion towards “is their math correct”, but I really don’t think it’s going to be productive without, well, actually having at least some of their math on the table.
@Jack Lecter: I was using hyperbole to make a point. I’m aware that these people don’t literally go around saying “We are completely and perfectly rational, our logic is 100% impeccable” like comic book supervillains. Yes, they’re aware that they have biases too. But I still get the sense that they think they’re less biased than they actually are.
People around here are very quick to shoot down the argument that the Technological Singularity is a secular replacement for the Christian God/Heaven, but I think there’s a good deal of truth to that. Scott once claimed that it’s like “arguing that the Wright Brothers couldn’t fly because Daedalus could,” and to his credit, that’s a very good and very clever analogy. But I think it still misses the point. The people making that argument aren’t using it as an object-level claim about the technological viability of Superhuman AI, they’re using it as a meta-level claim about the (possibly subconscious) motivations of Singularitarians.
And in that regard, I think they’re largely correct. I feel like a lot of Singularitarians believe these things are possible because they want them to be possible. They want to live in a world where the Technological Singularity can happen, and their math and their theories are designed in advance to prove that that’s the world they live in, rather than an earnest assessment of the world as it actually is.
Taking all that into account, the whole concept of X-Risk does come across as quite similar to Pascal’s Wager!
@LadyJane
Yes, you’re correct. It’s very possible that Singularitarians use motivated cognition and get to much higher numbers for existential risks, and yes, this would get us into Pascal’s Wager territory.
But that’s irrelevant, because even if they’re wrong, 99% of the problems still stays unchanged. AI is still coming, it will still be a very powerful technology, and alignment is still going to be very very relevant. It may not be a God (like Singularitarians think/hope), but capability-wise, it’s a good chance it will be pretty powerful. Will it affect us like Uber does? Like Soviet Russia did? By making lots of us unemployed and depressed? In some completely new way that we can’t even begin to guess? We don’t really know, but we are talking at least this level of change – that’s not Singularitarian talk, that’s common sense reached by just extrapolating recent technical advance.
We’re not (necessarily) talking existential risk here. We’re just trying to fix the worst side effects of the next big tech before they happen. Because to expect it to have no side effects… that would really be a first.
@Radu Floricica: Sure. Those are all valid points. But to the best of my knowledge, the people working to address realistic near-future concerns about AI causing shipping mistakes and traffic jams and vehicular crashes and infrastructural shortages are not the same people “working” to address concerns about superhuman AGI taking over the world and turning everyone into computonium. And if someone defending the second group suddenly brings up the fact that we’re still definitely going to need the first group, I’m going to call motte-and-bailey on them.
@LadyJane
I’m not even at the level of interested amateur when it comes to AI research, but just by consuming fiction and a bit of LW I get to concepts that are obviously useful in both scenarios – like Coherent Extrapolated Volition or Deontological safety switches. Well, take the last example and replace it with a process optimization scenario for an industrial complex.
We’re not yet at the level where this is going to be worrying – traffic mistakes are not what AI problems are really about. AIs in general are not able to explain their choices – it’s a pretty fundamental characteristic of neural networks. They get a set of critera to optimize, and deliver a result. Also, we have a LOT of implicit knowledge of how a human society should be, that we’re unlikely to ever be able to spell out as a list of criteria. So at some point we’ll ask an AI to improve something, and it’ll give us a perfectly good solution that involves killing babies as a side-effect. Or any other host of long term disadvantages – that would otherwise be within its capability to avoid, if it knew we’d want to.
Car smash pedestrians – bad. Contraceptives in the water supply – good?
The point of Pascal’s wager is that the payoff is so high that pretty much any non-zero probability is sufficient–your “basically infinity.”
In the case of a rogue A.I. the probability, at least in the view of some of us, is significant, probably more than one percent.
Eleven years ago I published a book, Future Imperfect, on possible future technological revolutions, and gave a talk on it at Google. I started by commenting that I thought global warming was a pretty wimpy catastrophe—I had three different ways of wiping out the human race faster than that. One of them was A.I.
When I wrote that book I had probably never heard of MIRI, and I doubt any of my thoughts on the subject had been influenced by Yudkowski et. al.
Do has there been a utilitarian Einstein that creates the theory of utilitarian relativity where the laws of
physicsutils start to break down as you approach infinity?I recommend skimming the second half of the paper I linked above. You’ll see that a) EY is not even a co-author on this and b) this is math not philosophy. I think you at least need to call it something like ‘weird obscure math’ rather than ‘philosophical ruminations’.
I’m not sure what to make of the claim that AGI is no closer to being real than it was 20 years ago. In just the last 10 years, AI beat the best human go players which people said would take way longer, then the same AI proved how general it was by also beating the best human chess players without any special code for chess, then different AI started beating human pros at dota 2 and starcraft II, which is a step from round-based games with perfect information to real-time games with imperfect information and far larger game trees. Now AI can write text with flawless grammar about any subject.
How are we no closer to AGI now than we were 10 years ago, let alone 20?
This post is also relevant.
Fine, my point remains the same.
Building an AI that can play go/dota/starcraft/whatever is bringing us closer to building an AGI in the same way that increasing your maximum jump height is bringing you closer to being able to fly. While ostensibly similar, there is a very wide gap between the two.
Gravity puts a limit on jump height. I can’t think of an analogous ceiling for AI research. Imagine if 100 years ago, we couldn’t jump, and today the high-jump record is broken all the time. I don’t mean to argue for AI research, I just think your analogy is flawed.
I’m not at all convinced AI research is effective altruism. I’m not at all convinced the other way either. Like the man said, it’s outside of my comparative advantage to predict.
You misunderstood the analogy. Essentially, all game playing AI need to do is search the game tree for an optimal move using some clever optimization techniques and heuristics. You can improve the heuristics and the optimization, or simply give the searching algorithm more computational power or time to search, and this will improve your game playing AI, just like if you train you will be able to jump higher. But building a AGI is a *completely*different problem, which will not be solved by incremental improvements in game players, just like you will not be able to fly by improving you jump height (this isn’t to imply that AGI is impossible; my analogy is not perfect).
I think your analogy works pretty well, because it turns out we can fly…just not by learning to jump higher.
@Orpheus
Actually, no 🙂 The kind of algorithms that beat the top GO players a few years ago don’t work like that anymore – they’re generic game playing algorithms. They aren’t built for a specific game – they learn the rules just like us, then beat the crap out of us.
That’s the point people panicked a bit and started making lists of jobs that are going to be obsolete in 5-10 years (notice how it’s no longer “20”). Top of the list was call centers – you may want to follow that.
What @Radu said. DeepMind, which is the state of the art here, is not using search trees, it’s using generic learning algorithms that work, with very little tweaking, across a wide variety of domains.
I think they’re a lot further away from any generic AI than some would claim, but they’re a lot closer than you think.
@Enkidum
Actually, Deepmind’s AlphaZero does make heavy use of search trees, “MCTS” is a tree searching algorithm heavily used that actually acts as the key functional operator that allows the system to improve its neural net over time.
That said, your broader point very much stands. It’s still a fairly generic algorithm that for any normal two-player competitive board game mostly just needs the game rules and a bunch of compute power. And in particular, does NOT need any human oversight to carefully tune any heuristics, or carefully add in special cases or program in any expert knowledge (although those things would still help even further).And the tree search is a fairly simple algorithm too, also just needing the game rules and not much else.
@Orpheus – I’m with Enkidum, it’s far from generic AI, but it is one of the first steps demonstrating AI that learns something extremely nontrivial on its own with no expert human oversight. Yes, in a highly controlled sandbox environment – a board game – but still one that is nontrivial: It completely frustrated tens of thousands of human programmer-hours prior to that point for trying to make a AI even close to competitive with top humans. And without even being heavily tuned for that game, also handling other 2-player board games similarly well!
A few years ago, would you literally honestly have predicted even this small advance to happen so soon? (If you think game playing AI is still only about humans incrementally improving clever heuristics for a particular game, it sounds like you might not have even realized yet that this has happened?).
If this advance does surprise you or would have surprised you, as it surprised most everyone about how soon it came, you should at least consider that perhaps for general AI, even if still vastly farther off, could be less far off by a reasonable factor compared to whatever you thought before.
@lightvector
As I stated below, I believe that the kind of insight needed for AGI is fundamentally different than the kind of insight needed to build a better game player AI. To me, asking “Does creating a better game playing AI bring us closer to creating an AGI” is exactly the same as asking “Does creating a better game playing AI bring us closer to proving the Riemann conjecture”.
@Orpheus
With all the bad rep Rationality is getting here lately, I’m glad I read the Sequences a couple of times. If a non-trivial, surprising piece of information (like current AI being able to play any board games without being programmed for it) fails to change your position at all, there’s something wrong with your position. In Sequence terms, it means you’re not approximating a Bayesian Engine close enough – a rational, bayesian entity would not completely fail to update on surprising information.
@lightvector
Thanks for the correction. I clearly understood this a lot less than I believed.
@Radu Floricica
If someone were to cure AIDS tomorrow, would you say we were closer to curing Alzheimer’s ?
@Orpheus
If I am convinced that AIDS is impossible to cure for reasons related to why Alzheimer can’t be cured, and somebody told me that actually… AIDS is kinda cured already, also Ebola, and they’re working on all generic infectious diseases… at the very least I’d stop and seriously reconsider my premises.
You came into this conversation believing that current software needs to be programmed in order to beat us at games. You found out that’s not true – actually, computers can just learn by themselves to do it. The correct reaction is to stop, reconsider, and change your position even a tiny bit. As far as I can tell you didn’t. This is a known way to make mistakes – there are names for it and everything.
First consequence of noticing this is that it’s not particularly productive to keep discussing the subject itself – it that piece of information failed to move you at all, it’s unlikely other, bigger pieces of information would move you either. So we need to change step, and first address the context – like I’m doing here. Then there are a couple of predefined dance moves:
– what would convince you that generic AI is possible, in theory? (you’ve already got this question a couple of times in this thread, I think)
– what is your position here? what do you hope to obtain from this exchange?
If we can back up a step, I have a few (honest) questions about DeepMind and how the general learning process for new games goes. Let’s stick with the StarCraft example.
1) How do we teach it the “rules”? As in, what does the process of us giving it the rules look like, and what form does that data take? How specific does it have to be?
2) Once it has the rules, what does the learning process look like. Is it simulating games over and over learning what does and doesn’t work? How many simulations/game-hours does it take before it can turn to the puny humans and say “git gud newb”.
3) Does it do worse when parts of the game are wholly random/unpredictable (roll of the dice, random drops, what have you) than in a game where the environment is mostly static and everything is based on your decisions and the decisions of the opponent?
I haven’t read the full details of the Starcraft algorithm, but I’ve read some of DeepMind’s other papers and seen a couple of their presentations, so here goes (someone else please correct my likely errors). This is mostly based off my understanding of how their AI learned to play a suite of 80’s Atari games, I don’t think the principles have changed that much since.
The AI has access to the pixels currently on the screen*, to the possible actions at any given moment (in the case of Atari games, the possible states of the joystick and buttons), and to some measure of “score/outcome/whatever” which it tries to maximize. It is not in any way taught the rules – that is literally the only information it is given. (This is, if you’re interested, exactly analogous to the classic reinforcement learning paradigm, in which you have states of the environment (the pixels), possible actions, and outcomes, and indeed their AIs are all a variety of reinforcement learners.)
*I believe for the Starcraft one, it actually had access to the entire map, which is an advantage it had over humans.
It simulates a game between two versions of itself with different randomly-chosen parameters (that determine what actions will be taken in response to a given state). If I remember correctly, the parameters of future versions are adjusted slightly in the direction of the winners. Or something like that (it’s more complicated). Do this many, many times and you end up with an unstoppable force. How many? I believe it’s on the order of millions, but I could be a couple of orders of magnitude off.
Stochasticity of Stimulus-Action-Outcome cycles slows down learning of any kind. But I think you’re asking about in a given game, not in the learning process itself. In which case I think the answer is still yes (but am much less certain than about the effect on learning itself, which is definitionally true.)
@Radu Floricica
Come on, this isn’t what I asked and you know it. My point is that just because both AIDS and Alzheimer’s are “diseases”, knowing that one one was cured does not mean that we are any closer to curing the other.
It would be the correct reaction if I thought that the problem of creating a AGI was somehow contingent on the problem of building good game players. As I don’t, it is not.
We didn’t discuss whether or not I think that AGI is possible in theory (for the record, I already do). We discussed whether or not we are closer to AGI now than we were 20 years ago. People claimed in this sub-thread that, essentially, the varius gameplaying AI and gpt2 were partial results on the way to AGI, which I disagree with. If your next question is “what would be a partial result on the way to AGI?” the answer is, as I stated below, “I don’t know”.
err… aren’t we just having a nice conversation?
@Orpheus
Sure we’re having a conversation, but still. For example a standing purpose in most conversation is to change my mind. It’s not the only one, of course, but I’m pretty happy when somebody manages to do it, because it means I’m improving.
On the other hand if, like you just said, there is nothing you can think of that would convince you that general AI is likely, than it means this part of the conversation is, well, a bit floating – because I was trying to change your mind and and assuming that it would be possible and welcome.
No. That analogy works as we go from chess to go (larger tree, but same basic class of game). It doesn’t work as we go from go to starcraft II, because the latter is real-time and has imperfect information. These are both aspects of generality. Real-world applications are real-time and have imperfect information.
And then there’s GPT-2, which is also very much a step towards generality. An AI that can answer arbitrary questions is already insanely powerful. If playing chess is jumping high, then GPT-2 is not jumping higher, it’s building a shitty airplane.
Is it really? It seems to me like a markov chain on steroids that still doesn’t keep an internal model of what the hell it’s talking about.
@sty_silver
You are wrong. Real time and imperfect information games merely require some adjustments to the algorithm, but again it is still the same basic algorithm (remember that we already had a stracraft playing AI in the 90’s- namely the one that came with the game).
Same deal for GPT-2. It’s impressive to be sure, but hardly the sort of conceptual jump required for true AGI.
Can you name a specific skill that is significantly short of AGI whose mastery would count as conceptual progress in your book?
Another point on this. You seem to trust your own opinion more than mine on this. Okay, that’s fair.
Would you consider Stuart Russel an authority here? He’s talked about this in his recent podcast with Sam Harris. Quote (this comes from a discussion of how many abilities ‘general intelligence’ is made of).
At about 03:09:10
@sty_silver
No, I can’t, just like I can’t state a theorem that will get us 50% to proving that P=NP, or the Riemann conjecture.
I still don’t buy it. Again, we had AI that played starcraft in the 90’s. Why would I be surprised that 20 years later we have some thing that does the same thing but better?
I don’t know what Stuart Russell’s reasoning is, but I know enough about the subject to know that what he is stating, as he is stating it, is incorrect.
You are ignoring the point of the argument–that Deep Mind played Starcraft well without having been programmed to do so. Unlike the AI that came with the game.
In summary: you are confident that you are correct and Stuart Russel is wrong, and there is no evidence short of AGI actually happening that would lead you to update your position.
@David
But someone programed it to program itself to play, right? Again, impressive, but a far cry from AGI.
@sty_silver
Maybe there is some result that would constitute “part of the way to AGI”, I just can’t think of one. And it certainly wouldn’t be some specific skill.
While I do agree it’s debatable…
Things that might kills literally everyone, even if they’re very unlikely, can score quite highly.
If you believe the risk is zero then it will seem obviously useless.
If you believe that having a group of people making a lot of noise about AI safety is useless then it will seem like a poor investment.
Pulling numbers out of the air:
But if, say, you believe that there’s a 1 in 100 chance of rogue AI killing everyone.
and you believe that MIRI might reduce that by a tenth to 9 in 1000 chance by means of getting the attention of the kind of people who work on AI and getting them to think harder about the problem…
Then you would think of it as like a project to save 7,000,000 people. (7 billion * 1% * 1/10)
Though of course many EA types likely avoid MIRI exactly because of the problem that it’s really hard to quantify their effectiveness and/or they just don’t believe AI is a threat or buy that anything MIRI does affects how likely it is to kill everyone.
Cool numbers, how did you come up with them? Sure, maybe it is a project to save 7,000,000 people. Or maybe it is a project to save 0.0007 people. What makes your guess better than mine?
How about the fact that Murphy is using numbers at all and you’re not?
To quote Scott from the first of the posts you linked:
This is a rather fundamental issue and it’s not necessarily obvious that the kind of existential-threat-from-AI research we’re talking about here (without the “existential threat” bit it’s hard to make the case for Effective) is that close to sane – when conducted in all seriousness, at least.
Interestingly enough, Scott writes a bit later in the same post:
Worth keeping in mind when considering imaginary objects, and the sort of AI under discussion is purely imaginary.
There are definitely threats associated with the application of computers to decision making, it’s just that paperclipping isn’t in the set of realistic ones.
“Realistic” sounds awfully handwavey to me. Are you assigning a literal zero probability to paperclipping? How can you do that with anything? If not, what probability are you assigning it? Whatever that probability is, does it pass basic muster, per Scott’s second post? If it does, and we do math on it, what result do we get?
Yes, I consider the probability of the kind of God-level AI typically envisioned in paperclipping scenarios to be so vanishingly small it essentially rounds to zero.
I’m not even convinced the concept of superhuman AI is coherent (for Turing reasons).
What does rounds to zero even mean? In a lot of contexts one in a million might as well be that; in other contexts one in a trillion is way more than zero. You can’t just do that when we have big numbers in the numerator: billions of lives at least, so hundreds of billions of man-years, not to mention future people….
Okay, so how confident are you that it’s not coherent? Looking at the probabilities in terms of what you’re pretty sure is physically possible or not is a mistake; if you’re 70% sure something’s 100% impossible, you’re still only 70% sure. Focus on the epistemic probability.
@Nick Yeah… both these posts are so bad I am having a hard time even beginning to formulate a reply. Just pull a probability out of your ass for every thing! Oh, but don’t let it be too small, that is unreasonable.
That’s Pascal’s Mugging.
@Orpheus
If you have a substantive criticism, I’m interested. If you’re just going to strawman, I think I’d rather argue downthread about usury.
@Jiro
It can go that way, I agree. That’s why it’s important to justify one’s numbers. But avoiding numbers is the bigger mistake, not the smaller one. It helps to read Scott’s first post in light of the second; it’s why I linked them together.
@Orpheus
yep, much better to just ooze a constant stream of insulting snark while failing to read any responses properly.
that’s the true path to sane decision making. Don’t even think of quantifying anything in any replies. Just throw more snark.
I thought you were asking questions in good faith but I’ve given up on this comment chain because it’s really really annoying and frustrating.
@Nick
Fair enough. In one sentence, my criticism is: garbage in, garbage out.
Scott’s computer example in the first post is deceiving: yes, I can give a decent guess as to the probability of my computer breaking down, but that is because I know something about my computer: I know its general state, I know how long I owned it, I know how long my previous computer lasted, etc. So my guess is at least somewhat educated.
But what do I know about the probability that AI will kill us all? Maybe AGI (as in-visioned by EY and co.) isn’t even possible, so the probability is exactly 0. Maybe we live in a Mass Effect style universe were organics are always destined to be killed by synthetics, so the probability is exactly 1. And so on, so every number in [0,1] seems to be about as good as another. Than you do your math, come up with another number, equally as meaningless as the first, but now since you have done some calculations, presumably correctly, you mistakenly believe that your new number is not meaningless.
So all you have accomplished was going from understanding that you have *no* information about the issue to mistakenly thinking that you have *some* information about the issue, which is clearly a step down.
First, you’re making the same mistake I pointed out to Faza above. Look at epistemic probabilities, not whether something is physically possible or not. Even if AGI were 100% impossible, you should never be 100% sure of that. In other words, your range should be (0,1).
Second, it seems to me that we have to regard things like AlphaZero and GPT-2 as increasing the probability of AGI—even if it’s from infinitesimally small to infinitesimally small. You can, if you like, regard the dead-ending of certain approaches as evidence against, but that cuts both ways: the dead-ending of certain attempts at alignment raise the probability of AGI existential risk, too. You said we need some information about the issue, and that looks like some to me.
Why are we not donating to the Will Smith’s Men in Black institute for prevention of alien invasion?
Why are we not coordinating terrorist attacks on SETI just in case someone receives a Dark Forest warning on it and decides to reply and ask for an attack?
Surely the possibility of these things happening is not 0%
Is your problem with superhuman or with AI?
Suppose we produce an AI that is about as smart as a dumb human. Will that make you reverse your position?
Alternatively, would your argument also reject the possibility of an alien race whose members are enormously smarter than we are?
Exactly what it says on the tin. For the purposes of expected value calculations the assumed probability is zero.
This incidentally, is the only sensible way to approach Pascal scenarios.
Watch me.
Those people don’t exist. If you’re not convinced that this is the case, I propose you formulate a set of truth-apt predicates that will allow you to identify but one of such people in potentia. Truth-apt, as in: answerable as true or false.
Talking about “big numbers in the numerator” is sleight of hand, no less than the original Pascal’s Wager: if you’re imagining something (in this case: people that may be alive at some point in the future), you’re free to endow it with any properties you care to, including population numbers.
That’s all fine and dandy, but we have no reason to believe that these properties are in any way reflective of reality, nor are we obligated to take them into account when making real-world decisions – quite the contrary, in fact.
Pretty confident.
Assume the human mind is Turing complete (there are good reasons to do so, including the fact that we can, in fact, simulate known Turing complete machines). Therefore any computer system (AGI) that is able to replicate a human mind will also be Turing complete.
Two systems that can fully simulate one another are said to be Turing equivalent. Clearly, an AI of at least human level will be able to simulate a human mind (that is: perform all computations that a human mind can perform), by definition. If the human mind is Turing complete, it means that it is able to simulate any Turing machine (by definition), including the AI.
There are two ways to try to get around this:
1. You can postulate that the human mind is not Turing complete, in which case I’m going to want to see at least an attempt at a proof,
2. You can postulate that the computational capabilities of the human mind – and, by extension, an AI of at least human level – are a superset of those available to Turing machines; in other words, that the capabilities of the human mind exceed those of the universal Turing machine. In that case, however, you’ve pretty much stepped outside of known theory and will need to provide a compelling alternative in order to be taken in the least bit seriously.
Does that actually mean anything?
Upon a time, I read about the hypothesis that water left in a pot on a boiling stove was only statistically expected to boil; repeat the experiment enough times and at some point it would, in fact, freeze. These days, I am told, physics doesn’t subscribe to this idea of thermodynamics any more.
Time for a lesson in System 1 thinking. Have a look at this Chess StackExchange answer – specifically at the position described as one
If you know anything about chess you will see why this position is drawn and why even a novice player can spot that it is so. It is not only statistically drawn – no matter how deep your search tree goes, you will not discover a way for this position to end in anything other than a draw. The rules of chess preclude this.
A human analysing this position performs a rapid pruning of the search tree simply through recognizing the pattern of interlocked pawns that definitively separates the two sides. There is no possible move within the rules of chess that can alter this state of interlock, so we can terminate our analysis as soon as it is identified.
Interestingly enough, chess software struggles with such – admittedly artificial, but perfectly legal – positions, because they aren’t particularly well suited to recognizing such patterns.
What’s that got to do with the topic at hand? System 1 thinking in humans manifests itself primarily in identifying the impossible – or merely highly improbable – and pruning it from the decision tree. Thus, I consciously discard any hypothesis that requires, as premise, the acceptance of a postulate contrary to well-established laws of physics. If your hypothesis requires, for example, FTL travel or perpetual motion, just to get off the ground, it is not one I’m inclined to take in any way seriously.
Now, the difference between this and chess is that in chess all rules are known and immutable (if we change them, it’s no longer chess), whilst I cannot be fully certain that what I consider well-established laws of physics shall not change at some future date.
Until I have proof that this has happened, however, I consider every proposition that goes against them as crankery, plain and simple. The probability of the proponent being dumb, or out for a quick buck, is simply much greater than that of the laws of physics being not what they appear.
You want epistemic probability? Here’s epistemic probability for you: my money is on FAI research being a way to extract money from the rubes and that EA endorses it because, frankly, it’s part of the same community. It requires no postulate other than the assumption that people are people and will act as people have been known to do throughout history (a look at pretty much any religion confirms this).
Which is more than we can say for paperclipping.
And yet we can make predictions about the future and act on them. We can wait until the future becomes the present, check our predictions, and if they were wrong we can adjust our model and try again. And when we have signs that indicate our model is accurate, and no signs it’s not, we can and should act on those predictions. Somehow this even works when we’re not working directly from physical laws—I know how best to dress and whether to bring an umbrella in the morning based on a weather forecast, and I haven’t been rained on too much lately.
Your truth-apt argument, in other words, proves far, far too much. It’s too quick to say this all occurs in our “imagination”; of course our models don’t exist as tangible physical objects, but no, we cannot just assign whatever “properties” we want to them, because accuracy depends on the degree to which the map corresponds to the territory.
Okay, now here’s a third way: when we say superhuman AI, we don’t mean some kind of Turing oracles. We mean an AI that can think faster or more rigorously or synthesize more data more accurately than can a human. Why is that impossible?
An admirable defense of the concept of uncertainty. But let’s place it beside what you wrote above. Bostrom predicted that people will exist in the future; you responded that this is not truth-apt. Yet you observe around you that humans reproduce. Fast enough, even, that our species propagates. This is not a physical law, but I would guess you’re still pretty certain of it; if not, you’re liable to be fooled by a lot of cranks. It’s therefore not much of a stretch to say that people will exist in the future. Indeed, it seems to me the only way humans don’t go on propagating themselves for just about as long as they’re able is some kind of existential threat.
I don’t think you can hold both these positions at once.
@Faza (TCM)
This is an obscene abuse of the entire concept of reasoning itself.
We need to hurry to Turings grave with copper wire and magnets because harnessing the spin may solve the energy crisis.
Lets get one thing out of the way first.
Turing completeness is not special.
MTG cards are turing complete. but try to run a database on a MTG table and you’ll have a bad time.
My wrist watch has a finite state machine that is basically a tiny tiny turing machine. It is a tiny computer.
I work with a 500 core cluster with terabytes of RAM.
That is also a turing machine.
But if I tried to run sequence alignments on my watch I would have a bad time.
If I wanted to run a VM mirror of the watch on the large one the extra load wouldn’t even show up in the logged metrics.
Here’s the secret: Turing machines, the kind they talk about in proofs, the hypothetical kind with a tape of infinite length, those can never exist in the physical universe, they are a fiction.
For any finite state machine that has ever existed in the physical universe, a conceptual turing machine as used in CS thought experiments, one with a tape of unlimited size, capable of an arbitrarily large but finite number of steps in arbitrarily short finite time: that could solve the halting problem and any CS grad could write you the code to do it, it wouldn’t even be complex.
For real finite state machines it can be entirely possible for one very large one to solve the halting problem on another very small one.
it’s possible for a large finite state machine to fully simulate a small one while the small one may be entirely incapable of simulating the larger one.
+1
I…. what? Maybe re-read my post. I was quite open about where the numbers were coming from.
Well perhaps not the 7 billion number but I took it as given that people would guess that’s a reference to world population.
that’s kind of my point.
If you believe the risk is zero then it will seem obviously useless.
If you believe that having a group of people making a lot of noise about AI safety is useless then it will seem like a poor investment.
If you’re giving to charity and you decide that, then *don’t give to MIRI.*
If you believe those numbers are higher then MIRI looks like a great investment and disagreeing on the estimates doesn’t mean that the other person is irrational.
I’ve seen enough AI specialists disagree on the matter along with enough philosophy students with no AI knowledge at all (the second group being way more confident in their beliefs weirdly) to say that it’s not unreasonable for smart people to disagree on the questions involved.
You really weren’t.
Why would I believe that? Where does that 1 in 100 figure come from? Did you run a simulation? Did an angel descend from heaven and gave it to you? Did you consult a magic 8-ball? Ditto the 9 in 1000 figure.
Whether or not *I* give money to MIRI is not at issue here. I am trying to understand the position of the Effective Altruism community which seems to have several pet causes (Malaria, Animal welfare etc.) all of which make sense, given their stated philosophy, except for one which is just… bizarre.
Edit: Sorry for the snark, but your ” re-read my post” comment really ticked me off.
read the line before that.
Then read it again.
Then read it again for good measure.
I’m not going to be charitable when you ignore clear statements.
If you don’t want to get told to re-read a post then read it properly.
I was completely transparent that they were numbers I was pulling out of the air for illustration sake.
Which is better than no numbers at all.
Feel free to fill in your own guesstimates for what you might consider reasonable into the calculations.
If your numbers are zero or one in a quadrillion then you will conclude that MIRI is uselss.
Either for the real risk or for MIRI’s impact.
But about 1/10 of AI researchers apparently consider an intelligence explosion likely.
About 1/10 think AI safety research should be prioritised more .
http://aiimpacts.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/survey-summary.jpeg
from other posts of scots quite a few consider the possibility of an existential threat from AI important.
So I don’t think my 1% illustrative number was too crazy.
No, it really isn’t. I don’t even understand what line of thinking would lead you to that conclusion. Making numbers up out of thin air is literally no better than making any other ideas up out of thin air.
@LadyJane
You make wild assumptions based on basically nothing and refuse to quantify them in any way or even state what the assumptions are and pull a conclusion out of thin air.
Someone else makes assumptions and is open and honest about what the assumptions are, clearly states the assumptions and attempts to quantify them and then lays out how those assumptions lead to the conclusion.
The latter is strictly better in basically every way.
No, it isn’t. That’s the point we have been trying to get across in multiple subthreads.
Saying “I have a gut feeling that X is true”, is strictly better than saying “I have a gut feeling that A = seven billion and B = 3 and so A/B >1 so X is true QED”. Both are pure gutfeel, but the latter launders it with a layer of mathiness and pretends to unearned rigor.
Only if you can defend the numbers as something more than gutfeel is the mathematical solution in any way better. It isn’t enough to “be open and honest about the assumptions”, you have to be open and honest about the reliability of the resulting conclusions – which, if the input is pure gutfeel, then GIGO.
If you’re calling the approximate world population “gutfeel” something is very very wrong.
Saying “I have a gut feeling that X is true”, is strictly worse than than saying
“I know that A = about seven billion”
“I’m pretty sure B = x% ish because [survey result]”
“My I think C may be more than Y% though I’m not any kind of expert”
“C has all these other areas where if it has no effect it would imply things”
“so unless Y is insanely tiny Blah is true QED.”
people can see that A is close enough, B is reasonable-ish and C may be a clear judgement call.
So if the true uncertainty revolves around C then the discussion can focus properly on C. It’s informative. It points the discussion at somewhere worthwhile.
What can anyone do with “I have a gut feeling that X is true”,?
nothing, absolutely nothing. It’s worthless in every way.
You’re basically saying “I don’t like actually outlining a process because GIGO, so instead I just prefer this thing that does nothing but spew garbage, always no matter what you feed into it”
But mostly in the thread it hasn’t even been on the level of “I have a gut feeling” rather than just “Sneeeeeer! Sneeeer!”
I’m pretty sure they’re saying that “1 in 100” and “reduce by a tenth to 9 in 1000” are gutfeel (which they clearly are) but I could be wrong.
Reduces by a tenth might be a gutfeel, but once again, there are ranges to what are reasonable numbers here. “Reduces by absolutely none whatsoever” or “reduces by epsilon” are, it seems to me, not; for one thing, it seems to me like MIRI has already changed the conversation somewhat about AI. If nothing else, it seems to have prompted a fair number of other AI researchers to share that they too are somewhat concerned, based on Scott’s big list of researchers’ views.
If we go back once again to the numbers Bostrom actually published, which Scott quotes at length in a link I posted above, he assumed a ridiculously low likelihood of changing things. And the argument still went through. This “garbage in, garbage out” thing is sounding more and more like dogma.
I’m not. I said absolutely nothing about world population.
~John Schilling
~John Schilling
Truly, you have a dizzying intellect.
@Murphy: We get it. The “seven billion” figure was the real number in your equation, not the one you made up wholecloth; it was the “1 in 100” and “9 out of 1000” figures that you just pulled out of nowhere. Harping on that fact does not make John Schilling’s argument look any less credible, it just makes you look like an obnoxious pedant trying to score cheap wins while missing the larger point.
And John’s larger point still stands: If you multiply X by Y, and X is a figure based on actual statistical data, while Y is a figure you just made up out of thin air, then the product of the equation is still just something you made up out of thin air. Y could literally be anything, so the equation’s product could literally be anything. The fact that a random guess is phrased as a number doesn’t make it more valid than any other random guess. Neither does including that number in an equation with some other numbers that actually do correspond to something real.
Now I’m going to be generous and steelman the argument that I assume you were going for, before you got caught up on that needless bit of pedantry: Presumably, you don’t consider your “1 in 100” and “9 in 1000” figures to be a completely random guess, you consider them to be rough estimates, or at the very least, educated guesses. Unfortunately, you haven’t provided any evidence of this, so the rest of us are forced to conclude that they are indeed wholly uneducated guesses. And, as already established, wholly uneducated guesses are no better than any other “gut-level feelings,” even if they’re formulated as numbers and plugged into “real” equations. I could just as easily say the chance of superhuman AI developing is 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, and modify the results of your equation accordingly, and that wouldn’t be any more or less valid than the equally arbitrary figures you came up with.
> @Murphy: We get it. The “seven billion” figure was the real number in your equation […] Harping on that fact does not make John Schilling’s argument look any less credible
I disagree. As a bystander, I didn’t understand why John would so strongly make the false statement “I said absolutely nothing about world population”. I presumed it was an oversight. I feel like Murphy was almost obligated to call him on this, although it could have been done more politely. My expectation was that John would would apologize for misspeaking. Instead John seems to double down on his mistake, responding with an insult. I thought this apparent lack of respect for accuracy did indeed weaken his argument.
(It may be worth noting that I start out with a very high respect for John’s intellect, usually find his comments persuasive, and thus even a ‘average SSC’ comment would have felt out of place coming from him.)
> Now I’m going to be generous and steelman the argument…
I think the better steelman is that an argument that includes a defensible equation is a useful framework for decision making, even if the numbers plugged in to the equation are guesses. If everyone can agree that the equation is right, it can focus the participants on making better estimates. I agree with Murphy that an argument that mathematically combines explicit guesses with an equation to create a final number is strictly better than just a bare guess at the final number.
My statement was not false; my statement was wholly arbitrary and stripped of object-level referents. Your accusation, and Murphy’s, that I have some secret agenda and am lying about it, is too annoying to bother with any further here, but understand that you probably won’t be getting any charity from me in the future.
> Your accusation, and Murphy’s, that I have some secret agenda and am lying about it
I don’t think there is a secret agenda. In this case I’m more of a mistake theorist, and guessed that when you used Murphy’s estimate of the human population as part of your example, you weren’t consciously reflecting on what it referred to. I didn’t think you were lying when you said “I said absolutely nothing about world population”, I just thought you were wrong.
If I was going for technical correctness, I’d probably grant “nothing direct about”, but can’t get behind “absolutely nothing about”. I am surprised that upon further reflection you still feel that quoting the numeric value of a world population estimate doesn’t count as mentioning it. I’m guessing now that it’s because you intended for your statement to be about arbitrary numbers, whereas I as reader thought it was relevant that the number originally referred to a population estimate.
Respectfully, I think you misunderstood, John’s right. John criticized Murphy’s for dividing a made-up number in to a known number (population) and treating the result as less made-up:
The charitable assumption is that Murphy misread this to think that, in John’s phrase “both are pure gutfeel”, the word “both” meant “A = seven billion” and “B = 3”. But in actuality, John’s “both” meant “Saying I have a gut feeling that X is true” and “saying I have a gut feeling that A = seven billion and B = 3 and so A/B >1 so X is true QED”.
Technically, John did mention population, but he didn’t say anything about it. I mean, he was very very clearly criticizing made-up numbers, and the population is the only number here that isn’t made up.
> The charitable assumption is that Murphy misread this to think that, in John’s phrase “both are pure gutfeel”, the word “both” meant “A = seven billion” and “B = 3”.
I agree that this is likely. I misread “both” this way on my first read, and only got the correct meaning when I reread a couple minutes later.
> Technically, John did mention population, but he didn’t say anything about it.
That’s a finer line than I’m willing to split, up there with “what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is”. It might be possible to persuade me that “he didn’t say anything about it”, but not that he “said absolutely nothing about” it. The use of “absolutely” tips the balance for me.
> I mean, he was very very clearly criticizing made-up numbers, and the population is the only number here that isn’t made up.
Back to agreement.
But what about the more general question: is there any added value to a number that is result of an formula whose inputs are guesses over just a guess at the final number?
For example, does the Drake equation for estimating the number of alien civilizations really add absolutely nothing over a bare numeric answer? I think that even if the answer shouldn’t be trusted, showing the reliance on the inputs is informative. Even if the inputs are guesses, isn’t an answer that can be generated by plausible sounding inputs “better” in some way than one which requires inputs everyone agrees are implausible?
nkurz,
The Drake equation seems like a perfect example of the harm of equations where you just plug in numbers. It apparently has been shown that if, rather than just plugging in estimated probabilities, you plug in probability distributions for each value, the number of ET civilizations approaches zero.
So the mathiness of the Drake equation with very reasonable guesses actually misled a lot of people.
@LesHapablap
> The Drake equation seems like a perfect example of the harm of equations where you just plug in numbers.
The rhetorical persuasiveness of the “mathiness” can be a negative, but the fact that it’s an equation is what allows for self-correction. Yes, for years many people looked only at the answer and were misled. But now by paying better attention to how the inputs affect the output, they are more informed. This eventual progress strikes me as a win for equations, and evidence that it was indeed better than just a guess at an answer.
> It apparently has been shown that if, rather than just plugging in estimated probabilities, you plug in probability distributions for each value, the number of ET civilizations approaches zero.
There have been several papers, reaching slightly different conclusions. Rather than eliminating the possibility of multiple alien civilizations, I think their common answer is more that “0” can be a plausible answer. Here’s an interview with the author of one of the recent papers, with links to many of the other papers: https://futurism.com/life-universe-scientist-drake-equation-study
That is to say, if we believe that MIRI has a 10% chance of averting any AI apocalypse that might occur, in a way that no one else would ever have managed to do without MIRI’s help.
I don’t believe that, and why should I? You pulled that number out of your hat, presuming you have a hat, and you cause me to greatly doubt your objectivity in this matter. As the champion of quantitative rationality in AI risk assessment and mitigation, please to provide us with a defensible, quantitative assessment of the probability of MIRI providing a unique and decisive contribution to the defeat of an Unfriendly AI, and show your math.
Just fill in your own guesstimate.
1 in 10, one in 100, one in 1000 or perhaps you believe they’re not making any difference at all.
Perhaps someone else could but unless they’re actually doing so or would do so if paid and you think they’d do a better job then they’re not terribly relevant.
If you estimate zero then don’t give money to MIRI.
or perhaps you think some other group addresses the same risk better, in which case maybe give them money.
It’s traditional that when someone clearly states they’re pulling numbers out of the air for illustration purposes they people don’t go “OMG OMG OMG SHOW YOUR WORK I NEED CITATIONS FOR THOSE EXACT NUMEBRS!!!!”
Pick your own preference for the numbers and multiply out.
On a related note when someone says “now imagine Jane has 3 oranges and… ” they don’t need to provide citations for the orange harvests in Janes home county.
I have done so, and drawn appropriate conclusions. But I’m not the one who is trying to persuade other people to donate to MIRI, or persuade other people that donating to MIRI is anything but folly, so I don’t really benefit from doing that math in public. You, would.
Personally I consider donations to malaria funds etc better, I’m not fighting the case that MIRI is better, merely that MIRI **can be** an entirely reasonable choice under fairly reasonable assumptions.
Same way I’m not a pro-lifer but I’ll argue the case that entirely reasonable precepts (that happen to not be mine) can lead to that position.
Not a significant difference from where I sit. What is significant is, you seem to be claiming that your case is superior to that of those arguing against you because your case is based on math and theirs is just fuzzy irrationalism.
And I’m calling you out on that. If your “math” is making up two numbers out of thin air and showing that you know how to do multiplication, that’s no better than saying “I have a gut feeling about this…”
the opposition seems to be “I have a gut feeling that is beyond quantification at all so I’m going to Sneeeeeeeer at everyone else 24/7”
If you never state your assumptions in any clear way, like the sneer club, then nobody can address them.
If you say “well, I think this guess for a value isn’t too unreasonable” then you can at least talk about whether it’s reasonable or not.
Never mind that some people are sneeing at the very idea of treating a small chance of helping a big problem as worthwhile vs a certainty of helping with a smaller problem.
I pulled 1% out as an example number but it’s vaguely based on some old surveys of AI researchers where 10% thought AI might be an existential threat and 10% thought that a foom type scenario was very possible.
If I saw that and said “nah, zero or 1 in a quadrillion” I don’t think I’d be taking the opinions of experts into account in a reasonable fashion.
the effectiveness of publicity campaigns and the effectiveness of miri I have no idea how to quantify, but the effects of people warning about possible disaster probably isn’t zero.
Sometimes gut-level feelings are useful for things like “not giving all of your money away to a weird fringe techno-cult because they convinced you that Skynet would turn the universe into paperclips if you didn’t.”
I don’t have any hard proof that Zorp the Surveyor won’t consume all of humanity and melt our flesh off with his volcano mouth, but my gut-level feelings tell me that it’s not worth worrying about, no matter what the Reasonabilists say.
Bringing people together and giving them living wages to work on a topic they’re enthusiastic about, then openly publishing their result – that’s a pretty decent recipe for improving a theoretical domain. Strictly as a Bayesian prior without any particular info I’d give it pretty decent odds.
It’s further improved by the fact that most competent players are commercial and thus highly incentivised to keep the interesting parts of their research secret. It kinda has to help the ecosystem to have an extra open outlet.
We could talk on whether it’s better or worse than academia, which is doing the same thing.
This is exactly why I’m skeptical of Effective Altruism as a general concept. Different people have different values, and thinking that they can all be flattened into a single “utility” value is extremely reductionist. To most people, it’s going to seem like exactly the sort of “Evil Robot logic” that Scott was complaining about the other day.
As an example, let’s take three upper middle class people who decide to donate $10,000/year to charity. One chooses to give her money to a fund for helping starving and sickly children in third world countries. One chooses to give her money to a group that feeds and shelters homeless youths here in the US, who are at lower risk of death from starvation, exposure, or disease, but still face serious risks and live well below what most Americans would consider a decent standard of living. And one chooses to give her money to a local community organization that builds recreational centers for moderately poor local teenagers, covers miscellaneous expenses for moderately poor local families (e.g. the cost of getting a new pair of glasses), helps down-on-their-luck local residents afford food and rent, and so forth. In my view, it seems ridiculous to argue that the first woman is behaving more ethically than the others; they’re all giving the same amount to charity, they’re just prioritizing different things.
In fact, it would actually be bad if everyone behaved like the first woman, because then the homeless youths in the US and the moderately poor families in the town wouldn’t get helped at all. You’d effectively be recreating the Donut Hole phenomenon caused by government welfare and healthcare programs, where the people at the very bottom are getting help, but the people in the lower-middle area get nothing despite still needing some amount of aid. Congratulations, you’ve caused individual decisions to become as dysfunctional as mindless bureaucratic policies.
And that’s not even taking into account the subset of EAs who just give all their money to AI research. Most people would consider those people worse, from a moral perspective, than any of the women in my example – and rightly so, in my opinion. Yet according to a certain type of EA logic, the MIRI donors are somehow the most ethical people of all.
I know approximately nothing about the Effective Altruism movement. But if I were involved in creating something by that name, it would be providing people with information on what the effects of a given contribution/cause were likely to be, not with a rank ordering of good-bad, better-worse etc..
OTOH if a typical fund raiser type created it, charities would pay to be evaluated (favourably), and charity aggregators would be lobbied to send all donations to charities on the lists (or maybe only the higher ranked ones). No one would actually evaluate whether the charities were any good, just whether they conformed to some easily gamed – and widely published – set of metrics.
And if some earnest nerd type rationalists created it, but then brought in professionals, it would start with a reputation for good selection, but swiftly converge on the gameable metrics/pay to be ranked implementation.
But perhaps I’m just cynical. Or depressed. Or maybe both.
And then there are people that want to give $10.000 to the most effective cause. That’s who EA is for.
There’s also a rationality facet to that, but it’s secondary. So don’t take what I’m about to say to be too preachy.
EA is about the awareness of tradeoffs. There are quite a number of biases that influence charity giving, probably even more than more practical domains. Salience, scope insensitivity… So when you chose teenagers in US vs malaria in Africa, EA is shoving into your face the image of people dying ugly deaths on hospital beds. Real people, not statistics.
That’s pretty… unpopular, to say the least. And at least somewhat discouraging, like it was mentioned a couple of open threads ago. But I think the key word above is “vs” – if you chose to give to your community, good! Do it! But if you feel like making the world a better place in general, just use a EA approved organization, and sleep well knowing you did good. Also if you value your sleep, don’t look too deep into how they’re reaching their conclusions.
I might be mischaracterizing the EA movement, but I didn’t think sharing their utility function was a requirement – I know personally I’m more bothered by people doing things that don’t make sense by their own values than I am by people having different values to me.
If the second person in your examples had the option of two different charities who both help homeless youth, and they thought it was worth assessing which one of them does better at turning donations into a real difference on the ground, then they agree with the most important part of the EA argument.
There will certainly be EAs who’d also want to convince you that distance from the people you’re helping doesn’t matter, or that saving lives is more good than buying glasses, or even that a slim chance of minutely reducing x-risk is more good than saving individual lives. But you can disagree with them without disagreeing with the general thrust of EA, which is simply that we should use evidence and careful analysis to ensure our donations help others as much as possible.
I think calling the first woman more ethical misses the mark, but someone who believes feeding the hungry is higher priority than helping the poor might say she’s more effective.
It’s less about the specific charity you end up on than it is about how you choose it.
If all three donors assessed all three charities, and each individually thought “Yes, this charity is the one who will do the most good with my $10,000/year” then they are all endeavoring to be effective altruists. There are certainly arguments to be made for all three.
If none of them looked at any evidence and picked their charity on a whim, or on the basis of whoever’s advertising best pulled their heartstrings, then they aren’t trying to be effective.
>In my view, it seems ridiculous to argue that the first woman is behaving more ethically than the others; they’re all giving the same amount to charity, they’re just prioritizing different things.
You seem to be working off virtue ethics or some variation, at least that’s my best guess.
Does your system of ethics have nothing to drive competence or care?
It would appear that under your system someone throwing 100 dollar bills into a pit marked “ChArItY” where the bills do nothing but fuel a leaky furnace for an upper middle class family is ethically equivalent to someone with similar resources who cures 80,000 people of blindness.
Under your system of ethics is the only thing that matters the vague wave towards anything that’s nominally charity?
How much does it extend beyond charity into other aspects of life?
Are parents who can’t be bothered to learn what to feed their child properly, who just find something that’s nominaly food and pour it into their infant, meaning well but leaving it stunted with vitamin deficiencies morally equivalent to parents who put some thought in and make sure to use the same resources carefully to do the most good for their charge?
It’s like you’ve drawn a line around what you’d like to do and anything that leads to a different answer must be wrong.
EA is the concept of **triage** applied to charity.
I get the impression that your mental model of charity is fundamentally that it’s something that doesn’t really matter, a symbol for symbols sake, a feather boa to show off socially.
If you believe it’s a matter of life and death then not treating it as triage is insane.
There’s the old standard stories about someone with a minor injury sitting in the ER and throwing a hissy fit because they’ve “been here all day” and the doctors keep rushing people who just arrived past them.
To which the response is: “Be thankful you’re not the person the ER doctors dealing with instead of you, be thankful that you’re last in line and that your problems are so minor that you may never reach the front of the queue”
2 families come into the ER
One needs help with the cost of getting a new pair of glasses. (lets pretend that they thought the ER was the place to ask advice about that)
The other, well their kids are on the edge of death and need urgent care.
Now imagine that more of the second type of family keep turning up. How long should the family who need a new pair of glasses wait for help with their problem? At what point should the doctors say “hold that family with the dying kid in the waiting room, we need to deal with the glasses guy”?
that is a serious question, make sure to actually answer it in any reply. Because it’s isomorphic to your position.
The moderately poor families in the town have very very very small problems compared to the families with dying kids. You deal with the worse problems first in the same way that a doctor deals with the guy who’s bleeding to death before he deals with the guy with a nasty bruise and sprained ankle.
Sometimes that may mean a guy with a sprained ankle throwing a hissy fit over being ignored and storming out complaining that the ER is useless but that doesn’t mean you should abandon triage.
By this reasoning, if your own kid got a sprained ankle, you should deal with malaria in Africa in preference to helping your own kid., since you do more good that way.
In the ER scenario, pretty much the only reason to prioritize one patient over another is need. This is not true in the charity scenario, even if an evil robot is unable to prefer socially close people to socially far away people.
Only if you value your own kid exactly the same as all other human life.
I don’t know about you but I wouldn’t trade my nephews life for the lives of 2 strangers in brazil.
But a stranger one county over has no more connection to me than a stranger in brazil. So when it comes to my budget for helping strangers it would seem odd to prioritize one strangers sprained ankle over another strangers dying child.
I could stick to only helping my friends and family and let all strangers rot but then that’s less charity and more helping me and mine.
Ridiculous appeal to extremes. I could just as easily create a scenario where the tradeoff was between “helping 500 homeless teens in the US rise up out of poverty, ensuring they become successful middle class citizens” and “helping one starving African go slightly less hungry for a single day.”
Bad faith argument, but I’ll address your point anyway. If we’re comparing charity to healthcare, then I don’t see it as equivalent to the ER, I see it as equivalent to the entire healthcare industry in its entirely. So yes, it would be ridiculous to go to the ER for a pair of glasses, but the healthcare industry as a whole provides for people who need glasses. In fact, the healthcare industry provides goods and services that are even less necessary for survival than glasses, like painkillers and Viagra and cosmetic surgery.
As a society, we could reallocate those resources to something more severe and/or urgent. We could say “no one gets cosmetic surgery until everyone who needs glasses has them; no one gets glasses until everyone who needs antibiotics has them; no one gets antibiotics until everyone who needs the cure for the rare Indo-African Skin-Melting Plague has it.” But we don’t do that. Why do you think that is?
I could ask the same of you. Do you apply the same hyper-utilitarian triage mentality to every other aspect of life too? What would that even look like? I’m reminded of this comic, it sums up the pitfalls of that line of thinking pretty well.
the fact you point to that comic, that you seem to genuinely see it as nothing but a social pissing contest….
you…. seem to kinda be missing the point of utilitarianism…. so very very very badly that you don’t even seem to get the basic idea right.
Utilitarianism doesn’t mean “the african always wins”.
If you had an intervention that cost X dollars and that same X dollars was only enough to give 1 african kid a meal for one day… and that intervention you had would on average pull 500 homeless teens in the US up out of poverty, ensuring they become successful middle class citizens it would score better almost all utilitarian frameworks than making one person slightly less hungry for a day.
But the problem is that in almost all cases it’s almost the exact opposite.
Choice 1 : for X dollars we could send 1 lower or lower-middle class american kid to camp for a week.
Choice 2 : we could keep this entire african villiage alive, build them a well and teach a bunch of them to read.
Choice 1: for X dollars we could train one guide dog to help one middle class blind man for approximately 9 years.
Choice 2: For that same X dollars we could make it so approximately 400 indian kids who are going blind get to keep their sight and not go blind at all.
Those aren’t even extreme examples. Those are ones where X is a real number and those are approximately the real choices.
And inevitably someone always turns up to scold anyone who advocates for favoring the second choice systematically.
If that middle class man is your kid or best friend, sure, I get why you’d want to favor him, but if he’s a stranger to you why is he worth more than 400 times as much to you as the strangers in india? What qualities does he have that makes him that much more important to you?
@Murphy"...What qualities does he have that makes him that much more important to you?"
The quality of being a neighbor and/or fellow American so I feel more of a sense of obligation/solidarity to them.
I understand that you don’t, that lack seems common to the collegiate/ruling class.
I value my friends and neighbors that I know.
When I examine my feelings I do value members of my nation and other europeans slightly more. But not 400 times more.
If there was a bus with 400 indian kids going over a cliff and car with one guy from my own nation going over the same cliff and I had to choose which to save the bus is gonna get preference.
I’d have to have a remarkably extreme tribal worldview to view it otherwise or genuinely just place zero value on any lives not part of my nation.
I suspect you’re doing better at seeing my point of view than I yours. On a visceral level valuing someone 400x more highly just because they’re part of the 300 million other citizens of the same country just doesn’t click.
@Murphy,
On a pure worldwide human need basis that makes sense, but I can’t helo of billionaires lobbying for themselves to get taxed less, and then funding overseas charities, while the roads, bridges, and schools here further degrade.
So yeah, I’d prefer a little more patriotism and a little less humanitarianism amongst our ruling class.
I suspect that the difference isn’t so much philosophical as geographic since you’re a European, and much of Europe has a stronger “safety net” (and the tax rates to pay for it) than here.
If you live in a place that was many living in tents equally or even more desperate foreigners don’t seem as important as they very visible poverty seen everyday.
If I was Canadian or Scandinavian I imagine the plight of the third world would pull at my heartstrings more, but I see way too much need here at home for that, even at “400x” the utility/effectiveness.
No, I understand utilitarianism quite well. I’m aware that bringing 500 homeless teens out of poverty would score more “utility points” than helping one starving African for a day, that was the point of the example. I was showing how, much like your “filling a leaky furnace for an upper middle class family,” I too could create ridiculously extreme, unfair, and lopsided comparisons to make one option look several orders of magnitude better than another.
But let’s cut to the chase, since you never actually addressed the core of my argument: Why doesn’t the entire healthcare industry operate on the triage principle? Why do we “waste” resources on cosmetic surgery and painkillers and eyeglasses at all, when those resources could be going to curing terminal diseases? On an even broader scale, why doesn’t the entire economy operate on the triage principle? Why do we “waste” resources making movies and producing game consoles and cultivating organic foods for upper middle class urbanites to enjoy, when those resources could be used to feed the starving?
Right here is your problem.
And it’s an utterly fundamental one.
the examples I used above weren’t extreme ones. They were straightforward ones.
Based on real costs.
The opposite of extreme, really. Your examples however seem to lack any link to financial reality.
The amount people really do throw at sending one disadvantaged kid to camp really could do everything I mentioned in the other option. The price of training one guide dog really could keep 400 indian kids from going blind.
they’re not extreme examples. You don’t seem to want to get that. You seem to want to pretend they’re extreme so that you can ignore the sheer enormity of the ethical disconnect.
because society is deeply unfair, and the people who control the vast vast vast majority of resources in society mostly have terrible priorities and basically most of them tend to place approximately zero or even negative value on the lives of anyone who isn’t part of their own tribe. The donkey sanctuary gets better funding than most charities that help 3rd world kids because, put bluntly, although it would be a social faux pax for them to admit it, most people care more about big eyed donkeys than they do 3rd world children.
Murphy,
You’re not wrong in my opinion, but you’re not being very charitable. People don’t make decisions that way: they don’t think “I have limited resources, and my cat needs a $2000 operation but I could instead let me cat die and give that money to schistosomiasis treatments in Africa, but I just care more about my cat than a thousand African kids.”
People think: “should I let my cat die, or do I care enough about it to spend $2100?” They don’t think about African kids with diseases at all, or if they do it is in a separate decision about giving to that charity. The cat does a much better marketing job than the African kids.
It isn’t just greed or unfairness, but that people a) don’t know about good charities and maybe don’t trust the ones that are marketed to them and b) don’t gain any status, because you can’t just put “gave $1000 to SCI last year” in your tinder profile. And yes, also c) they care more about people close to them than poor people they will never meet.
Note that when charities do find ways to allow people to signal their virtue, like the Livestrong bracelets, people are more than willing to give lots of money.
Mr. Petersen says that supporting the arts is important because artists rejuvenate cities. For all the posts here that start with “what would it take to create a new city from scratch somewhere?” The answer requires young people that find the place cool, with interesting restaurants and things to do and see, and to make a place cool requires starving artists, according to Mr. Jordan. So if you spend some money on a decent painting from a starving artist, not only do you get the painting which has value to you, you support the creation of interesting places, and interesting places have great economic value.
Very few non-artists move to a city for the quality of its starving artists.
People move to a city for jobs. work, paid employment.
Trendy bars with neat murals attract those paid employees to trendy neighborhoods. Not trendy cities.
Nobody moves to a place because of its starving artists, but they certainly factor in whether a place is cool and interesting.
Neighborhoods vs. cities is a distinction without a difference.
Very few people have absolute freedom of where to move.
They have jobs, they have careers, etc
When picking neighborhoods within reach of your job, people have a fair bit of leeway.
Which city to live in tends to be fair more constrained.
Add a load of art to an economically screwed city and not much happens.
Add a pile of jobs and money to an artistically dead city and suddenly there’s lots of well-paid young people who want to buy art and want cool and interesting places to hang out… which will attracts the more sensible brand of starving artists and make sure they’re not starving at the same time.
I’ve heard from several places (including here?) that U.S presidents have a relatively small impact on the macroeconomy, or at least smaller than folks give them credit for. How true do you think that sentiment is?
Completely true.
To the extent they have any impact at all I’d say it’s in a “confidence” sense. Scott Adams has discussed this quite a bit in his belief that the stock market is all one big confidence game, and that the President’s job is to “make people believe the stock market will go up” and, if he does that, it will go up.
I wouldn’t go quite as far as him, but I do think that people believing the President will impact the economy is a much bigger factor than the President actually impacting the economy. I was actually working in strategy consulting shortly after the 2016 election and I can tell you that significant business decisions were made (IMO, poorly) based solely on “We think Trump is going to do X, therefore it’s a good time to invest in Y.” At this point, the economy has, technically, been impacted by Trump, regardless of whether he actually gets around to doing X or not (in case you’re curious, so far, he has not, in fact, done X).
If you mean the business cycle, then yeah, it’s probably true. The Fed has had a much bigger impact than the federal government, let alone the president, on our recovery from the last recession. Outside the stimulus, whose effects are debatable, Obama had virtually no impact on the business cycle. Neither has Trump, regardless of all the apocalyptic takes we’ve seen over the last two and a half years. The Fed members are appointed by the President but it’s a consensus driven organization and they don’t usually stray too far from orthodoxy.
As far as I know, this is what macroeconomists generally believe.
Usually I agree, unless the president has taken dramatic actions with regards to the economy. Trump’s massive deregulation push and tariffs and trade war count. I don’t think it’s enough to be the difference between boom or bust, but it’s probably worth a point of GDP growth.
You think the trade war is resulting in GDP growth? Please elaborate.
If you put tariffs on foreign goods, encouraging companies to manufacture things in the United States, the Gross Domestic Product goes up. Because we’re producing more things domestically.
I can see an argument that it becomes a misleading statistic because we’re producing things more expensively than we could import them, but the number still goes up. How do you figure it doesn’t?
Well, there will be secondary effects from things being more expensive, as well as supply chain disruptions. Also, exports suffer due to retaliation.
Primary effects outweigh secondary effects. China can’t retaliate much because they import little from us, and they’re going to buy our soybeans anyway. And as for supply chain, intermediate consumption is basically removed from the GDP calculation. If GDP goes up because a product became more expensive because raw materials became more expensive that becomes a wash when you subtract the intermediate consumption.
And the primary effect is that a protected job cost far more than it is worth, and thus decrease the GDP. To follow your logic would mean that the optimal production plan is that everyone live in complete autarcy.
Well, now that you mention it…
ETA:
But if the worker’s wages go up, doesn’t that increase GDI?
> Because we’re producing more things domestically.
Are we as result, though?
My perception of the received wisdom is that all of these tariffs are going to go away the moment the next President takes office. So, optimistically, you’d need to be convinced that your investment would completely pay for itself in 6 years.
I’m not certain that there’s much of any significant manufacturing which wouldn’t be profitable without the tariffs but which would suddenly be so profitable as to be able to pay off the capital costs in 6 years, especially given how most of the tariffs are topping out at 25%.
Sure, some factories will put on a second/third shift. And maybe some capital refresh gets done a bit earlier. But we aren’t going to see a substantial portion of steel production get moved back to the US.
Looks like a comeback to me… I can’t say this is necessarily because of tariffs, but it was high…then it was low…and now it’s going up again.
Imports do get counted in GDP figures, they just go under the “consumption” part of the equation. You don’t just automatically increase wealth by moving companies here.
Eh? In the expenditure approach to calculating GDP, imports are directly subtracted from the figure.
X is exports, M is imports. Just putting on tariffs that decrease imports automatically increases GDP.
I know, I know, everybody hates tariffs because cost of electronic gizmos slightly increases, but they do make GDP go up, not down. They may not increase total wealth, and worst of all, some of the wealth is captured by the working class instead of us in the professional class where it rightly belongs, but GDP goes up, money goes to workers and they like it and vote for it.
No, because (from the next bit on the Wikipedia page, and Wrong Species’ comment above):
If a tariff means $100 fewer widgets are imported than lass year, then your GDP goes down by $100 because consumers/the government/whoever are now spending $100 less. But obviously they now have $100 to spend on other things, which is why you subtract imports. So in accounting terms the net effect is zero by definition. I’m sure other people will give better explanations of the net economic effect predicted by standard theory.
This is a really fundamental misunderstanding of how GDP works. GDP is trying to calculate the economic activity in the country accurately. When an item is imported, it shows up under the term “Consumption” or “Investment”. Imports are subtracted to avoid double counting. This isn’t something that’s debatable. It’s true by definition based on how the terms are defined.
And when they use that $100 they were spending on imports to buy a domestically produced product instead C stays the same while I decreases, increasing GDP. GDP does not measure “economic activity.” From the wiki:
It’s a measure of stuff produced, not stuff consumed. If you put on a tariff, this disincentivizes imports and incentives domestic production. People respond to incentives, more stuff is produced domestically, and GDP goes up.
The problem with your reasonment is that if it’s so great that the government decide the price and means of production of one industry, then the societies where the government control the economy should be optimal.
We both know it’s wrong, so you are neglecting some things you shouldn’t. And one of those things is opportunity cost: every cent dedicated to a lost cause is a cent that’s not given to a worthy one.
Thus, the workers wage don’t go up. Only the protected one do, and it’s at the expense of someone else. If you are good, that someone wasn’t doing anything better with the money. If not, it’s a global loss for the society as a whole. Currently, it’s a loss for society.
This is the fallacy of the excluded middle. Some government intervention is preferable to a completely free market* and to total government control of the economy.
Yes, the workers’ wages go up, at the expense of the owners or managers. This seems like a good correction right now as wages have been stagnant for decades while the wealth of owners continues to rise.
I’m going to need some evidence for that. The stagnant wages, the rusted out factory towns, the opioid crisis, the arsenal of democracy transplanted to China that are the fruit of “free trade” seem like a loss for society. We got cheap electronic gadgets for the professional class, but that doesn’t seem like a good trade. Is massive wealth inequality not a “loss for society?”
* Although we don’t have free trade, anyway. We have a system of environmental and labor regulations that increase labor costs in the US, incentivizing companies to flee to more relaxed employment regimes like China, who then also raise barriers to prevent American goods from being imported there. None of this is a free trade / free market system.
@Conrad Honcho
I didn’t explain that adequately, because I didn’t understand it at the time. But you’re still wrong! There are explanations here and linked from there, but I didn’t find them very clear (I would be grateful if anyone can explain what “The foreign country’s decision to run a trade surplus with the US causes US investment to be $40 higher than otherwise (for any given level of US saving.)” means). I will attempt to give a clearer explanation based on the example we were discussing:
In year one, Bob earns $40, Alice produces a $40 widget and Bob buys it. In year two, Bob earns $40 but this time purchases a $40 widget from China instead. Consumption is the same, but imports have increased by $40. Does this mean GDP has decreased by $40? No, because we haven’t said what Alice did in year two. If she perished in a tragic fire that also destroyed her widget workshop, then GDP has indeed decreased. But this is because value has been lost, not because of imports. So for the comparison to be equal we assume Alice has pivoted to making $40 of wodgets instead, or invested the $40 she used to produce the widgets . This causes a corresponding increase in GDP, thus there is no net effect.
The key point that people who are talking about primary/secondary effects on employment etc. is that this is pure accounting; there is definitionally no net effect unless you start considering economics. It doesn’t seem impossible that there could be a positive economic effect from a trade surplus — Scott Sumner goes hard against it in that link but macroeconomics is definitely arguable.
But it seems very doubtful that there could be a positive effect from a surplus enforced by tariffs. Suppose in year one Bob earns $40, spends $35 on Chinese widgets and $5 in other consumption/investment, and Alice eats the $40 of raw widget material that grow on the trees near her house. In year two Bob earns $40 which he spends entirely on widgets made by Alice, because of a tariff on Chinese ones increases their price to above $40. His spending hasn’t changed, the contribution from imports has gone from -$35 to $0, but Alice’s consumption has gone from $40 to $0. So the net effect is -$5 and therefore to argue that GDP has stayed neutral or increased you need to show how someone (presumably Alice) has managed to increase value by at least $5. You might say “well, realistically Alice would be able to produce more than $40 of widgets out of $40 raw material”, but if that were true she could’ve done so in the first year.
In year 3, President Trump puts a 20% tariff on widgets. Kevin, who had been unemployed and addicted to fentanyl sees an opportunity, cleans himself up and opens a widget factory making $40 widgets. Bob buys a $40 widget from Kevin instead of a $48 widget from China, and Kevin gets himself a sweet $40 wodget from Alice. GDP goes up by $40 and there is much rejoicing.
When you buy goods from China, their GDP goes up. If instead you put tariffs on foreign goods, this incentivizes people to produce those goods domestically, thereby increasing our Gross Domestic Product and in turn decreasing China’s.
This article that comes from the link that the blog post Sumner links to explains it well.
@Conrad
You are mixing two very different arguments. One of them is that importing something automatically decreases GDP based on the account of identity. This is completely wrong based on the definitions used by economists in defining GDP. Look at the article I just linked to.
The other is an empirical argument about incentives, which could theoretically be true. But your assertion that higher tariffs will lead to higher investment is extremely dubious. Just because you can make up a story ok why your preferred policy is the best doesn’t make it true.
@Conrad Honcho
Nope. What you’re positing there is that GDP increases because Kevin magically creates a factory from nothing. It is true that magically appearing factories would increase GDP; empirical evidence suggests that they are rarely produced by tariffs. In other words, you’re making an economic “argument” rather than doing accounting.
What actually happens in accounting world is that $40 of capital goes towards a factory that employs Kevin, when it was previously engaged elsewhere.
No it doesn’t. When goods are produced domestically, that uses capital that would’ve been spent on something else. Conversely, the goods in China that are no longer exported are consumed there (or something equivalent).
Put it another way. Scott Sumner has PhD in Economics and I’m pretty sure you don’t. That certainly doesn’t mean he’s right on complex macroeconomic issues, but it seems likely he knows more about the accounting of GDP than you do. If you’re saying that’s not the case, what’s your explanation?
@Wrong Species
I don’t think that article is applicable. That’s saying that imports don’t decrease GDP in comparison to no imports. Conrad’s argument is the more sophisticated argument (Scott Sumner says “slightly” but I think it’s a lot more convincing) made by Ahmed Fares in my link.
Yes, I jumped ahead with the “imports subtracted from GDP” thing by assuming the consumption would stay the same, shifting to something produced domestically. That’s the whole point of this. You levy tariffs, decrease imports, but people are still going to buy stuff, so they’re going to buy domestically produced stuff, increasing GDP. Unless we’re at maximum production and employment capacity, which we are not.
Ergo my original statement:
And I think Ph.D. economists are very good at explaining the policy preferences that make rich the sorts of people who employ Ph.D. economists.
Again, nope. No-one is considering the situation where the money that would be spent on foreign goods just sits around uselessly. What you are missing is that buying domestic widgets rather than Chinese ones does not mean domestic production increases. All it means is that some domestic capital is now allocated towards producing widgets rather than producing something else or being invested. This does not mean GDP has increased.
It’s certainly tempting to think that it does, because when Kevin goes from being an unemployed addict to a productive factory worker it sure seems like some value is being created. But this ignores the fact that someone (or rather some source of capital) has to pay Kevin and provide him with a factory, which they could’ve used for something else (and furthermore, in the real world we would expect the something else to be more valuable since if it weren’t they would have been employing Kevin before the tariffs).
Those capital expenditures also increase GDP (I). GDP goes up both for the factory and for the things the factory produces.
We have a fiat currency with apparently limitless lending capability, so…capital is always sitting around? Borrow some money, employ some unemployed people to build a factory. GDP goes up from factory. Use factory to produce widgets. GDP goes up from widgets.
Maybe GDP is being gamed here as a false metric, but the number still goes up. But most importantly, actual material wealth creation goes up. And even more importantly, that wealth creation is captured by Americans rather than foreigners.
Why is it so difficult to understand that when we produce more things domestically, Gross Domestic Product goes up?
@Conrad
Bastiat wrote a relatively short text (“That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen”) which may be useful here, where he mentions the example of establishing a new military barracks in a town, which was at the time presented as a straightforward way to generate economic activity. Bastiat notes that, even though the town now has many more customers for its wine and more money flowing around due to the presence of the new soldier’s wages, all of that money must come from reduced consumption of wine somewhere else, and decreased flow of money elsewhere due the wealth transfer from the taxpayers to the soldiers. An analysis of the effects on the economic activity must account for all that is seen (the soldiers spending more) and that which is not seen (the expenditures deferred or delayed by all the taxpayers who now have less disposable income).
In the matter of tariffs, even if one grants that every $40 widget not imported is replaced by a $40 widget newly made in country (which I am not willing to grant, since if the widgets could be made in-country by $40 instead or $41 there would have no reason for them to not be competitive in the first place), all the raw materials , capital and labor used to build that $40 widget are taken from the overall material/capital/labor supply and cannot be therefore used to make any other thing. The protectionsit nation does build $40 widgets anew, at the price of everything else which it could have made instead from those inputs. Prior to the tariff, those inputs either had been used to make something worth more than $40 (and therefore the tariif is destroying value) or else were idle. Your argument assumes that all of that capital/raw material/labor was idle. While I agree that there MAY be significant amounts of idle labour available (like your junkie Kevin example), getting that labour to a productive use requires raw materials and capital which (even in a fiat money economy) must be taken from the rest of the economy, making other production more expensive and thereby reducing the amount of money left over (after consumption) to fuel new investment.
No.
Domestic production of the good you are no longer importing goes up. Domestic production of the export goods you were exchanging for those import goods goes down.
Do you have any mental model of the relevant markets, in particular exchange rates? If not, you should realize that you are arguing from ignorance, evaluating a change in one feature of a complicated interacting system by looking at one effect and ignoring all the rest. It’s at about the same level as someone who argues that raising the minimum wage will make us all better off because the workers getting the higher wage will have more money to spend.
One of the frustrating things about teaching economics is that people start out thinking they already understand it.
Exports suffer even if there is no retaliation.
Anyone who does not understand why I, and (I predict) Krugman, and any other competent economist, would expect that, does not have the basic understanding necessary to evaluate the effect of tariffs.
This kind of discussion is why I compare popular talk about trade issues to arguments about what will happen when the Apollo mission runs into the crystalline sphere of the moon. Ptolemaic astronomy is only about a century more out of date than mercantilist economic theory.
We have a massive trade deficit with China. What are we exchanging for the goods we’re importing from them?
As for mercantlism being out of date, why are all the smart places like Canada and the EU still imposing tariffs? How much better off would the German economy be if the EU stopped tariffing American cars? Do they not have any smart economists in Germany?
@Conrad “As for mercantlism being out of date, why are all the smart places like Canada and the EU still imposing tariffs?”
If you look at the data (https://wits.worldbank.org) , in 2012 /the last year for which data are available, MFN weighted average tariff for the European Union was 2.64 %; 2.79 % for the US; 2.88 % for Canada.
Average weighted effective tariff was 1.68% for the US, 1.40% for Canda and 1.31 % for the European Union.
So Canada and the European Union have indeed overall lower tariffs than the US. Trade imbalances between US and these countries are not due to their imposing tariffs. Regardless, the latest rounds of tade disagreements are not (in spite of what you seem to imply) a matter of “the World/Canada/EU/etc.” lecturing the US regarding the need to lower tariffs: they are a (mostly unilateral) decision by the US administration to impose additional tariffs in spite of previous agreements (GATT/ WTO/etc.). The onus is on the US administration (or its supporters) to prove that changing the status quo in the direction of higher tariffs is appropriate, not on the rest of the world to prove why they are not willing to change the status quo on the other direction: after all, the present status quo was already achieved by attempting to balance the pro- and anti-tariff arguments on all sides.
I think that’s a misleading statistic because that’s the applied tariff. If I put a 270% tariff on dairy products like Canada does after a certain amount has been imported, the applied tariff is basically 0, because no one bothers to import stuff that would face a 270% tariff.
@Conrad Honcho
This question gets asked all the time by supporters of tariffs as if it’s some home-run argument. It’s not. It’s been answered many, many times – including here in the comments of SSC. The answer is twofold.
1. People do not, generally speaking, have a great understanding economics (perhaps especially the economics of trade). Every new generation of people has a tendency toward the same economic fallacies, just as people have a tendency toward the same misunderstandings in physics and probability – until they are educated to know better.
2. Policy is not decided by economists, but by politicians, who might find it in their own interest to support tariffs. See public choice theory.
That’s a pretty bad chart. Steel production in the U.S. went into a downswing in 2015 (due to the shale oil collapse), and started bouncing back up in early 2016 (when oil prices bottomed out). It’s still below its pre-crisis highs. The y/y gain as of April 2019 is well below where it was in March 2018, when the steel tariffs were introduced. I think you can easily make the argument that steel tariffs have been a net negative for US steel production.
I don’t think that article means what you think it means. You’re confusing the company “U.S. Steel” with “steel production in the United States.” U.S. Steel (the company) has less efficient blast furnaces, so with the increased demand for steel produced in the United States (because of the tariffs), Nucor with their more efficient processes is grabbing market share previously held by the U.S. Steel corporation. Which U.S. Steel is trying to counteract by investing in new, more efficient facilities. The only reason overall steel production/profits aren’t as high as they could be is because of the cooling global economy, reducing exports, which has nothing to do with the tariffs. If anything, the tariffs saved the US production companies because with the US being one of the only hot markets, everyone else would be dumping their steel here if they could.
It’s extremely disingenuous of the authors to try to spin Nucor taking U.S. Steel’s market share via improved efficiency as some sort of net negative for overall U.S. steel production caused by Trump’s tariffs. But, this is entirely what I expect. It is impossible to get a man to understand the benefits of tariffs when his cheap iPhone depends on his not understanding them.
I’m not confusing anything – US Steel is the second largest domestic steel manufacturer, and actually employs more people than Nucor. Furthermore, while Nucor’s CEO claims the tariffs have helped Nucor, there’s precious little evidence that they’ve actually created any new jobs in the company.
Just to demonstrate that tariffs haven’t lead to some big surge in manufacturing jobs in the US: the y/y rate of increase in goods- producing jobs peaked in mid 2018, shortly after the introduction of tariffs, and has now dropped to a nearly 2-year low. I see no evidence that the Trump tariffs have created net jobs, and I think it’s deeply disingenuous to make that claim.
Are we talking about GDP, steel production, steel jobs, or all US jobs / manufacturing jobs here? You’re switching metrics every post.
American steel production was down, it has come back up, and is only not higher still because of the overall cooling off of the global economy. The fact that we’ve got rising wages, strong job growth, and strong GDP growth despite the slowdown in the global economy and what would be expected from the business cycle looks good to me.
Now, I do think the way Trump’s been doing tariffs have been doing more to hurt China than to help the US, but he’s tweeting today about combating India’s mercantalist behavior, so that could be a good sign. What I want is more protectionism rather than economic warfare.
I’ve never mentioned GDP in this thread, and I don’t consider it relevant to this argument. No straw men, please.
Regarding your claim that the positive effects of tariffs have been masked by a global economic slowdown – do you have any direct evidence for this? If that’s true, then we’d expect to see an even more severe slowdown in steel production elsewhere in the world, and yet steel production in China is booming. Why are US firms not enjoying a similar renaissance? Why did fabricated metal product payroll growth and primary metal payroll growth peak in mid-2018, shortly after tariffs were implemented? Every available statistic on steel production, steel payrolls, and more general manufacturing payrolls points to a slowdown starting in mid-2018, one that hasn’t appeared in China or India.
Because I started this thread talking about tariffs increasing GDP. You keep switching metrics every post and I have no idea what point you’re trying to prove. My point was “tariffs increase GDP” and you keep switching to steel production, to jobs, to manufacturing jobs.
What is your point, and why are you arguing with me?
My point is that GDP can only go up as a result of tariffs on steel if steel production (and the jobs that come with it) increases domestically as a result of the tariffs. Tariffs were implemented, and the steel industry has subsequently slowed. You can make whatever high-level macro assertions you want about the impact of tariffs on steel production, but reality disagrees with you.
Speaking for myself, my beliefs regarding tariffs don’t actually seem to have any effect on the prices of the things I buy. As in most issues of public policy, I expect most voters to be rationally ignorant in this area.
(Link is to a chapter of David Friedman’s texbook, and is using the term ‘rationally’ in its eco-jargon sense. Cntrl-F ‘Ignorant’ to find the relevant bit.)
I am given to think you’re wrong about tariffs, but I don’t have the sort of detailed object-level understanding I’d need to be confident of that, and even if I did, there’s always off-model uncertainty to think of. What I am fairly sure of is that, if the people who disagree with you are nakedly wrong and irrational, our reasons for being so stem more from what it’s in our interest to believe than what policies it would be in our interest to have implemented. If you want to argue that the two are the same in this instance, you either have a lot of argumentative work ahead of you, or a much higher regard for our society’s epistemic institutions than I do.
Rate of growth might have slowed, and the article you posted said that’s because of a cooling in the global economy, not because of the tariffs themselves, which have increased demand for domestic steel. But the steel industry is still growing, and GDP is going up, so I’m certainly not wrong about tariffs in this regard.
While I would agree with the general heuristic that if a good is more expensive to make it will become more expensive to the consumer, I’m skeptical it applies to iPhones. iPhones are priced like fashion devices. Apple figures out what the market will bear and this is not much related to the production cost. If iPhones cost $20 more to make, that would likely be $20 less profit for Apple, not $20 more in price passed onto the consumer.
$360 to make, sold for $1000. This is not a commodity item. Maybe at tighter profit margins we would see $20 in costs passed onto the consumer, but not at these numbers.
Very true in the short run (as in, within a given presidency), but very untrue in the long run. Any large expansion of entitlements or regulation will affect the economy from now until, at a first approximation, the end of time. Or at least the United States. The effect of any one of those expansions is small (or at least starts small) but its cumulative impact can be enormous, particularly if it’s anything more complicated than a strict transfer.
By “the macroeconomy” do you mean inflation and unemployment, which are, roughly speaking, the subjects of macroeconomics, or do you mean the whole economy, which includes things like GNP, which depends on lots of things outside of macroeconomics?
For the latter, I think the president can have a large effect, but most of it will occur after he is out of office. He can affect the tax structure, the regulatory structure, the deficit, lots of related things, all of which affect the overall economy, but not instantly.
Consider deregulation of the airlines. Or the creation of the Social Security System. Or the abolition of the draft.
The second-order effects of policy changes can be much larger than the first-order effects. I can speak from personal experience when I say that the Obama administration decision to mandate higher fleet fuel economies for US automakers is heavily responsible for the ~90% drop in the price of Li-ion batteries in the last decade.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to engineer a sufficiently horrible airline customer experience for yourself that results in you being offered Lifetime Platinum Frequent Flyer status from your chosen airline as a means of compensation.
The nature of the harm to you can be either physical, emotional, reputational or otherwise, but must be severe enough to have a very high likelihood of the airline wanting to compensate you with Lifetime Platinum. Other people may be harmed if it helps you complete your mission, and you may call upon the help of an airline insider if necessary, provided their own incentives aren’t completely irrational.
A United executive makes security remove me from first class so the exec can take my seat. During this process I am separated from the newly-cremated ashes of my grandmother because there is no space in the economy overheads. The CEO gets drunk during the flight, opens the overhead, and spills the ashes all over the floor. The cabin staff vacuums them up without notifying me.
You may believe that this sort of behavior from a United exec is implausible, and I’ll grant you that, but these are rational decisions a complete fuckwit asshole could make, and if you’ve been on a United plane recently that seems at least possibly appropriate.
Stories abound in general aviation about airborne ash-scattering gone wrong, in which the ashes all end up inside the plane or helicopter. The only way to scatter ashes from a plane is to put them in a paper bag, and throw the whole bag out the window. Trying to hold onto the bag is a real bad idea.
Anyone with a military background want to address the accuracy of the below statement I found somewhere about the Vietnam War? (Cough @bean cough). I’ve been doing some self-study on the war, and then I came across this online:
“The Vietnamese population, despite mass bombardment of civilians by US air power, was growing so fast that more men were coming of age than were being killed. This severely worried US planners. Their troops were legion and a seemingly inexhaustable supply of men. Their supply source in China was out of US reach and their supply lines were extremely difficult to interdict. The Ho Chi Minh trail was constantly degraded but continually repaired, whilst VC tunnel bases deep in US held territory were notoriously difficult to dislodge. North Vietnamese fighter aces armed with Soviet MiGs and heavy AAA meant that whilst US air power could bomb from high altitude, anything more precise was very risky. Furthermore, US fighters were forbidden in their ROE to engage an enemy aircraft unless fired on first or receiving visual confirmation that it was NOT Soviet, lest they accidentally escalate the war. This negated their BVR advantage with AIM missiles.”
I’m particularly curious about North Vietnam allegedly having Soviet planes and anti-aircraft systems, as I’d heard that they had no air force at all. (Wouldn’t the pilots require extensive training from the USSR as well? You can’t really just sell someone a fighter jet and say ‘so here’s the instructions manual, anyways good luck’). It would make sense though, because I was curious as to why the US didn’t bomb North Vietnam more (I understand they did some, but seems like it would’ve been a larger and more effective part of the war effort)
The extent to which the North Vietnamese war effort was a meat grinder fed by a very high (~7 IIRC) TFR is underappreciated in popular conception of the war. It is however correct.
The problem with the NVA/VC logistics base wasn’t that it was located in China but that for geographic and political reasons in about that order it could be inserted into South Vietnam almost arbitrarily. In the closest thing to an official account of why the war was lost, “On Strategy” by Harry Sommers, that these factors were never addressed is identified as the key reason for the ultimate outcome of the war.
The North did have an air force which included a few aces. At least some of the pilots were trained in the USSR. However, while air defenses were able to inflict losses on the attacking air force beyond what we’re accustomed to in a post-Gulf War world they were unable to protect any given location from bombardment.
The problems with the Vietnam air war were essentially political in nature. The air campaign was badly handicapped by political restrictions because the Kennedy and Johnson administrations in particular had a very strange theory of nuclear war that suggested that the other side would read coming on too strong as a signal and escalate to nuclear weapons. Also, they wanted to show they were negotiating in good faith, so anything that the other side hated too much was stopped as a bargaining chip. Such as the USS New Jersey, which made a very successful cruise, and then was sent back into mothballs. It was only at the very end of the war that Nixon authorized the Navy and Air Force to do what they’d wanted to do at the beginning and fight effectively, and it prevented the North Vietnamese from welching on the peace deal they’d already agreed to very effectively.
This is 100% not true. I believe a few Soviet pilots did fly against the US in the early days of the war, although their jets had North Vietnamese markings. But the reason for the prohibition on BVR engagements was nothing to do with the Soviets and everything to do with fear of shooting down an American aircraft.
The NVAF was a fairly serious force, and yes, their fighter pilots had Soviet training as well as Soviet aircraft. Their air defense people were world-class, and from what I’ve heard, invented a lot of the techniques now standard worldwide. In 1972, Hanoi had the heaviest air defenses on the planet, and the success of the Linebacker II campaign seriously scared the Soviets, because it meant that the B-52 could probably reach Moscow, too.
Signal boosting because it directly answers the OP’s question, and (IME) is under-appreciated by Millennial Americans who grew up in the Post-Cold War era of US air supremacy.
I would disagree that this is the part that’s a direct answer to the OP’s question. Those defenses were a problem, but they weren’t the main limitation on US airpower in Vietnam. That was political from day 1. The US was forced to conduct the bombing campaign under insane political shackles (for instance, SAM sites couldn’t be bombed while under construction because of fear of killing Soviet nationals) and because of that, air power was used very badly. When they finally removed those shackles, it worked very well despite the defenses.
Two things I missed the first time around:
1. If your strategy is to literally try to kill more of the enemy than are reaching military age, then you are doing something horribly, horribly wrong. Please stop and examine the life choices that lead you to this point, then find something else to do.
(Most of the people who ran the Vietnam war were deeply stupid, but even they weren’t quite this stupid, IIRC.)
2. There was no mass bombardment of civilians by US air power. The air campaign was always at least in theory targeted at military/industrial targets, and Rolling Thunder was fought by fighter-bombers. The only real mass bombardment was Arclight, and that was on theoretically tactical targets in South Vietnam or Laos.
This +1000. I do not believe that US war planners were “severely worried” by the fact that they weren’t literally genociding the young-adult-male segment of the Vietnamese population, because literal genocide was never a part of the US war strategy. That would almost have been up McNamara’s alley, simply because it gives one a quantifiable metric to target instead of intangibles like “morale” and “political will”, but I don’t think even he went there.
That wasn’t even our strategy in WWII, against Germany or Japan. Making it impossible to sustain an army in the field due to e.g. shortage of supply trucks is much more efficient, as is reducing said army to a state of despair regarding its prospects for victory because they haven’t had so much as a truckload of rice in the past month and the enemy seems to have infinite bullets. If you can do that, it doesn’t matter how many soldiers the enemy can nominally recruit or conscript, because soldiers can’t win wars unless they have food and bullets and the belief that it is possible for them to win wars.
His strategy was to kill more soldiers than could be recruited/infiltrated into South Vietnam. This didn’t work, and was still pretty stupid, but not as stupid as literally fighting demographics.
(This is the highest praise I have given McNamara in a long time.)
Yeah, but would was signal that he could kill twice as many!
/s
Right, but one of the inputs into “how many soldiers can be recruited per year” is “how many men become eligible to be recruited each year”. There was definitely discussion about how the latter number affected the former number — Dereliction of Duty documents some of it.
That being said, there wasn’t any effort to reduce that latter number.
I suspect I am not alone in my opinion that your thoughts on Robert McNamara deserve their own blog post.
@sfoil
I have no doubt of that. I have a copy of Dereliction, but haven’t had time to read it. Which is sad, because I’m sure it would flatter my prejudices very well.
@Brendan
I’ve put “What went wrong in Vietnam” on my ideas list.
@bean
I’m rather shocked you haven’t read Dereliction, because I’m sure I’ve heard you cite examples of Johnson admin decision making process that sound lifted directly from it. It’s very good, but frankly there’s not much reason you should read it at this point. You already believe exactly what it says.
@cassander
I’ve spent a lot of time hanging out with people who had read it and cited it extensively. So I’m not reading it to be convinced. I’m reading it for more ammo.
What I found odd about Dereliction is that ostensibly McMaster wrote it to show how terrible the Joint Chiefs of Staff were (the title refers to them) but it mostly left me with the impression that Johnson and McNamara were to blame for everything. It’s not at all clear was the author expected the JCS to do: mass resignation, maybe.
Having also read The Best and the Brightest, there is a huge overlap between the two books. Maybe McMaster started out wanting to put more blame on the military establishment but basically just arrived at the same conclusion as Halberstam from a slightly different angle.
Interestingly, in my WW2 studies it seems that the British were quite interested in firebombing German cities and massacring the entire civilian population, and it was the US who was more focused on specific targets (which I’m guessing was pretty challenging, in between German AAA and also the level of accuracy possible at that time). Of course, the British were probably on a bit of a revenge mission at that point….. can’t really blame them
No, they weren’t trying to kill the population. They were trying to destroy their houses. This was easier to do (bomb shelters are pretty effective) and their studies said it was more effective at demoralizing the civilian population. Their studies were probably stupid, but that’s what they said.
Part of this was dictated by choice of missions. Through most of WWII, the USAAF was the only air force in the European theater that did daylight bombing; this allowed what passed for precision bombing at the time, but was also very dangerous. Even the USAAF, with all its manpower and materiel advantages, was forced to stop eventually; they started back up again in 1944 once fighter escorts became available.
The Brits, on the other hand, gave up daylight bombing early and switched to night for most of the war. This was much safer, but couldn’t be accurately targeted until ground-scanning radar systems got a lot better, so indiscriminate bombing of enemy cities was about all it could do.
Granted Bomber Command was forced into night area bombing by technological and operational limitations, but they really believed in it. Note what happened when Coastal Command asked if the Germans would noticed if there were 900 planes over Berlin instead of 1000, because they could really use those extra 100 to fight the U-boats that were STARVING THE NATION. Bomber Command blew them off.
This is what I came here to say.
Thoughts on the third season of Stranger Things, anyone?
Having watched the season, I have mixed feelings. On the positive side:
– The enemy is actually scary.
– The action really moves.
– The acting is very good all around.
– When you do dangerous things, not everyone gets to go home again, which makes sense.
But on the negative side:
– Adolescent sexuality gets way too much airtime.
– Having massive Russian base right beneath a small town in the US midwest burns a lot of credibility.
– Some of the comedy is a bit cringey, particularly one strangely placed musical number in the last episode.
I wish I could watch a re-edited version of the season. My version would lose all the comedy that isn’t strictly necessary for relieving tension. It would also trim down the drama a bit. These cuts would reorient the film from a drama/horror/comedy to just a horror/drama with an emphasis on the horror.
The season as streamed gets a B+.
A few side notes:
– Was REO Speedwagon’s “Can’t Fight This Feeling” a wedding staple for a generation or so? My God that’s a romantic song.
– Did anyone else see the big Russian as a subtle Terminator homage?
I might be oversensitive to this, but them having to put in the Mad Men-style belittling of women, male squeamishness at women’s periods, was annoying.
(Edited out spoilers until I figure out how to encode text like I’ve seen people do here.)
Use this website: https://rot13.com/
I’m only halfway through it, but my take is pretty much the opposite (rot13 for potential spoilers):
erzbir gur 3eq vgrengvba bs “bu abrf gur zbafgre bs gur
jrrxlrne vf vainqvat bhe jbeyq!”, naq xrrc gur shaal nqiragherf bs xvqf (naq abg-xvqf, gur vpr pernz iraqbef qhb vf cerggl tbbq), juvyr univat gur creireg anepvffvfg vagebqhprq ynfg frnfba or na npghny ivyynva, vafgrnq bs n furyy sbe gur zbafgre bs gur lrBut I could be wrong, as little as I appreciated the first two seasons, they did subvert my expectation a bit (namely, jealous-jock-boyfriend turning monster-bashing paladin in the first, and government-scientist-man not being evil in the second).
There’s some of that in this season two. Gur Fgrir+Ebova ebznapr gurl nofbyhgryl frrzrq gb or urnqvat sbe vf na YTOGD urnqsnxr.
Best season of Stranger Things yet, IMO.
I wasn’t really bothered by your first 2 criticisms. They are horny teenagers and a group of them are going through puberty. They handled their relationships in particularly funny ways and I totally believed them as overly dramatic 14-15 year olds that don’t know how to talk about or even process their feelings.
Also, as to your second: it’s the 80s, a lot of the plot points relating to the Cold War aren’t going to make sense. It goes with the genre.
Subtle? The major literally called him Arnold Schwarzenegger at some point. I was waiting for him to start fixing his eye and arm in front of a mirror.
I must have missed it. When did that happen?
Episode 3 or 4, the sheriff goes to question the mayor, ask who that motorcycle guy was, and the mayor snarkly responds “he’s Arnold Schwarzenegger”.
Oh yeah. Episode four, about 17:30 in. Good catch.
I felt it was more of what we got in the last 2 seasons, which is pretty good, but it’s also feeling pretty repetitive at this point. The level of implausibility is also getting awfully high. Guvf gvzr nebhaq jr unq n guerr fgbel zbafgre yvgrenyyl qrfgebl n znyy naq jr’er fhccbfrq gb oryvrir gung ab bar fnj vg unccra orfvqrf bhe vagercvq urebrf?
I also swear to god that someone on the writing/production staff is a Dean Koontz fan, because I spend most of the time watching this show thinking about how much it reminds me of various scenes from the moonlight bay trilogy.
So it turns out I have an allergy to dust mites, which is annoying because they are hard to escape from. Has anyone had this problem before, and if so, what worked best for you?
I’m trying a bunch of interventions right now but I want to wait to describe them until I get some replies to avoid biasing the outcomes. Except to say that caffeine seems to be an excellent decongestant (for daytime use).
I used to get pretty severe allergic reactions seemingly at random. An old hoodie in my office that I hadn’t worn for a while, a particular armchair at my grandmother’s house, random things. I finally got fed up and got tested and was pretty much off the charts for dust mites. I take a 10mg generic Claritin pill every morning (loratadine) and that seems to help. It feels noticeable on the days I forget or don’t take it. Not sure how much of that is placebo. Other than that I just change my AC filter more often and clean when I notice the allergies acting up in a particular area.
I have the same allergy I believe (dust mite feces) and already conducted a series of tests with various treatments. The two most effective solutions were medication and moving house (to somewhere colder, in my case Sydney to Canberra). There are significant regional variations in dust mite prevalence.
Otherwise, just get a nasal spray of some kind. There’s plenty of generic nasal allergy stuff all over the place, Sensease, Nasonex… I’m sure the US has similar products.
Careful, the nasal sprays are reputed to be addictive.
Probably not an issue, since not having an allergic reaction is also quite addictive (you really want to keep doing it) and you don’t cite any harm (or sources, which would be useful for a claim like that) from the addiction.
Here’s the Mayo Clinic:
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/hay-fever/expert-answers/nasal-spray-addiction/faq-20058247
As they say, addiction is the wrong word. But they are known to have pretty nasty rebound effects if used regularly. Anecdotally I’ve known people whose sinuses are essentially permanently congested if they don’t use their nasal spray every couple hours.
Apparently the rebound effects don’t apply to the prescription steroid sprays the doctors have prescribed for me.
I had a bad experience with a generic steroid nasal spray which made me feel my nose was full of nasty chemicals for a day after my second (and final) use, but Avamys seems to be easy to use and fairly effective.
Pseudoephedrine also has a rebound effect but is extremely effective for short term use…
For me, it’s just bedroom cleanliness. Cleaning everything at least once a week, including washing the bedsheets, really improved my quality of life.
How did you discover this?
So one fun thing to do is test how good you are at guessing. Well can you guess if these titles are fake or real?
Notes about the titles in the link
1. I flipped a coin if heads it would be a real title if tails a fake title
2. These are titles of japanese light novels.
Is this really forecasting? I thought forecasting was about trying to guess the future.
Also, what’s up with the numbering? I loaded it twice and got different orders (with what I assume are the original numbers attached).
ETA: is there any reason for non-weebs to have any priors at all about Japanese light novel titles? I would assume that the logical thing for an outsider to do would be to guess 50-50 for each one, which defeats the point of the exercise.
RE: forecasting, I probably used the wrong word there “guessing” is more appropiate
I think I accidentally clicked on the “random order” button I’ll remove the random order
also for point #2, I won’t comment on that until after I close the survey
I’ve read/seen a lot of these so I feel like I’m cheating a bit.
That’s ok, there’s a guy who literally gave 0 for every fake one and 100 for every real one
Pop culture analysis, with special interest for David Friedman and Plumber:
In the Marvel movie Black Panther, Wakanda is the most advanced state on Earth. It’s so isolationist that no one leaves except for military spies and if any foreigner makes it past the border into its rural hinterland, they don’t even see the high-tech urban core behind its force field. They can trade vibranium for any desired imports, but exports seem to be on a smaller scale than the amount a foreigner can steal (cf. Captain America’s shield during WW2, Ultron’s 2014 theft). How false are the economics of this premise?
In the same movie, the villain Eric Killmonger was raised in Oakland, California by an African-American mother and Wakandan spy father, which left him so traumatized that he dedicates his life to connecting black terrorists to Wakandan weapons to help them kill white people. Is this a psychologically credible reaction to Oakland?
I don’t see what’s so wrong with that. If vibranium is that useful and they have a monopoly, then their profit maximization involves artificially reducing the supply. Assuming that it has some significant state involvement, they probably have other concerns than profit maximization, like keeping their privacy.
Complete isolationism is probably very difficult to pull off; Japan managed it in a sense because it was a group of isolated islands, and even then there was cultural contact with China and Korea, and later European explorers and traders.
Wakanda being landlocked (I presume?) has more porous borders, more chance of somebody slipping through and seeing the forbidden parts – there must be some kind of rumours amongst neighbouring countries about Wakanda if it keeps other African people out. If it is trading vibranium for goods, that means it can’t be 100% self-sufficient, and if vibranium is being used in high-tech applications then somebody is going to be curious about the source and will try getting in to see if they can mine it for themselves (if they believe the ‘goatherders’ facade) or make trade agreements to get more (if they think that there has to be something more sophisticated by way of a society).
There are basically three ways it could work.
1. Vibranium is not merely a very useful power source, it’s also a highly versatile element that can be used to produce all of the other materials necessary for the functioning of an industrial-level society: plastics, steel, conductive metals, maybe even food and water and medicine through some kind of Star Trek replicator process. That last one is a stretch, but the others are believable enough given the sci-fi premise of the movie.
2. In addition to vibranium, Wakanda also has literally everything else that it needs to be a self-sufficient society: bountiful supplies of petrocarbons and iron ore and rare earth metals, plenty of arable land for agriculture, enough plant and fungus species to create antibiotics. This is highly unlikely, but not impossible.
3. Wakanda does trade with the outside world, it simply doesn’t trade vibranium. They could still trade vegetables, meat and dairy products, various raw materials that were mined from the earth, and so forth. Obviously they have some contact with other nations, since they have their own representative at the United Nations, so it seems likely enough that they might trade for everything they need.
The real problem with the Wakandan masquerade is that it’s an example of “the lady doth protest too much.” The claim that the country is entirely comprised of subsistence farmers and herders is absurd, to the point of being incredibly suspicious. There is no country in the world that’s still entirely pre-industrial, even highly undeveloped nations like Mongolia and Bhutan still have modern cities. Sure, there are still large populations of subsistence farmers and herders in parts of Sub-Saharan Africa and Central Asia, and even hunter-gatherer tribes on a few remote islands, but those groups don’t have U.N. representation. If T’Challa’s father can show up to a diplomatic conference in Vienna wearing a modern Western suit, then it stretches credibility to think that he’s from a country that literally has no urban population/commerce centers or industrial-level technology at all.
I think you’re deeply misinterpreting the character’s motivations.
Don’t we see one of Wakanda’s towns? It’s just a poor african town. Maybe they have a make believe small city too.
Isn’t it kind of implied that this is definitely happening? They’re part of the United Nations (or whatever the global body is called in the Marvel Universe), which implies some level of interaction with the outside world.
My understanding is that the Wakanda which participates in the UN and that everyone knows about is, basically, a reverse Potemkin village. Wakanda’s geographic boundaries exist and are large enough such that everyone knows there’s space there. But the space any normal person can observe appears to be “standard impoverished African subsistence farming and nothing more.”
The actual Wakanda is the elite techno-utopia we observe behind the magical energy cloaking shield. Nobody except Wakandans know about this place. And this place doesn’t trade or interact with the world at all, aside from the royal family and occasional spies.
I think the MCU UN is the UN, and that’s what Wakanda attends meetings of. There was also the World Security Council (which used to oversee SHIELD, tried to nuke New York during the Chitauri invasion, etc.). But I’m not sure that survived the events of Winter Soldier and it was explicitly distinguished from the UN in Cap and Tony’s debates over the Sokovia Accords.
Insofar as vibranium is clearly a Magic Wish Fulfillment Metal that can create whatever its wielder desires, the premise is unfalsifiable.
If we substitute a plausible material, one that is either an extremely strong structural metal or a source of abundant energy but which does not also produce antigravity and mutate flowers into superhero ambrosia and all the rest, then no.
You can’t import all the goodies necessary to build a wealthy and technologically advanced nation, or even city-state, without the rest of the world noticing that you are doing this and figuring out what is going on, if only so that they can get in on the action.
You can’t import all the services necessary to build a wealthy and technologically advanccity-state at all, unless you are going to import a huge chunk of your population as guest workers as in e.g. Dubai. You need skilled people on site to run that sort of economy, and you don’t get those skills by importing textbooks and reading real hard. So either a huge number of Wakandans are going to be conspicuously studying in foreign universities for a generation or two, or you’re going to be importing a huge number of trained foreigners at least as teachers and if you’re in a hurry they’re going to be doing the work directly for the first generation.
And you can’t keep any of this secret in the age of satellites, because “nobody is going to look because nobody is going to care because it’s just a bunch of primitive subsistence farmers in the middle of nowhere” isn’t the way it works. The middle of nowhere is where people hide things that other people want very much to find, and primitive subsistence farmers all too easily morph into insurgents or narcoterrorists or soldiers in someone else’s proxy war. Cities in the middle of nowhere, will attract even more attention.
The closest you could come is to use your vibranium internally to produce something mundane but valuable for export. Maybe vibranium-alloy superhydraulic presses designed by a local genius can mass-produce gem-quality diamonds which you tell everybody you’re digging out of a deep hole in the ground, and you build a prosperous city-state on the basis of diamond exports. But that’s going to look more like Dubai than Wakanda.
And none of this gets you a city of ultra-tech wonders beyond what the rest of the world offers for sale, because even if we imagine “vibranium” enables things beyond the technology of the mundane world, it takes enormous scientific and engineering and manufacturing talent to translate that into more than a few clever gimmicks. See above as to why you don’t have that talent without opening up to the outside world.
If you want a plausible super advanced isolated society, the gamebreaker that should be enabling that is not vibranium, it is the heart-shaped herb. Which they, obviously, ought to be growing by the field. That is, their economy is supercharged because the Wakandans themselves are supercharged.
Yes, but then the winning move would have been to export heart-shaped herb extract to the poor oppressed black people of Oakland, and that takes us straight into a realm of literal racial supremacism that Disney probably doesn’t want to touch with a 10-parsec vibranium hyperpole.
.. Hmm. I think I see a way to have an african economic super power which – while not invisible – is mostly ignored and discounted.
Step one: Ca 1900: German African colonies adopt Georgist Land Taxation to put a stop to land speculation (and because no local big-wigs have enough pull to prevent it) The income from this is largely in local scrip, so hard to send back to Germany, and instead gets mostly plowed into education and infrastructure. Economy ticking over much, much faster than anyplace else in Africa. WWI: Germany looses, but the former German colonies end up independent with Georgist Taxation entirely intact.
The local political settlement can be summed up as “No. Fucking. Private. Rents”. Consequently, the new nation also rejects intellectual property in its totality, and runs a zero tarriff regime without ever signing up for the WTO. Cue: nigh vertical economic takeoff. But everyone just scoffs at them as the intellectual property thieves.. even when their tech is better than anybody elses.
Except, Russia in the 1920s and 1930s (and arguably through the 1950s). First, clever economic theories that are supposed to produce “nigh vertical economic takeoff”, basically never produce nigh-vertical economic takeoff. And you can say that this is because it wasn’t true Georist Land Taxation, it was corrupted by that damned T’Lenin and his crew of sell-outs, but it always seems to work that way.
And second, no, the rest of the world does not say “We think your economic theories are silly and so we are going to ignore you”. The rest of the world is frightened by the Other and any claim that the Other is on an inexorable path to economic supremacy will be taken over-seriously if only because opposition parties within the Western capitalist democracies will need some threat to accuse the parties in power of not taking seriously enough.
A big issue here is just that, from the movie, we have no idea what Wakanda is actually like. They have a lot of impossible novel technology, like their cloak, but outside of a pan shot of some skyscrapers, we never see into their living-rooms. Do they use smartphones and refrigerators, who knows. As far as other countries knowing what they are up to the problem there is the time scale. Wakanda could have gone through ‘the Renaissance’ 10,000 years ago for all we know. Between the time when the oceans drank Atlantis, and the rise of the sons of Aryas, the Fig X was the most popular smartphone in Wakanda.
I think that its not implausible at all.
First, regarding vibranium, vibranium is obviously a military resource so its export being controlled is no different than the US prohibiting selling enriched uranium or the specs for military equipment. Also, its their most expensive resource they can trade for whatever they want, but they are sufficiently advanced that they can trade things of much lesser value to the outside world still at amazing rates. E.G., the US might want a kilo of vibranium and offer 100 tons of steel, but Wakanda could just as easily get 100 tons of steel by offering a few non-vibranium revolutionary technologies that we don’t already have. Like soldier invisibility cloaks, or something. In other words, its like if interstellar aliens came to Earth. Obviously we would want to buy their hyperdrives, but we might not have anything of sufficient value to offer in exchange for them, or they may want to hold out until we’ve bought other things first, so they can have a trade monopoly for a while.
Second, Killmonger seems not all that different from some historical figures, so I’m not that caught up on it.
Makes me think of Botswana. One main export (diamonds), and managed to build over it high civilization and living standards.
@Le Maistre Chat
I haven’t seen the movie and I’ll not an economist, but I’ll go with;
.
@Le Maistre Chat
Well the comic book character of “Black Panther” was created a few short months before the “Black Panther Party For Self Defense”, which wasn’t basically founded at the old Grove Street (which is now called Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard) Meritt College campus (I actually remember being at a pottery class that my Mom was a student of before they moved the school, the old campus is now a Senior center), and as “Days of Rage” alludes to there was all sorts of “revolutionists” about in the ’70’s, but I’ll go with the character of “Eric Killmonger” as being born in 1987 like the actor who played him, which makes him 20 years old when Obama was campaigning in Iowa.
So let’s see 2009 the guy is 22 years old, he’s born too late to remember the most brutal years of the crack cocaine market share wars, though there was a spike in the murder rate in the mid 2000’s, he witnessed a man with an African father who’s wife is African-American become President of a majority white United States, but maybe his mothers home is foreclosed on sometime between 2009 snd 2012, he see’s Obama re-elected, and he see’s the news of Oscar Grant in Oakland and a spike in reports of other unarmed black men being killed by Police and that Florida wannabe vigilante in the last ten years, so some things that may make such a character hopeful and some less so?
About the only recent African-American terrorists that I can remember are ex-U.S. Army soldier John Allen Williams/Muhammad who was born in 1960 and his then 17 year old accomplice (born in 1985), so I guess that’s plausible, but really Stephen Paddock who caused far more deaths with his terror act, other than his Dad being a convicted bank robber, was 64 and seemed like one of life’s “winners” and “credible reactions” don’t seem to have much to do with those murders, demonic possession as an explanation of such evil seems more fitting, it may not be believable in fiction, but some monstrous people don’t seem to have a “villain origin story” for their murderous actions.
You may be interested to know that Killmonger’s position maps less to “mass-murdering terrorist” and more to “member of US Congress.”
His main point of philosophical disagreement with the rules of Wakanda is his belief that they should give their technology to insurgent rebel groups to enable them to fight off their own oppressors themselves. While Wakanda agrees with the Marvel heroes and the CIA, that this is inappropriate and they should actually just wall themselves off and let the rest of the world work out its own problems.
Marvel gets away with some really weird political allegories sometimes, and most people never really question it.
I watch the movie once a long time ago, but I remember Killmonger’s position as more of “to fight oppression we must become the oppressor of the world”.
And even if he was right, he seems a little too deranged to let him in charge.
Pretty much:
“I know how colonizers think. So we’re gonna use their own strategy against ’em. We’re gonna send vibranium weapons out to our War Dogs. They’ll arm oppressed people all over the world… so they can finally rise up and kill those in power. And their children. And anyone else who takes their side.
“It’s time they know the truth about us! We’re warriors! The world’s gonna start over, and this time, we’re on top. The sun will never set on the Wakandan Empire.”
And now that I think about it, “wall themselves off” was their original stance and was soundly rejected by the wakandans at the end of the movies.
They are shown opening a community center in the USA to show their new policy. Not saying it’s great (I wouldn’t begin in america if I wanted to help oppressed black people), but it’s better than what was suggested by Matt’s comment.
On economics:
1) I’m not a historian, but my rough understanding is that before recent history, most societies that managed to advance significantly had some substantial way of exchanging and incorporating at least ideas, whether by trade, conquest, being conquered, etc.
That said, the Wakandans don’t have to have exchanged ideas with the muggles on Earth – they could have had early contact with alien civilizations like the Kree or advanced local groups like the Inhumans or the Atlanteans. Alternatively, maybe their founders decided to isolate to protect their access to the heart shaped herb, and the herb itself helped them outpace other Earth societies.
1.1) Based on Ricardian trade theory, no matter how rich the Wakandans are, they could become richer still by trading with the less fortunate rest of the world, but they may have other priorities.
Depending on the continuity, sometime Wakanda won’t trade with the outside world because they think the rest of the world is not enlightened enough to handle the cure for cancer, et al.
I repeat (again) @Scott Alexander,
I have been banned for 3 months as “Echo Chaos” for no stated rule violation. That time has expired, but my ban still has not been lifted.
I would like clarification as to when it will be lifted.
Have you tried emailing him? I think he checks that more thoroughly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Da0aXfshlxM
Taleb says that restaurants which win awards are likely to go broke quickly because awards are given by peers or newspapers rather than customers. (7:00)
Are restaurants which get awards more likely to go broke?
Restaurants that receive awards attract a lot of new customers in a relatively short time period thereafter, and these customers are often motivated by a short-term desire to see what the fuss is about, without necessarily wanting to find a new regular favorite. If you’re the owner/manager of such a restaurant, your business will be spiky and inconsistent, which can make it hard to scale up and down and to structure yourself to meet the desires of your customer base.
By analogy:
Melbourne was voted the “world’s most liveable city” several years in a row. Since then, a lot of people from interstate and overseas have moved there, diluted it’s character, crowded it out, and made the place less liveable than it ever has been. At the same time, politicians and bureaucrats boast about these accolades, which reduces the incentives to address issues and improve. In this way the ‘business’ of Melbourne spirals into failure, much like an acclaimed restaurant.
See also: “Nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded!”
I’ve got some theories about why the claim might be true, but I’d like to find out whether it’s true first.
Or to put it another way, to what extent is Taleb on to something true, and to what extent is he a gifted BS-er?
Wondering if I might put a big bottled-up book bleg out there for a bunch of different topics:
1) Are there good blogs for dedicated discussion of non-fiction books? Right now Marginal Revolution is where I get most of my book recommendations. There’s gotta be more comprehensive and dedicated resources out there. I love to talk about non-fiction books but really don’t have anyone out there who shares my interests.
2) How should one read Clausewitz? Abridged? Is there a particular edition that is good? Amazon seems to suffer from shoddy scammy versions.
3) Books/other resources for learning more about cars; how they work, the history of their development and different models, etc. The kind of stuff that a “car guy” would know.
4) Ditto but for computers. I don’t know anything beyond the very basic conceptual insight that information can be encoded with sufficient amounts of binary a la Morse Code and executed with electric switches.
5) Books about classical music. Ideally a classical music equivalent of The Story of Art, if you get that reference.
6) Ditto but for poetry. How to appreciate and understand poetry better.
7) Rental property investing. Buying and renting apartments, basically.
8) An abridged version of Gibbon, what version?
9) Ditto but for Boswell’s Life of Johnson.
10) Home repair.
11) Books on Modern India and Latin America. Basically the equivalents of The Search for Modern China or The Making of Modern Japan or Guy Arnold’s Africa: A Modern History, if those references mean anything.
12) A book about William Blake. His life but also his work and world and how to contextualize and understand it. Could potentially include the entire English Romantic poetry movement.
Thanks in advance for any replies. I’d love to strike up conversation about books in my wheelhouse if that’s anyone’s jam.
A book about William Blake. His life but also his work and world and how to contextualize and understand it. Could potentially include the entire English Romantic poetry movement.
The only recommendations I have are Chesterton’s biography of Blake (which is more “how Chesterton felt about Blake”), free to read online version here, and Peter Ackroyd’s Blake (published 1996) which is something along the same lines. They might not tell you very much about Blake, but they’ll give you good idea of how two writers reacted to Blake’s work and the discussion of which may give you a broad view of the imagery and topics in it. The Amazon page for Ackroyd’s book will also give you recommendations on other works about Blake, which may be helpful.
The thing to remember is that Blake is not only a poet but also an artist, a political radical, and a mystic. He also seems to have had something of Beethoven’s talent for falling out with/insulting friends and patrons 🙂
A sample from Chesterton, which will give you an idea if you could tolerate it or not:
Oh man, I had no idea Chesterton had a book about Blake. This is gonna be awesome.
You may not learn an awful lot about Blake but you will certainly learn a lot about Chesterton’s reactions to him and his work 🙂
There’s no need for the subjunctive, Deiseach; I already went off and read it. 🙂
That was fast work! 😀
To understand Blake, you have to start by understanding the Zeitgeist of the 18th century, then move on to trying to understand Blake the man. He loved God but was a radical heretic, which made him a liminal figure between Britons like Samuel Johnson who supported the Anglican theocracy and the deists/atheists of the Enlightenment. In the 1790s, the right-wing Francophone philosopher Joseph de Maistre started criticizing the spirit behind the French Revolution metaphorically; William Blake wrote poems like he’d met the spirits of the French and American Revolutions and had mixed feelings about those two people.
Reading Boswell’s Life of Johnson would immerse you in the British Zeitgeist, in a one-sided way.
Username origin revealed?
William Blake wrote poems like he’d met the spirits of the French and American Revolutions and had mixed feelings about those two people.
Yes indeed; from the beginning of his 1793 “America a Prophecy”:
I don’t know of any good blogs about books. But I cast a wide net for recommendations including:
– LibraryThing’s automatic recommendations based on what I’ve already read. (I used to use Amazon, but now they prefer “sponsored” links to those honestly derived from data. Goodreads ostensibly offers the same service, though only for in-print books – but I don’t trust them (since Amazon bought them), and don’t like the site style.)
– Bibliographies of books I liked
– On-line fora about topics (not books) that happen to mention books positively
– Word of mouth, including some small scale bloggers who post “what I’ve been reading” and “which of these famous books have you read” memes.
The resut is a list of books to read (fiction and non-fiction) that grows faster than I can read them, keeping me more or less content.
Note by the way that both LibraryThing and Goodreads include discussion about books, by their patrons. I don’t use that resource, but you might like it a lot.
[It’s also worth noting that I googled “the story of art” as a result of this post, and added it to my list. This is common behaviour for me. Also that I get my books from libraries, so I can afford to take home duds occassionally.]
Thanks for the recs. I’ve never heard of LibraryThing. It seems similar to Goodreads but with a more thorough selection of recommendations.
Glad to have helped with The Story of Art.
Charles Rosen has two books, one on classical and one on Romantic music. But they’re more advanced than the Gombrich, so if you don’t already know something about music theory I wouldn’t recommend trying them.
In addition to Deiseach’s recommendations, I liked Leo Damrosch’s biography of Blake. More a conventional bio than the other two, and a good deal of info on his art as well as the poetry.
And a book called India After Gandhi is cheap on Kindle today, if that’s how you like to read. I haven’t read it, but it got good reviews and I’ll probably pick it up later today.
Haven’t read your references, but I got a lot out of Edward Luce’s In Spite of The Gods: The Rise of Modern India.
Modern South Asia by Bose and Jalal is what the South Asian history course I took way back when used. It’s pretty good; I reread it some years back and found it engaging and informative.
I struggled with the unabridged version. I was told that it was chock-full of funny little anecdotes but I stopped 100-150 pages in because it seemed to just be endless correspondence between Johnson and his publishers about when projects would be published. I honestly wondered if I had downloaded the wrong book or something.
I’ve always felt like I must be missing the appeal of Johnson (if I have to hear one more “I refute him thus” anecdote I’m going to scream), and this is the first thing that’s persuaded me there’s something there. Thanks.
If you are interested in Boswell, you might want to look at his memoirs, which were discovered about a century ago and published.
Re: 11),
I was on a date recently with a woman of east Indian descent and our conversation included what books we’re reading. She talked about Planet India by Mira Kamdar, which sounds like it could fit what you’re looking for.
For home repair I recommend instead of a book, join a home repair or DIY forum, and look for Youtube videos on particular things you’re trying to do.
4) Richard Feynman has a pretty good series of lectures called “Computers from the Inside Out” that explain the basic principles of how computers work, in his inimitable style. It’s of course 40 years out of date, but the basic principles haven’t changed, and it’s a very good introduction.
6) Stephen Fry has a book called The Ode Less Traveled which is actually more like a textbook on how to write poetry – each chapter introduces a couple of concepts, and there are exercises at the end that review them. You’ll understand a lot more about how the art works if you can create it.
10) Any standard home repair guide is fine, the Reader’s Digest ones are very good (there’s a general one, and then a number of more specialized ones as well). But as someone above said, videos are often more informative. I’d get the book, and for any given new task, read the relevant pages, then watch a couple of videos. Nothing beats hands-on experience, however.
If by “other resources” for computers you’re willing to tolerate a video series, Ben Eater shows building a very basic 8-bit processor from the ground up with basic gates. I do warn you that it’s quite long overall; there are 45 videos, and they average in the 15-20 minute range. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLowKtXNTBypGqImE405J2565dvjafglHU
One relatively short one that shows how he builds things from concepts to working circuit is the one where he shows how to take a bit pattern and make a 7-segment display show the corresponding hex digit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zffjsXqATg (Later videos show a simpler but less conceptual method and expand this to a three-digit decimal display) This series a good job for me to understand how a bunch of on-and-off circuits can be turned into something legible through pure boolean gates. If his style engages you on that one, it may be worth your while to start back over from the beginning of the series.
It’s only one book; just read the whole thing. This version is the standard modern translation and includes Bernard Brodie’s synopsis & commentary, which you can use as an abridgement if you really don’t want to read it all the way through.
I’ve read “Vom Kriege” unabridged, it’s somewhat long and sometimes repetitive, but still very readable.
I’d worry that any abridgment would cut some of the parts making it, at times, distracting (Clausewitz really hates pedants, and make it known)
I’m no expert, but I enjoyed Paul Griffiths’s A Concise History of Western Music. (Assuming you mean “classical” in the broadest sense.)
> 10) Home repair.
What are you looking to get out of this? It’s a combination of knowledge as well as skill. You can’t learn the skills through anything other than practice.
If you want to fix small stuff in your own house, find something which is broken, watch several videos on YouTube on how to fix it, and then fix it. Don’t worry – you’ll probably do a poor job the first few dozen times, but ability will grow quickly.
If you want to develop skills without risking your own property, consider volunteering with Habitat for Humanity a few times. With luck you can get experience with many of the relevant trades and at least understand what a building should look like. They also have a good reputation for being able to take unskilled people off of the street and give them basic skills in short order.
If you want the textbook understanding of what a residence should look like, I suggest reading the International Residential Code, 2018 edition. Note Appendix J where you can learn the difference between alteration, reconstruction, rehabilitation, renovation and repair. Alternatively, contact your Authority Having Jurisdiction and ask them what building code they currently use and read that one instead.
4) the elements of computing systems: building a modern computer from first principles
Networking a top-down approach
These two books are nice
Someone I know recommended the book Code for computers. I think this is it:
https://smile.amazon.com/Code-Language-Computer-Developer-Practices-ebook/dp/B00JDMPOK2/
A straightforward reading of the Gospels suggests a radical anti-wealth position in the teachings of Jesus, not just the camel through the eye of a needle comment, but also the parable of the rich young man who is told to sell his possessions and give the proceeds to the poor. How should a Rockefeller, for example, who was a very religious protestant, reconcile wealth to such comments in the Gospels?
Prohibition of usury was once taken quite seriously in Christendom, but it has largely fallen away. Catholic thinkers in Renaissance Italy even came up with fancy Latin terms for what we would now call “time value of money” and “risk premium” to make usury acceptable, but is this also not an area where moderns have just ignored religious law for hundreds of years due to inconvenience? (For me personally, it seems there should be a moral difference between lending to a corporation with limited liability, and lending to an individual, but I’m not sure that’s relevant here).
How should a Rockefeller, for example, who was a very religious protestant, reconcile wealth to such comments in the Gospels?
If they can obey such commands, then sell all they have, give to the poor, and follow the Lord like Servant of God Dorothy Day.
If they can’t, try to live the Devout Life:
I would not call Jesus anti wealth. I would call him radical on money though. Merely being wealth neutral was quite radical at the time. I would rather characterize Him as saying that having money should be a really low priority – so it is not that having money is bad, it is that holding on to it is low enough priority that lots of things should make you willing to give it away. Jesus certainly talked about times having money is keeping people out of the Kingdom of Heaven.
But Jesus also talked about the possibility of using money well. So, for example in the parable of the talents in Matthew 25, the first two guys have quite a good bit of money. They invest it in a productive way, pleasing to the master. They are commended and rewarded. The guy who had more to start with is even rewarded more because he used it well. The guy who doesn’t invest what he was given is basically yelled at. This is not exactly pro money – it tells you that any money you have is really owned by God and you will be held accountable for how pleasing to God your use of it was. But that parable is perhaps the clearest example of Jesus saying that having money isn’t bad in and of itself.
Or, for instance, look at the parable of the dishonest manager in Luke 16. There, Jesus treats money as a thing that will disappear soon – so why hold on to it rather than making people happy with it. There it is not as if having money is bad. It is just that it would be silly to act as if you will have that money forever. As in the parable of the talents, the money isn’t really yours. It is, if anything, a test to see how you will manage God’s money. Dying with money not used for God’s purposes is the last thing you should do to pass that test.
I don’t know much about how Rockefeller reconciled his actions with the Gospels. That would be fascinating if someone does know. I know that all kinds of churches have tried to regulate the use of money. You already mentioned the medieval attempts. Luther certainly had things to say on the subject of usury. The branch of Puritans who ended up in America ended up trying and failing to regulate the economy to prevent unreasonable profit. If nothing else, that one had the problem of incentives to get around their regulations. My reading of the history of attempts by the church to regulate greed is this – no regulations will overcome a human heart that loves money more than God, and that was always the problem. As Jesus says, you can’t serve two masters.
As for the practical problem today, a rich man who wants to follow Jesus ought to take money very lightly and very seriously. Lightly in that giving up the money for some more important thing should be easily thinkable. Seriously in that using the money well is a serious responsibility. Such a man ought to seek out wise and faithful economists, business leaders, investors, and so on to learn how to get it right. Yes, finding those people might be crazy hard, but either giving away or investing Rockefeller level wealth is a crazy hard thing to get right. Give or invest 10 dollars and you mostly just have to have good first order effects. Give or invest 10^10 dollars and the second and third order effects could easily do outright harm, much less fail to do as much good as you would like.
Nitpick/clarification: The Parable of the Talents is usually interpreted as referring to making good use of our skills and abilities (indeed, our word “talent” comes directly from the parable) rather than about money per se, although the parable would lost much of its force if we supposed that making money was ipso facto a bad thing.
Glancing at my parables book, that’s one of a few popular interpretations. It’s also been traditionally read as an allegory for Christ’s return and reward/punishment of people based on their behaviour. Alternatively, a somewhat less eschatological take – it’s about faithfulness of Jesus’ followers and a warning to non-followers.
Oh, to be sure, the parable of the talents can be generalized from just how you use your money to how you use everything you were given. I think it should be so generalized. But what it teaches on money is in no way diminished by the fact that the principle can be generalized. It’s also a discussion of Christ’s return, and it’s also warning people that when he does return he’s going to ask whether people are being faithful. But it’s doing so in the context of whether they were faithful stewards.
I think one trend in scholarship is to read the Dishonest Manager/Unjust Steward (which is one of the weirder ones) as being about the necessity of decisive action in light of the coming apocalyptic event. This is similar to some scholarly readings of the Pearl of Great Price and the Buried Treasure.
Oh, certainly. One possible reason not to treat money as forever is that you might die, but another possible reason is the world going up in fire. I was being deliberately vague as to why the money might disappear, since I don’t think the parable makes it super explicit. But I think that whatever else the parable is doing, it is saying not to treat your money as if you will always have it.
Well, firstly, the eye of the needle comment comes from the parable of the rich young man.
Secondly, Jesus does not tell the young man to sell everything he owns at first. First he tells him to behave morally and keep the law. The young man says he does and asks if he can do even more. Then Jesus tells him to sell his possessions (in one version) or everything he holds (in another). In both cases, there’s room to interpret this not as a call to get rid of all his wealth but to get rid of all his luxuries and give that money to the poor instead.
The Eye of the Needle referred to a packed gate in Jerusalem. The point of a camel through the eye of the needle is not to say rich people cannot go to heaven. It is to point out that there are additional difficulties and temptations brought by wealth, in particular the desire to take something expensive (like a camel) with you. Keep in mind this comment comes immediately after Jesus tells him to give to charity and the young man is sad. The context is Jesus is saying he is restrained from following Jesus due to his wealth.
On top of that, Jesus then says the person could still go to heaven because, despite his attachment to wealth and weakness, Jesus saves.
So, all in all, it’s not that hard to reconcile. Jesus is laying a prohibition above and beyond what he expects ordinary people to follow. The passage is more relevant to ideas of priestly or monastic poverty than to the laypeople, since the passage makes very clear rich people can still get to heaven if they are moral and believe in Jesus.
No, it hasn’t. Every state has some form of usury law, whether it’s an explicit usury law or interest rate limits or whatever. Likewise, there’s the Federal concept of unlawful debt/unlawful interest that protects against loansharking.
Likewise, the prohibition on usury was only really a thing from the 4-5th centuries to the 15th century. And it varied in strength and seriousness over the period. It was not present in Jesus’ time and we know some early priests and bishops loaned money for interest. Likewise, after the 15th century the Church increasingly relaxed its standards. Also, even during these times, banking families found ways to make loans. Jews and Italian bankers were common in the Middle Ages. Instruments similar to modern Islamic banking were also not considered usurious.
+1
Looking at the context of what Jesus says about wealth in the Rich Young Man scenario, RYM asks “What more can I do than be an upright citizen under the Law of Moses?” Jesus says supererogatory virtue is giving all your wealth to the poor. RYM says “That’s hard!” and Jesus tells His disciples that trying to enter Heaven while rich is like trying to pass a camel through the eye of a needle.
The Catholic and Orthodox teaching is that we the living almost never know who’s in Heaven and never know who’s in Hell[1], but the Catholic concept of beatification implies a truth claim that “heroic virtue”, a high level of supererogatory moral behavior, probably factors in getting one there.
There are so many different Protestant theologies, you might as well ask rich believers on a case-by-case basis. Luther’s sola fide is a big influence, so you could say hopefully “Yeah, being rich is immoral, but I feel safe with even with that guilty because faith is the only factor in getting to Heaven. God is generous!”
[1]I don’t know the theology behind the old custom of paying priests to celebrate Masses for dead kin in Purgatory, as that implies a presumption that they definitely escaped Hell by Grace but weren’t virtuous enough to zoom to Heaven like a Saint.
I don’t know the theology behind the old custom of paying priests to celebrate Masses for dead kin in Purgatory, as that implies a presumption that they definitely escaped Hell by Grace but weren’t virtuous enough to zoom to Heaven like a Saint.
Not to tootle my own horn, but around three years ago I wrote a post for a Protestant audience about the subject – if you’ll indulge me, here’s a slightly edited version of it (I stripped out all the Dante – yes, I know, I know).
This is long, so I’ll break it up into chunks:
Purgatory
In the early Church, penance was generally performed in public and generally consisted of being excluded from the common life of the Church and the sacraments for a period ranging from months to years (depending on the severity of the sin). When the Irish saints moved on to evangelise Europe during the 6th-12th centuries (approximately), they brought with them the practice of private confession and austere penitential practices (fasting, pilgrimage, alms-giving, mortifications of various kinds, prayers and so forth) for fixed periods – they developed penitential canons, with a focus on reparation and the temporal punishment of the guilt of the sin.
This last is going to be important, for that was what laid the groundwork for the length of time indulgences could remit. First, some basic definitions.
(1) What’s Purgatory?
Importantly, what Purgatory is NOT: a second chance, another bite at the apple, or a place of everlasting torment. Purgatory is not a way to wiggle out of Hell – you are already saved, you are already one of the Blessed – this is why we speak of the Holy Souls and why they are numbered amongst the Communion of Saints so that they can intercede for us. Purgatory is a place of hope, which is where the contrast between it and Limbo comes in: Limbo was considered to be a place of “perfect natural felicity” (note the ‘natural’ as distinct from ‘supernatural’, i.e. it is what the Utopias of Earth strive to be, without war, disease, hunger, death or strife, but those within were forever deprived of the Beatific Vision, the presence of God). There are no pains in Limbo, but neither is there any hope. Purgatory does involve pains (whether we’re going with the folk-religion view of pains as severe as the fires of Hell or a more sophisticated view) but it does have hope, because there is a fixed term and a limit, and this is a purification before entering into the many mansions.
So, then, what is Purgatory? A definition from the Catechism:
(cont.)
(2) Where is that in the Bible?
2 Maccabees 12: 39-46
Other verses considered to relate to Purgatory are 1 Corinthians 3: 10-15, with regard to the mention of “saved as through fire”, where the “work” is our works in our lives as Christians; if we have lived as we should, these will endure, but if we (as most of us have done) have backslid and fallen along the way, these works will be consumed and we will be as gold purified in the refiner’s crucible by having the dross burned away:
(3) I still don’t get it: if you’re saved, why are you in Purgatory, not Heaven?
Here we get into the technical stuff – Purgatory deals with the temporal effects of sin, the satisfaction of Divine Justice. Once again, the Catechism:
There are crimes which are not a sin, and there are sins which are not a crime (though we might think that they should be). How can reparation be made? How can I make it up to the one whom I have offended, injured, damaged? If I steal money, I can pay it back, but how can I pay back angry words, blows, neglect, injustice?
Sin is a real thing, and it has an effect upon the soul. Being “spiritual” does not mean a gauzy, ethereal, airy-fairy, insubstantial thing – “pie in the sky when we die”. It means that it leaves marks on the soul the same way that if I punch someone, he has a black eye and I have barked knuckles. I’ve hurt him and I’ve hurt myself (and of course, I’ve hurt my relationship with God).
Habits of sin leave a mark and a tendency, the same way that a constantly blowing wind will leave the branches of a tree bent in one direction. It’s something akin to the way we form habits, both bad and good. The neurological pathways in the brain get “etched” by repetition, reinforced by chemical rewards and so the habit becomes automatic. To break the habit, we have to re-train and re-wire the brain.
To break the habit of sin, to untangle the ball of yarn, to straighten the bent branch, to untwist the coil of wire – that is the purpose of Purgatory. Like burning off the dross and slag when turning iron to steel in a furnace, Purgatory removes the attachment to sin and creatures (which doesn’t only mean living things, it means all things in Creation which are good in themselves, but which are not God) until we are totally united to the will of God.
Traditionally, the fires of Purgatory have been represented as being of the same intensity as the fires of Hell. Now, whether you wish to conceive of these as actual real fires, or supernatural fires, or some other medium, think of the fire as being the fire of love. The intense desire and longing of the soul to be in the presence of God and to be united with the One who is Love is what is the torment, as in all the love poetry where the poet laments what parts them from their beloved:
(cont.)
(the end, finally!)
(4) Who are these “Holy Souls” you mention?
The souls in Purgatory, the souls undergoing purification, the saved and blessed who ask our prayers and who pray for us. We call them holy because they are; their faults and flaws are imperfections on their beauty, not the self-willed sterility and rejection of God that the damned souls in Hell have inflicted upon themselves. Their prayers of intercession for us are as effectual as those of the saints in Heaven standing before God, and our prayers for each other are what the Church Militant here on Earth and the Church Suffering or Church Expectant in Purgatory have to do with one another in the mutual bonds of love as the Mystical Body of Christ.
Just as particular penances for particular sins lasted a certain period of time (days, months, or longer) so the corresponding view of how ‘long’ a stay in Purgatory is fixed depends on the amount and nature of sins.
This doesn’t mean that, for instance, Sinner A has to spend six thousand, five hundred and ninety-one years in Purgatory (because Purgatory is outside of space-time) but that IF you totted up all the penalties associated with the unrepented or unpurged sins according to the older use of separation from the life of the public Church on earth for fixed terms, they would add up to a certain amount of time. The same way that, by our prayers and suffrages for them, it can be considered as working along the lines of parole.
Think of it as those sentences you hear from secular courts of someone being sentenced to three hundred years in prison. Obviously, no human can serve that kind of sentence, even if you count they die in jail and you keep their body in the prison graveyard. It is a measure of the penalties they have incurred due to the number, nature and gravity of their crimes.
(Then we get onto indulgences, but that’s a whole other kettle of fish).
Since I have a chance to ask someone who seems to know, when does this doctrine develop? I’m familiar with it primarily from Dante (and parts of your description do sound very familiar there), but I wasn’t familiar with the biblical derivation. How much of the doctrine of Purgatory is actually around before Dante, how much of it is drawing on the Divina Commedia?
The Anglo-Saxons talk about it.
I’ve read a text about some wicked noble who has a near-death experience, in which he is shown hell, purgatory and heaven. He then comes back to life and mends his ways. It’s all very medieval and gruesome.
IIRC, his vision of purgatory includes people living in paradise most of the time, except that fire comes up to their waists for an hour each day.
Edit: It’s the vision of Tundale. I’ll reread the pugatory stuff in a while. But all the Middle English is starting to give me a headache.
@Rebecca Friedman
Catholic tradition is older than Dante. How much older is apparently debatable: Jacques le Goff places the full development in the late 12th century, but many previous texts allude to a purifying stage directly (the Dialogues of Gregory the Great) or indirectly in the practice of prayers for faithful departed.
Ott’s Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma would discuss the sources for purgatory, but I don’t have access atm. I swear I always notice these questions when I’m not at home….
Here it is:
https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/foster-three-purgatory-poems-vision-of-tundale
Purgatory starts at line 1495.
ln. 1721 and onwards is an interesting account of purgatory:
@Rebecca Friedman
Okay, finally home to look at Ott. The Scripture appealed to is 2 Maccabees 12:42-46, Mt 12:32, 1 Cor 3:12, and Mt 5:26. The Latin Fathers are appealed to from Tradition, including St. Cyprian and St. Augustine. Ott also adds this:
Oh wow. That is quite a lot more responses than I was expecting. Thank you all! Especially thank you for the poem, Lambert. I need to read more of that when I have time to settle down and work through the Middle English, it sounds fascinating. If also a bit disturbing.
And definitely a different place from the one Dante’s describing.
AFAIK, this is a medieval religious invention not supported by archeology or contemporary sources.
It appears you’re correct. Still, the phrase (which is used elsewhere, though the Jews often used elephants or other even larger animals) still meant something more akin to ‘great difficulty’ than ‘complete impossibility’.
Or at least that’s what I was taught in those sources. Perhaps people are still repeating the myths.
In all of the synoptic gospels, it’s followed by Jesus saying in so many words that “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible” (or various phrasings to that effect). That strongly indicates that impossibility (but for a miracle) is what the “camel through the needle’s eye” image is going for.
The rich young man isn’t a parable (a fictitious story Jesus told told to illustrate a point). It was an encounter with an actual person. It is not clear that he would have advised every person to sell all their possessions, although there are passages in which Jesus tells people they can’t be his disciple unless they give up all their ties, including loving family more than him. It’s hard to turn the Gospels into a legal code (I’d say, intentionally), in part because it’s basically impossible to take everything Jesus said literalisticaly since he uses hyperbole so much. But if the Protestant Reformation means don’t worry about the fact that you love Mammon more than God, he’ll save you anyway, then that is awfully hard for me to square with what Jesus actually said. Do you really have “faith” in Jesus if you systematically disbelieve him whenever his teachings actually intersect with your own stuff?
Money has positive valence in a lot of the parables, but this is an unreliable test of Jesus’ teaching since most of his parables are allegories in which money stands for something else. But the parable of the rich fool and the parable of Dives and Lazaras seem to contain warning about riches as their direct meaning. At the same time, there are explicitly righteous rich people in the Bible (Abraham, Job) so there is an acceptable way to use wealth in certain circumstances. Holding onto it when Jesus says point blank to give it up so you can literally follow him is not one of those circumstances…
I feel quite confident that the gate in Jerusalem story is a preacher’s fable with no basis in fact, and one which removes much of the sting of the hyperbole. Jesus also talked about swallowing camels, and no that wasn’t a common name for an alcoholic mixer in 1st century Palestine.
I was going to point out that it’s not a parable, but you beat me to it. I’d add that the scholarly consensus now tends to see the parables as specifically metaphorical stories or similes, as opposed to interpretations where they are allegorical.
One place I’d look to see Jesus’ attitude towards wealth and possessions in a non-hyperbolic fashion is the directions he gives (in Mark 6, among other places) for mission travel. It’s very minimalistic – often appealed to by scholars trying to compare Jesus to a Cynic philosopher.
That’s a bad place to look, since Jesus makes it clear that those instructions are for that particular mission when he contrasts them with new instructions later in his ministry:
That bit – only Lukan, I believe – is in the context of talking about the crisis he’s predicted. Point taken, though. I think at a minimum, we can say that Jesus was in favour of having no more than you strictly need.
I’m not sure what fine distinction you are making between “allegorical” and “metaphorical stories or similies”.
Surely the “consensus” is not denying that things in the parable stand for other things, e.g. a Father/King usually stands for God, seed can stand for the gospel message, sheep stand for people, wedding garment/oil represents righteousness or spiritual preparation, etc. That’s all I meant by allegorical…
It seems to me that the Rich Fool and the Rich Man and Lazaras are in the minority of parables that are meant to be read “straight” without taking them to be allegories in this sense (although I do take them to be essentially fictitious in the sense that they do not pick out actual specific historical individuals, nor do I think the purpose of the latter parable was to give actual literal details about the topography of heaven and hell).
Cracking open the relevant section of my book, I see that I’m misremembering things. Scholars now are less against seeing the parables as allegories (defined as “a series of related metaphors”) than the 19th century Germans. However, what the Germans were likely responding to – over-allegorizing of the parables – is also a problem. There’s some really baroque interpretations of parables where every single element is allegorized to some bit of later Christian theology.
I would say instead, the simplest interpretation is often the best one (these were stories told orally, after all, which argues against complicated interpretations), and you have to be really careful to avoid reading later interpretations into the original bit.
The tricky part comes when scholars start asking what the original form of a parable was, and what was added by the gospel authors.
Is the difference that in an allegory every element is significant, whereas in a parable, only the broad point is?
It’s less about allegory vs metaphor – mea culpa; I haven’t really been covering parables much in my effortpost series because it’s a major rabbithole (you can write entire doorstop books on a single parable!) – than about the degree of allegorization.
A common scholarly position now is that a lot of the parables, especially the weirder ones, are about decisive action in light of the coming apocalyptic event, or about the upheavals and reversals that this will bring – and so, you don’t really need a full-on allegory. A simple metaphor will do.
It gets complicated when you start wondering if everything in the parable as we have it now is original to Jesus. Take the Wicked Tenants. The current forms all include something about how the vineyard’s owners will have revenge, and a Psalms citation. It’s thus, by the time of the canonical gospels, already very clearly read as an allegory for God’s shifting favour in response to the Jewish authorities’ rejection of Jesus, etc. There’s other allegorization going on, possibly – the servant beaten over the head for John the Baptist’s beheading is one, as I recall.
However, there’s a decent number of scholars who see those bits as later additions, and read the parable as concluding with the death of the son. In that reading, it’s a story of reversal, creating complete disaster for the landowner: the guy’s son is dead, and the ones who killed him are still on his land. Not good!
On the other hand, the allegorization of the parable of the Sower already present in the text seems to now be seen (following a rejection, arguably an excessive rejection, of allegorization in the 19th century) as likely or at least plausibly original. That would make the parable something like Jesus’ commentary on missionary activity, etc. (Then, having concluded that, scholars get to the good stuff: detailed examination of sowing techniques and crop yields in the Hellenistic ancient near east. Aw yeahhhhhhh.)
For an example of the sort of allegorization that is generally rejected now, the Good Samaritan has had a lot of church exegesis positioning it as an allegory about salvation, with every single thing mentioned in it related to some element of Christian theology.
+1 to the things Aaron wall said.
I wasn’t aware a parable needed to be fictitious. If they do, then that was an error on my part.
Surely not. The Young Rich Man said he kept all the laws and then was greatly sad at having to sell his possessions. Jesus follows up saying how difficult it is for the rich to enter heaven with saying that God can still save them. “The disciples were even more amazed, and said to each other, “Who then can be saved?” Jesus looked at them and said, “With man this is impossible, but not with God; all things are possible with God.”
Jesus begins saying that no one is good and orders the Young Rich Man to sell ὑπάρχοντα or ἔχεις. Both imply something more concrete than, for example, περιουσία or κληρονομία or πλούτη. Now, it’s possible that Jesus was being metaphorical. But it could also be that Jesus was calling him to asceticism and to follow him rather than spend his time caring for his patrimony.
Fair point, as said above.
Yes, it could be particular advice for that one rich young man: he claims to have carried out all the requirements of the Law (and Jesus does not seem to doubt him) so that was not what was separating him from perfect union with the will of God.
So what was? It seems it was his attachment to his wealth – maybe he liked being the wealthy young man who could live in comfort. Even if he was generous in charity to the poor and almsgiving, if his wealth/personal status/comfort was the important driving force in his life, then the way for him to attain salvation was to cut the cord, and quite drastically: his love of his wealth was what was holding him back so get rid of the wealth.
Another rich person might get quite different advice if their besetting sin was different. However, we should err on the side of caution and take it as a general rule that attachment to wealth is not good, rather than presuming “well, I’m okay, I’m not in danger of loving my wealth too much”.
Usury, in medieval Christian and Muslim thought, was any charging of interest, not just a charging of high interest, which is what modern usury laws are about.
I should have been more explicit about usury. What I mean is, lending with any interest at all was once forbidden, and that restriction has fallen away since the Renaissance. Modern usury laws only target what’s regarded as immorally excessive rates of interest. What’s forbidden in scripture is any lending at interest at all.
More precisely, the Torah forbade Jews to lend money at interest to Jews. At some times, Christians have extended this to include Christians lending money to Christians. I’m not saying this is an unreasonable extension, but that’s not quite the same thing as something directly and clearly forbidden.
Yes.
–CS Lewis, Mere Christianity
I know that this isn’t the point, but did CS Lewis predict the phrase “dunking on” someone?
Literally one letter off, and it makes perfect sense in context. I had to read it twice to make sure I wasn’t misreading.
I think that’s probably a transcription error for “thinking of”; you get these a lot with online versions of books that have been scanned in and the optical reader makes a hash of some words, and there never seems to be any editing done to fix them up.
Or indeed printed versions where they’ve relied on “we scanned in an old copy of the original and ran the type setting from that, rather than do it all the old-fashioned way”.
Deiseach is likely right and ‘dunking’ was supposed to be ‘thinking’, but dunking of gives me an image of a dunk tank as the standard punishment for loan sharks and the like. Perhaps I am too easily amused by typos.
I was searching for a quote that I already had in mind, and I apologize for any transcription errors. I just went to find my hard copy of “Mere Christianity” and check the quotation, but I appear to have misplaced it. =\
I think the cultures that actually prohibited usury have historically allowed investment as long as you set it up as a defined share of the risk/profit, rather than as something where you get to collect the money even if the business goes belly up. This would mean Lewis was wrong that the stock market is inherently luxurious. Pretty sure there are Muslim investment funds set up to avoid usury.
Yeah, as much as I like having Lewis on my side here, his discussion is almost as imprecise as my (flippant) comment—he seems to equate interest with usury even as he admits he has no expertise. And it’s not so much that folks today ignore the prohibition on usury as that they don’t understand it (like thinking all interest is usury…), or think it no longer applies, or think modern economics has shown it was always a bad idea; often I hear all three. These objections aren’t always made in good faith, but there’s a kernel of truth in each one: we have to explain what it is, we have to show it still applies and why Christians largely stopped talking about it, and we have to have the expertise to apply, say, titles of interest from medieval discussions to modern financial instruments.
Nick, I think you are operating within the framework expounded on a link you once posted with an extensive analysis of the difference between usury and interest. (https://zippycatholic.wordpress.com/2014/11/10/usury-faq-or-money-on-the-pill/) In my opinion, that analysis itself begs the question: it assumes that an unsecured loan (i.e. without a mutuum) is in itself unlawful instead of arguing why one should regard it so. Moreover, I left that reading with a distinct impression that the author was trying to read into the scriptural prohibitions something that was not there (the acceptability of loans with mutuum) I could not understand why the author could simultaneously:
A) think that such a non-obvious reading was consistent with scripture
B) think that other readings (“it’s a prohibition meant for a world with no inflation”, “requiring an interest means the loan is not a praiseworthy charitable act , but a business transaction where no supernatural merit is gained” , “it is an admonishment against taking advantage of the poor”, etc.) are a twisting of the meaning of scripture
FWIW, I think the scriptural admonitions against interest are reflections of a world with almost no knowledge of the basics of economics, where money gets its value from being literal gold/silver i.e. a luxury good with no intrinsic worth except as a status symbol, and where its role as an exchange facilitator is not considered as a source of wealth.
My new stupid-phone turned usurious into luxurious…
@Nick
Titles of interest are also distinct from investment. The former is a (supposed or actual) excuse to charge a nonzero but bounded interest on a loan. The latter needn’t be structured as interest one loan to an individual person at all, it could be a share of a joint venture that gives you the right to a specific share of the profit.
@PedroS
I’m not relying on it at all, actually, though I don’t know that anything I’ve said is inconsistent with it; it was Randy who mentioned him last time this came up, and I alluded to my own minor disagreement with Zippy in my response.
I note, though, that Zippy labels one of his questions “I don’t get it. Why is charging interest on a loan always morally wrong?” and explains Aquinas’s treatment of usury. On Zippy’s view, it’s selling something that doesn’t exist, an expectation of wealth which was never created. Now per Aquinas justice is to give each man his due, but if you sell something nonexistent, you’re due nothing. So usury is unjust. I don’t see how that begs the question at all.
I’m happy, anyway, to answer objections as I’m fit to, but you’ll have to be more specific. What basic economics did we miss?
” it’s selling something that doesn’t exist, an expectation of wealth which was never created. Now per Aquinas justice is to give each man his due, but if you sell something nonexistent, you’re due nothing. So usury is unjust. I don’t see how that begs the question at all.”
In modern times, every instance of selling labor is also an instance where one is exchanging something for another thing which does not yet exists: people are not paid every day, so employees are giving something of value (their work) for 30 days in exchange for a promise of a salary to be paid on the 30th day. Likewise, if wages are paid on the 1st day, the employer is paying for labour which does not yet exist. If deferred compensation for labour is licit, why should capital be considered differently? IMO, medieval and neo-scholastic reasoning assume, without proving, that money is qualitatively different from other forms of capital and that is the only reason they claim its use cannot be remunerated.
I can see absolutely no principled reason to consider that receiving payment for use of capital is morally dubious but receiving payment for use of a field is proper. Money is just as real and productive as land or labour, and if receiving rents from land is proper, so is receiving rents from capital.
The obsession on the moral impermissibility of receiving a profit from lending money cannot, in my eyes, but lead to a situation where no moral person lends any money and therefore only the most unscrupulous people will lend money, leading to even more exploration of the poor than otherwise. If a doctrine leads to bad fruits (such as loansharking or considerable inhibition of economic activity), I think the parable of the Fig Tree requires one to consider that the doctrine may be at least partially wrong.
Not paying labourers for their work at the end of each day is also forbidden in the Torah, by the way.
I’m not particularly convinced by the Scholastic arguments that usury is intrinsically evil, but there is an important difference between farmers and say credit card companies even in the modern day. A farmer makes the majority of his profit from people who use his product responsibly to get fed. The credit card company makes the majority of its profit from people who use his services irresponsibly and thus end up worse off than if they hadn’t used the product. The farmer isn’t secretly hoping the person buys too much food now and starves to death later as a result. The moneylender is hoping for the outcome where the client ends up worse off, and trying to convince as many people as possible to go down that road. To see a moral hazard here, you only need to accept the Golden Rule.
@Aron Wall
FWIW I will try to get to everyone’s objections today. This discussion is very interesting, more so than last time this came up, but I am only an amateur, am a day laborer myself, etc. 🙂
>The credit card company makes the majority of its profit from people who use his services irresponsibly and thus end up worse off than if they hadn’t used the product.
Citation needed. Blood from a stone and all that.
@Lambert,
Unfortunately I’m too busy right now to do the necessary legwork. Perhaps it is not true.
But if you reinterpret my comment as an explanation of why ignorant people who didn’t do the economic analysis might (possibly incorrectly) think there is a moral problem with the credit card industry, then I believe my point goes through without a citation. 😉
It is certainly true that the credit card companies want to screen out people who are too irresponsible or poor to pay the money back at all. What they presumably like best is people who are a bit better off, who get in too deep to pay off the principal but still regularly make their monthly payments. They certainly aren’t making much money off people who pay off their full balance every month (which depending on the contract, frequently doesn’t lead to any interest being charged at all).
Well, it probably isn’t good for the credit card companies if these people die before paying off the principle (assuming that people with high unpaid credit card balances are unlikely to have a positive enough net worth that the principle balance can be taken from the estate following death).
Does that follow if the amount paid over time exceeds the principal? Principal plus things like operating expenses and inflation, of course.
For the lender, the principal is an investment. Like buying stock. The lender paying back the principal is like a stock buyback*–they’re not out money, but their income stream is cut-off. Best case scenario is for the borrower to continually pay them dividends by making the minimum payment every month–well, minimum payment plus some late fees, annual fees, etc.
*It might not actually be, I know nothing about stock markets. But it’s like what you can assume I imagine the term means.
…And that is exactly the sort of logic that gets you usury.
It’s hard to say, without inside information, where credit card companies make the most profit. They make the most revenue, however, from interchange fees — the cut they take from all credit card transactions. This seems to be reasonably honest money. Cardholders who carry a balance certainly pay a lot more in fees, but they also tend to be a higher credit risk, so whether these cardholders as a whole are more profitable or not is unclear.
That’s a good point (and makes me glad I edited ‘credit card companies’ to the more general ‘lenders’).
I do kind of wish that these fees were more transparent. Some gas stations have a different cash price because (presumably) for the station the margins are pretty low and those fees aren’t insubstantial. I wouldn’t be adverse to using a debit card (or ATM, even) instead if the merchant and I could split the difference–right now the incentive is for the borrower to use the card, the merchant pays, and I get a small cut back in points.
In the broad scheme, are credit cards facilitating commerce, or are they basically taking value by virtue of a superior negotiating position? Clearly the card users think they bring them value.
I find credit cards much more convenient than dealing with ATMs and change, so they definitely bring the consumer some value. The relevant question is whether they are worth the cost, hidden among increased prices at every merchant that accepts credit cards. Even if I could find out, and even if I decided the answer is no, it’s still a coordination problem. If I unilaterally switch to cash, in most cases I pay the same increased price as someone using credit. The costs are distributed among all customers whether they use credit or not, so I might as well use credit.
Loans certainly create value (I’m not going to commit myself to commerce), and usurious loans can too (which is not to say the usury isn’t unjust). Of course, folks can still be suckered by bad contracts or lack of transparency even if they think they’re getting a good deal.
@ Jake, yep, exactly.
According to this link, credit card companies make ~26% of their revenue from interchange fees and ~8% from annual card fees. So while they would almost certainly prefer people to maintain a balance (and take cash advances, and trigger late payment penalties), they are still making significant revenue from people who pay in full every month
@pqjk2
That still leaves just shy of 2/3 of the money coming from penalty fees, cash advance fees, and interest.
One of the original disputed claims was
Which appears to be true. Take out that 2/3 and I’m not convinced the CC companies would even be operational.
So just for background, the credit card company does not actually make the loan. The bank does. Sometimes they are one and the same (Amex and Discover follow this model, essentially), but for the more popular Visa and Mastercard cards, they are just running the network and getting a transaction fee. The bank is the one you pay interest to if you are running a balance.
The economics of lending are one thing, but I was more just trying to get at how the laws governing usury “carry over” into Christian law. It seems like, the OT bars charging interest to gentiles, but then from there it’s unclear if that “drops out” with all the other OT law (ex-Ten Commandments) such as kosher dietary requirements or persists as something Christians are supposed to follow. And in any case since the initial prohibition was on lending with interest to gentiles, how could that carry over in any case, since gentiles are the ones who went and adopted Christianity?
Different kinds of businesses vary, but there are costs associated with handling large amounts of cash (particularly losses due to theft, and costs of security to prevent that sort of thing), and I know there are at least some businesses where the reduction in those costs is sufficient to more than make up for the interchange fees. So it isn’t exclusively consumers who benefit from credit cards as an option.
In the era before fiat money, wouldn’t repayment have been primarily in kind? That is- our money is gold and silver; I lend you money (which means I am physically handing you a certain quantity of silver or coupons for it) and I expect to be repaid the same quantity of silver. In that context, charging any interest at all is clearly just profiting without doing any work.
In the modern world, though, money loses value over time, so charging “interest” is necessary simply to be repaid the same amount you originally lent.
My understanding (and it’s as a layman) is that inflation occurred under specie as well. If the supply of money increases more than goods, then inflation will occur, and vice versa–“fiat money” is nowhere in that definition. The one that sticks out in my mind is the large amounts of inflation in Spain that occurred due to all the silver coming in due to the discovery of the New World.
One of the benefits of fiat money is that they can try to target small, predictable inflations, because both large amounts of inflation and any amount of deflation have terrible consequences. But changes in the value of money weren’t something that were invented with fiat currency.
Which is why inflation is a fine choice for an extrinsic title of interest, provided the rate is pretty stable. It’s not a blanket justification for any old interest rate, though.
One thing that would clear up an immense amount of uncertainty over the justice of interest rates is marking how much of a given rate is inflation, operating expenses, lost opportunity, etc. It would become more obvious to the borrower to what degree the lender is just trying to break even vs. trying to profit from his having money and your not—and while there is always opportunity to lie about, say, how much is required for operating expenses, at least, should that come to light, everyone would agree it is unjust.
Isn’t the proper economics answer to this question essentially “All of it”?
Assuming a reasonably competitive lending industry, there’s no real reason to believe any particular lender is earning “excess profit.” Why should “lending money” be inherently more profitable than say, building a new widget factory? To the extent that lending someone money means paying the opportunity cost of not building a new widget factory, then all of the interest rate is, in a certain sense, compensation rather than exploitation…
That argument proves too much, Matt; assuming a reasonably competitive anything industry, no one is earning any profit.
Economists bite this bullet; it’s called the “Zero-profit condition” or “Zero-profit theorem”.
” It would become more obvious to the borrower to what degree the lender is just trying to break even ”
Why should moneylending, among all possible occupations, be morally required to generate no wealth above breaking even? This reminds me of a conversation I had long ago with my father-in-law, where he was arguing that the production of things required for survival (like food staples) should not be remunerated above the break-even point : every profit would be “exploiting people on their need for survival”. NO matter how much I counter-argued that e.g. farmers who grow wheat have as much right to gain wealth to provide for their children as people who make luxuries, he would still argue “I do not care about their wealth: I care that they follow God’s admonitions to care for the poor and to not exploit people’s need”. The thought that all those farmers are not society’s slaves and could morally decide to devote themselves to some other occupation which allowed them improve their lot (thus leaving all fields abandoned and causing famine ) just could not move him from his position that some occupations should, in the name of Christian charity, be as poorly remunerated as possible.
Right. If you’re allowed to make a net profit in everything but farming/moneylending/medicine/whatever, then you are now living in a society where the only farming/moneylending/medicine that will be provided is that which is motivated purely by charitable giving (and thus, will be dramatically undersupplied relative to, well, everything else…)
Even in a regime of zero inflation, lending you $100 for a year means that I do not get to use that $100 for that year. To expect something as recompense for that hardship is surely reasonable.
I think it’s the love of money that’s the problem, not money stewarded well. While Jesus spoke a lot against the wealthy, but he also accepted a lot of hospitality from the wealthy. I think it would be fairer to say that Jesus spoke strongly against greed and failure to care for others, not wealth itself.
The rich young man who was told to sell what he had and give it to the poor had asked Jesus a specific question: What must I do to inherit eternal life? He was a bit of a braggart actually: I’ve kept the commandments since my youth, look at how good I am! I bet you can’t find anything to fault me on! I’m speaking highly of you, I want you do speak highly of me in front of all these people! Jesus’ response to the question of what the man must do to inherit eternal life was to name the one thing that the rich young man couldn’t (or wouldn’t) do: give up his wealth. I do believe these words have worth at face value, but I think if we follow on, Jesus is making a different point.
After the man left, Jesus said it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. The disciples asked him back “Then who can be saved?” Jesus’ response: “With man this is impossible, but not with God.” His point (I believe), there’s nothing we can do to be saved, salvation is God’s gift to give, not something to be earned.
Yeah, this. Keeping any money you could help the poor with a moral hazard, but God offers to take you to Heaven despite that and all other moral failings.
FWIW, Calvin did not ignore the prohibition on usury, but instead decided that it was part of the rules given to the historical kingdom of Israel, and therefore not applicable to modern Christian nations. He was still very concerned about making sure excessive interest was not charged, but I suppose you could say that it was a slippery slope from there to where we are now.
I’m not super plugged in to these debates but it seems like laws from the Old Testament (and sometimes the New Testament as well) are maintained or punted pretty much arbitrarily, with some rationalization like Calvin’s offered up. It usually turns out that the flexibility is rooted in the need to convert gentiles to the faith who otherwise couldn’t be got, so e.g. kosher dietary restrictions didn’t last very long.
There’s always a danger of using any principle in a biased way, but when you read Calvin he truly comes across as someone trying to put together rules consistent with logic, Torah, Jesus, and Paul the apostle. I’m not saying everyone has to agree with what he came up with. I’m not saying other people never just pick and choose which bits they like and which they don’t. I’m saying that Calvin at least was not merely rationalizing. To be clear, I have my own disagreements with Calvin and those who followed in his tradition, but read Calvin’s Institutes before you accuse him of being arbitrary. He’s not.
Some things might seem arbitrary, but there is justification for most of it that comes directly from New Testament teaching. The book of “Acts” chronicles the early church as it goes from completely Jewish to majority non-Jewish. In particular, Peter is given a vision about non-Jews no longer being unclean. And in the first church council recorded in Acts (ch 15:1-35), the Jewish church leaders only bind non-Jewish believers to only several Jewish laws. So from the very beginning the Jewish Christians tended to follow the OT laws, but the non-Jewish Christians did not.
Even in the Gospels, Jesus makes clear that it is not physical food that makes someone “unclean”, but rather what comes from inside (Mark 7:19, Matthew 15:16-20).
Now that isn’t to say everything is obviously clear as to what “laws” still apply and what doesn’t apply. In general, I believe that commands/laws that are found in the New Testament still apply to Christians, and many of these are a sub-set of the commands found in the Old Testament (for example, Jesus re-iterates that following the Ten Commandments is good). There are some things though like head coverings (1 Corinthians 11) that are followed by some denominations and not others. But usually the justification for not following is interpreting the passages in a non-literal way (or to say that it is a cultural manifestation of a certain spiritual truth, and no longer applies to this cultural instance, though of course that is a dangerous kind of argument since you could apply it to basically everything).
I’m not sure if it is relevant, but there is an old distinction in Jewish law between the Noahide rules, which apply to all mankind, and the rules that only apply to the people of Israel.
@DavidFriedman
It is relevant, at least the rules imposed on Gentiles by the 1st Century council of Jerusalem look very similar to a Noachide code. However, in practice the rules Christians have retained from the Old Testament are broader than this, most notably the Ten Commandments (as well as the Two Great Commandments to love God and one’s neighbor) play a very significant role historically in Christian ethics…
Cleary writes in The Church and Usury, h/t Thomas Storck,
This doesn’t work as a justification (if usury is instrinsically wrong, you still can’t do selectively), but it’s an interesting guess at why the distinction was drawn.
The easy dodge is to say that Jesus was preaching a temporary, extra-rigorous morality within the context of some apocalyptic event approaching – which thus should be adjusted for the fact that the apocalyptic event evidently wasn’t as close as Jesus’ preaching would indicate. This isn’t an especially good dodge – if someone got something so important wrong, why are you listening to them on other important things?
Yes, I didn’t mention that but there’s an apocalyptic undertone to a lot of Jesus’s advice, “pluck out your eye” and such. And it’s my understanding that a lot of later Christian thought was motivated by the growing realization that the Second Coming was not a near-term event.
I’d say it’s a lot more than undertones. You’re right on the development – it’s clear that the failure of the apocalypse to happen as predicted was a major concern early on.
I see no equivocation in what Jesus taught about wealth. In the eye of the camel comment he said a rich person could not enter the kingdom of heaven. In the story of the rich young ruler, he told him to sell all and give to the poor. The young man’s failure was in failing to do that. Jesus made it clear he could not enter the kingdom. In the story of the rich man and Lazarus, the only sin of the rich man was being rich, i.e. having while others around him did not have. He is not condemned for failing to give scraps to Lazarus. He is condemned for being rich. Rich people rationalize away these teachings because they are rich and do not want to give it up. How can I not love money when I refuse to give it up to obey Jesus and help others. Talk is cheap. Until one gives up his money he loves it too much. I am not a Christian so I don’t have a dog in this race, but if Jesus was not clear about this, he was not clear about anything. If we are not required to take his teachings on riches seriously what teachings do we take seriously?
The thing with the rich man and Lazarus is not just that the rich man is rich.
Someone brings Lazarus to the rich man’s gate. Lazarus wants to eat some of the nice food the rich man has. He’s not demanding anything. He just wants food that has fallen on the floor. That’s all he wants. It looks like he doesn’t even get this. The rich man is wasting food (his table is full to literal excess) and not even giving the scraps to the poor man right at his door.
I don’t think those details are included just to make it clear that Lazarus is in a pitiable state in his mortal life. The rest of the parable invokes Moses, and Moses certainly had things to say about sharing with the poor. So I am really not sure on what grounds you say that the parable condemns the rich man merely for being rich.
That said, I think you are mostly right. By any real standard, very many people today in the Western world have lots of money. Many people don’t want to think about what Jesus says about money. But the real standard is not ‘do you have money’. The real standard is whether you are acting like you are temporarily keeping Jesus’ money for him.
Not me, but I know a guy who half the year is a doctor who pulls in what I assume is the usual doctor’s salary. The other half of the year he brings his family to the developing world to offer free medical care there. He couldn’t do that without a fair amount of money. In addition to that half of the year, he is a hospitable and generous man. When Jesus asks him how well he used the money he was given, is he going to have an unacceptable answer? I think not, but then, I’m not the Judge.
So the rich man would have been fine if he had given Lazarus a couple of scraps? I don’t think so. Your making some big assumptions as to why something that is not said is not said. If it is not possible for rich people to go to heaven then simply being rich is sufficient to keep them out…at least per Jesus. If this man gave scraps it would have zero effect on him. It would not change him. Tons of rich people give tokens for one reason or the other, but this is not related to selling everything and giving it to the poor. THAT would change a person. The changes it would make will not happen without the action.
Agreed that it’s a question of where the rich man’s heart is at. The failing to give scraps is a picture, a proof, of just how bad his heart is, just how bad a lawbreaker he is. He won’t even give food fallen to the floor to a poor hungry sick man. Giving token scraps but still being a rich man who loves money would not be enough. He’d probably have to give it all away if he wanted to change.
But his problem isn’t that he’s rich. His problem is that he’s a hard hearted lawbreaker. In the story Jesus tells, the rich guy’s relatives do have a problem. But their problem is that they won’t listen to the Law, to Moses. The Law already told the rich to lend to the poor without being harsh in demanding repayment, to be generous, to be hospitable, to be fair. And breaking but one part of the Law is to be a lawbreaker. So again, Jesus isn’t saying that guy’s problem is with what Jesus says about being rich. Jesus says that the Law his audience acknowledged already condemned such a man.
This analysis does not absolve the rich. Far from it. But it also does not absolve the poor. Being a hard hearted lawbreaker who does not want to listen to the Law is a human problem. I think Jesus’ disciples are quite correct in their reaction to hearing Jesus say that it is easier for a camel to go through a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of Heaven. They ask who, if anyone, can be saved? That, not just a rich person being saved, is the thing which Jesus says is humanly impossible. But with the one who made heaven and earth and governs all things? Possible.
So yes, save a rich man? Impossible.
Save a lawbreaker? Impossible.
Does Jesus offer a way to be saved anyway?
Yes.
Himself.
That is the good news.
Yes, I imagine that any number of people truly accepting the good news would need to give away most or all of what they have. The same way any number of people without money might need to turn away from something they once were.
So the rich man would have been fine if he had given Lazarus a couple of scraps?
It doesn’t actually say that in the parable. Both die and go to the afterlife, Lazarus to his reward and the rich man to his torment. Abraham tells the rich man, who has asked for help:
So it’s not so much “give a few scraps and you can dodge hellfire”, it’s “what do you value in your life? if you value your wealth and luxury, then enjoy them, but remember: you can only enjoy them in this life”.
So how do we know what to do? That question is also asked and answered:
It is not impossible to be rich and to be virtuous, but you have to remember to work at it. And it’s not simply throwing a few scraps to a beggar, it’s to not make an idol of wealth and raise that up instead of God and your neighbour.
@marshwiggle
I disagree. It is where the rich man’s money is for where his money is his heart will be.
The story does not say the rich man failed to help Lazarus. In fact, the fact that Lazarus chose that spot might indicate the pickings were good there.
@Deiseach
Jesus never said anything close to that, and I cannot imagine him doing so. He knew that what you claim is not possible. He knew that a man’s heart would be where his treasure is. Why is the treasure being held onto? Because one values it more than they care about helping others. Again, I do not care at all about helping others so I have no dog in that hunt either. But I am also not blind to hypocrisy.
So you say, but Jesus said otherwise.
HowardHolmes,
In Luke 19:1-10 Jesus says that Zacchaeus is saved despite the fact that he only pledges to give away the majority of his wealth. Jesus also says repeatedly that Abraham was saved. He also gives a piece of advice about generous hospitality (Luke 14:12-14), which can only actually be done by somebody who retains enough possessions to host a banquet. (Yes, in verse 14:33 he says to give up all your possessions, but do note the accompanying verse 26—do you also fault Christians for not hating their family members enough? Speaking of parents, Matthew 15:3-7 appears to teach, at least on its face, that support of parents may also obligate one not to dedicate all of your wealth to God—honoring them being one of the Ten Commandments, after all.)
This is enough to refute the extreme intepretation that only the immediate unloading of 100% of your possessions suffices for salvation.
Anyway it is not actually possible to give up all your wealth without adding an AND to the end of the sentence. Like “AND join a monastary” or “AND become a begger” or “AND follow an itinerant preacher around Palestine” or “AND go into the wilderness and eat locusts and honey” or “AND jump out a window”. All of these except the last involve a plan for continued subsistence, and the nature of the act depends quite a bit on what the intended AND to follow is. (There are people with no wealth who still consume just as much resources as people with wealth.)
Once you’ve given up your attachment to money, there is no reason in principle why the continued subsistence can’t most efficiently come from your own paycheck.
The fact that you “don’t have a dog in this race” is quite signficant, actually. Christians can certainly go through a lot of convolutions finding reasons to not obey Christ’s commands (since they feel obligated in principle to obey the ones they acknowledge as applicable) but a non-Christian has the opposite temptation of adopting a simplistic interpretation without really thinking through what it would mean to obey it, or placing it in balance with the Bible’s other commands and obligations.
Anyway another doctrine of the New Testament is that the Holy Spirit gives different gifts to different people; and therefore two lives that are both radically sold out to Jesus may look quite different from each other in outward details. So you should give up your wealth if and only if the Spirit says to do so—and so ultimately the question ends up turning on something a non-Christian doesn’t even believe exists!
Christians take Jesus seriously but not literally, non-Christians take Jesus literally, but not seriously?
It very much matters which Christians we are talking about. Different faiths have different dogmas regarding this. At least stated dogmas.
I am very familiar with churches which TALK a lot about the importance of taking Jesus words (and the rest of the Bible) literally, but in practice it is still selective. “Tis so sweet to trust in Jesus // Just to take him at his word // Just to rest upon his promise // Just to know thus saith the Lord” is a great hymn, but the application is a little awkward in the case of a Lord who constantly speaks in hyperbolic sayings and commands, and fundamentalists don’t go around gouging out their eyes and chopping off their hands anymore than I do.
Not that I’m saying they SHOULD, but the fundamentalists I know usually seem to think it’s OK to take things nonliterally if it’s obvious you aren’t supposed to do so, but they seem to me to be unconscious of the degree to which their own local religious traditions are informing that judgement.
It seems to me that Jesus deliberately made his teaching maximally resistant to being turned into yet another form of legalism, but many Christian traditions (on both sides of the Reformation) really just want an updated Torah, and are doing their best to try to reverse-engineer the list of rules so as to avoid constant struggle with ambiguity.
But what if God thinks that struggling with ambiguity is necessary for our character development? Maybe that’s why he have us a Bible consisting of one testament full of precise laws which are in large part no longer applicable, and a second testament full of laws that are impossible for ordinary humans to obey when taken literally. It’s the worst possible setup for extracting a consistent set of agreed rules, but maybe that was never the point.
@ Aron Wall:
You’ve given me some food for thought here.
@Aron Wall
Are you kidding me! That is lame. Zacchaeus clearly got from Jesus himself the idea that following Jesus meant giving up being rich. That is a point for me. Surely the writer of this story did not intend for the reader to wonder whether or not he followed through. I sense desperation for rationalization.
God in the earlier part of the Old Testament was way in riches. How could Noah afford to build the Ark. How about Lot and David and Solomon. God made Solomon the richest guy ever then saw how it turned Solomon against God. That is probably where God figured it out. The rest of the OT (prophets) is much more into aceticism. By the time we get to Jesus, God has it figured out.
Jesus was a rabbi, not a precursor to Emily Post. Whatever his message in this story it had nothing about his concern for how rich people can best impress others.
Yes, as a matter of fact I have never met a Christian that did not love his family more than God.
I think Aron meant “he only pledges to give away the majority of his wealth”, as opposed to all of it, not “he only pledges to give away the majority of his wealth”, as opposed to actually giving it away.
Oh, thanks. Makes more sense. I have not thought I was suggesting giving away all money. Like someone says, we also need to eat. One can give away enough to no longer be rich and still have some for food and clothes.
Yes, that’s what I meant. Sorry for the ambiguous phrasing.
One of the ground rules Christians use when interpreting the Bible is that God is omniscient, in fact he even knows the future; so God can’t have “learned” that riches are a bad thing.
Regarding Emily Post, did you read the passage from Luke I cited? The entire point of the passage is NOT to try to impress your rich neighbors but instead invite the poor people who can’t pay you back. My point is that there are ways of helping the poor and needy that require retaining control over your resources.
Perhaps this is true, but how would you know?
The only way I can think of to tell externally, is what people do when forced to choose between them. My best friend converted to Christianity from Judaism even though he was afraid his father would disown him…
Let me tell another story, from about 3 decades ago. A close family friend had an extensive music collection. He started to read the Bible, to see what it was all about. One day he feels God asking him, “If I asked you to give up this entire collection for me, would you do that?” He had to think about it, but he realized the answer was yes.
God never did go on to ask him to actually give up the music, at least not yet. But God isn’t just interested in external behavior, he wants to come first in our hearts.
I have to admit I’m coming at this from a Protestant background, but I’m moderately familiar with the Catholic position on this also. Nevertheless, especially from the Protestant view, the New Testament does not say anything about usury specifically. It seems to fall quite firmly into the “Mosaic Covenant” side of things that were prescribed for the Israelite polity. I understand that there is an argument to be had about “selective” incorporation of the Old Testament, but once you postulate that there are some things incorporated, some things not, then usury seems like a pretty non-central example of things that obviously were re-affirmed as valid in the New Covenant context. They’re certainly closer to “no mixed fibers” (never mentioned, not included in the Jerusalem Council’s admonition to Gentiles) than to, e.g., sexual immorality (mentioned multiple times, included in the Jerusalem Council’s admonition) or even to something broader but less context-specific like “greed,” mentioned by Paul at various times.
That makes sense, but I wonder if that would be different if the early church had been significantly richer? Paul does address preferential treatment of rich people at points, but were there really enough professional moneylenders for the topic to arise?
Usury was condemned in the Church in the early patristic era. They didn’t lay out a complete theory of usury at the time, but neither did they for the Trinity, of course.
Here’s Thomas Storck, summarizing John Noonan’s survey in his book about the subject:
ETA: Made myself less brave.
No reason to turn this into a bravery debate 😉
Protestants don’t reject all capital-T Tradition, but we do examine it.
In any event, rejection of usury for the clergy seems significantly different (also apparently earlier) than for the laity, doesn’t it?
Also, I would have to examine the sources more carefully, but it seems a central question is whether usury-as-any-interest versus usury-as-greedy-exploitative-interest is being described. Even in the Israelite tradition I don’t know if we have full information which was the customary ancient understanding, and whether or not that comported with the Patristic understanding of the term.
Unless I’m misreading Storck, the conciliar prohibitions to the laity were roughly contemporaneous with the prohibitions to the clergy, though some of the Church Fathers, like Clement and Tertullian, were condemning it earlier than the councils.
I don’t see why that should make a difference. Foundational Christian doctrines took centuries to define.
@Nick:
Because determining the nature of the tradition and its understood doctrinal basis is useful in examining it.
I don’t know how many moneylenders there were, of course. There were definitely wealthy people, though. In the early Acts church, where they had a quasi-commune, there were a number of people wealthy enough to have and sell property. Barnabas, for example, sells land and brings in the money. This leads to the Ananias and Sapphira debacle where they sell the land, bring part of the money, but tell Peter it is everything, whereupon they are struck dead for lying to God. (As an aside, this episode pretty much ruins one of the prettier Biblical girl-names, much like “Delilah”). Of note is Peter’s response that it belonged to them, they could have brought part or all if they wanted, but their lies were blasphemous, seemingly recognizing private ownership while also encouraging generosity and discouraging ostentatious status-seeking. There are also a number of references in Paul’s travels to prominent community members, wealthy Greeks, members of royal households, etc. who presumably had resources, and he accepts and solicits donations from people with property to give to the Jerusalem church in need. So I don’t know that even the very early church was entirely unacquainted with prosperity. Whether that included money-lending, I don’t think is told.
What should a resilient, resourceful and broadly capable person in our society be able to do?
Since we have to start somewhere, here is Robert Heinlein’s famous list:
I won’t address the whole list, but I will comment on the “program a computer” item. Is it essential? No. You can be broadly capable without being able to code. “Use a computer” definitely belongs on the list though, and that includes being able to do somewhat sophisticated things with a web browser, search engine, word processor, and spreadsheet. That said, computers sure are used for a lot of things in our society, and knowing how such a fundamental technology actually works does seem generally useful. Perhaps “program a computer” belongs in some sort of choose-five-of-ten list of electives for the broadly capable person.
I’ve never liked that quote, because it mixes together a bunch of generically positive qualities with jobs that you really really don’t want amateurs doing. Go ahead and die gallantly or change diapers but I for one would prefer invasions planned by generals and buildings designed by structural engineers.
Beyond that, his premise is demented. Specialization of labor is civilization in a very literal sense. The polymath is celebrated precisely because mastering multiple skillsets and performing them at a professional level is inherently very difficult. We should continue to celebrate and look up to people who are so broadly talented but society cannot expect every man to be a polymath.
I think you’re right that specialization is essential, but there is something to be said for not being completely clueless outside of your specialty. All of us have to engage to some extent with the complexities of life. It’s really not that useful to be the world’s best physicist if you lose your life saving to some swindle. And that’s where having some breadth is useful.
Expecting people to be true polymaths is unreasonable, that’s true. But there is a less demanding model that may be useful: the T. Know a little about a lot of things and a lot about one thing. But what “lot of things”?
The thing is, that’s clearly not what Heinlein was saying.
Some of the items on that list, sure. Changing diapers, balancing accounts, setting bones and cooking meals are all helpful life skills to have. There’s conceivably a time and place when you might really wish that you knew how to do those things.
But how about writing a sonnet? Can you even imagine a scenario when you think “damn, if only I could write a sonnet everything would be so much easier!” without it dripping with irony?
Being reasonably self-sufficient is a good thing, but opportunity cost is real. Wasting time developing skills which will almost certainly never be useful is literally worse than spending the time masturbating. At least then you’re having fun.
OK, sure. I don’t know if Heinlein was speaking loosely or making a point somewhat different for what I am trying to say.
Let’s refocus on my original question, “What should a resilient, resourceful and broadly capable person in our society be able to do?”
“Writing a Sonnet” is basically the minimum effort to discover whether or not being able to write a sonnet will be personally useful to you.
There’s also a difference between “Being able to do” and “Doing” which is important. I’d be able to command a war or build a building, if the situation for some reason was such that nobody else could do it and it needed doing. I think the virtues described are probably more metaphorical than literal; it isn’t the ability to command a war well, it is the idea that you wouldn’t, in that situation, just not be able to do it at all.
It is basically saying “You should never find yourself helpless”. Maybe you don’t do the best job, but you can do -a- job.
Skill in using language in a creative and artful manner is hardly useless.
For instance, every birthday, Valentine’s Day, and anniversary I compose a poem for my wife, to be delivered to her at work, with an arrangement of flowers. I would say this has made my life considerably better, and hers as well.
Instead of “write a sonnet” I’d have “turn a phrase” which is ironically a less poetic way of saying the same thing.
One should be able to order one’s thoughts in a persuasive manner when the occasion calls for it, which it certainly will at one point if you want to get to the stage where “change a diaper” is necessary.
And I would prefer that medical care be provided by doctors, but I’m still in favor of as many people as possible learning as much emergency medicine – and even not-emergency medicine – as they reasonably can.
Another problem is that the list gives you no reason why you should want to know how to do those things compared to some other things of similar usefulness level. And yet if we were supposed to be able to do *all* the things of that usefulness level, it would be clear that the list is unwieldy and nobody could possibly be able to do all of them.
Also, some of the items are too particular to a time and place, even while Heinlein doesn’t recognize this. I have about as much need to butcher a hog as Heinlein did to use a cellphone. The list is skewed towards rural frontier settlement, in a cultural context where the frontier was the recent past and a lot more of the population was rural, and Heinlein’s sci-fi reflects this–Heinlein was really being very parochial when he wrote that, thinking his own cultural context was universal.
It’s a dumb quote. If I’m a soldier that’s participating in an invasion I really really don’t want the guy planning it to be a dilettante.
How many generals actually plan and execute more than one invasion? Its not as if generals get to practice their art that often, and those countries which do have fairly common invasions have a lot of generals as well.
Richmond Kelly Turner wasn’t a general, but he planned a lot of invasions.
The only person who probably has him beat on that is Dan Barbey. Also not a general.
But yeah, those are very much the weird edge cases.
But on the other hand, we might be looking at this wrong. It doesn’t say “plan and execute an invasion”, it just says “plan an invasion”. And generals do that all the time. Between training and contingency plans, your average general/admiral has probably planned a dozen or more.
Wasn’t Heinlein’s quote in a context where (some) humans were effectively immortal? That might give time to become competent to a specialist level at many things – and bored enough with one’s initial specialization to do so. (But wouldn’t help with whatever differences of ability can’t be fixed with training and experience – the tone deaf won’t have musical careers.)
Yes, Lazarus was around 2000 years old at the time.
Funny how the other subthreads don’t seem to get this. Ars longa, vita maxime longa, basically.
The implication is that humans in general should be able to do those things.
It’s easy to see it as unproductive, because, well, specialization actually is for humans. The whole culture-gene co-evolution that jump-started the human race may actually have begun when the first men went hunting and left the first women gather and tend the children.
But I think it’s a worthy ideal. Not to actually do all those things – yes, this would be stupid – but to be able to. Which is what the quote is actually saying. I am able to do a lot of things I’m not likely to do – I can change the oil in my car, for example. Or bleed the brakes on my motorcycle by the side of the road. You can guess which of those actually came handy 🙂 But it’s not about being useful – it’s (I think, I can’t really guess what the author was thinking) about moving your ass and taking the journey. We shouldn’t be happy to only work in a cubicle all our lives and get better at one small piece of knowledge work. That’s what drives civilization forward, yes – but not us, personally, as human beings. We should always strive to widen our competencies – not as an instrumental goal, but as a primary goal in itself.
So it’s not a list of things you need to be able to do. It’s what actually being a human will naturally turn you into.
I see this as “a society of pure specialists is not a human society.”
I think at the time this was written, “programming” and “using” were effectively interchangeable terms due to the primitive state of user interfaces and software libraries.
I don’t think this is an unreasonable list. It’s maybe tautological that specialized experts do things within their area better than amateurs, but I don’t think his point is that “you need a PhD in each of these areas of study,” but rather “while it may be wise to defer to experts, they are not always available, so it is also wise to train on a variety of essential tasks to the point that you can accomplish them without complete disaster.” As an example, his advice to be able to “cook a tasty meal” doesn’t mean “fuck chefs and restaurants,” (in fact in the same book he helps establish a restaurant and eats there frequently). He is not advocating extreme rugged individualism (though he may have a personal preference for that), but rather he’s advising against becoming overly dependent to the point that you will die without others – as eusocial insects indeed are.
Nowadays, the main trick is to be able to find good instructions for these things and be flexible enough to learn them fast when you happen to need them.
Agree
Probably a gender neutral version of this series from the Art of Manliness. Basic home and vehicle maintenance, basic social skills, how to dress acceptably, basic housekeeping.
Binge reading far right garbage on the internet is making you miserable. You should take a long break from it.
This is good advice.
+1
Brad is correct.
More generally, you’re probably spending a lot of your time exposing yourself to weird ideals of what people “should” be, rather than what they are. Most people aren’t Bay Area workaholics. Most people aren’t suave, multi-talented, supermen (or -women). Most people, by definition, are pretty average, and they find pretty normal jobs that aren’t insanely time-consuming, partners who are also pretty normal, a hobby or two, etc. Most people aren’t doing “something like working 60 hours a week as a corporate lawyer.” Simply being normal and unimpressive, most people fashion lives that are pretty good, lives that other people don’t write about much. Relax; you’ll be fine.
So, yeah, as brad says, don’t read the Daily Stormer unless you’re actually researching nazis. As our esteemed host is fond of pointing out, the movement they are part of has a similar level of power to your average PTA board. They are completely and utterly irrelevant to your life, and only worth paying attention to as something to point at and laugh.
In terms of the specific stuff you talk about…
But in that novel you just wrote, you don’t talk about a single one of your interests, desires, or abilities. The only thing you say is that you’re terrible at everything and have no interest in anything. Which is, I suppose, technically possible, but I very much doubt it’s true.
What are you interested in? What do you care about? Start there.
You appear to have a very fatalistic/deterministic attitude towards most of these skills that you’ve allowed yourself to be convinced you need (which isn’t surprising, I suppose, given some of the people you’ve been reading). But no one is naturally good at anything. Some of us may have more propensity to excel at certain things after many, many hours of practice, but no one who is good at anything ever did it without effort, and boring, gruelling repetition. So the necessity of the stoic is there for all of us.
Personally, I’d suggest some kind of physical activity is a decent place to start. You sound like you could use it, at any rate. Go for a run. Lift heavy objects up and put them down again. You can even listen to nazi podcasts while you do so.
I dunno, I apologize if the above is useless. But it does seem to me that your main enemy here is yourself.
It occurred to me that my “listen to nazi podcasts while you do so” might come across as flippantly cruel. I just meant it as a gentle ribbing of your Daily Stormer reading, not a CW battle-cry.
You seem like a decent person. You’ll probably be fine, given time.
Those people going to BJJ after work aren’t better at mustering up energy than you, they were looking forward to it all day. It sounds like you’re putting a lot of energy in to fretting about what you ought to be. What do you love to do? (Weed, video games, blogs, etc don’t count)
I think you need to accept that you cannot possibly satisfy all the ideals at the same time. If you really want to be the 60-hours-a-week corporate samurai, you cannot also be the perfect dad, an accomplished amateur artist and a pillar of your community. Basically no one has that kind of time and energy.
Or at least, it will take some time to get there. If you’re still in school, you shouldn’t expect to have a life’s worth of accomplishments under your belt already.
I think your main problem is not any of the deficits you mentioned but your neuroticism.
Being an Awesome Cool Guy definitely has its benefits but is not remotely necessary for a decent career and a happy family life.
Stuff like dancing, cooking and fixing pipes will never come up in your professional life and in your private life only if you want it to. Low energy and introversion mean that you’re probably not becoming a CEO or a big corporate boss but few people do anyway.
I know people who, like you, lack every single Awesome Cool Guy trait and still have good jobs and families.
I also know people who check all the boxes and are crippled by insecurities anyway.
This advice may be impossible to follow but if you could change one thing about yourself it shouldn’t be dancing or cooking or even low energy or introversion. It should be the worrying about being inadequate part. Inadequate people still get to have nice lives (sometimes), but if you’re depressed then there is no level of dancing skill that will make that go away.
First off, what brad says. Stop hate-reading. You’ve got the gist, and additional exposure is not going to do you any good.
For the rest, consider taking up an outdoors sport. If you’re not up for socializing, consider skiing, cycling, hiking, something like that. You will improve your confidence, your energy levels, your health and psychological well-being.
Don’t worry much about handiness yet. You’ll figure that out when you own a home. Thankfully, tools are cheap and you can learn to do almost anything home repair-wise from YouTube videos. I watched a couple of videos and installed crown molding in my house and it looks great. I was never taught this stuff as a kid, but inexpensive tools and YouTube works wonders.
Also don’t worry so much about your height. Women are all the same height when they’re lying down anyway. I know a guy who’s 5 feet tall and he cleans up because he’s outgoing and sings in a rock band. I know you’re not outgoing and don’t sing in a rock band, I’m just saying there’s ways to compensate, including but not limited to singing in a rock band.
Just saying, get off The Daily Stormer, go outside, and get out of your head. You’ll feel better.
No one else seems to have mentioned this yet, which is disappointing. A lot of parenting is about preparing one’s kids not just for a good job, but for all the life skills and bourgeois respectability @Atlas feels is expected of him. To take the most obvious example, parents are really concerned with whether their kids have friends, because socialization is really important.
A lot of young people these days seem to have a lot of anxiety about a lot of parts of life, and the common denominator is often that one’s parents either did not prepare them or did not know how. Speaking from experience here: I’m in my mid-twenties, and life for the foreseeable future remains a slow crawl to get the skills and experiences I did not have as a young person so I can do this life thing halfway right. I’m not saying get angry at your parents or something, they may well have done the best they could, and frankly a lot of today’s advice is don’t push your kids to do x and y and z—I’m just saying, it’s not supposed to seem hopelessly impossible.
The flip side of this, which I think others have ably spoken to, is which and how much life skills and respectability are just bullshit. That’s definitely another way it comes to seem less hopelessly impossible.
Well, I never thought home repair was “hopelessly impossible.” My dad just paid somebody else to do it. He and my mom taught me plenty of other things, though. Mom taught me how to cook. Dad taught me how to shoot. Stuff like that.
I would put this more in the category of “it’s unlikely you’re going to be able to teach your son every Masculine Virtue, but don’t worry about the ones you miss because you can still learn those later.”
It’s not so much that any one seems hopelessly impossible as that the set does. Anyway, if you don’t mind my saying so, it sounds like your folks did all right by you. Based on Atlas’s list, by contrast, it’s possible his parents were a lot more hands off.
Perhaps the quote was somewhat self-serving of him, then?
I suspect Atlas will say, in response to people telling him to stop reading sites giving him these ideas, that he is merely reading people’s perspectives on the world, evaluating them, and coming to his own conclusions about the world and the optimal way for him to face it. As rebuttal to which I offer this observation: “You are what you read.” It’s entirely possible to be unpersuaded by something, but it’s also very difficult not to subtly change your perspective over time with enough exposure to anything that you find engaging enough to read that much.
PS–don’t go the Kevin C route, please.
Sure, and I can understand why a Jew might want to read the Daily Stormer once or twice to figure out “what the hell is these people’s problem with me?” But once you’ve figured that out, and what’s screwy about their world view, you can stop. You don’t have to keep reading it for masochistic reasons. I’m familiar with the arguments of anti-Catholics, but I don’t spend my spare time reading screeds against papists.
Yup. There’s a lot to be said for engaging with people of very different opinions, it’s a rare and frankly praiseworthy thing to do. But that’s what something like this place is for. Doesn’t mean you’ve got to pay attention to wannabe Hitlers/Maos.
“You are what you read.”
There’s real wisdom in this. Even on SSC there are some threads that I skip for exactly this reason. I’ve done my due diligence and that’s more than enough. I don’t need to passively or actively engage with them over and over again.
>PS–don’t go the Kevin C route, please.
What do you mean by this? I remember that guy and how he was eventually banned, but there are a bunch of different things that this statement could mean.
All-devouring cynicism and despair, I assume?
Basically formulating a criteria for adequacy that he was unable to meet, inducing a feeling of justified self-loathing despite no one else actually pushing that judgment.
Coupled with an insistence, at least when I last argued with him, that it was possible for his morals to be impossible to live up to, and that any attempt to change said morals, even being persuaded otherwise, constituted losing himself. That is a hell of a bind to put oneself in, and I felt really bad that I couldn’t persuade him out of it.
I always felt for Kevin, because I also struggle with all-devouring feelings of inadequacy. The difference is, I try to stay grounded within consensus morality (or what passes for it in the decadent left enclaves where I reside) and he stuck with his own bizarre distorted form of the ideology we can’t talk about, which itself is a bizarre distortion of actual European history.
If I’m reading between the lines correctly, I think he was banned by his own request. And I can respect that.
I’m not going to give you a lot of detailed advice, because you probably either don’t want it, won’t believe it, or (most likely) have already heard it before. I’ll just keep it short and simple: Just wait until you get older. Things will (probably) work out. If they don’t, you’ll still be mostly okay.
I was like you. Virtually no positive traits except above-average IQ. Throughout my 20s, this was of interest to approximately nobody (male or female). Once I hit 30, the dating market changed, and suddenly “smart, responsible, decent career” became enough to attract women for whom the same could be said. Now life is pretty good. Don’t worry so much. You’ll be fine.
This.
The sex advice columnist Dan Savage started a charity a decade or so ago called It Gets Better, focussed on gay teens in high school, the point being that it sucks being a closeted gay kid in high school for all sorts of reasons, but for the vast majority of people, once you go into the real world a lot of those problems just kind of disappear. And this is a really important message to get out to this vulnerable population (arguably becoming less so in very recent history, at least in the wokest of areas).
I always thought that it would have been wonderful to have that aimed at literally everyone. We’re constantly bombarded with youth-centric messages telling us our young adulthood should be the best part of our life. Which is just horseshit, especially given the way we’ve chosen to organize our society. Having so little control over so much of your life does not make you happy or healthy.
There’s almost nothing about my mental or physical state now, in my mid-40’s, that isn’t better than it was when I was 20, or 25, or 30. About the only thing that is clearly worse is that it’s harder for me to keep weight off. I’m very far from living my ideal life, but it is so much better now than it was, and that goes a very long way.
I think this is highly correlated with western/American culture emphasizing freedom as a virtue, and simultaneously not putting excessive demands on youth in general.
Like, my teenage years were, in one sense, the “best of my life” in that I could sleep in every day and do nothing but play videogames and read cool blogs. And the various “problems” I had (one of my friends was a jerk to me, my online girlfriend isn’t returning my AIM messages, my dad won’t let me use the truck on Friday night) were trivial in comparison to the problems one faces as an adult. That was pretty nice. I’d love to be able to live like that again.
As an adult, I can’t, because I have responsibilities and expectations and no external third party providing me free room and board. But life overall is better in a whole lot of other ways as well.
This has been my experience too.
Mine too. But for the worse.
Plenty of valid criticism, but no one has given their own list. I’ll try:
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan a course of action with due consideration to all likely outcomes, prepare their food from the raw ingredients, navigate unfamiliar territory urban or wilderness, wield a hammer or screwdriver, turn a phrase, balance accounts, perform basic first aid, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, hold their tongue and temper, cooperate, act alone, analyse a new problem, pitch manure, send an e-mail, recognize danger, die gallantly. Specialization is for those who have the basics down.
Bravo.
In the spirit of Randy’s answer, I’ll actually try to answer OP, but in a far less poetic way than Heinlein was clearly going for.
A human being should be able to:
– wield all basic tools (hammer, screwdriver, pliers, wrench, paintbrush, roller, drill, saw [hand-, skill-, mitre-, and chain-]), with enough proficiency that they can, given instructions, perform any repair job that only requires said tools.
– run 5 km in less than 40 minutes (assuming no physical disability).
– cook multiple tasty meals from scratch
– read a newspaper article and articulate how it may misrepresent the issues it discusses
– know the difference between mean and median
– budget such that they can save some of their income every month
– swim
– spend a day without talking
– give a presentation
– discuss details of several well-known books, plays, movies, songs, etc
– use firearms safely
– light a fire
– catch, clean, and cook a fish
– operate a bicycle, car, and boat
– tend a garden, both ornamental and vegetable
– reliably make another human reach orgasm
– move on a dance floor in a way that isn’t embarrassing to them
– play an instrument
– write well
– treat others with respect and kindness
– know the basic tenets of all major religions
– speak at least three languages well enough to order food, understand directions, and make awkward conversation
– control a soccer ball and baseball
– accept their own finitude, understand that ideals are not the same as requirements, and understand that virtually no one has mastered all the above (or all the other items I’ve missed from the list).
I doubt there’s one list that applies to everyone. But defining yourself in limiting ways (“I suck at math”) is a good way of making yourself less than you can be. To approximately quote Richard Bach, argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they’re yours.
Definitely a huge improvement over the original list but a lot of the items are still of dubious value.
For example, the three below:
After high school, all but a miniscule fraction of the population stop playing team sports or musical instruments. After college, almost all of those people will also stop. Which is a good thing: playing an instrument or a sport with any amount of skill requires daily practice and that’s a large time investment.
Dancing is useful for dating, which at least makes it more likely to be useful for a few years after you graduate college. But even then it’s likely a better use of your time to just learn Game directly. It doesn’t matter how good of a dancer you are if you can’t close the deal at the end of the night.
The list isn’t meant to be solely “things that will allow you to get X, which is the thing you really want”.
Dancing and music are enjoyable in and of themselves. That’s the point. I don’t dance to get laid (though it’s helped in that regard). I can’t play an instrument, but I wish I could, even solely for the deeper understanding of music I would have gained as a result.
Ball control is simply meant as representative of a broad category of physical abilities that are involved in sports. E.g. f you can play baseball, you can throw and catch, which are part of a huge fraction of sports.
True for some people, but certainly not for all. If it’s true for you, consider yourself lucky, but also consider that there really are some of us for whom almost nothing is enjoyable besides sitting around, playing video games, and arguing with people in blog comments.
Please accept that I’m trying not to be an asshole about this, but I really do believe there’s something wrong with that. The list is meant to be prescriptive (so long as the last point about no one being able to do it all is highlighted). I think you should try to get more out of life.
That being said, I’m not interested in coercion, or even arguing the point that strongly.
Someday I’m going to write a pseudo-Aristotelian tract that arguing in blog comments is the highest good.
Hopefully you’ll post it as a series of tweets.
@Randy M
🔥🔥🔥
Enkidum,
I’m probably overstating the case, although not by much.
It’s not necessarily that I derive literally zero pleasure from things like music, dancing, art, exercise, or other “socially acceptable hobbies.” It is the case that the amount of enjoyment I derive from them is quite significantly lower than the amount of enjoyment I derive from my “far less socially acceptable hobbies.”
Given that I have a somewhat-demanding but well compensated career, I put a pretty high premium on my leisure time. High enough that if I’m designating time specifically for leisure, you can bet that I’m going to prioritize the things that grant me the most leisure. Which means that if you see me learning to dance, I’m doing it explicitly for non-leisure reasons (such as, learning to dance helps attract women). And any comments like “you should dance for the enjoyment of dancing!” are entirely missing the point (for me at least, maybe not for you)
@Matt M
That’s fair. I was being a little too strident in my reply.
A 40 minute 5k is pretty slow. I’d expect anyone who isn’t very unfit to be able do it — if you can continuously run for the whole distance that should clear it comfortably.
I think you underestimate how sedentary many people are. I’m not sure I could do it…
Agreed here. A slow walking pace would clear it in about 90 minutes. A reasonbly brisk walk with a few spurts of jogging and you’re pretty much home free. You need to average about 4.7 mph across the course.
What Matt M said. I suppose 25 minutes would be an indicator that you’re actually reasonably fit (and you should be, so I suppose it’s really the number that should be there). But I wanted to provide some hope to the less than fit among us, for whom eve running 1k is a real challenge.
I think 25 minutes would be too stringent — that would require a lot of training for most people. But something that barely requires running seems too loose. I think I’d put it somewhere in the 30-35 minute range.
The USMC fitness test includes a run of 3 miles, which is approximately 5K. Requirements vary from 28 minutes (young men) to 36 minutes (middle-aged women).
https://www.military.com/military-fitness/marine-corps-fitness-requirements/usmc-physical-fitness-test
Yeah, and while I could probably do the 28 if I was busting my ass, I don’t think that’s a realistic expectation of society at large.
EDIT: Actually, I could definitely do it. Yeah, it isn’t that big a deal.
Well, from my advanced age, I wound myself thinking about geezers and children – after all, Enkidum did say “a human being” not “a healthy adult”.
Any ideas where to get started on the dancing? It’s actually fairly important socially in my groups, but, at least in my head, my dancing is emberassing.
Honestly, not really. I’m an… interesting… dancer, but I basically learned on the job, by going to lots of highly noob-tolerant clubs in the mid-90s. Never taken lessons or anything like that – I hear that things like salsa are very popular? I find getting rather tipsy helps with the nerve problem.
You might try to find something like this:
http://www.linedancetoronto.ca/
They teach line dancing for free once a week. Once you know formal dancing, casual dancing should be pretty simple; just do some of the simpler moves without elaboration in time to whatever music is playing.
The Heinlein quote isn’t so useful as a literal guide to how to live, but there is some useful guidance in there. If you ever have to take care of an elderly relative or friend, or raise a child, there’s a really important principle: Don’t do things for them that they can (safely and at reasonable cost) do for themselves. Climbing up a ladder to get something from the attic for an aging father with a bad knee is sensible, but routinely doing stuff for him he can do for himself is encouraging him to become less capable of taking care of himself. Do that enough, and he’ll lose the ability, or think he has. (Think of Theoden in _The Two Towers_.).
In modern life, it’s way the hell too easy to do the same thing to yourself. That 30-minute home repair seems like a pain in the ass–maybe I can hire it done. Cooking a meal is a hassle, maybe I should buy my meals pre-made. Learning that new piece of software looks like a slog–maybe I can make one of my younger coworkers do it. Etc. I find that now that I’m older, it’s a constant temptation to push off the unpleasant slog onto someone else, but I have to resist it–otherwise, I’ll become less and less capable. When I was younger, though, I had the same temptation. The times I gave into that temptation have come back to bite me many times, when I had the chance to learn something and didn’t because it didn’t seem like something I had to do and I didn’t wanna, and now I’m ignorant of something that would save me a lot of money/pain to know.
There’s nothing wrong with deciding to hire out some unpleasant job you don’t have the time for, but it’s a mistake to avoid learning how to do basic stuff for yourself, because in so doing, you make yourself less capable of taking care of yourself. That doesn’t mean you have to be good at everything–I can’t butcher a hog or plan an invasion or conn a ship, either. What it means is, don’t limit yourself too quickly. Don’t just define yourself as a programmer or engineer or whatever–also try to become at least minimally capable in a lot of other areas. Especially, don’t pre-emptively define whole areas of human knowledge or problems as “not my thing” without at least giving them a try.
Paul Graham (one of the founders of Y combinator, a startup accelerator) likes to talk about the traits of successful founders of startup companies. One of those traits is relentless resourcefulness. That doesn’t necessarily mean being a Heinleinian hero, but it means that you’re not easily stymied when things break or go wrong. (You can see why this is important in startup companies, where things go wrong all the time and there’s no money to hire an expert to fix them.) I feel like that is a useful trait to try to cultivate in everyday life–not just to start up a company, but to finish a project or get through a class or salvage a vacation after some major thing has gone wrong. You don’t need to be a mechanic to know how to jump a car or change a tire; you don’t need to be a doctor to know basic first aid; you don’t need to be an accountant to be able to use a spreadsheet to do a basic budget.
The opposite of resourcefulness is helplessness. Being utterly at a loss–getting stuck. Sometimes you’ll see kids do this–they’ll get stuck on some problem and just sit there unproductively unable to get past it. Part of being an adult is figuring out how to get around those problems, or ask for help, or look something up, or something.
Lazarus Long or Pham Nuwen or Hermoine Granger are nice characters to emulate, but horrible ones to compare yourself to–they’re fictional and almost nobody can measure up. Similarly, people like Ben Franklin or Thomas Edison or Steve Wozniak are super-impressive people it’s worthwhile to look up to and learn from, even though neither you nor I will ever reach their level of general competence and ability.
And I agree with Brad. There’s a lot of bravado from writers on the internet that probably isn’t backed up by their actual abilities, and anyway your job isn’t to be Mr Red Pill or Mr Alpha, it’s to be the best version of you that you can reach. Maybe find stuff to read online that helps you with that project. That will also likely be appealing to enough women for you to find one (you only need one) that’s worth keeping. (I don’t know you, but keep in mind that a lot of small, nerdy, homely guys marry and have kids, so it’s not like this is out of reach as a goal.).
Grow a flower, repair a bike, start a successful business, stitch a hem, harangue a crowd, sketch from life, welcome a newcomer, improvise over a break, seduce a beauty, research a conclusion, drive a car, identify a bird, sing in harmony, entertain a dinner-table, stand up to a bully, give a lecture, choose an outfit, apologise when wrong, hold their tongue, change their mind.
I think that all all of these, along with all of Heinlein’s other than the exceptionally difficult “plan an invasion”, are achievable by the age of 20-25 by any one person of moderate but not extreme luck in their baseline intelligence and character, given an appropriate education starting reasonably early in life.
Are you sure about “start a successful business”? I could only see that for people inclined toward tech or business, otherwise good luck starting a successful business by 25 in medicine or the sciences. Unless a lemonade stand or freelance tutoring counts.
Otherwise good list.
I was thinking of a small business like a trade or craft from which you could draw a full income – and mostly thinking of having the skills to start it and keep it running, rather than actually doing it at that age. Tech unicorns are not, indeed, for the average Well Rounded Person.
I know I’m echoing what a bunch of other people already said, but it seems like your main problem is just that you’re getting your ideas about masculinity and success from The Daily Stormer and various far-right books/videos. These standards are extremely unrealistic and virtually impossible for most people in the developed world to live up to. And beyond that, they’re not standards that are shared by the vast majority of the populace, they’re just weird fringe ideals that are only taken seriously by an infinitesimally small subset of the population.
For instance, the vast majority of people would not consider aggression and disagreeableness to be positive traits, and would in fact consider those traits to be highly undesirable. Sure, assertiveness and resolve are admirable qualities, but if you’re conflating those things with aggression and disagreeableness, that already displays a fairly toxic mode of thinking that’s likely to get you in trouble far more often than not.
@Atlas,
Okay, I didn’t go to a four-year college, and I’m a blue collar worker (yes as a plumber, my username wasn’t an act of imaginative inspiration), but your self assessment is similar to my own one when I was in my early 20’s.
Okay, first off, as most everyone has already commented: Life advice from those who have shown that they are likely too batshit crazy ’cause, you know, they are self-proclaimed Nazi’s is unwise (also stay away from Maoists, left-anarchists, and don’t become a libertarian until you have a lot of ready spending money, it would probably be best for your mental health to not think too deeply about politics until you’re in your 30’s (to “argue from authority” I think Aristotle said to not study political philosophy until you’re in your 40’s), if the taste for it is too strong, I remember reading a bunch of works by Bertrand Russell (with a bunch of works by C.S. Lewis as a balance) in my 20’s, plus a little bit of John Rawls (which was hard to follow), a little bit of Herbert Spencer, and a little bit of Karl Marx (basically the books the woman who became my wife had from her University education), but really, just enough Rawls to get the gist, and mostly the Lewis and the Russell should be fine, the Marx and the Spencer just balance each other, skip one, skip the other – that’s enough for politics, just nodding and agreeing with whomever you’re with that’s mainstream in your area will probably be good.
Otherwise a lot of your list looks like a desire for status, and I’m going to take a leap and guess because you want a romantic partner – my advice for that is to try and spend less time on-line and more time engaging in a hobby that women near your age are interested in, and I strongly suspect that’s still music and dance, so yeah, form a band, or take some dance lessons.
As to being “handy”, believe me no young lady is going to jump into your arms because you fixed her car or faucet, you’ll be lucky to even get a smile, but if you really want to be “handy” the key is desperation and stubbornness, though being calm and not exhausted will help you get ideas on how to proceed. If you really want to learn a trade: become an indentured apprentice (that will also help with the “make a living” thing).
In terms of how to think about what to do for a living, once again I recommend:
How to Tell When You’re Tired: A Brief Examination of Work by Reg Theriault
and
Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work by Matthew Crawford
The kindle of The Machinery of Freedom is only $4.99. What more do you need?
The protection agency wants the first month’s fees up front!
While the government takes its much larger fees as you earn your income or spend it.
But the comment wasn’t about living in a libertarian society but about being a libertarian.
@DavidFriedman
A Kindle and a place to plug it in, though more specifically, my guess is that @Atlas would probably be happier if he left politics as a hobby behind for a while (or if he is politically active was in a movement with more girls instead).
Since (like most 20-somethings) “until your older” isn’t advice he’d be likely to accept, he may accept “Until you have lots of cash” instead, but he could do worse reading than your book (and apparently is).
He must have a computer and web access or he wouldn’t be posting here, and there are free kindle programs to let him read kindles on a computer. And if he doesn’t have $4.99, the second edition of Machinery is a free pdf on my site, although the third edition has lots of additional stuff.
There you have a point. The problem with “movement” is that you also want a movement based on ideas that you believe in, which restricts the alternatives a good deal.
So probably better to find a non-political interest with more women—folk dancing, perhaps.
If he did want to be a libertarian and use the movement for mate search, both Students for Liberty and Young Americans for Liberty seem to have a respectable f/m ratio, although still below one. Porcfest felt like a ratio reasonably close to one, although I don’t have any statistics, but I suspect a large fraction of the women were part of married couples.
There’s a meetup this Saturday in Washington DC at 7pm on July 13. We’ll be meeting at 616 E St Northwest. Come talk about the blog if you’re in the area!