Open Thread 141.25

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1,084 Responses to Open Thread 141.25

  1. Lightveil says:

    Are there any books or resources that have aided in increasing your general cognition (mental recall, generalized problem solving maybe)? I’m personally not that great at pure fact-recall, and I’m sure there are ways I can improve with that at least somewhat; I haven’t looked into studies for this yet, wanted to ask if anyone here had recommendations for that sort of thing before I did that.

    • Paul Brinkley says:

      The best method I found for improving mental recall is still the one I learned from my high school English teacher back in the late 1980s: “places in a building”.

      Start with a list of things you want to remember, anda building you’re so familiar with that you could describe what’s at every step. For example, if you live in a townhouse, you might know the front door, and then inside that is a five foot square landing with stairs up and down and a coat rack to your left. Halfway down the down stairs is a sconce containing a pot of dry ornamental flowers. And so on.

      Then you imagine placing everything in your list into the building, one list item per building feature. An Alaska tree ornament hangs from the coat rack. The sconce now contains a “Visit Alabama” poster. And so forth.

      With practice, you can simulate a walking tour of the building co-temporal with walking your list. It also doesn’t have to be a real building. If you’ve played a videogame with a well-defined world, for instance, you could just as easily place list items within that. In general, one can view this method as mapping an unfamiliar sequence onto a familiar one, but describing it that way is more boring than talking about places in a building.

    • Statismagician says:

      You might try Kim’s Game.

    • Don_Flamingo says:

      Ratfic actually. HPMOR and recently Worth the Candle and Pokemon: Origin of Species.
      Long-term in the occasional concept that’s new or put into a new light for me perhaps, but when I binge-read them for a couple hours and look at my life there’s a noticeable shift in perception for up to a day afterward, where solution to personal problems become easier and obvious, they just pop out.
      Sadly there’s very little of it that’s out there. What I mentioned is already the best, if one is put off by the idea of sparkly vampires and magical friendship ponies.

    • Mark Atwood says:

      “The Memory Book” by Harry Lorayne

      And the concept of Spaced Repetition Memorization [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition ]

      Use these two things, and people will think you are some sort of impossible magician.

      That these are not anchor foundation parts of public school is yet another example of how “school” is not for “learning”.

      The techniques in “Memory Book” were, in more enlightened times, THE foundation of being any sort of scholar or professional, and had to be mastered before anyone would bother wasting any time trying to teach you much more.

      • Chalid says:

        How much effort does it take before you see significant improvements?

        • SamChevre says:

          Spaced repetition using Anki works fast. I started spending ~10 minutes a day on it to strengthen my French vocabulary, and could see the difference in reading ease within a week.

  2. Nick says:

    SSC, how expensive are children? What do people mean when they say they can’t afford kids, or that kids are unaffordable period? How well can we quantify this?

    I see at least two interpretations. One is how much kids commonly cost. Another is how little they might cost if you were serious about saving money—say, avoiding the two-income trap by getting a cheap house in a bad school district and homeschooling.

    I think a dollar figure per year is the more useful answer, but the first interpretation may be better answered as a percentage of income. And later kids cost less than earlier ones, so if you want to answer for what, say, a third kid would cost—the kid a lot of families say they’d like to have but can’t—that’s great.

    • Business Analyst says:

      I think it’s not really that kids are all that expensive (even urban kids). What’s expensive is raising kids in an urban job center, while maintaining a professional/UMC lifestyle (frequent travel, both spouses work, and the kids maintain the effort to stay on a track to be admitted into a top 50 USNWR undergrad school, etc).

    • Statismagician says:

      Per USDA, about $13,000/child/year for a married couple with two children. This will skew lower with >2 children, higher with single parents.

      It’s not clear to me that this is a useful minimum or even marginal cost, though – they have ~30% per-year cost going to housing, which you might very plausibly already be spending if you live in a house or apartment with a spare bedroom, for example.

      • Plumber says:

        @Statismagician >

        “…spare bedroom…”

        I believe “spare bedrooms” were abolished 30 years ago.

        If any are left to be found they’re located in “There-Be-Dragons, Texas” or some such.

        • Statismagician says:

          NB: I live in Missouri, where my 1,200 ft^2 apartment costs $950/month.

        • gbdub says:

          Suburban Phoenix. My 4 bedroom house has a mortgage payment <$1000. Phoenix is a cheap metro, but single family homes in suburbia everywhere are typically 3 bedrooms minimum and most people aren’t renting those rooms out.

          You live in an extremely expensive bubble.

        • If any are left to be found they’re located in “There-Be-Dragons, Texas” or some such.

          I live in the SF Bay Area, and we have a room that is both a guest bedroom and the place to put the accumulated toys from when our children were children–available for current children, mostly my granddaughter, to play in. That’s a spare bedroom, and if we had managed to produce a third child it would have held him or her, with no need for additional housing.

          You surely can’t refuse to check the evidence that your belief is false.

          I now have a convincing argument for why you have to come visit (meetup this Sunday, for example). Wife and offspring welcome too.

          • Oops. My wife points out that I wrote “Sunday” when the meetup is Saturday.

            If you and your family do show up Sunday you will be welcome, but it will be a very small meetup.

          • Plumber says:

            Thanks @DavidFriedman,

            As always my wife has made plans and a long car or my absence isn’t welcomed by her, I couod take a “vacation day” Monday to Friday during work hours and visit then instead.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            @Plumber:

            As always my wife has made plans and a long car or my absence isn’t welcomed by her,

            Huh, a woman who hates limousines.

          • Plumber says:

            @Le Maistre Chat,

            Oh jeez.

            “long car trip

          • What day would be best for a visit depends on when. Tuesday my older son and his family usually come over for dinner, so if you want to meet my beautiful baby granddaughter that would be the best day. Every other weekday some member of the family has some evening commitment, so visiting during the day is fine but dinner time means that Betty (Thursday), or Betty and Becca (Monday), or Betty, Becca, and Bill (Wednesday) go off somewhere after dinner–I’m still available. Friday my daughter Becca is committed for most of the day, but the rest of us are available to socialize.

            Saturday and Sunday are usually free.

            Obviously you are welcome to bring any or all members of your family.

            This Thursday, of course, is Thanksgiving.

      • Nick says:

        Yeah, at 29% that’s $3,770/year, or $314/month—nearly the cost of the two-bedroom apartment I grew up in.

    • Jake says:

      Here’s some real-life numbers from my kids monthly expenditures (4 kids, stay-at-home mom):
      $200 housing (difference between housing costs when we were DINKs vs now divided by # kids)
      $100 groceries (about an extra $25/wk for an extra mouth…not bad all in all)
      $40 restaurants (an extra kids meal or two a week)
      $100 college savings (529 plan)
      $100 hobby (piano lessons, soccer, something ends up being about $25/wk)
      $50 clothes? (this is probably on the high side, but I just had to buy winter gear… hand-me-downs knock this way lower for subsequent children)
      $20 babysitter for date nights (again this is lower because I split it up among a lot of kids)
      $50 misc toys/furniture/etc (catch-all)

      This comes out to about $660/month/kid which seems about right to me. Kids aren’t super expensive, but they aren’t cheap. Though they do get cheaper in volume to a point. As they get older I’d expect some costs to increase. Add in the ~$400/month opportunity cost each for their mom staying at home instead of working (calculated that on another forum…its surprisingly inefficient for a second spouse to work with small children), and you are about at the $13k/yr Statismagician quoted.

      • matthewravery says:

        its surprisingly inefficient for a second spouse to work with small children

        Had a fellow I know in the Navy who was married to another officer. They did the math and her hourly rate less child care costs came out to less than minimum wage. (He made more because he’s a pilot.) So she retired early to take care of the kids.

        The trick is once the kids are in school, working starts looking like a much better option, and a 5-10 year break from the work force can be devastating to many careers. So some people choose to bite the bullet and continue working for that ~decade because of long-term concerns.

        • gbdub says:

          Yeah it’s that last paragraph that sucks. Otherwise between taxes and full time child care costs, having the second spouse work is minimal benefit unless the second earner would be making like $50k a year.

    • matthewravery says:

      “Can’t afford kids” means different things to different people. Most commonly, it means something like, “Can’t afford kids and maintain my current lifestyle”.

      To answer your original question imprecisely, I’d say that kids are costly in terms of time and money (with degrees of fungibility between the two) but most noticeably in freedom. Your option set is curtailed dramatically when you have kids.

      (I say this as someone who’s doing well and has a good job, so I my life currently has a ton of optionality. Were I poorer, my perspective on the effect of children on what things I could do on a daily basis might be different.)

    • Randy M says:

      I recall this coming up recently if you want to search.

      As right now we are home schooling, kids are costing 50% of our income, – whatever expenses would have gone to the wife’s new job, – whatever we save by having someone do the cooking/cleaning/maintenance rather than going out for all that like we might with two full time employed, + the cost of an extra bedroom per month, + a bit more for groceries & clothes, + additional for insurance covering family rather than just a couple, + occasional medical co-pay for orthodontist or X-ray, + a bit for toys treats.

      But the long and short of it is, we five can get by on ~65,000/year in California, so probably less than you think.

      • Nick says:

        I recall this coming up recently if you want to search.

        It’s come up a lot, yeah. But I wanted to start the conversation with numbers if possible. The question why people feel kids are so unaffordably expensive is just as interesting, but I think the answer to that depends a lot on what the numbers look like.

        • Statismagician says:

          College-costs-as-reported vs. college-costs-as-actually-paid is a big part of it, I expect.

        • Randy M says:

          I’d say, doing the math on my equation, about $45,000 per year the way we do it, for up to three kids, going to run a bit more if looking to go for more than that. (It’ll be a step function as you feel the need to add bedrooms, etc., but it varies by family when that is required.)
          If we had them in public school in would probably be ~5,000. Not sure what private runs, considerably more per.

          There’s a lot of variables, and a lot of places where sacrifices can be made depending on priorities. I’d say it probably varies from ~2,500/year to 10,000 without accounting for lost income due to variation in education, and some unfortunately lose the lottery and end up paying tons in medical expenses or heartache.
          Obviously you’re only asking about one side of the equation.

    • aristides says:

      Here is my serious about saving money plan, bearing in mind that I don’t actually have any children yet, and googled these number in like 20 minutes. Food will probably cost roughly $2,400 per year per child. Clothes will probably be around $600 a month. We already are renting a 4 bedroom house just on preference alone, and plan on buying a 4 bedroom weather or not we have kids, so no additional cost there. We are doing the 2 income trap of homeschooling in rural area. My wife works about 10 hours a week at home, and my dad is going to help with child care, so no extra cost there. We plan on saving $720 a year that our child will receive at 18 if they want to go to college or start a business. Entertainment expenses will likely not noticeably increase, since we do not take vacations and spend all our money on video games and Disney+ already. Our child can play the same copy of Pokemon that we can. Health insurance premiums will go $80 a month, plus copays, I’ll say $1,200.

      Each additional child will not increase my health insurance premiums, and can receive hand me downs. This brings my extremely optimistic annual number to $4,920, with additional children costing $3,400. I will not be surprised if I am off about 50% of the costs. Still that gives my estimat around $5,000 to $7,500 annually, half of what the average married couple with 2 children are paying.

      • Randy M says:

        Clothes will probably be around $600 a month.

        Per year, surely? Or you have really snazzy kids.

        • Plumber says:

          My thoughts exactly, even if your going clothes shopping at Target instead of Goodwill/Salvation Army/yard sales/church sales even $600 a year is a lot.

          • Rebecca Friedman says:

            Yeah, as far as I can remember my parents were very generous – I had velour dresses for winter and summer dresses with pockets and one Best Dress replaced whenever I grew really thoroughly out of it – and I’d be shocked if they were spending that much. I think at current prices, most of my dresses came to $45, and I got maybe three new ones per year. There’s also jackets and socks and underwear and so on but… $600 is a lot.

          • SamChevre says:

            Geography matters though: I think we’re well under $600 a year in total, but just getting good winter clothes costs ~$100 a child here in Massachusetts.

          • Nick says:

            A good winter coat costs a lot (I think mine was well in excess of $100, and a friend just bought one last week for $170, he said), but those are adult sizes; can you get a good kid’s coat for, say, $100? And moreover, those can last a few years, at least if you buy large.

            ETA: Another factor now that I think about it is athletic clothes and equipment. Though I imagine that’s more toward middle school and on.

          • Randy M says:

            I still have jackets and sweaters from twenty years ago, although that probably wouldn’t be the case if I wore them year round, expensive clothes do tend to last awhile.
            Now kids will out grow them, but that’s why you shouldn’t be ashamed to make use of hand-me downs or second hand stores.

          • SamChevre says:

            Just for clarity – the $100/child was for us, buying good secondhand clothes where feasible. But full winter clothes if you want to be able to play comfortably in snow for more than a few minutes is a coat, snowpants, a hat and cloves, warm socks, and boots. And boots in particular are expensive and wear out quickly.

        • aristides says:

          Oops, I meant year. $50 a month. My clothing budget isn’t that high.

    • EchoChaos says:

      So, solid two-income trap avoider here. We are on a school district boundary where we’re in the “worse” although the actual neighborhood is nice, we homeschool and my wife stays at home to take care of our four (so far) kids.

      It really isn’t that expensive at all in terms of actual marginal costs, especially for later kids. The real costs are opportunity costs. We don’t take big international vacations (and rarely even big domestic) like we did before kids, we don’t eat out, etc.

      We are saving pretty aggressively for college for so many kids especially with the college bubble ever-inflating, etc.

      What most people mean when they say they can’t afford kids is either that kids would be a major imposition on their free time or that they can’t afford the kind of childhood they envision a kid wanting as perfect.

      • meh says:

        is home schooling among SSC insanely higher than base line?

        • Lambert says:

          Seems to be.
          Smart people who know the content that kids need to be taught.
          People who were bored at school.
          People who read Bryan Caplan.
          People who know enough other likeminded people that they can get some economies of scale going.
          General nonconformists and contrarians.

          • matthewravery says:

            Yeah, a weirdly high number of people hated school and seem to think school is an awful place for very smart kids.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @matthewravery

            Most of them think that through hard experience. It’s not exactly random bigotry.

          • and seem to think school is an awful place for very smart kids.

            “Awful” is too strong. I was bored of the time, in a very good private school, and so was the woman I am now married to, in a reasonably good public school. We thought we could do better for our children, and I think were correct.

          • matthewravery says:

            @EC

            I don’t think it’s random bigotry, just over-generalization from individual experience. I think plenty of smart folks have a bad time at public schools, but I don’t think that means that, as a general rule, smart kids have a bad time at public schools.

            But maybe I’m either over-generalizing from my own experience (not flowers and unicorns but neither constant misery) or ya’ll have a few extra SD on IQ over me.

            My point would be to keep an open mind about it and evaluate schools case-by-case. I went to a pretty good magnet school where I wasn’t the smartest kid in my class, though I was near the top. (Aside: Many of the folks I went to grad school with were top of their class with a bullet, and I think they suffered from it when entering an environment where they weren’t easily the smartest person in the room.) I knew kids growing up that didn’t like the standard HS or the magnet and were able to do community college starting at 16, which they enjoyed more. Homeschooling isn’t the only way to “opt out” of existing system, and often times kids have a good idea what they want.

            Where you live matters, too. I think growing up in a college town was helpful, both because you had a smarter (on average) student population (thus higher demand for “gifted” programs and the like) and because you had a higher-quality pool of instructors to hire from (since many graduates wanted to stay in the area).

            My current area has high-quality magnet schools as well, but also a lot of high-achieving parents. I worry that combination will make grade school an overly-competitive experience for the children.

            YMMV.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @matthewravery

            Sorry I missed this earlier. I’m not claiming to be a lot smarter than you, and obviously @DavidFriedman has both of us lapped, but I think it’s a very common problem.

            In any school, public or private, the further you are from the local mean, the worse it’s going to be. In either direction, really, as low intelligence kids will get mocked and smart kids will be bored and possibly ostracized if they’re too far from the mean.

            Now, this depends on your local mean, and it sounds like you were in a smart area where you were very close, so school was fine for you in those terms. My local mean was unusually low when I started school, which is why my parents homeschooled me. No local mean is ever going to be high enough for a +2/3 SD kid.

            Now, obviously some of them are socially adept enough to make it work even when they’re much smarter than the peer group, but it’s even better to teach them at their own pace and let them be friends with their peer group regardless of having to dumb down to fit in. This is how real life works, after all.

        • eigenmoon says:

          Yes, because the base line is this: public schools in Illinois using solitary confinement. At least read the incident report fragment. This is what public schools are now.

          • Tarpitz says:

            On the one hand, this seems to be special needs schools rather than schools in general, so I’m not sure this really makes the case for homeschooling to parents of children without special needs.

            On the other hand, what the actual fuck?

          • Lambert says:

            A) why did that page take so bloody long to load?
            Can’t I just read an article without a constantly moving background?

            B) That’s not even the Judge Rotenburg School.

          • quanta413 says:

            I can see how the slope happened. I doubt that the people doing it did it because they thought it had rehabilitative effects on the isolated child. But it may help regain control of the room, which could help make the other children not in isolated timeout better off. Although the bigger part may be, it probably makes some staff’s lives easier. Seriously, those jobs sound terrible. I am not surprised ordinary humans would sometimes throw up their hands in frustration during job like that and do something to make their lives easier.

            So the staff makes their lives easier, they justify it by thinking it helps them keep the remaining children in order and making some progress. Kids peeing themselves is probably a lot more common at a special needs school, so the staff aren’t as horrified by that sort of case as the readers are (who likely haven’t thought about the implications of how badly things could go with developmental disabilities).

          • meh says:

            If you’ve ever interacted with kids that age, it is hard to judge how serious those scare quotes are without observing the actual situation. Kids will say stuff like that even for trivial things.

          • quanta413 says:

            I agree the complaints of the kids don’t necessarily mean a lot on their own and it’s hard to judge that bit, but the ten-hour detention stands out to me. I assume the kid was let out to go to the bathroom (because otherwise I’m pretty sure the reporters would’ve said so) and to eat.

            But it’s tough to figure out a situation where that’s just an understandable screw up. The entire day and then some? Did the child try to eat a teacher or something? Were they a little Mike Tyson?

        • Plumber says:

          @meh says:

          “is home schooling among SSC insanely higher than base line?”

          Seems like a good topic to add to the yearly survey @Scott Alexander!

          FWIW, were sorta homeschooling our 14 year-old son, but a lot of that is now having him take equivalent classes at a nearby community college (which took a lot of hoops to get to do)

          I’ve posted before that I don’t think High school and maybe even most of Middle school should’nt even exist, the community colleges do a better job.

          Some specialized teenager oriented “health”/”social-living” class (“please get anyone pregnant/get pregnant yet, and don’t catch/spread diseases“), and with the low birthrates this decade I don’t even know if there’s still much call for that, otherwise apprenticeships and/or college at no latter than the age of 15 seems right.

        • The two children of our present marriage (both of whom sometimes post here) were first unschooled in a very small and unconventional (and inexpensive) private school, then home unschooled.

      • Don_Flamingo says:

        Why bother saving up for college, if you know it to be a bubble?
        If it hasn’t burst already by time it becomes relevant, then it’s probably better not to go. Or just send them all to German universities, where it’s statefunded?

        • EchoChaos says:

          Why bother saving up for college, if you know it to be a bubble?

          Because “know” is a strong word and I am not betting on it popping in the next 10 years based on how long things can stay insane relative to when my kids are going to grow up.

          If it hasn’t burst already by time it becomes relevant, then it’s probably better not to go.

          Why would that be? Even now, with the bubble pretty bad, college is better than no college for a variety of reasons. If my kids choose a trade or non-college path when they’re 18, then I have a large nest-egg to start them with anyway.

          Or just send them all to German universities, where it’s statefunded?

          I’m not a German citizen. I don’t know how difficult it is for Americans to attend German schools.

          • Don_Flamingo says:

            I am. As far as I’m aware, you’d pay the same rates. Less than 400 Euros per semester including a statewide trainticket. Living costs are comparable to the US.
            Different unis might handle this differently, though. Many courses are entirely in English, too. And graduating college (not a given, look at dropout rates for STEM [and who cares about non-stem]) might be better than no college at all.
            Am far from saying that saving is bad or US college a bad idea…. just that there’s a wider world out there, which might be a lot cheaper.

          • Lambert says:

            What are the rates for Masters’ like?
            Less than the 9000 or so in Britain?

      • SamChevre says:

        Anecdata: at the Western Mass SSC meetup one time, none of the first 6 people to arrive had gone to anything like a conventional school: then someone came in who’d gone to Catholic school so we all asked him lots and lots of questions. (And no two of us had done similar things–very Bob Jones -ish homeschooler, Amish-Mennonite one-room school, unschooling, other random.)

      • Shion Arita says:

        Am I alone in my thinking that the ‘school quality’ of my (potential future) kids doesn’t matter aside from maybe college? I went to a ‘bad’ middle and high school and, meh.

        My take is if the kid is intelligent enough that education and learning things really matters to them, any school before college would be equally useless to them, as it was to me. If they’re not, then it doesn’t really matter then either, right?

        • ana53294 says:

          It does matter for the happiness of very intelligent kids. Smart kids in bad schools get really bored and miserable.

          So if you only care about the end result, and don’t care about the kids’ happiness during school, then no, it doesn’t matter.

          • Clutzy says:

            Meh. Intelligent kids in a mediocre school that allows segregation via honors and AP courses do fine. I went to such schools my entire life and our top scorers always competed (and often beat) the higher average scoring schools around us, its just there was also a large contingent of low scoring students technically in the same school.

          • Statismagician says:

            Note that scores have nothing to do with whether or not the kids in question are bored and miserable.

          • Clutzy says:

            Note that scores have nothing to do with whether or not the kids in question are bored and miserable.

            Well, there’s no guarantee of that at a top school either. And from my experience, its true for the dumb kids and the average kids as well. Its not a newsflash that kids don’t like school. Its a system that caters more towards the enrichment and comfort of adults (both the teachers and the parents warehousing kids there), rather than the entertainment and education of children.

            Even simple fixes that would increase student performance and enjoyment like having multiple recesses outdoors are too much work for most of these systems to comprehend.

          • ana53294 says:

            I sincerely believe that kids who have the option of homeschooling (so if they really like school, they can go) would be overall happier during their childhood.

            The people who I heard were miserable homeschooling were people who didn’t have a choice as kids to go to school.

          • Shion Arita says:

            I guess what I’m getting at is I think that very intelligent kids would be really bored and miserable no matter what school they are in. That was certainly true for me; I had a ‘good’ elementary school, and then a ‘bad’ middle school and high school, and to be honest I was happier in high school, but for reasons independent of the education quality. because even though the elem. school was ‘better’, it was still extremely boring and useless to me.

            And like Clutzy said, the dumb and average kids didn’t really seem to like it much either.

        • Thomas Jorgensen says:

          School quality matters, but it also usually does not vary much, and naive measures of it are trash.
          That is, you need to get the socio-economically adjusted numbers. If a school is serving a catchment region that includes a google campus and the neighbourhood where all the local university professors live, it is going to post really impressive grade and sat averages. Even if it is bad. Simply because it gets students who are outliers.

          The question that matters is “how much is this school going to successfully impart to a kid similar to my child.” And by that measure, the usual result is that as long as you are not going to school in the middle of a lead-poisoning super-fund site (IE, a school district so horrific teachers are in full-time damage control mode) the differences are not that large, and frequently favor the public schools over the private alternatives. – That is, depending on your specific location, paying for private schooling might actively be harmful to your childs educational attainment, despite the private school you are sending the kid to having much higher average grades, because it is achieving that by cherry-picking students, not by having better teachers, and the same kids would have done as well or better in the local public school.. and certainly would have had better odds of being valedictorian, which is the sort of thing that looks shiny on an application.

          • quanta413 says:

            +1.

            At least in the U.S. (and I’d guess in a lot of Western Europe and anywhere rich enough too) unless the school has an unusually violent and poorly controlled student body, it’s not going to make much difference to students. And I’m not convinced there are many schools that are good enough to make much difference to students in the long run on average.

            Most schools with merely average or below average repuration are similar to above average reputation schools except for the student body. Really, really smart kids might be really bored in class as a below-average school, but they’d probably be bored at fancier school too. If they get pummeled at one school, there’s a good chance they’d get pummeled at another school. As far as subject matter goes even fancy high schools aren’t going to teach differential geometry or cover thousands of pages of secondary and primary sources in a history class each semester.

            There are some cases where it’d make a difference to get into a particular school (public or private). You’re not going to get thrashed for being a nerd at Stuyvesant whereas you might at some other NY public schools, but that’s not typical.

          • RalMirrorAd says:

            I agree 98% though i’m skeptical of your claim that a cherry picked private school might be worse than a public school. Cherry picking students results in higher averages that have nothing to do with teacher ability but cherry picking *does* allow private schools more discretion in removing troublemakers. Peer effects are non-trivial if i recall and so being surrounded by studious/conscientious peers as opposed to being stuck with disruptive trouble-makers.

            A public school AP program might wash out that private school benefit but those sorts of programs have come under attack recently.

          • John Schilling says:

            If a school is serving a catchment region that includes a google campus and the neighbourhood where all the local university professors live, it is going to post really impressive grade and sat averages. Even if it is bad.

            That school basically isn’t going to exist, because the people voting in local school board elections are going to be googlers and university professors and they will make sure that it is Not Bad. Or else they’ll pull their own kids from it and send them to a different (maybe private) school rather than use their kids as test subjects for the “it doesn’t matter if the school is bad” hypothesis.

          • Thomas Jorgensen says:

            Private schools do worse-than-the-local-public-school on the metrics after you adjust for student body really, really often. It is not a rare occurence. Younger teachers, worse paid teachers, a religious focus, just plain happening to end up with a less competent principal by bad luck, and the owners just plain cashing out to the detriment of student success.
            Private schools that are better than “Send your kid to public school, spend the going rate for private school tution on hiring masters students from the local uni to do one-on-one instruction for as many hours as that budget will cover”… basically do not exist.

          • albatross11 says:

            I think in practice a bad school is just a school with bad students like 99% of the time. I know of a local magnet school[1] that is highly regarded. The physical school is very old and in constant need of repair, and the facilities are not nearly as nice as many other schools in the county. People still move to that school district, because most of what makes a good school is good students. And I think there’s a kind of multiplier effect–they get better teachers because having good students inspires the teachers and draws the best ones, but also because a class full of hard-working, well-behaved, smart kids is more fun to teach and you can do more fun stuff when you’re not just struggling to get the kids to learn the basics.

            [1] It has non-magnet students, but the majority of the students are in one of the magnet programs. Non-magnet students often get to take some of the magnet classes, as well, assuming there’s room.

    • meh says:

      If you have a career that has any path of significant advancement, then the cost is very high; even if you are not the primary care giver.

    • benwave says:

      The biggest cost to my mind is the fact that one of you needs to stop working for up to five years. All the other costs pale in comparison!

      • Whether that’s a large cost depends on whether the one in question has work that he or she finds rewarding. There must be quite a lot of jobs that are worse than being a housewife.

    • hls2003 says:

      I would just add that all of these estimates are laudable but are also not considering outliers like various special needs or multiples. So these are all perfectly legitimate estimates of averages; but they may not include tail risk.

      • Statismagician says:

        Well said. Also note that a lot of these can be caught during pregnancy; you will want to have already had a serious talk about what you and your partner want to do if this does come up before trying to have children.

      • Randy M says:

        If you were going to have >1, doing so all at once (naturally, rather than IV or something) is probably cheaper since there’s less years before you can have both parties working again.
        But it’s going to be concentrated chaos.

        • hls2003 says:

          I don’t think it’s cheaper, because you need multiples of everything all at once. If you have two kids spaced 3 years apart, you need 1 crib, 1 infant car seat, 1 high chair, 1 set of infant clothing, 1 set of bottles, etc. If you have twins, you’ll need to buy twice as much physical stuff.

          ETA: Dovetailing with the breastfeeding discussion in the prior thread, it’s extremely unlikely to be able to breastfeed multiples. Formula costs $1.50 to $2.00 an ounce, and for twins+ you’ll be needing formula for every baby instead of zero babies. That lasts only for a couple years, but it’s significant.

          • Butlerian says:

            I very strongly suspect that the cost of the “physical stuff” you describe is negligable compared to the wages forefitted by not earning for a year.

            Two infant car seat rather than one is not going to cost anyone a year’s wages even if you gold-plated the second one.

          • hls2003 says:

            Less than, probably, but not negligible. I also very strongly suspect that you haven’t had to buy a bunch of that stuff all at once.

            Let’s say the stay-at-home parent earns $36,000 per year and the partner earns $64,000 for a $100K income. After taxes, that $36K probably results marginally in about $24-27K of additional foregone income. Day care is going to average something like $10-12K per year, and that’s out-of-pocket, which you’re saving. So the actual foregone dollars in that instance are closer to $15K. The “extra stuff” I’m describing (including formula) runs in the multi-thousand range. Not $10K, but not $1K. So yeah, it’s less, but it’s a noticeable percentage, not “negligible.”

            The most convincing loss, to me, is the “getting off the career track” argument. There’s no good way to offset that, and it takes its bite out of the high end of earnings many years later, not the low end of current earnings.

        • Randy M says:

          I don’t think it’s cheaper, because you need multiples of everything all at once. If you have two kids spaced 3 years apart, you need 1 crib, 1 infant car seat, 1 high chair, 1 set of infant clothing, 1 set of bottles, etc. If you have twins, you’ll need to buy twice as much physical stuff.

          Carseats expire and need to be replaced often enough you may not get much overlap. You don’t need cribs or high chairs at all.

          But that’s beyond the point, because those expenses are trivial compared to the lost earning potential.

          Dovetailing with the breastfeeding discussion in the prior thread, it’s extremely unlikely to be able to breastfeed multiples

          Based on experience, I doubt this in the average case. More than two, maybe. For some women, surely.
          We should, of course, be wary of any particular study on the topic.

          • hls2003 says:

            Based on experience and inquiry, it is highly unusual for a woman to produce enough to breastfeed two+ infants and not need formula. Highly.

          • Well... says:

            I’m a twin. My mom never used formula.

            This is anecdotal but one advantage to having twins, my parents tell me, is the twins entertain each other. For long periods of time. This hugely mitigates the amount of trouble you’d expect, and in some ways are easier than a single baby. (My dad had several with previous wives before he met my mom, so he’d know.)

          • zoozoc says:

            Carseats do not expire. The manufacturer recommends not using a carseat after X number of years because they want to make more money. But legally, there is no penalty for using an “expired” carseat. Insurance companies cannot deny you insurance if you are in an accident with an “expired” carseat.

            The food equivalent would be canned foods with an expiration date. The canned food isn’t actually bad after that point, but for various regulations/industry reasons, there has to be an expiration date.

          • Randy M says:

            The food equivalent would be canned foods with an expiration date. The canned food isn’t actually bad after that point, but for various regulations/industry reasons, there has to be an expiration date.

            Shrug. It might be the case that it’s just there to make money on something that wouldn’t otherwise ever obsolete. The idea of needing to replace them before they were outgrown struck me as silly at first too.

            Recently I put on my twenty year old roller blades, which had been in the garage, and the plastic snapped apart in five places.

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            Well… says:

            I’m a twin.

            Is your sibling named “Umm…”?

      • Nick says:

        That was something I thought about as I wrote the post, but I wasn’t sure I could ask people to factor it into their calculations. Incidentally, it becomes even more relevant if you’re having a lot of kids, because the risk of at least one having special needs goes up.

    • Plumber says:

      @Nick >

      “how expensive are children?…”

      Time is the biggest “cost” by far, after that it’s medical care and in what level of standard of living. 

      My employer charges a couple of bucks a paycheck for medical insurance for me, a couple bucks more for a spouse or one child, but medical care for two or more dependents is hundreds (San Francisco isn’t exactly “family friendly”). 

      Back in 2010 as part of the “stimulus” if you had dependents and lived in a high unemployment county if an employer would hire you some of your wages could be paid by the county with Federal government funding to your employer, in my county 50% of my wages would’ve been reimbursed to a private employer (didn’t actually get many much work but it was a nice thought), your kids health insurance could be paid by the government (in some ways the county clinic for children was better than private health insurance, the nurses really loved kids), and food stamps (actually a card) more than paid for meals, but what you couldn’t get without decent wagea was housing (savings and rent control is how we stayed housed, and even so the roof leaked).

      If you put in time kids don’t cost much:

      1) Home cooked meals using cheap ingredients (but having a kitchen and storage room for bulk items is expensive).

      2) Clothes, bedding and toys from Goodwill/The Salvation Army/yard sales, and especially church “rummage” sales (those are usually where the best bargains are found).

      3) Activities at libraries, public parks, occasional free days at museums (the Children’s Discovery Museum in Sausalito on their one Wednesday a month “sample” visit is particularly good).

      4) Standing in line (eight hours one day, plus four more the next for food stamps), plus social worker “consults (WIC) to get welfare state benefits. 

      All these take time which makes it harder to find and keep a job, one parent working reduces time available tremendously, two parents working especially without volunteer childcare help from friends/relatives exponentially increase the costs.

      In 2010 with a full-time stay-at-home-Mom plus a some paid work, some school, and job searches Dad not including rent and gasoline (and most of the gas was going to work, school, and waste-of-time-job-interviews) I don’t think we spent more than $3,000 (if even that) for two adults and a six-year-old.

      2019: Full-time-stay-at-home-Mom, full time working Dad, homeschooled teenage son and three-year-old son, we spend about a $1,000 a month on supplemental education, an extra $200 a week for medical insurance through my employer that covers our kids, maybe $300 a year for clothes and toys (and that’s still a lot of toys), diapers/wipes/etc. were about $200 a month for a couple of years, food – oh jeez, I’m guessing that the teenager costs us an extra $500 a month to feed, his little brother not even half that. 

      The real expense is housing, a studio apartment near the Port and a higher risk of your kid getting asthma (’cause of the diesel fumes) will probably run at least $1500 a month, plus there’s more crime and a much greater likelihood that your car’s windows will be smashed and/or the car’s battery or the whole car will be stolen (and when it’s found the battery will be gone and you’ll have to replace the cables that were cut), to live in sweet suburbia 15 miles from work in a two bedroom/one bathroom house is at least double the rent of the studio by the Port of Oakland, a two bedroom apartment in The City is at least triple the rent, in far suburbia the rent is the same or less than cheaper parts of Oakland, but your only seeing your kids awake on weekends (which is the only time you may see them after your wife divorces you, which seems to be the fate of most long distance commuters first marriages) unless you somehow find a job that pays the rent in far suburbia (good luck with that, if jobs were plentiful there the rent wouldn’t be cheaper).

      Send your teenager to Catholic school and your looking at another $20,000 a year expense.

      One parent being a full-time caregiver and bargain hunter cuts costs enormously, if you’re both working full time expect clothes and food expenses to at least triple, Target and take-out cost a lot more than church basements and cooking.

      • sami says:

        $200 a month on diapers and wipes? Surely you mean $200 a year right?

        • Plumber says:

          @sami,
          It was definitely more than $200 a year, I think we were using up a big box from Target every week for a while.

        • Jake says:

          For us it’s about $40/month for a box of ~150 diapers, and $20/month for the wipes (worth it to pay the extra $10/box for the good ones to not have to deal with leaks). Multiply that by 2 kids, and you’re at $120/month.

          • sami says:

            Huh, I guess I never realized how much wipes contribute to the cost. I think I bought three packs of wipes in the entire time before my son was toilet trained, just for putting in the diaper bag. We never used them at home because it was easier to just rinse his butt off with the hose in the kitchen sink.

      • Nick says:

        Send your teenager to Catholic school and your looking at another $20,000 a year expense.

        There’s been a real squeeze for Catholic schools, with (among other factors, I’m not sure these are even the biggest) competition from secular schools and declining family participation in most dioceses. Big city schools have responded by competing with fancy secular private schools—monetarily successfully, but obviously failing their mission to educate poor Catholic immigrant children, which those same cities no doubt have in abundance.

        Small town Catholic schools are less competitive but substantially cheaper. The Catholic high school near me growing up was <$3000 a year, which some local Hispanic families, for instance, could actually afford. The elementary school was $4-5000, if I remember correctly.

    • meh says:

      There is also the cost children have to your health.

    • SamChevre says:

      I’d say we raise children (5, ages 4-12) reasonably cheaply for middle-class parents–inexpensive area, homeschool, few and cheap activities. I’d estimate that we spend $10,000 per child per year, but part of that is being grown-ups. That’s based on “how much did we spend when we were first married” vs “how much do we spend now” – but we rented a studio apartment, vs owning a house. Marginal costs are much lower–if you already have the house and the van, it’s pretty much just clothes and food – say $150 a month.

      • DragonMilk says:

        What were the transition points (# of kids) between studio apartment vs. house?

        • SamChevre says:

          We moved several times between cities, so it wasn’t based exactly on number of children–we moved from the studio apartment into a one-bedroom house we built ourselves before the first was born, but that’s the only time we moved within the same city. That said – we had 3 children in the house we built ourselves, which was 900 sq ft, one-bedroom. That wouldn’t have worked if they were bigger, but the oldest was only 3 when we moved. We then had a 3-bedroom house, and a fourth child. Then we moved to where we are now, which is four-bedroom, and had a fifth child.

          As the children get older, a bit more space would be handy. On the other hand, a good friend has 5 children about the ages of ours, and works from home as a programmer. They have a solidly middle-class income, but prefer more land and a smaller house. They have a ~1000 sq ft, 3 bedroom house, but several acres of land. (This is a choice: they could afford a bigger house if they wanted one.)

    • A Definite Beta Guy says:

      You can do a lot to control the expenses, unless you are stuck with massive medical bills, live in expensive areas, or insist on paying for every dime to an expensive colleges. The Hispanic employees at our factory have large families that they begin at a very young age, and many attend decent state schools. More privileged people like my sister can afford a decent-sized house, a stay-at-home spouse, and a few children in good schools. My neighbor has had his wife stay-at-home for nearly 2 decades and we live in a pretty nice Chicago suburb.

      However, you have choices in life. Some people really, really, really want to buy the new phone, and some people really, really, really want to go on international vacations. Like, all the time. Like, 3 times a year. The last vacation I took was to SF this summer, and the last vacation I took before that was 2016.

      We probably could float my wife or I as a stay-at-home parent, even with the colossal student loan expense, but it’s a lot of opportunity cost given our current incomes.

      I will change my tune really quick if school is as bad for my kids as it was for me, because there’s no point in having money if your kids are chronically depressed.

    • Well... says:

      Related: how expensive is it to not have kids to care for you (or help outsource your care and assure its quality) when you’re really old?

    • Chalid says:

      I’m guessing that the real answer looks something like “kids on average take 15% of your income, +5% for each additional kid” and not like “kids cost $10k each.” (Made up numbers, don’t take seriously).

      The main costs are additional housing, career opportunity cost, and childcare/schooling. The first two scale with income and the third is something you definitely buy more and better-quality versions of when you have more money (e.g. a full-time nanny can cost $40k or more depending where you live, private school or moving to a better school district can cost a lot). All other costs are small by comparison.

    • Jake says:

      After reading a lot of comments on this thread, it seems like the general consensus is that kids cost somewhere between $5-$15k/yr each (with additional children getting cheaper), and the tradeoffs are much more about lifestyle tradeoffs than pure monetary considerations (this seems to be mostly U.S. based). While I agree with this analysis, I also feel the need to point out that people on this site tend to be on the higher end of the earnings spectrum. Median household income in the U.S. is ~$60k, so 3 children would consume somewhere between 25% and 75% of that income, which can be a huge consideration. If you consider that the adults in the household probably cost at least as much as the children, a 5-person household at $5-15k/person starts potentially exceeding 100% of income. And we need to remember that 50% of households make even less than that.

      • acymetric says:

        Also note that that would be ~$60k before taxes. Even with the various deductions for children your tax rate will be above 0%.

      • EchoChaos says:

        Far closer to 25%. People who are making $60k aren’t buying things that put them into the $15k a year bucket for their kids.

        • Jake says:

          Likely, but it depends on a lot of factors. Three of the biggest single costs are housing, healthcare, and childcare. Housing is going to be pretty variable based on where you live. Healthcare likely increases in direct cost as your income goes down, as a lot of higher income earners get better benefits from their jobs. Childcare also probably has a pretty stable floor across income ranges, and is likely to be more necessary to a lower-income family where both parents need to work.

          My point was more that looking at an additional $5k/yr expense can be a lot more daunting if you are on the lower end of the income ranges. I’ve had friends/family members who have chosen not to have kids because of this (and others who have had kids, but really couldn’t afford it).

          • Randy M says:

            I think this is reasonable.
            A lot of well-off people imagine that raising a happy child requires lots of expenses that in reality they could do without, often without noticing the loss.
            But there are a number of baseline expenses that make it a significant hurdle for the less well off, some of which may be able to be addressed by policy or lifestyle choices, many of which are not.

    • Ketil says:

      OECD operates with “units of consumption”, the first adult in a household constitutes one unit, the second 0.7, and each (child) after that adds 0.5.

      Of course, this is very coarse, but might serve as an indication, and in particular, there are economies of scale that I suspect are (or can) be greater than for adults. (Kids can take over clothes, toys, and sports equipment, while I can’t really use much of my wife’s things – not without some raised eyebrows, at least). The first child in particular tends to incur a lot of one-time investments.

    • Viliam says:

      Eastern Europe, two kids of age 4 and 2. Not sure how much of this will be relevant for you.

      The greatest expense was losing a few years of my wife’s salary. I suppose this one hits hardest the families where before having kids the woman made decent money and she used to spend it all on herself. Our situation is quite okay here, because I make more money than she did, which means that as a pair we lost less than half of our total income; and both of us started with decent savings.

      The second greatest expense was having to buy a larger place to live. As a single guy, I had a 55 m2 flat, which was okay for me and an occassional girlfriend, but I can’t imagine living there with a wife and two kids. Now we have 80 m2, which is maybe a bit more than we need now, but it means we have a reserve in case we decide to have more kids.

      Luckily, the kids are healthy, and the mom was able to breastfeed them. Because problems in this area can generate a lot of expenses and work.

      Kindergartens can be costly; luckily my employer generously contributes 50% of the cost. This is a rare case where I applaud political correctness, because of course this policy was made with the intention to make women return to their job faster, but it would be sexist not to offer the same benefits to the male employees.

      Everything else is relatively peanuts. Second-hand clothes are cheap. People donate so many toys we don’t have enough place to store them. (Relatives buy new toys; friends and neighbors donate toys their kids are too old to play with.) Small kids don’t eat a lot. If you used to eat regularly in restaurants, and now you start cooking at home, your food expenses will decrease despite now feeding more people.

      The occassional vacation can get expensive, but this is optional.

      • sharper13 says:

        As a single guy, I had a 55 m2 flat, which was okay for me and an occassional girlfriend, but I can’t imagine living there with a wife and two kids. Now we have 80 m2, which is maybe a bit more than we need now, but it means we have a reserve in case we decide to have more kids.

        Occasional comments like this are big reminders of how different these calculations are in the United States. I just checked and a local “tiny” one-bedroom apartment in the average cost of living city I’m in is $585/month and 65 m2. We have four kids, but we’ve lived in ~325 m2 in a middle-class neighborhood for more than a dozen years at $900-$1500/month (depending on city and commute location) and that’s not super unusual here (ignoring the coastal CA, NYC & D.C.).

        Granted, we lived in large-by-comparison apartments until we had our second child, when we moved into a townhouse, but we had our 3rd kid in a full-size house.

    • brad says:

      What do people mean when they say they can’t afford kids, or that kids are unaffordable period?

      It means they wish they had more money. Yeah, so does everyone but not everyone gets sanctimonious about it.

  3. Bobobob says:

    Can anyone recommend some good non-entry-level, reasonably hardcore, but still general-interest science books that have been published over the last few years?

    I feel like I’ve read everything out there that’s worth reading, so now I’m reduced to rereading what I already have. Examples of my sweet spot: The Road to Reality by Roger Penrose, From Eternity to Here by Sean Carroll, Quantum Computing Since Democritus by the other Scott A, Complexity by Stuart Kauffman, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle by Barrow & Tipler (that one goes way, way back).

    It’s incredibly frustrating to scan the science section of Barnes & Noble or my local indie bookstore and see all these books that purport (yet again) to explain quantum physics, parallel universes, evolution, etc., not to mention McBooks with titles like “Hydrogen: The Element that Changed the World” or “The Physics of the Avengers.” Any suggestions?

    • Elephant says:

      Anything by Philip Ball. Anything by Steven Vogel. Mary Roach’s books are phenomenal, but I’m not sure they’re “hardcore” enough for what you want.

    • eightieshair says:

      Have you checked out any of the Theoretical Minimum series by Leonard Susskind?

      So far there’s v1 Classical Mechanics, v2 Quantum Mechanics, and v3 Special Relativity and Classical Field Theory. They involve actual math, but all the necessary mathematics (other than basic algebra) is explained in the books.

    • Douglas Knight says:

      Why restrict to the last few years, or even the last few decades?

      The Origin of Species.

      • Bobobob says:

        I’m not sure I have the heart to read Darwin in the original. My tastes run more toward the modern glosses of Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett.

        • Statismagician says:

          It’s quite accessible, actually – Darwin is a good writer working before a lot of the jargon was invented.

          • Lambert says:

            I found it far too thorough and dry for a lay audience.
            OotS backed up an extraodinary claim using an extraordinary amount of evidence about pigeon breeding and other tedious stuff.

          • Statismagician says:

            I suppose I’m probably not representative – you can always skip the bits about pigeon breeding after you get the gist, to be fair.

    • littskad says:

      Paul Nahin’s The Science of Radio is a lot of fun and really interesting. He’s also got a lot of other interesting books.

      • Bobobob says:

        Paul Nahin wrote one of my favorite science books ever, Time Machines. The best book on time travel ever written, liberally seasoned with examples from virtually every time-travel SF story ever written.

    • quanta413 says:

      Going to also break the recency requirement although not by nearly so much. Structures: Or Why Things Don’t Fall Down is an excellent work that covers a lot of solid mechanics related to buildings. It makes use of some basic math (like Algebra I), but if you can read the Road to Reality I don’t think that will be a problem.

      I am kind of surprised you classify The Road to Reality as general-interest. It’s sort of halfway between an entry-level description of some subfields of physics (and a hell of a lot of math) and a condensed mathematical physics textbook in a way that I find awkward. Have you worked out some of the exercises in the book by hand?

      • Bobobob says:

        I don’t understand most of the equations in RtoR, but hey, you certainly can’t accuse Roger Penrose of talking down to his audience. My favorite part is when he introduces those googly extraterrestrial tentacle notations for four-dimensional vector torsion algebras (or whatever they were). I’m glad someone is on top of this stuff.

    • Mark V Anderson says:

      Isaac Asimov? He is always fun to read, was a real scientist, and had integrity. Obviously it won’t be the latest stuff since he died sometime ago, but easier to read than say Charles Darwin.

    • abystander says:

      The Vital Question by Nick Lane. He is a biochemist and has very interesting hypothesis about the origins of life and the development of eukaryotes based on bioenergetics. What is the most likely source of energy for the first cells, and implications of mitochondria has for the development, reproduction and death of multi-cellular life forms?

    • Murphy says:

      Not really science apart from a bit on the application of quantum physics to crypto but “the code book” by simon singh is really good and approachable for anyone.

      • Bobobob says:

        Yeah, I’ve read that. I find Simon Singh a little frustrating, he sometimes veers over into pop science territory. And let’s not forget he wrote “The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets” (which I haven’t read, but as a fellow writer I can’t blame him for making money however he can…)

  4. jermo sapiens says:

    Over the weekend I came up on the worst “scissor statement” I had seen before in my life. It was put out by an organization called “Washington STEM”, but I would expect that most progressives would agree with it. In fact I believe that the statement is the essence of progressivism condensed in as pure a form as possible. And I would submit that this statement is a central tenet of the current state religion of progressivism, much like the resurrection of Christ is the central tenet of Christianity.

    The statement can be seen here, but is reproduced below:

    If you conclude that outcomes differences by demographic subgroup are a result of anything other than a broken system, that is, by definition, bigotry.

    Never mind that bigotry is actually intolerance of other’s opinions, and that the statement therefore is enormously bigoted, there are a few remarkable things about it.

    It presumes to know the reason behind every outcome difference in demographic subgroup.
    It presumes to know why some people may disagree with it – because they are evil.
    It allows minority problems to be weaponized against the majority.

    This is our wonderful multicultural future. Because group X has worst metrics in activity A, group Y will be made to pay. Obviously this will be applied selectively, groups favored by the elite will be allowed to benefit from having better metrics in anything (and will be held up as an example of that group’s superiority), and groups that are not favored by the elite will be made to pay when they do better than a favored group, and they will be made to pay when they do worse than a favored group.

    Ignorance Diversity is strength.

    • Randy M says:

      Why not apply it to individuals? Any evidence of different outcome among individuals should be evidence of a broken system.

      • JPNunez says:

        This is solved trivially by remembering that each individual is a complex system of cells trying to survive and/or reproduce.

        • chrisminor0008 says:

          So a person with only 1 cancerous cell who doesn’t acknowledge that the system is broken is bigoted?

    • ARabbiAndAFrog says:

      Outcome is ability+opportunity, roughly speaking. In larger numbers luck is not relevant, so we have to measure like this. If you claim that a particular group has worse outcomes despite having equal opportunity, you claim that that group has worse ability. And that’s bigotry. Because you assume different groups have different ability.

      Equal opportunity + unequal outcome seems like unstable arrangement, because either opportunity is not as equal and needs increasing, or limited opportunities are wasted on the unworthy. I suppose annonimity can be enforced somehow to suppress heuristic on behalf of the outliers, but can you really remove it all.

      We all have limited time after all, to educate ourselves and the others and limited number of vacancies to fill. Is it reasonable to expect teacher to work well when they can clearly see that their pupils will grow up into violent thugs. Is it responsible for a parent to encourage their daughters’ pursuits if they know they likely will grow up to want to be stay-at-home mothers, or is it reasonable to expect employer to hire and train someone who will get pregnant and drop out?

      • jermo sapiens says:

        If you claim that a particular group has worse outcomes despite having equal opportunity, you claim that that group has worse ability. And that’s bigotry. Because you assume different groups have different ability.

        1. Do you think men are stronger on average than women?
        2. If you answered yes to 1., do you think that this is because men have greater opportunity to get strong?
        3. If you answered no to 2., you are a bigot, according to your algorithm.

        Also, bigotry is not “claiming that a group has worse ability”.

        • ARabbiAndAFrog says:

          Bigot and proud.

          Your claim is a factual observation that only the most brazen progressive would deny. But what if instead you were to state that women are less fit to serve in armed forces because they lack physical strength? Bigoted enough?

          Perhaps “bigotry” is a term too loaded. It’s not bigoted if it’s correct and/or directed against outgroup.

          • jermo sapiens says:

            But what if instead you were to state that women are less fit to serve in armed forces because they lack physical strength? Bigoted enough?

            I would definitely make that claim. I dont think it’s bigoted at all. Not even a little bit. I dont even think it’s sexist.

            Specifically, if sexism is defined as beliefs that the genders are different, well then sexism is true and being true is good. So if sexism is bad, it must be defined as a false belief about differences between genders. But because women are in fact weaker than men, the belief that women are weaker than men is not sexism (or bigotry).

            Any corollary following from that belief is also not sexism or bigotry.

            Saying that women are stupider than men would be false, and therefore would be sexism.

          • benwave says:

            @jermo sapiens,

            Would you really make the claim that women are less fit to serve in the armed forces based only on the information that women are on average less strong than men? I would have thought that physical strength was not a particularly important quality for soldiers in modern warfare, at least not at the size of the difference between sexes.

            It would definitely make them less fit to serve all other things being equal, but all other things are not equal.

            This is not a nitpick – it is possible that the totality of qualities of women that differ from men might make the average woman better as a soldier than the average man in modern warfare. To make that judgment based on physical strength alone would be wrong, would it not?

          • Randy M says:

            This is not a nitpick – it is possible that the totality of qualities of women that differ from men might make the average woman better as a soldier than the average man in modern warfare.

            Of course, that posits even more differences between the groups, even possibly mental ones.

          • benwave says:

            @Randy M,

            Of course. I accept that

          • Noah says:

            @benwave Depending on your role, physical strength can be incredibly important, mainly for carrying stuff.

            From: https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/research/a25644619/soldier-weight/

            In 2016, the Marine Corps Times reported a new standard for strength and endurance. An average Marine Corps infantry officer should to be physically able to carry 152 lbs. for nine miles. That load might sound extreme, but even official documents describe carrying a 100 lbs. as standard. In the ensuing debate about whether this was realistic, one marine infantryman described carrying more than 200 lbs. during missions in Afghanistan.

          • Lambert says:

            We had this discussion last week, did we not?

          • viVI_IViv says:

            it is possible that the totality of qualities of women that differ from men might make the average woman better as a soldier than the average man in modern warfare.

            And it is possible that a teapot might be orbiting Jupiter. But it is not.

            Shall we name this “Feminism of the Gaps” argument?

          • benwave says:

            @ VI_IV

            I was not particularly interested in evaluating the truth or falseness of that statement, my point was more generally about what conclusions it is reasonable to draw from particular data. This is relevant to the discussion as a whole

          • Trofim_Lysenko says:

            @lambert

            Yes, but there are aspects worth digging into in detail that we didn’t cover last week.

            @Benwave

            Physical strength and endurance requirements are varied, but generally high, and tend to be highest in the most directly combat related jobs for ground forces.

            The basic “problem” here is that at the end of the day, there are physical components of those positions that can’t be removed through technological progress because part of the fundamental requirements is “Be able to do the job without your high tech force multipliers if you have to”. Infantry, cav scouts, etc need to be able to patrol and move to contact over rough terrain carrying everything they need for combat and for sustainment for 2-3 days. Armor crew need to be able to crack track, sling recovery chains, haul ammo and fuel and load manually for cases when the automatic loader is damaged (in cases where an autoloader is present). Artillerists need to be able to run their gun drill, which involves a lot of quick movements of very heavy objects precisely, etc.

            To be clear, none of these are tasks that “women can’t do”. These are, however, tasks that on average fewer women than men can do at a given level of performance. This is completely setting aside any other potential mental, emotional, psychological, or cultural issues. Bottom line: Even if everything but gross physical differences of strength and endurance are held as equal, you aren’t going to get anything like 50-50 or 60-40 representation without doing damage to standards and readiness.

            My personal opinion, based on a study of the issue and on my own experience in the US Army, including serving with women for years in a Cavalry Unit that integrated non-combat arms MOSes and was initially gender-integrated, then was segregated prior to final certification and deployment, is that women can and should be allowed to serve in all roles in the modern military, to include infantry…

            …but that we should not allow that change to affect standards, and that subsequently we shouldn’t be surprised if the result is that females are under-represented relative to the general population. And of course the corollary: That if you see a military where females are serving as infantry and similar roles at or close to the same frequency that they appear in the civilian population as a whole, there is solid reason to believe that standards and readiness levels for that force have been lowered.

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            One thing I’ve heard of where women might have an edge over men is that young women tend to be more trainable than young men. If true, what military jobs would this be most important for?

          • Aapje says:

            Pilots?

          • bean says:

            And of course the corollary: That if you see a military where females are serving as infantry and similar roles at or close to the same frequency that they appear in the civilian population as a whole, there is solid reason to believe that standards and readiness levels for that force have been lowered.

            I don’t think there’s a military outside maybe Israel where females are serving at anything like their proportion of the general population. Not just in combat arms, but everywhere. The US Army is 16-18% women, even though most jobs have been integrated for a couple decades. Why is a debate for another day, but this is a brute fact, and it applies to even the most progressive of volunteer military forces (draftee-based forces are different for obvious reasons). Men on average like military service more than women, and there are traits of combat arms which I expect to amplify the interest difference.

            So having 50% women as the benchmark for broken standards in combat arms seems likely to produce a lot of false negatives because that would require women in the military to seek out combat arms at a greatly elevated rate, and that just doens’t happen. I’d say that if they’re in the combat arms at the same rate as the rest of the service/branch, something has gone wrong. Even a lower rate is suspicious, but that’s a lot harder to quantify.

            @Nancy

            There are essentially no unskilled jobs in the military these days. There are some that do take more training than others, but you’re now looking at things like translators and nuclear reactor operators.

          • jermo sapiens says:

            @benwave:

            It would definitely make them less fit to serve all other things being equal, but all other things are not equal.

            In what other things are they not equal? Off the top of my head, I would say empathy (women being more empathetic than men obviously). But I would take a stronger soldier over a more empathetic soldier.

            A good test would be to have one nation have an all male army and another nation have an all female army, and have them fight. But I think there are a few moral issues with conducting this experiment that wouldnt get past the review board. Still, I would bet on the all male army, all other things being equal.

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            @ bean

            I didn’t think there were any unskilled jobs in the military, but it still might matter now quickly and perhaps thoroughly people can be trained. It’s also possible this only matters when you have to ramp up quickly.

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            One thing I’ve heard of where women might have an edge over men is that young women tend to be more trainable than young men. If true, what military jobs would this be most important for?

            Straightforwardly best suited would be jobs requiring the largest training components. This also includes jobs that change so rapidly that they require constant re-training. This suggests high tech roles. I think it may also suggest people-facing roles. So, as bean says, translators (especially face-to-face), liaisons, nuke operators, pilots, programmers, radio operators, radar operators, etc.

          • Nornagest says:

            Women, IME, tend to be better shooters in the early stages of training. Not a lot better, and the gap closes after more intensive training, but noticeably so*.

            But that’s only a big advantage in a military context for a few narrow roles. It doesn’t hurt, certainly, but modern infantry don’t win battles primarily by getting accurate shots off faster than the other guys — they win them by outflanking them with fire and maneuver, or by suppressing them and dropping mortar or artillery fire on their heads. Endurance helps with the former, and being able to carry more ammo helps with the latter.

            (*) I’ve noticed a similar pattern in sword, too. I think the unifying factor is that guys are more likely to brute-force the tasks early on, which — whether you’re talking about cutting or trigger pull — is counterproductive to proper technique.

          • Trofim_Lysenko says:

            having 50% women as the benchmark for broken standards in combat arms seems likely to produce a lot of false negatives because that would require women in the military to seek out combat arms at a greatly elevated rate, and that just doesn’t happen. I’d say that if they’re in the combat arms at the same rate as the rest of the service/branch, something has gone wrong. Even a lower rate is suspicious, but that’s a lot harder to quantify.

            To clarify, I’m saying that it would be strong evidence of screwed up standards/readiness, not the only benchmark, and I generally agree with the rest of what you’re saying. However, I’m less confident of putting a specific number on those other factors because most of the militaries we can use for case studies have budget, training, cultural, and/or political issues that make them hard to use for comparison, so I restricted myself to a more moderate claim. A lot of this is addressed more to the general audience in this thread, and remember that it’s a thread that’s centered around the widely held prior that inequality of outcome is prima facie evidence of systematic issues to be fixed through policy changes.

            I’ve tried to tailor my argument to be reasonable to those people who are starting from the idea that the end goal is proportional representation.

      • AlexOfUrals says:

        What about preferences to take the opportunities? Is it ok for different groups to have different preferences (under this framework)?

        • ARabbiAndAFrog says:

          I classify preference as subset of ability. Can (not) do and Can (not) decide to try is not that different in my opinion.

          • AlexOfUrals says:

            Philosophy aside, how do you base policies on that? Should they also regulate people’s choices in every area of importance?

            And how do you have ethics? If ability=choice, someone not saving their dying mother from incurable cancer isn’t morally different from someone watching as their mother drowns – one could (not) do and the other could (not) decide to do.

          • Shion Arita says:

            @AlexOfUrals

            All of what we consider moral culpability can be based on the extent to which past behavior predicts future behavior. Them not saving their dying mother from incurable cancer doesn’t convey any predictive information that that person is likely to cause problems in the future, while watching as their mother drowns does. It’s morally different because one case is strongly indicative of a significantly faulty algorithm for deciding what to do, while the other case is not.

          • AlexOfUrals says:

            @Shion Arita
            Your answer is totally reasonable under the normal assumption that ability and choice are different things. If we, as ARabbiAndAFrog suggested, consider them being the same, your explanation doesn’t hold. Of course not saving their mother from incurable cancer is predictive of their future behavior – it predicts that they won’t save anyone else from incurable cancer! And by assuming “faulty algorithm” being something different from a physical inability you’re bringing back the ability/choice distinction.

      • chrisminor0008 says:

        You’re missing culture’s influence. Blacks in the US (speaking broadly) don’t value education properly and their family structure is in shambles. Hispanics do have more intact families, but still don’t put enough value on education. The poor performance of these groups is mostly attributable to these factors. There’s plenty of discrimination against Asians and Jews, but they do better than Whites on a host of metrics because of intact families and an inordinate emphasis on education.

        • There’s plenty of discrimination against Asians and Jews,

          Do you know of evidence of any discrimination against Jews?

          • TakatoGuil says:

            Does all the violence against them count?

          • Does all the violence against them count?

            We’re told the racially motivated violence by blacks against whites doesn’t count, so no, that doesn’t count either.

            other than the literally millions of people in United Amerikkkan States who think the holohoax didnt happen but it would be best thing ever if it did and want to see every single jew rounded up and hanged when the Day of the Rope comes?

            I asked about discrimination, not ideology.

          • TakatoGuil says:

            Yeah, sorry but if your argument is, “In this other context with other people, all vaguely defined and having nothing to do with good faith debate, racial violence was defined in a motivated way so I get to do the same thing here, with you, apropos of nothing,” haven’t you already lost?

            Either I agree with you that racially motivated black on white crime is some form of discrimination, in which case you’re antagonizing me for no reason and derailing our conversation, or I don’t agree with you but won’t be reasoned out of my position if you’re correct because you’ve poisoned the well of our dialogue — it would be much wiser to turn my own words against me later in the hopes of catching me out and forcing me to re-evaluate my positions or at least be given a chance to make counterarguments that might make you re-evaluate yours (hopefully resulting in both of us walking away with the truth of the matter instead of the reverse).

            Either way, you’ve also announced that you aren’t going to define discrimination consistently — it’s clear that you personally think black-on-white violence is discrimination whatever others think, and thus failing to accept violence as discrimination in other contexts is motivated reasoning. As such, there’s no point in putting anything forward as evidence at all; nothing anyone can say would count as evidence in your eyes. That’s a dangerous game to be playing with bigotry.

          • @TakatoGuil,

            How other people define the word is clearly relevant for the question of discrimination. What I was thinking originally is discrimination in the job market or in higher education, as has been shown to exist against Asian applicants to Harvard.

          • quanta413 says:

            I don’t think discrimination has a strong effect on the overall outcomes for Jews in the United States right now (although it has the worst possible outcome for a few extremely unfortunate targets), but the Ivy League gave it the old college try ~100 years ago.

            And the Ivy League plan “worked” for their purpose in that it kept their donor base more like the elite until more Jews had already risen up through CUNYs and such and the elite was more Jewish. Then the Ivy Leagues didn’t need that barrier any more. But Ivy Leagues and other anti-semites in the U.S. didn’t really hold Jewish outcomes in the U.S. back noticeably.

            It can be pretty hard for one group to keep an entire other group of people down without a lot of violence. Like pogroms or round up the kulaks level violence. By the 1960s, segregationists were unable to apply enough violence to win and they weren’t unwilling; similarly the British in India gave up.

          • Plumber says:

            @GhostUser says:
            November 20, 2019 at 6:42 pm

            “…other than the literally millions of people in United…”

            I’m gonna go a hard NOPE on this, as on average Americans (as of 2017) like Jews (Catholics are a close second, than Protestants, Buddhists, Hindus, Mormons, with atheists and Muslims being the two affiliations that Americans are more neutral towards).

            Urban Americans have gone to school with and worked alongside Jews (or are Jewish themselves, and/or have ancestors/relatives who are), and American conservative Christians have or often know someone who has visited Isreal and have favorable views of the Jews there.

            Sure I’ve heard a few stray remarks that can be considered anti-Jewish, but I’ve heard more anti-black, anti-Christian, and even anti-Irish remarks, and if you said “thousands” I could believe you, but millions?

            I simply don’t believe you.

          • Do you know of evidence of any discrimination against Jews?

            I don’t know of evidence of discrimination against Jews in the U.S. at present. But I think it is well established that elite universities discriminated against Jewish applicants a century or so back. Jews were successful then too, which is some evidence that outcomes depending on more than whether you were discriminated against.

            And similarly for East Asians at present.

          • RalMirrorAd says:

            Elite universities had quotas (which if i recall were set at a *multiple* of the population proportion) but University student was at that time already a minority, and when we isolate that to the elite universities we’re talking about a couple of hundred people per year being discriminated against. As others have pointed out elsewhere Ivy league membership isn’t really necessary or even sufficient to become wealthy or successful, and was and to some extent still is more of a club membership.

        • albatross11 says:

          chrisminor:

          That’s a plausible explanation for the black/hispanic/white/Asian/Jewish differences in school outcomes, but how do you know it’s a better explanation than statistical differences in abilities across groups?

          • chrisminor0008 says:

            You’re right; I don’t know. It’s possible it’s both, but there’s no chance that environment and culture play no role.

            But there’s a lot to unpack here. “Ability” is a very complicated thing, influenced by genes and nutrition and upbringing. If black kids grow up in a culture that devalues academics, you’ll get black adults that have lower academic ability. There is also definitely some difference between these groups on a genetic level, but inferring something about genetics based on outcomes in this society is difficult.

            The current state of black culture is a catastrophe. And it’s at least a big chunk of the reason why blacks do more poorly. People pointing out racial bigotry and racial discrimination and “problems with the system” are totally missing the problem and should spend their energy getting parents to stay together to raise kids and inculcate a culture that values academics.

          • viVI_IViv says:

            You’re right; I don’t know. It’s possible it’s both, but there’s no chance that environment and culture play no role.

            The environment as things like nutrition, parasites, pollution, etc. definitely counts, but this is more of a difference between first world and third world, rather than within first world. It would be difficult to argue that e.g. African Americans have a worse environment than Vietnamese people, yet, the Vietnamese have higher average IQ and academic performance (PISA scores).

            As for culture, Vietnam has an officially Marxist-Leninist one-party government which used to preemptively shot intellectuals (now they just fire the dissident ones).

          • chrisminor0008 says:

            @viVI_IViv,

            > this is more of a difference between first world and third world, rather than within first world

            You’re assuming what you want to prove here. Environment also includes the expectations of your parents and peers that education is worth spending time, effort, and money on. I don’t think it’s so obvious that Vietnamese people have a “worse” environment in this regard than black Americans. I don’t know enough about Vietnamese culture to have an opinion on it, but Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans have a culture that is better adapted to success in the 21st century.

            I think you’re arguing for some genetic-based difference between these groups. That’s possible. But the culture definitely has a effect, and it’s the elephant in the room that no one seems to want to talk about.

          • viVI_IViv says:

            I think you’re arguing for some genetic-based difference between these groups. That’s possible. But the culture definitely has a effect, and it’s the elephant in the room that no one seems to want to talk about.

            It’s plausible that a group with a low average genetic IQ than creates a culture that does not value intellectual pursuits, and if you are a smart person in such group then this culture might hold you back to some extent, but these are second-order effects.

          • DeWitt says:

            It’s plausible that a group with a low average genetic IQ than creates a culture that does not value intellectual pursuits, and if you are a smart person in such group then this culture might hold you back to some extent, but these are second-order effects.

            Or it’s plausible that a group with low average genetic IQ creates a culture that does value intellectualism because it has no means of survival otherwise. Just so stories will get you nowhere.

          • albatross11 says:

            DeWitt:

            More to the point, just-so stories will get you everywhere–they can be spun up to explain any set of facts.

        • quanta413 says:

          There’s plenty of discrimination against Asians and Jews, but they do better than Whites on a host of metrics because of intact families and an inordinate emphasis on education.

          Cite? As far as I can find looking stuff up, U.S. Jews have comparable divorce rates to other white ethnic and religious groups.

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            There might be more to intact families than lack of divorce– I’m not saying it’s common for Christians to abandon their children, but throwing kids out for sex (non-marital for girls, homosexual for both sexes) or for turning 18 does seem to happen, and I’ve never heard of Jews doing it.

            I don’t have a feeling for the numbers, though, so I don’t know whether it’s enough to visibly affect outcomes.

          • quanta413 says:

            There might be more to intact families than lack of divorce– I’m not saying it’s common for Christians to abandon their children, but throwing kids out for sex (non-marital for girls, homosexual for both sexes) or for turning 18 does seem to happen, and I’ve never heard of Jews doing it.

            The kicking out for sex thing is only true of some very conservative Christians. Kicking children out for turning 18 happens, but doing it with 0 support is pretty rare. I can think of a few examples in my personal life, but they all occurred a few decades ago. And those people did very well anyways.

            The story doesn’t make sense for explaining why Jews do better than the white average. The most secular subgroup of Ashkenazi does really well, but have family patterns and social behaviors very similar to other white ethnic groups. Sephardic and Mizrahi subgroups don’t do much better than the average on IQ for all American whites (maybe they have more income, but I’d bet they have less than Ashkenazi on average), and I’m unaware of any evidence that the average Sephardic or Mizrahi family is less intact. And the ultra-religious Haredi are unusually poor and uneducated as a group (unless you count education about the Torah). And I would bet a lot that Haredi generally have more intact familes by most metrics.

    • edmundgennings says:

      Are there progressives here who would agree with that statement?

      • HundleyZachary says:

        While I do not agree with the statement, I know some people who likely would. I don’t believe they represent Progressivism as a whole.

      • Statismagician says:

        I don’t know what I count as anymore, politically, but I think the statement isn’t wrong, exactly, so much as it is incapable of generating actionable policy. The ‘system’ which is broken isn’t the schools or law enforcement or hiring policies, it’s [everything everywhere for the past few centuries], so it’s never clear what exactly we’re supposed to do about it.

        • jermo sapiens says:

          it’s [everything everywhere for the past few centuries]

          If you dont mind, I would like it if you could expand on that. I dont mean to be uncharitable, but from my perspective this kind of wishy washy everything answer is a form of crimestop.

          • Statismagician says:

            I mean that there aren’t discrete causes for the societally-disparate outcomes we care about. Saying ‘change the system!’ is fine, but you have to be able to say which system and how – and if, e.g., we know differential educational attainment isn’t colleges’ fault because they’re actively trying to recruit minority students preferentially, and it isn’t high schools’ fault because they don’t have any control over their own student bodies or budgets, and it isn’t local governments’ fault because they don’t control their population or tax base, and it isn’t individuals’ fault because they don’t control where jobs or affordable housing is… what do you want done about educational attainment, exactly? Modern statistics rest on a deep historical substrate, what was once causal isn’t necessarily anymore, and keeping this straight is harder than I have any reason to think my side can manage at the moment.

        • it’s [everything everywhere for the past few centuries], so it’s never clear what exactly we’re supposed to do about it.

          Men don’t get pregnant. That’s a large difference in outcomes, and it has been true for much longer than the past few centuries.

          Women live longer than men. Is that evidence of a broken system?

          I’m curious about your “past few centuries.” I would have thought that, in terms of equal treatment by sex or race, modern society is much more egalitarian than past societies, not less.

          • Ketil says:

            Men don’t get pregnant. That’s a large difference in outcomes, and it has been true for much longer than the past few centuries.

            Biology is a broken system? Can we all go home now?

            Women live longer than men. Is that evidence of a broken system?

            I think it is partly caused by society’s lower valuation of men, so we spend less effort to combat the things that shorten men’s life spans. So, for some values of “broken”, yes.

          • Statismagician says:

            1) is probably part of the leftover-disparate-outcomes formula about which there isn’t anything obvious to be done.

            2) is irrelevant, because both you and I know that it doesn’t count when the disparity favors the historically-disadvantaged group. Or else it might just be that men and women differ at the population level in risk-taking behaviors. If only there were some way to explain this biologically…

            3) is obviously true. This is the source of the problem with current-day progressivism – all the obvious steps have already been taken. I expect if we ever end up controlling the Presidency and both houses of Congress, we’ll get to do the same ‘okay, so what do we do now?’ policy-free flailing that the Republicans did re: the ACA a couple of years ago.

          • Bobobob says:

            “Where’s the fetus going to gestate? You’re going to keep it in a box?”

          • quanta413 says:

            “Where’s the fetus going to gestate? You’re going to keep it in a box?”

            Completely seriously, we should be working more on fetus boxes! There’s a lot of potential there.

          • AlphaGamma says:

            @quanta413 I think the term you’re looking for is uterine replicator.

          • LadyJane says:

            Women live longer than men. Is that evidence of a broken system?

            Maybe, maybe not. At any rate, I’ve heard a fair number of feminists complain about it, typically blaming the discrepancy on behaviors that are physically or psychologically unhealthy but socially encouraged for men.

          • quanta413 says:

            At any rate, I’ve heard a fair number of feminists complain about it, typically blaming the discrepancy on behaviors that are physically or psychologically unhealthy but socially encouraged for men.

            There’s a good joke in there somewhere.

            I think most of the behaviors that really shorten men’s lives are more drastic. Basejumping, driving their car too fast, etc. That sort of stuff really lowers life expectancy. But I don’t think the mortality curves even out in old age.

            My vague memory is there is some reason to believe testosterone is not so great for lifespan besides the fact that it tends to increase aggression and risk taking. Like eunuchs live longer on average and have had an unusually large number of long-lived people or something like that. But that may be biased by some sort of selection effect (not all processes for making eunuchs had a good survival rate; maybe the healthier boys are the only ones left). Neutered male animals of other species tend to live longer too IIRC.

          • Aapje says:

            One of the biggest causes of the gender death gap was smoking, which used to be very masculine, until feminism made it more acceptable for women.

            Ironically, tobacco companies used to market to women with both feminist ads and ads telling women that smoking kept them thin.

            My vague memory is there is some reason to believe testosterone is not so great for lifespan besides the fact that it tends to increase aggression and risk taking.

            There is a study among German monasteries, where men and women have reasonably identical life styles. The gap was one year, which is probably the upper limit for biological causes.

          • @Aapje
            Interesting. Is it possible that the men in the monastery have lower testosterone than men otherwise?

          • DeWitt says:

            Alcohol would be the second example, as it is likewise something men abuse themselves of more than do women.

          • Aapje says:

            @Forward Synthesis

            They didn’t test it, nor did they consider it.

            Here is the paper, btw.

          • albatross11 says:

            Ironically, tobacco companies used to market to women with both feminist ads and ads telling women that smoking kept them thin.

            This is basically woke capitalism in a nutshell. (Or patriotic capitalism, or capitalism supporting any other cause or social movement.) The point is to sell your product; the social messaging may be a useful vessel for doing so, but isn’t the point.

        • teneditica says:

          What went wrong in the past few centuries to lead to the overrepresentation of ashkenazi jews today?

      • drunkfish says:

        Edit: I misread your comment, I’m a progressive who somewhat weakly disagrees with the statement. Leaving my comment because hopefully it’s useful.

        *raises hand*

        Trivially, this is false for things like athletic performance, and I don’t think any serious progressive would disagree that, e.g., world record marathon times are held by men for non-bigotry reasons. (there are gray areas of disagreement in the neighborhood of trans athletes, but those are edge cases).

        For the things that Jermo probably has in mind like economic performance and math scores and whatever, I think I still disagree with the statement, but very weakly. I think most intelligent progressives would, if pressed, share my view. The way I figure, innate differences might exist (in fact probably do trivially exist, if you take two random subsets of a group, their means are generally never equal), but their amplitudes are very small relative to current differences in outcome, to the point that we’d likely even get the signs wrong if we tried to guess the underlying difference. I think this effect is so extreme that it’s not even really worth discussing if you’re seeking truth, and therefore discussing it is incredibly tightly correlated with bigotry (though not a guarantee, that’s why i like the comments here).

        An analogy that’s hopefully useful:

        If you conclude that outcomes differences by star sign are a result of anything other than randomness, that is, by definition, superstition.

        This is untrue when we look at the fact that athletes born just before academic year cutoffs have different life outcomes to athletes born just after academic year cutoffs. That said, any time someone starts discussing astrology, even though they might be discussing fact, I write that opinion off without wasting time investigate closely.

        So rephrasing the original statement:

        If you conclude that non-athletic/other trivial outcomes differences by demographic subgroup are a result of anything other than a broken system, you are overwhelmingly likely to be a bigot.

        • jermo sapiens says:

          Why are you carving out athletic outcomes?

          • drunkfish says:

            Because the evidence is vastly more compelling (i.e. the amplitude of the difference is enough to swamp effects from a “broken system” so that identifying the sign is actually possible). This is in large part because the outcome we’re actually interested in, e.g. race time, is *much* easier to objectively measure than something like intelligence.

          • albatross11 says:

            drunkfish:

            Is there evidence that could cause you to change your mind on this issue, or is it a definitional thing?

          • drunkfish says:

            @albatross11

            I’m not sure what you mean by “definitional”. Evidence could definitely convince me to change my mind, but my prior is pretty high on “people arguing for innate differences between races/etc are bigots” because those people are common, including among academics, so it would have to be really compelling evidence. I think in a century or two, if the “system” is significantly less “broken”, my bar for that evidence would probably be a lot lower, but today we know there are enormous differences due to opportunities, and we also know bigotry is fairly common, and those significantly inform my priors.

          • Aapje says:

            @drunkfish

            I don’t think any serious progressive would disagree that, e.g., world record marathon times are held by men for non-bigotry reasons.

            I’ve seen many a progressive claim that athletic differences are purely social. It may not be the majority belief, but it definitely seems to be a belief held by ‘serious’ progressives.

            This is in large part because the outcome we’re actually interested in, e.g. race time, is *much* easier to objectively measure than something like intelligence.

            Race times are far from being as objective as you seem to believe. When swimmers were allowed to wear body-shaping suits, different people won, and with much better times than before those suits were developed and after they were banned.

            Doping also changes times and probably creates different winners (good ‘responders’). In fact, women probably benefit more from doping than men. With the high use of doping at the pro level, comparing gendered performances may plausibly underestimate non-doped gender differences.

            Ultimately, race time evidence tells you about human ability in specific circumstances, that are not truly objectively generalizable to human ability in a large variety of circumstances. Arguing that race times are easily comparable is like saying that incomes are easily comparable. They are, if you look at the bare numbers. However, once you start including confounders and such, things become way more subjective, not in the least by how you weigh and interpret all those complications.

            The way I figure, innate differences might exist[…], but their amplitudes are very small relative to current differences in outcome

            Biological and social differences seem to be very hard and often impossible to separate, so how do you know that the biological differences are small? How do you even define what difference is caused by an biological difference?

            For example, imagine that society has multipliers, where biological differences get amplified by social mechanisms. Then if there is an innate 10% difference, but amplifiers makes it a 50% difference, is that 50% the result of an innate difference or is it social?

            I think that you can argue both, because:
            – if you remove the 10% biological difference, the 50% social difference will disappear
            – if you break the multiplier, the 50% social difference will turn into a 10% difference

            Note that these multipliers aren’t necessarily arbitrary and can themselves be biological (part of human nature), part of how markets work, etc, etc.

            If there is no reasonable way to change a multiplier, does it then make sense to argue that the biological difference is inconsequential relative to the multiplier?

            PS. Also note that calling something a small difference is very subjective and can depend greatly on how you measure or present the data. You can have no difference in the average and yet great differences in the tails. In some cases only the tails matter, while in other cases only the average matters. This can be the difference between the very same biological difference being inconsequential or it being immensely important.

          • jermo sapiens says:

            Because the evidence is vastly more compelling (i.e. the amplitude of the difference is enough to swamp effects from a “broken system” so that identifying the sign is actually possible). This is in large part because the outcome we’re actually interested in, e.g. race time, is *much* easier to objectively measure than something like intelligence.

            That’s true. But measuring intelligence is something we can do with reasonable accuracy. Also, to the extent that the causes of gaps in academic achievement are due to systemic issues, you would expect the system to harm athletic achievement also. I cant imagine a system which keeps you from studying hard but lets you thrive athletically.

            Also, if one group is superior in athleticism, and equal in intelligence, and equal in everything else, that group is effectively the superior group overall, and should thrive like some groups who were discriminated against thrive today in the US.

            “people arguing for innate differences between races/etc are bigots”

            I take exception to that statement. I understand the problem with the discussion, and why people are upset by it. But when you have the legal doctrine of disparate impact, affirmative action, and powerful lobby groups saying

            If you conclude that outcomes differences by demographic subgroup are a result of anything other than a broken system, that is, by definition, bigotry.

            You can only fight this kind of nonsense by showing that the premise (i.e., there are no innate difference between races etc.) is false. You cant make a false declaration, make policy based on your false declaration, and then claim that anybody arguing against that false declaration is a bigot. The Christian extremist equivalent to this progressive extremism would be saying:
            1. God will not tempt you with homosexual thoughts unless your heart is evil.
            2. Homosexuals should have fewer rights than heterosexuals.
            3. Anybody who even questions 1. is a servant of Satan.

            If you make policy based on your premises, you need to allow your premises to be tested. If your premise is correct, it will survive the test. If you dont want your premise tested, you’re tacitly admitting that you doubt it.

          • albatross11 says:

            drunkfish:

            How are you defining “bigot?”

          • I’ve seen many a progressive claim that athletic differences are purely social. It may not be the majority belief, but it definitely seems to be a belief held by ‘serious’ progressives.

            I wonder if there is a pattern here, not limited to that particular ideology.

            An ideology pushes views in some direction. Reasonable people carry their position as far in that direction as can be reasonably defended. Since they are sharing the position with most of their ideological fellows, it doesn’t distinguish them as particularly committed to the ideology.

            So people who want to be distinguished within that group carry their position even farther, to the point where it cannot be rationally defended.

            For a right wing version some time back, consider anti-communists. Believing that Alger Hiss was a communist agent doesn’t distinguish you among anti-communists. Believing that Eisenhower is a communist agent does.

          • RalMirrorAd says:

            I’ll actually accept the idea that ‘race time’ [really, just time] has a more obvious definition and also potentially easier to measure than intelligence. In practice measuring something’s time can be technically challenging whilst still being easy to understand how it would actually be measured. (i.e. how long it takes a ray of light to travel a short distance)

            Intelligence is tricky because the definition is partially derived from measurement rather than the other way around. You observe that performance on various tests that involve different types of reasoning are correlated and infer that there is something in common that facilitates all of them [to some degree] and then you call that intelligence. Then you design a battery of sub-tests designed to try to isolate that component as much as possible and claim to be measuring intelligence.

            As long as that “definition” (The agreement to call some THING some NAME) is agreed to, if you go and claim that there is significant measurement error or difficulty in (note that retest correlation on IQ tests are very high) that concept, we might conclude that a more accurate IQ test would be even more predictive of life outcomes that are not strictly test-taking than it is already.

            So any IQ skepticism that focuses on potential measurement error is basically saying that true intelligence has a greater impact on predicting life outcomes then the relevant literature suggests.

          • jermo sapiens says:

            So any IQ skepticism that focuses on potential measurement error is basically saying that true intelligence has a greater impact on predicting life outcomes then the relevant literature suggests.

            Good point. To me anyways it seems pretty clear that life outcomes depend on intelligence, but also many other things, including luck, discipline, relationships, etc… so that we should expect a correlation between intelligence and life outcome but not a deterministic one.

          • lvlln says:

            @DavidFriedman

            An ideology pushes views in some direction. Reasonable people carry their position as far in that direction as can be reasonably defended. Since they are sharing the position with most of their ideological fellows, it doesn’t distinguish them as particularly committed to the ideology.

            So people who want to be distinguished within that group carry their position even farther, to the point where it cannot be rationally defended.

            I have no idea if the mechanism you’re describing is accurate, but it certainly seems accurate from my experience in deeply progressive/SJ/left spaces. I certainly saw what I would describe as status competitions between people based on how extreme an idea that they would openly proclaim.

            I also saw that rationality itself was attacked as an oppressive white male structure, and so it makes sense that people would feel free to escape the bounds of rationality in their efforts to believe things to gain status. Now, it occurs to me that perhaps this attack on rationality itself might have been part of this status-seeking phenomenon, which fed back in on itself resulting in the removal of traditional limits on what beliefs people are willing to genuinely hold.

            Then again, I’m pretty sure this attack on rationality also has roots in postmodern academia. Then again again, I wouldn’t be surprised if literature in that field is greatly influenced by the same types of status games that I observed in my social circles.

          • Civilis says:

            An ideology pushes views in some direction. Reasonable people carry their position as far in that direction as can be reasonably defended. Since they are sharing the position with most of their ideological fellows, it doesn’t distinguish them as particularly committed to the ideology.

            So people who want to be distinguished within that group carry their position even farther, to the point where it cannot be rationally defended.

            I think there’s another principle at work here that ties into this, which has shown up multiple times in this thread.

            If you’re truly committed to an ideological principle, it becomes a scissors statement. If you truly believe that “all outcome differences by demographic subgroup are always the result of a broken system” than anyone that believes that “some outcome differences by demographic subgroup are a result of anything other than a broken system” is an obstacle to solving the problem of outcome differences by fixing the system.

            To tie this in to what you are saying, at the extreme end, admitting that there are physical differences between men and women (world record marathon times) opens the possibility that there are differences are “above the neck” as well.

            “If you conclude that outcomes differences by demographic subgroup are a result of anything other than a broken system, that is, by definition, bigotry” is a lot more rigid, and, hence, easier to defend than “If you conclude that non-athletic/other trivial outcomes differences by demographic subgroup are a result of anything other than a broken system, you are overwhelmingly likely to be a bigot”, because you can whittle away the second statement by poking around at ‘trivial’ and ‘overwhelmingly’.

        • Cliff says:

          The way I figure, innate differences might exist …, but their amplitudes are very small relative to current differences in outcome, to the point that we’d likely even get the signs wrong if we tried to guess the underlying difference. I think this effect is so extreme that it’s not even really worth discussing if you’re seeking truth

          This strikes me as a really bizarre belief. You’re sure that there ARE differences, but you are certain that they are really small? Why?

          As far as I know, the observable differences are quite substantial. I mean even at a really high level (men/women, “races”), you have huge differences in disease incidence, appearance, athletic performance, etc.

          What reason is there to believe that all these differences are not innate? Being prone to sickle cell anemia is plausibly a result of bigotry and lack of opportunity?

          • drunkfish says:

            This strikes me as a really bizarre belief. You’re sure that there ARE differences, but you are certain that they are really small? Why?

            I guess I probably wouldn’t go as far as “certain”, but yeah, this is basically where I stand. The main way I arrive at this is that as society treats people more equally, subgroup differences have decreased in amplitude. I find it pretty bizarre honestly that some people take the view (hyperbolic but hopefully not a strawman in spirit) “well obviously during Jim Crow black people were held down by a broken system, but we solved racism in 1997 and now it’s entirely innate”. We know black people, even now, are exposed to much more lead and have much less safe childhoods (on average), so it seems trivially obvious that there are some societal impacts and therefore feels parsimonious that most of the difference is caused by the very unsubtle differences in circumstance that still exist.

            Being prone to sickle cell anemia is plausibly a result of bigotry and lack of opportunity?

            I’d definitely lump some disease incidence in with athletic ability as obviously real but not what progressives tend to be concerned with when discussing “broken systems”. Sickle cell and cystic fibrosis are obviously racially correlated and not caused by discrimination (though likely sometimes exacerbated by unequal access to treatment). Those are single-gene diseases though, which is exactly the kind of thing you’d expect to show up as different between isolated populations – one group develops a mutation that the other doesn’t see and it becomes common there. That strikes me as really different from something like intelligence which is (citation needed but hopefully obvious) incredibly complicated from a genetic and social perspective and has a lot less potential to easily change because of a small amount of time with different mutations (removing the genetic diseases that might impact it). Note that I say “some disease incidence” because some others (e.g. black women dying in childbirth) are obviously at least partially socially determined (probably primarily economic in the case of maternal mortality?).

          • albatross11 says:

            drunkfish:

            The main way I arrive at this is that as society treats people more equally, subgroup differences have decreased in amplitude.

            So, how well would you say that describes the outcomes of Jews in the US over the last century? It looks to me like as discrimination and prejudice became less common, Jews as a group diverged further from the surrounding population–higher incomes, more advanced degrees, more academic papers, etc. This is easy to account for in a different-abilities model, but not so easy to account for in a broken system/discrimination model.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @drunkfish

            Black income relative to white income in America hasn’t changed much since the 1950s.

            https://qz.com/1368251/black-income-is-half-that-of-white-households-just-like-it-was-in-the-1950s/

            Is your assertion that current America is just as racist as 1950s America?

          • @EchoChaos,

            The keyword there is household, blacks are less likely to be married, thus their households would earn less even if individual income was identical.

          • Guy in TN says:

            @albartoss11
            @EchoChaos

            “A society that treats people equally” includes both economic and non-economic institutions. You appear to be honing in on the changes in non-economic institutions (e.g., people’s attitudes towards race) as evidence that it must be innate ability, and not our institutions, that are the cause of inequality.

            Let me offer a thought experiment to show why this is flawed:

            Let’s say in 1864, everyone in the US underwent a philosophical and cultural revelation about race, essentially adopting the 2019 values of “yes, we shouldn’t discriminate or be prejudiced, or be racist, against black people.” From this point on, none of the slave owners were racist against blacks anymore.

            However, though the attitudes towards blacks had changed, the economic institutions hadn’t. Namely, most black people were still the property of white people. They were still slaves.

            Now, this society has solved “racism”, as understood to be the discrimination, prejudice, or negative feelings towards other races. But the economic institution of slavery still remains (justified on Pareto improvement grounds, let’s say).

            Is it reasonable to conclude that the differences between races must now be because of innate ability, since this society has eliminated racist attitudes?

          • EchoChaos says:

            @Guy in TN

            Not in the slightest. I am in fact specifically pointing at institutions. There is no way you can convince me that the institutions of 1950s America towards blacks are the same as the institutions of 2010s America towards blacks.

            Yet the result is very close to the same, which suggests some hidden element is causing those results to be the same.

            I am saying that society changed entirely the actual legal institutions around blacks in a massive Civil Rights movement and ended up with the same result suggesting that the legal institutions weren’t causing the inequality.

          • Guy in TN says:

            I am saying that society changed entirely the actual legal institutions around blacks in a massive Civil Rights movement and ended up with the same result suggesting that the legal institutions weren’t causing the inequality.

            I can think of one way in which things have clearly gotten worse: Incarceration rates for blacks are certainly higher in the 2010’s than in the 1950’s.

            But besides that, society didn’t change it’s entire legal institutions, because it didn’t change the subset of legal institutions called economic institutions.

            If in 1865 the government declared “Okay, we are not going to legally discriminate against blacks anymore. The government will no longer take “race” into account for any reason. But if you happen to be a slave, you still must be a slave, and if you happen to be a slaveowner, you still get to be a slaveowner. We are now colorblind.”

            Would you say that from this point in 1866, any inequality between blacks and whites must be due to innate differences?

          • albatross11 says:

            Guy in TN:

            The big problem there is the slavery–whites having a low opinion of blacks was a much, much smaller problem. (I’d say this is true today as well–hidden racism in the hearts of whites is probably not very important in explaining differences in outcomes.) And clearly, if you want to ask why the black slaves of Georgia in 1840 didn’t have the same kind of outcomes as whites in Georgia at the same time, slavery seems like it’s going to be the main explanation.

            But I don’t see why that informs us much about differences in outcomes in 2019, more than a century after the end of slavery and half a century after the end of Jim Crow.

            What seems like a defensible statement: blacks and whites have different enough situations overall that it’s very difficult to untangle how much of the cause of some statistical difference in outcomes in 2019 is those differences in situation, vs other stuff like differences in genes or culture or preferences or something. But note that this is *very* different from the original statement–that statement defines any explanation of a statistical difference in outcomes *other* than a broken system as bigotry.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @Guy in TN

            Incarceration rates for whites have risen as well, although not as quickly as blacks. It’s not a huge difference, though. In 1960, blacks were five times as likely to be incarcerated as whites. In 2013, it was six times as likely. That’s not exactly a massive difference.

            Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/09/06/incarceration-gap-between-whites-and-blacks-widens/

            I disagree that we didn’t change economic institutions, unless you’re referring to capitalism in general. There have been massive economic incentives to hire and promote blacks, and their college education rates have closed with whites substantially more than their income, for example.

            And to answer your question directly, there is obviously some leveling period based on prior wealth. But to see absolutely no progress for fifty years suggests something more than prior wealth. Especially since we DID see massive initial gains when they were freed from slavery, as expected.

          • John Schilling says:

            I find it pretty bizarre honestly that some people take the view (hyperbolic but hopefully not a strawman in spirit) “well obviously during Jim Crow black people were held down by a broken system, but we solved racism in 1997 and now it’s entirely innate”.

            No, that’s pretty much a strawman in spirit.

            You’re trying to simplify the problem into absolutes. Either X is the cause, or Y is the cause, but there is A Single Cause. Either X has been “solved”, or X has not been “solved”, no shades of grey. That sort of absolutism does figure into at least some progressive thinking, e.g. the OP’s cited quote. But the other side is pretty much defined by recognizing that this is a complex problem with more than one cause and incomplete solutions.

            If, in the Jim Crow era, you were to determine that racism was say four times more powerful and damaging than every other factor producing negative outcomes for black people in America, you might have been right. If you said that racism was infinitely more powerful and damaging, you’d be wrong. And if you were to say “well, OK, but if racism is 80% of the problem, we’re just going to round that to basically just racism for simplicity”, you’d still be wrong. And dangerously so.

            Because when the day comes (maybe in 1997) that you’ve eliminated 75% of the racism, then racism is not the biggest problem any more, and rounding to “it’s basically just racism” is now more wrong than right. But you’re not going to revisit your priors every year and carefully reevaluating whether you should still be rounding to “basically racism”. You’re just going to keep pounding away at whatever you can find that looks vaguely like racism. Including the people saying “it’s mostly not racism”, which you will round to racism.

            You will never, ever, ever get to equality of outcome for black people in America by saying “it’s basically just racism”, because you will be focusing all of your attention on an increasingly small part of the problem. So don’t do that. And along the way, you’ll be causing real and escalating harm, because as actual racism diminishes, more of what you are pounding at will be false positives and innocent victims. So don’t do that either.

            Many of the people saying “It’s not just racism” or even rounding that to “It’s basically not racism”, are trying to address the parts of the problem you aren’t. And being denounced as bigots for it. Don’t do that.

          • Guy in TN says:

            @albatross11

            But I don’t see why that informs us much about differences in outcomes in 2019, more than a century after the end of slavery and half a century after the end of Jim Crow.

            It’s useful to think about, because one reason why there are these inequalities is our lingering economic institutions, particularly the distribution of wealth.

            The OP statement about bigotry is obviously bonkers, I’m not defending it.

            @EchoChaos

            I disagree that we didn’t change economic institutions, unless you’re referring to capitalism in general.

            I am talking about ownership in general. A distribution of property based on race does not cease to have a racial component just because the value system that historically justified that distribution ceases to exist.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @John Schilling

            Agreed with pretty much all of that.

            @Guy in TN

            Sure, but we’re talking income. Unless you are arguing that income is 100% correlated with parental wealth (it isn’t), then there is no compelling reason why blacks starting at zero in 1865 while whites started at higher than that (many whites were back to zero in 1865 too) would mean that their relative income 150 years later would be at the same level as 100 years later.

            My family have gone from wealthy to poor to wealthy twice in our history in America. Once when we lost everything after the war and once in the Great Depression. Nevertheless, I am upper middle class to rich in earning despite my grandfather having a childhood of crushing poverty in the Depression.

            In fact, my family was poor more recently than the 50s, and my father’s childhood was at best “lower middle class”.

          • Guy in TN says:

            Unless you are arguing that income is 100% correlated with parental wealth (it isn’t)

            I think you’ve got the argument backwards here. I don’t have to show that income is 100% correlated with parental wealth, only that it’s >0% correlated, for the argument of “well we solved racist attitudes in both the private and public sectors, so any lingering inequalities much be innate” to no longer hold water.

          • Cliff says:

            I don’t have to show that income is 100% correlated with parental wealth, only that it’s >0% correlated, for the argument of “well we solved racist attitudes in both the private and public sectors, so any lingering inequalities much be innate” to no longer hold water.

            Okay, but no one ever made that argument, so…? If you think your points add something to the conversation maybe you could start by quantifying? Does income depend on parental wealth controlling for other factors? How many generations does wealth have an effect? There is a literature on this.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @Guy in TN

            For “the gap has remained nearly exactly the same for 70 years”, whatever is causing the gap has to have a large correlation to income and not have changed in the last 70 years.

            Wealth doesn’t fit that criteria, nor does imprisonment, which are the two causes you’ve proposed.

            It is entirely possible that one thing was replaced with another that happened to have an identical magnitude and impact, but at that point we have to consider using Occam’s Razor.

          • Guy in TN says:

            For “the gap has remained nearly exactly the same for 70 years”, whatever is causing the gap has to have a large correlation to income and not have changed in the last 70 years.

            Wealth doesn’t fit that criteria

            From The Economist, an article titled “The black-white wealth gap is unchanged after half a century“:

            The result was that in 1962, two years before the passage of landmark civil-rights legislation and the Great Society programme, the average wealth of white households was seven times greater than that of black households. Yet after decades of declining discrimination and the construction of a modern welfare state, that ratio remains the same.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @Guy in TN

            Sorry, I think I phrased that badly. The wealth gap is downstream of the income gap, not causing it.

            I agree there is an income gap where in the 1950s black income was half white income. I agree there is a wealth gap where in the 1960s black wealth was one seventh white wealth and that gap remains.

            But we know empirically that wealth is not 100% correlated with income. https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/about/news-room/press-releases-and-statements/2015/07/23/parental-income-has-outsized-influence-on-childrens-economic-future

            Now, .52 for men and .47 for women isn’t nothing (it’s large), but that is saying that about half of people can expect to move a quintile. If all blacks started in the bottom two quintiles, then you would expect in the three generations since 1950 for them to on average move up. True random diffusion with half of all children moving a quintile up or down in three generations would result in over a quarter of blacks reaching the middle quintile or higher.

            That wouldn’t completely close the gap, obviously, but it would shrink it in a huge way. We in fact saw this exact thing when blacks went from essentially zero in 1865. There was massive growth for the next hundred years, as you’d expect.

            And note that this is also still plausibly related to genetics. I would expect Nancy Pelosi’s five children to do exceptionally well regardless of the fact that Nancy Pelosi is rich simply because she is a very smart and driven woman who is going to pass on smart and driven genetics on average.

            For the income gap to remain stubbornly unmoving, it would have to be unaffected by this, which implies that it is either caused by something else or multiple something elses.

            Edit to add:

            This thread has probably run its course. Thanks a lot for the discussion. I see where you are coming from and find it a solid case, even if I don’t agree.

      • lvlln says:

        I’m a progressive who disagrees with the statement, but I’m at least sympathetic to the underlying sentiment.

        Thus I disagree with “And I would submit that this statement is a central tenet of the current state religion of progressivism, much like the resurrection of Christ is the central tenet of Christianity.” But, in my view, the underlying sentiment is.

        The statement in question is:

        If you conclude that outcomes differences by demographic subgroup are a result of anything other than a broken system, that is, by definition, bigotry.

        I’d say this is obviously false, since that’s not what the definition of bigotry is.

        But I think the underlying sentiment that this statement is expressing is something like:

        Only in a broken system can outcomes of different demographic subgroups be different.

        Or, more generally:

        Only in a broken system can outcomes of different individuals be different.

        And this one, I agree with, and I believe all progressives, by definition, agree with, for varying degrees of “broken.” Another way of saying this would be something like:

        In a truly non-broken system, society would be arranged in such a way as to guarantee equivalent outcomes for all individuals, regardless of ability, talent, effort, etc.

        I do think “broken” is too strong a word to use. Perhaps “unjust” or “non-ideal” is better, since we have no evidence of a “non-broken” system ever having existed or even being possible. But I think it more or less captures the progressive ideal of working toward a future where everyone gets equivalent outcomes, down to the individual level, regardless of any intrinsic characteristic differences between individuals.

        I’ve written before that one big difference I perceive between progressives like myself and non-progressives is that non-progressives are horrified by Harrison Bergeron, while progressives say, “Heart is in the right place, too bad about the implementation.”

        • jermo sapiens says:

          But, in my view, the underlying sentiment is.

          Yes, that’s a better way to say it. Thank you.

          Only in a broken system can outcomes of different individuals be different.

          I dont think we’re talking about the same kind of outcomes. If by outcome you mean things like income (is this like flammable=inflammable, income=outcome, anyways…), yes. Outcome in this case means your actual ability.

          But I wouldnt expect even the wokest blue checkmark to believe everybody can produce what Mozart produced with the right training. It’s more that progressives think that population A should produce 1.63 Mozarts per century per million people, and therefore population B should produce 1.63 Mozarts per century per million people.

          • lvlln says:

            I dont think we’re talking about the same kind of outcomes. If by outcome you mean things like income (is this like flammable=inflammable, income=outcome, anyways…), yes. Outcome in this case means your actual ability.

            Well, if that’s what outcome means, i.e. “actual ability,” then no, that statement and the underlying sentiment are ridiculous. Obviously, both at an individual level and and demographic subgroup levels, an equal outcome in terms of actual value produced, lives saved, great art produced, etc. won’t be equal whether the system is broken or not. I think some progressives – many of the loudest ones, perhaps – might believe a non-broken system would create such equal outcomes between certain types of demographic subgroups, but I wouldn’t consider it a definitional progressive belief.

            I wasn’t even thinking of income, per se. Just overall life satisfaction. Which is obviously infinitely harder to measure.

          • I wasn’t even thinking of income, per se. Just overall life satisfaction.

            Does your claim apply to Hitler, or whoever else you regard as very wicked? People who do horrible things deserve to have the same outcome, in terms of life satisfaction, as people who do good things?

          • Aapje says:

            @lvlln

            Just overall life satisfaction.

            Just?

            Life satisfaction seems to have a substantial biological component, while your claim seems to require it either to be entirely caused by outside influences or for human biology to be part of the ‘broken system’ that needs to be fixed.

            an equal outcome in terms of actual value produced, lives saved, great art produced, etc. won’t be equal whether the system is broken or not.

            What makes you think that being able to produce value for others isn’t a key component of life satisfaction for most/all people?

            If it is, then those very differences that you agree cannot be equalized, make it impossible to equalize life satisfaction, right?

          • lvlln says:

            @DavidFriedman

            I wasn’t even thinking of income, per se. Just overall life satisfaction.

            Does your claim apply to Hitler, or whoever else you regard as very wicked? People who do horrible things deserve to have the same outcome, in terms of life satisfaction, as people who do good things?

            Sure, why not? The only rationale I see for making people who do horrible things have worse life outcomes than people who don’t do horrible things is the logistics of incentives in society. If we don’t punish horrible behavior, then we get more horrible behavior than if we did punish horrible behavior, and having more horrible behavior tends to result in less overall life satisfaction for everyone and/or greater overall unnecessary suffering for everyone.

            This doesn’t change the fact that people like Hitler or Mao were full human beings with the full moral worth of any given human being and thus deserving of just as much life satisfaction as anyone else. Just, achieving that life satisfaction would have to come without destroying others’ life satisfaction the way they did IRL.

            @Aapje

            Life satisfaction seems to have a substantial biological component, while your claim seems to require it either to be entirely caused by outside influences or for human biology to be part of the ‘broken system’ that needs to be fixed.

            Yes, human biology is part of the “broken system” that needs to be fixed. This is one reason why I said I didn’t think “broken” was quite the right term; there’s no evidence of an “un-broken” system ever having existed or even being possible.

            What makes you think that being able to produce value for others isn’t a key component of life satisfaction for most/all people?

            If it is, then those very differences that you agree cannot be equalized, make it impossible to equalize life satisfaction, right

            As best as I can tell, all the empirical evidence points to the conclusion that every human experience, including life satisfaction or lack thereof, comes entirely from the individual’s biology. There’s no magic link between “producing value for others” – or any other external phenomenon – and “life satisfaction” – or any other subjective human experience – that doesn’t first route through the individual’s nervous system in some way. Obviously “producing value for others” is one fairly reliable way of manipulating one’s nervous system so that it produces the subjective human experience of “life satisfaction,” and perhaps right now it’s one of the only reliable ways, but it’s not clear to me that we won’t eventually have the technology to short circuit this by manipulating the nervous system directly.

          • jermo sapiens says:

            Yes, human biology is part of the “broken system” that needs to be fixed.

            I disagree strongly. Human biology is obviously responsible for many of our problems, but it’s one of those things we shouldnt play with like we can play with the marginal tax rate. We should treat human biology as fixed at least until we have an understanding of it that is almost god-like.

            it’s not clear to me that we won’t eventually have the technology to short circuit this by manipulating the nervous system directly

            Like in the Matrix? If we’re in the matrix right now, I would rather take the red pill (the original one) and get out of my pod to take on the machines like Neo did than remain comfortable my entire life.

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            I disagree strongly. Human biology is obviously responsible for many of our problems, but it’s one of those things we shouldnt play with like we can play with the marginal tax rate. We should treat human biology as fixed at least until we have an understanding of it that is almost god-like.

            Actually, I think I might see where lvlln is coming from here. As in, calling the system “broken” is putting more negativity on the connotation than is intended. It’s just… imperfect, and worth optimizing. We didn’t let the mystery of the human body keep us from developing shoes, soap, tattoos, surgery, antibiotics, and protein shakes. So what’s the big deal if we give women testosterone, say, until they’re on par with men in upper body strength?

            Where I think this argument has problems is when it goes to moving the Overton window on how we view differences. I think it’s not right to see them as evidence for general superiority. They’re just differences, as observed.

            To put it another way, maybe the “system is broken” people are wrong when they see the system as broken, but the “system is fine” people are also wrong when they see some parts as eternally better than others.

          • Aapje says:

            @lvlln

            I’d like to point out that your view on the brokenness of humanity and your fatalism seems to diverge greatly from the currently dominant progressive views. For example, eugenics or other tinkering to the extent that you seem to desire is typically not looked on kindly.

            So this particular discussion seems to throw little light on what dominant/powerful progressives believe. For example, I never saw Clinton arguing for eugenics or wireheading (or Sanders, or Biden, or …).

          • lvlln says:

            @Aapje

            Well, I never said anything about eugenics. But you’re right, the policy prescriptions I prefer tend to deviate greatly from what most progressives do, in a large part, I think, because my belief of empirical reality tends to be very different from what most other progressives seem to believe. But I think the underlying ethical principle of fairness as I outlined is one I share with most other powerful/loud progressives.

        • Randy M says:

          Kudos for biting the bullet and applying it to individuals as well.

          I’ve written before that one big difference I perceive between progressives like myself and non-progressives is that non-progressives are horrified by Harrison Bergeron, while progressives say, “Heart is in the right place, too bad about the implementation.”

          I have two contradictory responses to this, which are probably unsatisfactorily reconciled by taking a broad enough view of traits and desert.

          The first is to say that yes, that’s what paradise looks like, but the problem is there’s no earthly way to get there from here.

          The second is to say that equalizing outcomes basically makes utility monsters of anyone with any practically negative trait and punishes those who sacrifice for honorable gain.
          In addition to not being as intelligent, I also don’t work as hard as a doctor or CEO. They would probably have liked to play as much video games in college as I did, etc. They don’t deserve infinitely more than me, but a system that makes us equivalently well off is both unjust and terrible incentives for needed effort.

          • albatross11 says:

            Individuals are highly unequal in ability–this is an observable fact, and has been forever. Nobody ever mistook Aristotle or Isaac Newton or Ben Franklin for the village idiot, or thought they were equal in ability.

            There’s a factual question about the cause of that inequality of ability. One model (“the blank slate”) says that everyone has the same potential, but somehow different people end up unequal. Another model (“blood will out”) says that everyone is born with different potential and people end up with unequal outcomes because of those potential differences.

            It’s pretty clear that both models are necessary to understand what the world looks like. Einstein fed a diet of lead paint chips and hard blows to the head won’t grow up to be a genius, so the “blood will out” model isn’t always right. On the other hand, most people will never, ever be able to do what Einstein did, no matter what environment you raise them in, so the “blank slate” model is also not always right.

            Figuring out which parts of the world are better fits for which model can be tough. But a moral definition that rules one of the models out a priori is almost certain to just make you dumber.

          • Randy M says:

            Eh, I was all set to sign off on your sentiments, but then I read carefully.

            One model (“the blank slate”) says that everyone has the same potential,

            A model so absolute and absolutely wrong does no one any favors.
            I would like to alter it and aver that everyone has their own strengths and weaknesses… but this suggests that it all balances out, and that’s just not so.
            Everyone has a potential. Everyone’s potential can be adjusted by environmental factors beyond their control. Absolutely true and important.
            If everyone had the same potential, evolution would be impossible. You might say that it works on the fact that some people can only reach this platonic ideal with great effort–but then, the others who do it easier could choose to expend the same level of effort and do yet more.
            You could say we all have the potential to attain some minimum threshold of human value, and anything beyond that is meaningless. But that’s only true by defining out of ‘we all’ those who clearly never could.
            You could say that all potential is equal if given that their genes only vary within a certain narrowly prescribed band of variation, but that’s a useless tautology.

            This is literally magical thinking that I would accuse no reasonable person of holding.

            Instead, we need to stake a certain level of value upon ‘merely’ being human and encourage charity for those who get poor starting hands, and set up economic systems where the intelligent* or otherwise savvy benefit most by making their contributions available to society.
            *(a thousand years ago, maybe strength was way more important than intelligence, but time has weighted things differently)

          • mtl1882 says:

            The first is to say that yes, that’s what paradise looks like, but the problem is there’s no earthly way to get there from here.

            The second is to say that equalizing outcomes basically makes utility monsters of anyone with any practically negative trait and punishes those who sacrifice for honorable gain.

            I’ve never heard this so well-articulated before–it’s very helpful to have it spelled out. Thank you.

            I agree that this is the crucial dynamic underlying these questions, and that the best I can do is “unsatisfactorily [reconciling them] by taking a broad enough view of traits and desert.” Which I feel like boils down to the realization that we are not God, and need to aim for imperfect justice instead of impossible earthly paradise.

          • LadyJane says:

            Kudos for biting the bullet and applying it to individuals as well.

            I feel the need to dispute this point. I don’t think all progressives would apply this axiom to individuals as well. I consider myself very progressive, at least on social and cultural issues, and I certainly wouldn’t.

            For individuals, discrepancies in outcome can be a result of genetics, environmental factors, personal preferences, random chance, and so forth. However, random chance matters a lot less when it comes to large groups of people, and claiming that there are significant genetic differences between racial or ethnic groups is bigoted. That mostly just leaves environmental factors, both biological (such as being malnourished and exposed to lead poisoning) and psychological (such as being abused, beaten, yelled at, neglected, or some combination of the above). And if those factors tend to affect one demographic group vastly more than another, that’s probably a sign that something is broken on a systemic level.

            I fully reject the idea that each individual should or can have equality of outcome. I fully support the idea that large demographic groups should have equality of outcome, or at least shouldn’t have vast inequalities of outcome. These positions are not mutually exclusive.

          • jermo sapiens says:

            claiming that there are significant genetic differences between racial or ethnic groups is bigoted

            Isn’t that the definition of racial or ethnic groups?

          • Randy M says:

            claiming that there are significant genetic differences between racial or ethnic groups is bigoted.

            This does not suffice for me as sufficient reason to avoid doing so.
            But assuming it was, why is not claiming significant genetic difference between individuals equally hateful?

            I fully reject the idea that each individual should or can have equality of outcome. I fully support the idea that large demographic groups should have equality of outcome, or at least shouldn’t have vast inequalities of outcome. These positions are not mutually exclusive.

            Obviously they aren’t, in as much as no two positions are actually mutually exclusive in practice. I just don’t buy the logic that makes seeing differences bigotry in one case and obvious common sense in another case.

          • albatross11 says:

            Lady Jane:

            claiming that there are significant genetic differences between racial or ethnic groups is bigoted.

            So this seems like it’s a definition–this is what you think “bigoted” means. Right?

            But whether the genetic differences between different racial/ethnic groups explain any substantial part of statistical differences in their outcomes is an empirical question. In principle, you could come into possession of data that would resolve the question in either direction. Tomorrow, someone finds the NBA gene that somehow codes for basketball prowess, and it turns out that blacks have that gene at ten times the rate of whites. At that point, you are (by your statement above) obliged to become a bigot. Or am I missing something?

          • LadyJane says:

            @Randy M:

            But assuming it was, why is not claiming significant genetic difference between individuals equally hateful?

            If different individuals have different outcomes, that’s simply life. It’s an undeniable fact that individuals are vastly different from one another, as a result of both nature and nurture. But those variations should even out when you look at very large groups like “everyone with a Y chromosome” or “everyone with the genes for Caucasoid facial features and light skin.”

            @albatross11:

            Tomorrow, someone finds the NBA gene that somehow codes for basketball prowess, and it turns out that blacks have that gene at ten times the rate of whites. At that point, you are (by your statement above) obliged to become a bigot. Or am I missing something?

            I may have worded my statement poorly. Given the context of this discussion, I was using “significant” to mean “strongly correlated with life outcomes on a large scale.” Basketball ability would not be significant in that sense, because with the exception of the very small minority of people who become professional basketballers, skill at basketball does not have a major effect on life outcomes. The statement was not meant as an outright denial of the fact that Kenyans can run faster than non-Kenyans, Sub-Saharan Africans are vastly more likely to have sickle-cell anemia, women are notably shorter and weaker than men on average, or anything else of the sort.

          • cassander says:

            @LadyJane says:

            If different individuals have different outcomes, that’s simply life. It’s an undeniable fact that individuals are vastly different from one another, as a result of both nature and nurture. But those variations should even out when you look at very large groups like “everyone with a Y chromosome” or “everyone with the genes for Caucasoid facial features and light skin.”

            Why should you assume this when things like having a y chromosome are known to radically alter one’s biology in ways that clearly have something to do with life outcomes? At best/worst we should be debating the degree to which these categories are relevant, not if they are.

          • LadyJane says:

            @cassander: See my response to albatross. There are demonstrable differences between different racial/ethnic groups, as well as between the sexes, but they tend to be limited to things like physiology, athletic performance, and vulnerability or resistance to certain diseases. Obviously everything has some effect on life outcomes, but those traits don’t seem sufficient to explain the massive discrepancies that we see. Do you really think traits like physical strength or speed are that strongly correlated with successful life outcomes in the present day?

          • cassander says:

            @LadyJane says:

            @cassander: See my response to albatross. There are demonstrable differences between different racial/ethnic groups, as well as between the sexes, but they tend to be limited to things like physiology, athletic performance, and vulnerability or resistance to certain diseases.

            Except they aren’t. Those are the differences that are utterly unarguable, but there are persistent differences in harder to measure areas like IQ and personality as well. And even if we don’t trust our current measures of those things, why would we see substantial physically measurable differences and simply assume that there are no others more directly related to success in the modern world? the phrase “believing in evolution from the neck down” comes to mind.

          • Randy M says:

            It’s an undeniable fact that individuals are vastly different from one another, as a result of both nature and nurture.

            One man’s undeniable fact is another man’s hate, I guess.

          • jermo sapiens says:

            There are demonstrable differences between different racial/ethnic groups, as well as between the sexes, but they tend to be limited to things like physiology, athletic performance, and vulnerability or resistance to certain diseases.

            Is it the differences who tend to be limited to such things, or is it our ability to admit to such differences which are limited to such things?

            Did we just get super lucky so that evolution in homo sapiens magically stopped at the neck? We know genes influence the brain, but somehow different populations who evolved separately and differentiated in many aspects evolved identically when it comes to the brain. This is actually possible, octopus have similar eyes to us despite having an earliest common ancestor with no eyes. But we dont know this, because currently we dont have data that shows it. We have data that shows differences in outcome, and potential theories that explain away those differences without relying on genetics. Fantastic, explore these theories away and I really truly hope they turn out to be correct. But to claim that doubting these unproven theories is bigoted is way too far.

          • albatross11 says:

            Randy M:

            I think nature and nurture are both models for variation between people (and groups) that make sense to consider, and that reality is almost always some combination of the two.

            When describing group differences, there are plenty of people who dogmatically proclaim that only nurture matters (including here in this thread), as with the quote that started this discussion. There are also people who proclaim that only nature matters–this was common worldview of prominent whites in 1900, but it’s mainly a fringe view now. But reality seems far more likely to me to be a mix of the two.

          • Randy M says:

            But reality seems far more likely to me to be a mix of the two.

            Absolutely! But I’m not sure we get to the truth by mixing the two dogmatic, absolutist assumptions together.
            That is, “Environment has a profound effect on nearly every human trait” is a model that is necessary to understand the world.
            “Everyone has the same potential” is a model that hinders understanding the world.

        • albatross11 says:

          Ivlin:

          If by “outcomes” you mean everyone gets their necessities met no matter what their abilities, this seems uncontroversial. If you mean everyone who wants to gets to be a particle physicist or neurosurgeon or NBA player, it doesn’t make any sense at all in a world where individuals differ a lot in abilities and interests.

          • If by “outcomes” you mean everyone gets their necessities met no matter what their abilities, this seems uncontroversial.

            Define “necessities.” By the standards that I would expect most people holding such a view would use today, nobody had his necessities met more than two hundred years ago. Yet those people existed.

            To me, terms such as “need” and “necessities” are ways of avoiding thought about hard problems. They assume that some things are infinitely important, which does not fit human values as reflected in human behavior.

          • lvlln says:

            If by “outcomes” you mean everyone gets their necessities met no matter what their abilities, this seems uncontroversial. If you mean everyone who wants to gets to be a particle physicist or neurosurgeon or NBA player, it doesn’t make any sense at all in a world where individuals differ a lot in abilities and interests.

            First of all, I generally agree with DavidFriedman above. By any reasonable definition of “necessities,” there are vanishingly few people in the Western world who lack it, at least in terms of material needs (social needs are another matter).

            But second and more to your point, I don’t mean that everyone who wants to get to be a particle physicist or neurosurgeon or NBA player; rather, I mean that everyone gets to enjoy life satisfaction equivalent to that of, say, a Nobel prize winning particle physicist or a star neurosurgeon or a hall-of-fame NBA player. Right now, the one of the only reliable ways of achieving such life satisfaction is to actually become one of those things by actually literally accomplishing the things those people do, but I don’t know that that will remain the only way in the future. What I’m concerned with is the equalization of subjective experience, not with the equalization of the objective production that tends to cause the subjective experience.

          • jermo sapiens says:

            I mean that everyone gets to enjoy life satisfaction equivalent to that of, say, a Nobel prize winning particle physicist or a star neurosurgeon or a hall-of-fame NBA player.

            What do you think of aiming lower, like for example, letting everyone have the opportunity to enjoy the life satisfaction of a normal family life? And then you dont have to manipulate the nervous system directly.

          • CatCube says:

            @lvlln

            The problem is we don’t even know how to make people like hall-of-fame NBA players have the life satisfaction of hall-of-fame NBA players. I mean, Robin Williams killed himself. Plus, there are plenty of stories of people at that level acting out in some pretty flamboyant ways (Britney Spears’ whole thing, Latrell Sprewell choking a dude and later walking away from a $21mm contract, etc.)

          • albatross11 says:

            Ivlin:

            First, I agree that “necessities” can be sort-of fuzzy. All I’m saying there is that it doesn’t seem crazy to me to maintain some kind of social safety net programs (whether that’s UBI or some more targeted welfare-like scheme) to make sure people don’t die of starvation or exposure. But that gets to where I think we disagree (or I’m just misunderstanding your point):

            But second and more to your point, I don’t mean that everyone who wants to get to be a particle physicist or neurosurgeon or NBA player; rather, I mean that everyone gets to enjoy life satisfaction equivalent to that of, say, a Nobel prize winning particle physicist or a star neurosurgeon or a hall-of-fame NBA player.

            So it seems like that requires that life satisfaction be independent of:

            a. Innate abilities
            b. Choices

            As far as (a), I’m sure that’s outside our abilities right now–a much higher quality of life (presumably also higher satisfaction) is available to someone who’s healthy than someone who’s sick or disabled in some way, and we don’t have any way to equalize that short of going full Harrison Bergeron and making all the healthy people quadriplegics.

            As far as (b), your choices are influenced by your personality and intelligence and interests, all of which are partly driven by genetics. But it’s hard to imagine a world where all life choices lead to equal satisfaction.

            Alex is celebrating his 50th birthday with his wife of 20 years and his three kids. He’s remained faithful to his wife and treats her well; he is an involved and loving dad. He works hard at his job to provide for his family, and is known as a good neighbor and friend.

            Bob is spending his 50th birthday at the local bar, getting drunk. He just got divorced for the third time after his wife caught him cheating on her–ironic, since they got together while he was still married to his previous wife. He’s a little tight for money, what with the child support judgments for both of his legitimate kids and also for his three illegitimate ones. He has managed to keep his job, just barely despite occasional drunken no-shows. He’s been in jail several times for fistfights he got into over some minor slight. (“What’re *you* lookin at, motherf–ker?”)

            I’d expect Alex to have higher life satisfaction, and I don’t see any reason why that’s something that needs to change. People who make better choices feel better about themselves and their lives, right?

          • Garrett says:

            their necessities met

            It has been my experience that necessities somehow gets defined as whatever I’m good at producing that other people are not. But never what I am poor at attaining that other people excel at. That is, a good-sounding term which will only be used against me. So I’m opposed.

          • lvlln says:

            @jermo sapiens

            What do you think of aiming lower, like for example, letting everyone have the opportunity to enjoy the life satisfaction of a normal family life? And then you dont have to manipulate the nervous system directly.

            I think that’s a fine intermediate goal for now. Depending on what kind of nervous system manipulation technology comes out in the future, my mind might change, but it seems to me that what you state might be about the best we can do for the foreseeable future as well.

            @CatCube

            The problem is we don’t even know how to make people like hall-of-fame NBA players have the life satisfaction of hall-of-fame NBA players. I mean, Robin Williams killed himself. Plus, there are plenty of stories of people at that level acting out in some pretty flamboyant ways (Britney Spears’ whole thing, Latrell Sprewell choking a dude and later walking away from a $21mm contract, etc.)

            Yes, this is a very fair point about the impracticalities of implementing some progressive utopia right now. I don’t expect to see anything nearing the equality of outcome that I wish to see within my lifetime, or even within the lifetime of my grandkids. The technological innovation needed is basically scifi/fantasy level at this point.

            @albatross11

            a. Innate abilities
            b. Choices

            As far as (a), I’m sure that’s outside our abilities right now–a much higher quality of life (presumably also higher satisfaction) is available to someone who’s healthy than someone who’s sick or disabled in some way, and we don’t have any way to equalize that short of going full Harrison Bergeron and making all the healthy people quadriplegics.

            True and a very valid point.

            As far as (b), your choices are influenced by your personality and intelligence and interests, all of which are partly driven by genetics. But it’s hard to imagine a world where all life choices lead to equal satisfaction.

            I’d expect Alex to have higher life satisfaction, and I don’t see any reason why that’s something that needs to change. People who make better choices feel better about themselves and their lives, right?

            Well, more fundamentally than all of our choices being influenced by genetics, all of our choices are influenced by physics, directly. As far as I can tell, we are slaves to our choices, which are determined wholly by the physics of the atoms that constitute our body. Given that, I consider a world in which people who make better choices feel better about themselves to be deeply unjust and unfair. Someone who makes better choices is really someone who won some sort of cosmic lottery, no different from someone who was born to rich parents or with good looks.

            I think biological and sociological constraints make it so that it’s impractical, if not impossible, to decouple good choices from life satisfaction now, but I’d like to bring about a world in which those can be decoupled.

          • Randy M says:

            Depending on what kind of nervous system manipulation technology comes out in the future, my mind might change

            A more understated tautology I have not seen. I am impressed and am stealing that shamelessly.

        • eigenmoon says:

          Here’s an example of equalizing outcomes: USSR practiced compulsory agricultural work (pic: scientists sort cabbages). Belarus only cancelled this in 2000s. Uzbekistan still does it although with some embarrasment.

          It would greatly help progressives to gain credibility if they all would go do some agricultural work. After all, you need to embody the social changes that you wish to bring.

          • melolontha says:

            It would greatly help progressives to gain credibility if they all would go do some agricultural work. After all, you need to embody the social changes that you wish to bring.

            Would it, or would you immediately switch to mocking them as faddish virtue-signallers, and point out that their willingness to do this has almost nothing to do with the credibility of their actual policy proposals?

          • eigenmoon says:

            @melolontha
            Virtue signaling is exactly talking about equality without doing anything. So no, I won’t mock them for doing something.

            Instead I will mock them for the failure to achieve anything. Israel has the kibbutzim, which used to be very egalitarian and communist (no private property for kibbutzniks!). But the communist kibbutzim have died out; nowadays they’re all paying salaries. I won’t mock kibbutzniks for trying to live in the ideal (from their viewpoint) society. I will mock leftists for not doing that but instead demanding that the whole society is turned into a kibbutz. If the egalitarian mumbo-jumbo fails even in a purely volunteer society, how hard will it fail when imposed on people who actively hate it?

            Here’s another example (from “No Borders”). Some Greek anarcho-communists decided that the government is evil for keeping the refugees in horrible conditions and demanding some stupid paperwork. They had a house and they’ve opened it up for refugees. The only problem is that they could realistically serve a hundred but the refugees came in thousands. So the anarchists started demanding paperwork from refugees to figure out whom to allow in. They also posted bouncers to keep the rest of the refugees away. Basically the anarchists started doing the exact same things the evil state does. Again, these guys get respect from me for actually doing something but I also mock them for the disconnect with reality.

        • quanta413 says:

          I’ve written before that one big difference I perceive between progressives like myself and non-progressives is that non-progressives are horrified by Harrison Bergeron, while progressives say, “Heart is in the right place, too bad about the implementation.”

          Well as a non-progressive, you’re certainly right that I don’t think the heart was in the right place there.

          I’m not conservative either, but I just do not grok why I would want to have the same things as everyone else and so on and so forth. If different people want different things, have different proclivities, etc. how could making sure everyone gets the same stuff be a positive?

          That’s not even considering all the horrible, horrible practicalities. I’d like to think that the average progressive doesn’t think so much flattening is actually a good idea, they just think more flattening than we have is a good idea. Just like I’d like to think the average conservative doesn’t really want a return to the 1920s, they just want things to change slower than they do.

          • I’m not conservative either, but I just do not grok why I would want to have the same things as everyone else and so on and so forth. If different people want different things, have different proclivities, etc. how could making sure everyone gets the same stuff be a positive?

            This. I don’t understand it. I want a satisfactory explanation as to why this level of equality would be considered valuable in its own right. I can understand “equality before the law” because the alternative is a war of all against all, and I can understand wanting some minimum equal level of welfare (however arbitrary) because we are combining natural compassion with avoiding having the crazy situation of the state tailoring its response to the level of value we find in each individual person.

            If equality itself is good and not merely the characteristic being made equal in each specific case, then it comes down to a question of what we decide it is necessary for all humans to have. I hope all people have food on the table, a roof over their heads, and live lives that are generally satisfying according to their standards, but I very much don’t hope that all lives are tailored to reduce mutual hierarchies.

            I want a world without poverty and homelessness, and then above that level I want rowdy but peaceful competition. It’s just more fun that way. The real deep seated reason Harrison Bergeron is horrifying because it depicts a world that is oppressively shackled, and a world that is so constrained is boring and detestable.

            I sometimes wonder whether I could be called a progressive for supporting things like UBI, and I go back and forth on how many people really believe in equal outcomes beyond the basic sustenance level, but if that’s more characteristic of progressive ideology than I thought, then not only am I not a progressive, I don’t really understand the value of what progressives are aiming for. Is it a primitive instinct for fairness that goes into overdrive in some people, or is it just a built up association where applying equal standards for approximation reasons on some issues leads to the positive feelings rubbing off on equality itself, leading to the desire to have more and more kinds of outcomes equalized?

          • jermo sapiens says:

            I go back and forth on how many people really believe in equal outcomes beyond the basic sustenance level, but if that’s more characteristic of progressive ideology than I thought, then not only am I not a progressive, I don’t really understand the value of what progressives are aiming for.

            Right. Look at calls for “more women in STEM” or the like. These are made just because women are underrepresented in STEM, not because something nefarious was found in STEM keeping women out. The reasoning starts with finding an under-representation, and then working backwards to identify what kept the women out. The answer can never be that women in general are not that interested in STEM (that would be “something other than a broken system”), although that is the most likely and parsimonious explanation.

            Possible explanations for this kind of reasoning: they want to create lucrative work for themselves or their friends, or they never cared about women in STEM and are just using the issue to gain power.

          • quanta413 says:

            @Forward Synthesis

            I fully agree on wanting basically the same things! I don’t know what to do to help people feel generally satisfied. To some extent you’d expect a little bit of that to follow improving material circumstances, but maybe not. I don’t know if it’s possible for everyone to feel satisfied while things keep improving, if this is just the sort of thing each person has to wrestle with themselves, or what.

            Sometimes, I think politics would go a tiny bit more smoothly if we admitted that there are not technical or political solutions for living satisfying lives (unless you think wireheading makes sense I guess), but we are trying to improve material situations for other reasons.

            @jermo sapiens

            The discrimination explanation was pretty parsimonious in a lot of cases at least somewhere through the 1960s and 1970s. But in the ensuing decades women became doctors or lawyers at roughly the same rate as men, women started earning a majority of college degrees, and women even swept some technical fields in STEM almost entirely (like veterinary medicine where women are something like 80-90% of the typical class).

            It’s not like law and medicine didn’t have their share of sexists at the time, or physicists and mathematicians were unusually sexist by the standards of the time either. Things may change after women enter a field, but it’s probably more women causing less sexism. Not vice-versa.

            It’s a bit frustrating from my point of view that the narrative doesn’t change to reflect that some more complicated factors must be involved even if you believe the overarching discrimination narrative is still true, but that’s hardly unusual. Some conservatives still pine for early to mid 20th-century politics as if you could just transplant then to now despite all the political and technological changes inbetween.

            they want to create lucrative work for themselves or their friends, or they never cared about women in STEM and are just using the issue to gain power.

            This is very uncharitable. It’s probably true of some people, but it’s true of most really political types on any side. People believe all sorts of things all the time. This one was obviously true in a lot of cases within living memory. It’s not that weird someone would think the same explanation is true in another case, it’s just harder for some unexplained reason. When all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

            Like to me, everything looks like a case for mathematical modeling tightly coupled to experiments cause that’s the hammer I’ve got. I think my hammer is better than other hammers for understanding or improving a lot of things, but it would be surprising if I didn’t think so.

          • jermo sapiens says:

            When all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

            Good point. I think many progressives have just a hammer. But some have way more than a hammer, those are the ones my comment was directed to.

          • lvlln says:

            @Forward Synthesis

            I sometimes wonder whether I could be called a progressive for supporting things like UBI, and I go back and forth on how many people really believe in equal outcomes beyond the basic sustenance level, but if that’s more characteristic of progressive ideology than I thought, then not only am I not a progressive, I don’t really understand the value of what progressives are aiming for. Is it a primitive instinct for fairness that goes into overdrive in some people, or is it just a built up association where applying equal standards for approximation reasons on some issues leads to the positive feelings rubbing off on equality itself, leading to the desire to have more and more kinds of outcomes equalized?

            (Emphasis added)

            My guess is that there are progressives of either stripe that you described, perhaps both. I’m firmly in the former camp, though obviously I’d disagree with calling it fairness having gone into overdrive. My belief is that valuing fairness + a scientific understanding of humans necessarily implies a desire for equality of outcome. The scientific understanding of humans being that humans are entirely machines made up of atoms that helplessly follow the laws of physics, and as such all things any human does, including every individual choice they make, is entirely due to luck. It seems deeply unfair and unjust to me that people have differential outcomes in life satisfaction entirely due to luck, and so I’d prefer it if we rearranged society as to remove that factor of luck.

          • cassander says:

            @Forward Synthesis says:

            Is it a primitive instinct for fairness that goes into overdrive in some people, or is it just a built up association where applying equal standards for approximation reasons on some issues leads to the positive feelings rubbing off on equality itself, leading to the desire to have more and more kinds of outcomes equalized?

            I wouldn’t say overdrive, but I would say that the prime impulse of the left is leveling – the desire to tear down hierarchies, while that of the right to build them.

          • @lvlln

            The scientific understanding of humans being that humans are entirely machines made up of atoms that helplessly follow the laws of physics, and as such all things any human does, including every individual choice they make, is entirely due to luck. It seems deeply unfair and unjust to me that people have differential outcomes in life satisfaction entirely due to luck, and so I’d prefer it if we rearranged society as to remove that factor of luck.

            The big problem with this is that human universals exist on the basic level of things like “needing food to eat” or even things like “enjoying a comfy bed and a temperature controlled home”, but once you go beyond that level you run into the problem of people having different needs in order to be satisfied.

            There’s no one rearrangement of society that can make everyone satisfied at once. Theoretically (and nightmarishly!) the rearrangement could include rearranging the individual subjects themselves and altering their minds so that they are all satisfied by the same things, but even then the vanguard orchestrating this would have to agree amongst itself which arbitrary set of preferences it is going to universalize, and moreover the entire process of turning people into the happiness Borg would be extremely unsatisfying to the majority of people, so it would be resisted with violence. Universal satisfaction involves trade-offs that are themselves “lucky”.

            If you want to universalize “bed and breakfast” and end poverty and homelessness, my only opposition would be practical implementation under various conditions (and as technology advances, the practicality of various schemes can be bodged with enough robots), but if we’re talking about going as far as to equalize lives such that we flatten differentials in everything from gender expression to favorite foods, then we are going to be at loggerheads.

            Society should be at least a little bit… fighty. I think the majority of people agree with me on this. Once you’ve gone beyond the extremes that cause universally agreed sufferings like physical pain and hunger, you start interfering with the diversity that makes society a fun place, rather than a merely “nice” place.

        • melolontha says:

          Directed at right-leaning SSC commentors in general, only weakly inspired by the specific comment I’m replying to: it would perhaps be less fun, but almost certainly more productive, if you stopped reverse-no-true-scotsmanning progressives, and instead engaged with their most challenging ideas/proponents rather than defining the category such that it never has anything sensible to say. Yes, I’m sure you can find some people that hit all your bases, but that just means you’re weakmanning rather than strawmanning.

        • Baeraad says:

          I’ll second this. I don’t agree with the statement as written, because it implies that the system is creating the unequal outcomes. And more importantly, it implicitly tries to shame the people with better outcomes by denying that their own work and talents had anything to do with them getting those outcomes, and I have both practical and moral objections to shaming people.

          However, a proper sort of system would be trying to erase all gaps, both the artificial and the natural. Overachievers should be honoured for their accomplishments. They should also be made to share.

          • Aapje says:

            it implies that the system is creating the unequal outcomes.

            Not necessarily. It can be the result of a moral system that doesn’t distinguish between doing harm and not preventing harm.

            My impression is that progressives more often and/or more strongly tend to belief that than libertarians and conservatives.

          • The Nybbler says:

            However, a proper sort of system would be trying to erase all gaps, both the artificial and the natural. Overachievers should be honoured for their accomplishments. They should also be made to share.

            So you’re not going to shame them, just take the fruits of their labor and distribute them to those who underachieved? That hardly seems like an improvement.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @The Nybbler

            Even in this somewhat utopian system, if all the honoring is honoring group X and group Y is not honored as much, that will be noticed VERY QUICKLY and will be resented.

          • John Schilling says:

            Overachievers should be honoured for their accomplishments. They should also be made to share.

            Yeah, I’m going to ask you to be a bit more specific on what you mean by “honoured” here. Because my first impression is, you just mean to say some nice polite words that will make you feel OK about taking their stuff.

          • Statismagician says:

            Yeah. ‘Made to share’ is always going to fail, because people aren’t idiots about social dynamics. ‘Taught a worldview which includes a big serving of noblesse oblige‘ has worked historically, but requires a lot of maintenance and has interpersonal and political implications you may find distasteful.

          • I’m interested in the technical details of this “proper sort of system”.

            By “made to share” you mean “taxation on various forms of their income and wealth so as to redistribute it to everyone else”, right?

            And “erase all gaps” would translate into “100% taxes” I guess. Of course, if you go full communism there’s no need for “making people share” since society refuses to reward them with anything to share in the first place. This is probably not a good idea if you need to convince people with scarce skills to do jobs few can do instead of going and doing a more common trade, and if you don’t need to deal with this kind of labor supply issue, then we can safely assume we have an automated society, and in which case the overachievers are robots/computers so the social problem is muted.

        • Baeraad says:

          You’d be wrong about me. I’d snap my fingers in a heartbeat. Yes, a lot of people suck. So what? They’re still people and they still deserve to be happy. And putting everyone on equal footing in practical terms would ease the sting of some people being jerks quite considerably, I’d say.

          And yes, a lot of leftists are vindictive. My opinion is that those leftists are entirely missing the point of leftism. I for one would be overjoyed to let bygones be bygones if only tomorrow could be better.

        • jermo sapiens says:

          if the ancestors of Group A lived like kings while torturing and enslaving Group B

          Has this ever happened? I’m not being (intentionally) facetious. Poor whites in the south had a hard life (obviously better than a slave), but “lived like kings” is way over the top.

        • eigenmoon says:

          @melonontha
          instead engaged with their most challenging ideas/proponents

          A serious question: who are their most challenging proponents?

          A question: what’s the probability that they’re going to be cancelled next year (example: ContraPoints)?

      • DeWitt says:

        This is much more helpful than the OP. Jermo sapiens should get out more before trying to tar his opponents as absolute idiots.

        I disagree with the scissor statement.

        • jermo sapiens says:

          Jermo sapiens should get out more before trying to tar his opponents as absolute idiots.

          Honestly not my intentions. And I certainly dont think my opponents here are idiots, quite the contrary in fact. I wouldnt waste my time arguing with idiots. The very intelligent progressives here who are willing to discuss issues rationally are the main reason for my presence here. But I do intend on confronting them with the extremes of their side. I believe that’s fair. The extremes of “my side” are considered the absolute worst people on the planet. The extremes of the progressives have a monopoly in academia, the mainstream media, NGOs, etc…

          And I believe history teaches us that extremism on the left is at least as dangerous as extremism on the right, if not more, because extremism on the right is pretty easy to identify as evil, where as extremism on the left is more seductive.

          • Dan L says:

            I would expect that most progressives would agree with it. In fact I believe that the statement is the essence of progressivism condensed in as pure a form as possible.

            Bailey

            Jermo sapiens should get out more before trying to tar his opponents as absolute idiot

            Assault

            But I do intend on confronting them with the extremes of their side. I believe that’s fair.

            Retreat to the motte

            You cannot understand an ideology while equivocating between the essential and the extreme. They are very nearly opposites.

          • jermo sapiens says:

            The portion you cite as the bailey was badly phrased. I should have said that most progressives would agree with the underlying sentiment of it, and the underlying sentiment is the essence of progressivism.

            You cannot understand an ideology while equivocating between the essential and the extreme. They are very nearly opposites.

            I dont think opposite is the right word, but I understand there are significant distinctions between moderates and extremists of any ideology. My meta-point is that if you agree that washington stem is the extremist version of progressivism, they should be called out by the moderate version, just like Nick Fuentes and America First is being called out by more moderate conservatives right now. I dont see that happening at all. Instead, what I see is that when a moderate pushes back on the extreme’s excesses, the moderate gets attacked.

            When moderates dont push back, I assume the moderates are just acting as the motte for the extreme’s bailey, whether consciously, by fear, or by negligence, and that distinction is not relevant to me.

          • Plumber says:

            @jermo sapiens says: “…My meta-point is that if you agree that washington stem is the extremist version of progressivism, they should be called out by the moderate version..”

            Why would I bother? 

            I never heard of “Washington STEM” before this thread, and the small piece of gibberish cited just looks like the kinds of stuff that people with B.S. jobs come up with to fill time in meetings, a little annoying but hardly threatening.

            “just like Nick Fuentes and America First is being called out by more moderate conservatives right now”

            Are they?

            I don’t know who “Nick Fuentes” is and “America First” was an isolationist organization opposed to the U.S. entry into WW2 that Charles Lindbergh was associated with, I’m aware of Trump using the phrase again (plenty criticized him because of the old association), but I’m ignorant of any current group called that. 

            If there’s “calling out” I’m ignorant of it, but there hasn’t been much publicity of what needs to be called out, whatever your referencing hasn’t reached the front pages of The San Francisco Chronicle, (AFAICT) KCBS newsradio, and I haven’t noticed it in my glances at The Atlantic Monthly, New York Times, Washington Post, or The PBS Newshour.

            “I dont see that happening at all. Instead, what I see is that when a moderate pushes back on the extreme’s excesses, the moderate gets attacked”

            Yeah, extremist will extreme, out shouting is what they do

            When moderates dont push back, I assume the moderates are just acting as the motte for the extreme’s bailey, whether consciously, by fear, or by negligence, and that distinction is not relevant to me”

            Again, why would I bother “pushing back” against what I’m barely aware of? 

            ‘sides ultimately I don’t care about something that I don’t think will win anyway, whatever it is actually has to be a threat for me to worry about it, or it has to be something that I feel a closer connection to, when the AFL-CIO has a statement I fundamentally disagree with I’ll bother, but “Washington STEM”?

            Who the Hell are they and why should I care?

          • jermo sapiens says:

            I never heard of “Washington STEM” before this thread, and the small piece of gibberish cited just looks like the kinds of stuff that people with B.S. jobs come up with to fill time in meetings, a little annoying but hardly threatening.

            Washington STEM is just an example. They are not the only ones pushing this “gibberish”. This “gibberish” is pushed in academia all the time. I dont see much pushback from moderates on any excess of the far left, and when there is some mild pushback it’s qualified with all sorts of “please dont excommunicate me” type language of “I super duper value diversity. Diversity is our greatest strength. But maybe it’s not cool to require all job applicants to swear fealty to our super awesome political agenda”. And then unsurprisingly the person who pushed back gets crushed and receives no support from other moderates.

            Maybe you just havent witnessed any excesses of the far left. If that’s the case it will be my pleasure to give you examples. (in the linked example, the University administrators, presumably moderate progressives, sanctioned not the violent mob who attacked the conservative students, but plans to sanction the conservative students, because they didnt have a loicense for being there).

            As a further example, maybe you’ve heard of Noel Ignatiev, who died recently. He built his career out out of his calls to “abolish whiteness”. Naturally, because such views are so extreme, hateful, and repugnant, the progressives rejected him and he ended his days at some unheard of community college loved him and he ended up teaching at Harvard and received glowing obituaries in the New Yorker.

          • Plumber says:

            @jermo sapiens > “…pushed in academia all the time…”

            Oh, then it looks like academia is doing it’s job preparing students to work in…

            …academia (and the SF Public Defenders office).

            I’m sure starving Ukrainians felt sorry for the “old Bolsheviks” and Red Army generals that Stalin had purged…

            …actually I’m pretty sure that didn’t give a damn as they were too busy burying their own loved ones.

            In Orwell’s terms these collegiate shenanigans read like “Inner Party” vs. “Outer Party” stuff to this prole, and I find it hard to feel much worry about the collegiate class hassling each other.

            To quote the piece you linked to (and thanks for that it was interesting): “…If his ideas about whiteness and of “white privilege” became fashionable within the academy, they later took on forms he could barely recognize, and oftentimes, despised. He was bewildered by the rise of a style of identity politics that reified the fictions of race and, through its fixation on diversity in élite spaces, abandoned the working class…”

            Your “There’s no such thing as society” side won in the ’80’s, we live in the de-industrialized de-unionized wreckage, and so collegians now battling each other don’t get my sympathy, if you left the mid 20th century broad non-collegiate middle-class working-class in place instead of destroying the industrial unions and the family wage I could care some, but now?

            The collegiate “loony Left” is far too remote to worry about.

            I’m too worried about your side’s triumph in gutting what’s remains of what was.

            Quit college and get your hands dirty then you don’t have to worry about “academia”, and you can pay mind to the fate of the majority instead.

            You described idiots vs. sore winners, fit that in “mistake” vs. “conflict” theory

          • Dan L says:

            I should have said that most progressives would agree with the underlying sentiment of it, and the underlying sentiment is the essence of progressivism.

            It is unclear to me what the level of abstraction buys you, other than resistance to falsification. If you were starting from the perspective of trying to capture the spirit of progressivism, the responses in this thread would indicate a poor choice of example.

            My meta-point is that if you agree that washington stem is the extremist version of progressivism, they should be called out by the moderate version

            $OUTGROUP moderates need to do more to denounce $OUTGROUP extremism, while $INGROUP clearly has examples of pushback against its bad actors – this is an extremely common argument, and almost never comes from a position of empiricism. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it addressed in a systemic way with cross-domain applicability, and until that day I’m going to continue to treat it as a manifestation of outgroup homogeneity bias with a side of special pleading.

            Washington STEM is just an example.

            What you are hearing here is that it is a bad example. Toxoplasma being what it is, it was presumably chosen for that very reason.

            Passing Ideological Turing Tests is an important skill. Deliberately blowing them might be justifiable once in a blue moon, but is far more likely than not to be a sign of bad faith.

          • jermo sapiens says:

            Your “There’s no such thing as society” side won in the ’80’s, we live in the de-industrialized de-unionized wreckage, and so collegians now battling each other don’t get my sympathy, if you left the mid 20th century broad non-collegiate middle-class working-class in place instead of destroying the industrial unions and the family wage I could care some, but now?

            I wasnt old enough to understand what was going in the 80s. But I agree with you that the destruction of unionized middle class jobs has been a catastrophe.

          • Cliff says:

            More people go to college now so the people who were middle class without college are now mostly middle class with college, if not upper middle class. The middle class has shrunk modestly as its former members have moved into the upper middle class.

          • Aftagley says:

            What you are hearing here is that it is a bad example. Toxoplasma being what it is, it was presumably chosen for that very reason.

            To reinforce that point, go to the original twitter thread and look at the responses. They’re absolutely buried in conservatives who have been linked there because this image has been widebanded by conservative outlets.

      • I think the number of progressives here saying they either don’t agree or only weakly agree with the statement reflects more on how different people here are than anything else. If there are no non-superficial differences between different groups of people, then there must be something pervasively wrong with our system. What’s the middle ground?

        • Aapje says:

          I agree. ThingOfThings had a Intellectual Turing Test where they had SJ and anti-SJ people answer questions from both an SJ and anti-SJ perspective, where people had to guess whether the writer was SJ or anti-SJ.

          However, I concluded that the test was not so much representative of the more common SJ and anti-SJ people, but rather of this weird nerdy subculture.

        • The original Mr. X says:

          I agree with this. Maybe if you explicitly asked progressives “Is it possible for outcomes differences by demographic subgroup to be a result of anything other than a broken system?” they’d say yes, but in practice, most progressives I’ve interacted with outside SSC, and probably the vast majority of progressive organisations, treat outcomes differences as ipso facto proof of oppression (unless it’s a difference in favour of women and minorities, of course, then it gets as pass).

    • Protagoras says:

      While like everyone else I’m an idiosyncratic special snowflake with an absolutely unique perspective, my political alliances seem to be in the progressive camp; certainly I vote for Democrats and laugh along when people mock Republicans, and am more likely to complain about Democratic politicians being too conservative than about them being too extreme. But I certainly wouldn’t agree with that statement.

    • S_J says:

      Obviously, the current racial makeup of (…pauses, checks notes…) the group who play professionally in the National Basketball Association shows that one demographic subgroup has vastly different outcomes in the realm of basketball than another demographic subgroup.

      Thus the system is broken, and anyone who concludes otherwise is a bigot.

      The above is a reductio ad absurdum of the statement critiqued by @jermo_sapiens above.

      It shows the dangers of this kind of blanket statement. If some difference-in-outcomes is not the result of a broken system, then any claim that the difference-in-outcomes might be the result of a broken system needs to be studied carefully.

      Bigotry is an orthogonal question: a bigot may be right about the cause of the difference-in-outcomes, or a non-bigoted person may be right about the cause of the difference-in-outcomes.

      Alleging that disagreement about the ‘broken system’ is caused by ‘bigotry’ looks like an attempt to Shoot the Messenger, which is a form of logical fallacy.

      • S_J says:

        Can versions of the reductio ad absurdum be created in non-sports contexts?

        Currently, one demographic group has something like 95% of the workplace fatalities inside the U.S. The demographic group in question is male. Is this a sign of a broken system?

        In health outcomes, Black people inside the U.S. typically have slightly lower life-expectancy than White people, who typically have lower life-expectancy than people of Hispanic background. Is that a sign of a broken system?

        Along a different line of comparison, the population of Utah has noticeably better health outcomes and life-expectancy than the population of Nevada. I think this is true even if we compare similar ethnic groups in Utah and Nevada, instead of the demographic group of State population as a whole. Is this a sign of a broken system?

        The demographic group of “lawyers who have attended Harvard Law School” is significantly over-represented in the Federal court system in the U.S., especially at the level of the Supreme Court. Is that the sign of a broken system?

        • Don_Flamingo says:

          No cause men have biological comp. advantage in surviving danger and often enough rather like it.

          Perhaps, but how the hell would you create a system where life expectancies are equal, in spite of genetic, cultural and regional differences? So impossible standards of non-brokenness is applied, so no.

          Black Mormons vs non-Mormon Nevada-blacks differ culturally, so no (if that’s what you had in mind).

          Yes probably. Sounds like a racket.

          I’m a bigot! You’re a bigot! Feels good, man!

        • Garrett says:

          Currently, one demographic group has something like 95% of the workplace fatalities inside the U.S. The demographic group in question is male.

          As a non-serious comment:

          I understand that working on this issue would probably involve a greater emphasis on workplace safety and associated enforcement. But for some reason I just see a Monty Python-like sketch in my head of a group of people protesting and demanding for more work workplace fatalities for women, ultimately resulting in the police showing up to a dry cleaning business and shooting the woman working the till just to make quota.

          • EchoChaos says:

            You got a chuckle out of me for that one.

          • John Schilling says:

            I understand that working on this issue would probably involve a greater emphasis on workplace safety and associated enforcement.

            Some jobs are intrinsically dangerous in ways that no plausible “emphasis on workplace safety” will reduce to the level of e.g. secretarial work. Some of these jobs are necessary and not going to go away. The only remotely fair way of addressing this is to have those jobs pay more than secretarial work, even if they aren’t harder to do and don’t require more education, etc.

          • Randy M says:

            I will say this, the push for women in combat positions does show that feminists aren’t entirely opposed to reaching for some of the darker aspects of equality.
            I have a suspicion it’s a no win situation for society, though, because the day women reach >50% of casualties, we’ll hear about that quite loudly.

          • LadyJane says:

            Some jobs are intrinsically dangerous in ways that no plausible “emphasis on workplace safety” will reduce to the level of e.g. secretarial work. Some of these jobs are necessary and not going to go away. The only remotely fair way of addressing this is to have those jobs pay more than secretarial work, even if they aren’t harder to do and don’t require more education, etc.

            The question here is, why do men apparently take those jobs 19 times more often than women? After all, there are plenty of women out there who want or need money too.

            I can think of two explanations off the top of my head: First, the types of jobs that tend to be dangerous tend to also be correlated with physical strength; since men are stronger than women, they’re more likely to be qualified for those jobs. (After all, there’s a reason there are so few female miners out there.) Second, men are simply more inclined toward high-risk behaviors than women, possibly for biological reasons but also probably as a result of cultural factors.

            It may also be possible that occupations where the primary threat comes from other humans are inherently less dangerous for women than for men, even when they’re in the same role: a criminal may be less likely to shoot a female police officer, an enemy soldier may be less likely to shoot a female military officer. But that’s just pure speculation on my part, I have no idea if there’s any real evidence for it. And at any rate, that doesn’t explain the differences between male and female fatality rates when it comes to jobs like mining and construction.

          • Randy M says:

            Those are both valid reasons.
            It may also be easier for a woman to get charity or governmental assistance or support from a husband willing to work a dangerous job than vice versa.

            (edited to remove certainty)

          • Faza (TCM) says:

            The question here is, why do men apparently take those jobs 19 times more often than women? After all, there are plenty of women out there who want or need money too.

            Aren’t “they don’t want/need the money quite so much” and “they have better options” (for a given value of “better”) sufficiently plausible explanations?

            Where I sit, at least, it is not socially unacceptable for a man to support a woman. Whether that means that the woman does not work at all, or simply that the man is the major breadwinner, isn’t that big a deal.

            What that means is that one plausible solution to a woman asking “how do I get the money to support myself?” is: “find a sufficiently affluent partner”.

            There’s reason to believe that the converse is not true. In other words, men expecting to find a woman willing to support them are likely to be disappointed.

            A man hoping to sustain a successful relationship is therefore under pressure to earn more than his wife:

            Even in 2019, old-fashioned views on marriage prevail. American men are still more comfortable in relationships when they are the breadwinners. In fact, the risk of divorce is nearly 33% higher when a husband isn’t working full-time, according to “Money, Work, and Marital Stability: Assessing Change in the Gendered Determinants of Divorce,” a 2016 study of more than 6,300 couples by Alexandra Killewald, professor of sociology at Harvard University.

            “For marriages formed after 1975, husbands’ lack of full-time employment is associated with higher risk of divorce,” she found. “Expectations of wives’ homemaking may have eroded, but the husband/breadwinner norm persists.” That apparent disconnect may be due to peer pressure, or attitudes passed down from parents. Another theory: A persistent glass ceiling for women at work may encourage men to believe they should also be the highest earners at home.

            I make no comment on the inferences presented herein.

            A man unable to sustain a relationship must, naturally, pay his own way.

            Aside:
            From the MarketWatch article:

            Peters said his relationship ran into difficulty because of how his wife handled their disparity in income. His wife made $180,000 a year and, he said, she was the one who always had the final word when it came to vacations, where they ate dinner and other household bills. “The kids would ask her for money, and when she said no, they’d respond, ‘Fine, I’ll ask Dad then,’” he added. “And she would snort, ‘Yeah, sure.’”

            In my household, where I am the sole breadwinner, my wife controls the day-to-day spending. I freely admit this has an old-school sitcom feel to it.

          • LesHapablap says:

            Have a look at the most dangerous jobs in America lists, and how many do you think your average American woman would have anything to do with?

            https://www.businessinsider.com.au/the-most-dangerous-jobs-in-america-2018-7?r=US&IR=T

            Fishermen, roofers, loggers, linemen, garbagemen, construction laborers. Dirty, dangerous, physically demanding jobs, some of them requiring living and working in very uncomfortable conditions and away from home for extended periods.

          • johan_larson says:

            How the heck do you die on the job working as a garbageman? Get run over by overly aggressive drivers? People putting weird stuff in garbage bags might hurt you, but it shouldn’t kill you.

          • Clutzy says:

            How the heck do you die on the job working as a garbageman? Get run over by overly aggressive drivers? People putting weird stuff in garbage bags might hurt you, but it shouldn’t kill you.

            That seems like a much more plausible cause of death than most workplace deaths. Being in and around automobiles that don’t respect the normal flow of traffic all the time is incredibly dangerous. Its not like miners have most of their deaths because of catastrophic mine collapses (anymore). Instead its because your glove got caught in something and that results in some series of events that result in your death.

          • RalMirrorAd says:

            @LadyJane

            I think even controlling for physical strength there’s still the matter of subjective preferences for more income vs. workplace quality. There’s no intrinsic mapping of work hazards and stresses to increases in income, each individual varies in how much more money they’d need to be paid to accept a more dangerous job.

            There might even be high stress, low physical intensity work where a team of women would outperform the men by a significant margin but in practice men are over-represented because of different priorities about pay vs job satisfaction.

          • Randy M says:

            Get run over by overly aggressive drivers?

            Yeah, probably. People who work in and around traffic all day are going to be at risk, even if it is often largely in residential areas.
            There may also be losing limbs to trash compactors or something like that. Probably the occasional case of e coli or hepatitis or something contracted from the waste itself.

          • Garrett says:

            How the heck do you die on the job working as a garbageman?

            From The USA Today:

            The most common cause of fatalities, however, is transportation incidents, which account for 67.7% of deaths.

            Basically, you get hit by other vehicles, or you get run over by your own vehicle.

            For a surprisingly number of the listed positions, “first-line supervisor” was in the title of the job, implying that they weren’t the ones engaged in the labor themselves.

          • LesHapablap says:

            I found it strange that ‘pilot and flight engineer’ was on the list. Since airline flying is incredibly safe most of the deaths must be small planes and helicopters.

          • The Nybbler says:

            @Garrett

            Just a guess, but I suspect on a typical 3-man truck, one of them is officially a first-line supervisor, so they are actually doing the work.

          • JayT says:

            I was a garbageman for a summer when I was in college, and it is not at all surprising to me that it is one of the more dangerous jobs. You’re dealing with a machine that can easily crush you, you spend most of the driving time hanging off the side of the truck, and you spend a lot of time standing on streets with a lot of traffic.

            I suspect that these deaths will go down with the advent of the mechanical arm that picks up the trash can while the garbageman sits in the truck, but I don’t think those have reached saturation yet.

          • Faza (TCM) says:

            @LesHapablap,

            I found it strange that ‘pilot and flight engineer’ was on the list. Since airline flying is incredibly safe most of the deaths must be small planes and helicopters.

            It takes 1500 hours accumulated flight time to qualify for an Airline Transport Pilot certificate, so I’d guess that a fair number are folks working on their hours.

            Here’s a bunch of examples I found of the kind of work they’re likely to be doing.

    • AlexanderTheGrand says:

      It’s fair this offends your sensibilities — it’s making a claim of 100% confidence on some reasoning. Ask people whether they think any specific example of this is true and you’ll have a good debate, but at least people here (even the progressives!) know not to trust blanket statements. For that reason I think this is more pure inflammation than an actual scissor statement.

    • meh says:

      depends on which subgroup and the direction of the differences.

    • albatross11 says:

      Thomas Sowell makes the point in one of his books that it’s really useful to work out whether you’re arguing against a claim of fact or a definition. (He calls it “arguing against an identity” IIRC.) There are two ways to read this quoted text:

      a. We define bigotry as the belief that unequal outcomes by demographic groups are not the result of a broken system.

      b. We claim that it is so obvious that unequal outcomes by demographic groups must be the result of a broken system that anyone who disagrees with this obviously-correct claim must be doing so in order to push forward some kind of bigoted ideology.

      Honestly, I think (a) is closer to their intent. Which means there’s no arguing with the claim, because it’s just how they define the term “bigot.” (I’ve seen a similar argument where belief in unequal abilities across racial groups was defined as racism.)

      Their definition of “bigot” has an odd feature, though. There could be factual evidence that, if you saw it, would convince you to become a bigot. Now, if you took their definition at face value, this would be a totally neutral thing, and everyone would just wear “I’m a bigot” T-shirts proudly if that evidence came to their attention. But of course, “bigot” has a moral and identity meaning. The effect of this definition is to make some factual conclusions you might reach from evidence have a negative moral meaning–by reasoning correctly from that evidence, if it should appear, you would become a bad person. Or if you define bigots as your outgroup, you would become a member of the outgroup if you reasoned correctly from such evidence.

      This is how you sabotage your brain. Factual questions are hard enough to grapple with–turning them into a complicated puzzle of factual questions, logical questions, moral implications, and identity implications, you make them way less tractable for your brain to deal with.

      Now, I’m sure the people proposing this definition believe they’re the good guys. Perhaps they recognize that they’re not being entirely honest, but it’s all in a good cause. Or maybe they’ve simply sabotaged their own brains and now would like to help other sabotage *their* brains in a similar way.

      Either way, this is an example of an ideology that makes you dumber–literally, it makes your brain work less well. Accept this definition and internalize it, and either you lose your moral/identity condemnation of bigotry, or you become less capable of correctly reasoning and correctly interpreting evidence. Perhaps that evidence will never show up–perhaps all groups are equal in ability. But if not, you won’t be able to think straight about the matter–to accept evidence to the contrary means turning to the dark side.

      • The Nybbler says:

        Honestly, I think (a) is closer to their intent. Which means there’s no arguing with the claim, because it’s just how they define the term “bigot.”

        That doesn’t work, because “bigot” already has an existing meaning and affect. The only reason to use “bigot” for some other thing is to play dishonest word games.

        I do, however, think they mean (b). They probably just haven’t thought about it too much particularly when it comes to bad outcomes for men.

    • benwave says:

      This is our wonderful multicultural future. Because group X has worst metrics in activity A, group Y will be made to pay.

      I hear what you’re saying here but I want to challenge it. I sorta think that fundamentally progressives most care about inequality in incomes, and I think that if poorer people had more income, support for more extreme proposals of the kind I’ve quoted above would just sorta dry up and go away – progressives would be more satisfied with that state of the world and activism would decrease.

      I’m well aware that there are lots of real world examples to draw on of exactly the kind of proposal in that quote that have actually and are actually happening, but I think that too is sort of a consequence of progressives’ long inability to get any traction on just raising incomes of poorer people. The desire hasn’t gone away, but it’s been diverted into smaller, more specific and more winnable battles – gay rights, trans rights, dreamers, what have you – And into more extreme beliefs, such as the one you quoted.

      • Cliff says:

        progressives’ long inability to get any traction on just raising incomes of poorer people

        Well they have reduced post-transfer poverty to about 2% of the population, that seems pretty good?

      • Aapje says:

        @benwave

        George Orwell noted that many socialists don’t so much love the poor, but rather, that they hate the rich.

        I think that this explains a lot of behavior by progressives that seems extremely inconsistent with actual concern for the poor being a primary interest.

        • Along those lines, and going back to the Harrison Bergeron reference … .

          Suppose the only way of equalizing results is to equalize them down, to reduce the outcomes for the successful without improving outcomes for the unsuccessful—which is what is happening in the story. Does the qualified approval expressed by one poster still apply? Is that a good or a bad change?

          • Aapje says:

            @David

            My argument is that many progressives have adopted an ideology that legitimizes them ignoring inequalities that would seem to be a main priority, if one seeks to address major inequalities first.

            One solution to the difficulty of or negative consequences to oneself of equalizing results is to ‘deplorable’ people: we’d like to help them, but they refuse to be helped.

            IMO, this is how a large number of progressives justify writing off large groups: poor white people, men, etc.

            This way you can have lots of (upper) middle class people fighting for (upper) middle class interests, while claiming to care for the poor, even as their policies mostly harm the poor.

        • benwave says:

          I don’t see how that’s inconsistent with what I’m saying. The many you refer to will still demand more no matter how much we lift poor peoples’ incomes, but there will be plenty more who aren’t so ideologically driven who will become more satisfied, reduce activism, until the call for greater income equality doesn’t have enough support to advance.

          • Cliff says:

            Has activism reduced as incomes have increased at the low end? Is anyone actually pushing for more benefits for the low-income? Most proposals are massive giveaways to the comfortable, like free healthcare, free university tuition, right?

        • ECD says:

          ” The truth is that, to many people calling themselves Socialists, revolution does not mean a movement of the masses with which they hope to associate themselves; it means a set of reforms which ‘we’, the clever ones, are going to impose upon ‘them’, the Lower Orders. On the other hand, it would be a mistake to regard the book-trained Socialist as a bloodless creature entirely incapable of emotion. Though seldom giving much evidence of affection for the exploited, he is perfectly capable of displaying hatred — a sort of queer, theoretical, in vacua hatred — against the exploiters. Hence the grand old Socialist sport of denouncing the bourgeoisie. It is strange how easily almost any Socialist writer can lash himself into frenzies of rage against the class to which, by birth or by adoption, he himself invariably belongs…The ordinary decent person, who is in sympathy with the essential aims of Socialism, is given the impression that there is no room for his kind in any Socialist party that means business. Worse, he is driven to the cynical conclusion that Socialism is a kind of doom which is probably coming but must be staved off as long as possible. Of course, as I have suggested already, it is not strictly fair to judge a movement by its adherents; but the point is that people invariably do so, and that the popular conception of Socialism is coloured by the conception of a Socialist as a dull or disagreeable person. ‘Socialism’ is pictured as a state of affairs in which our more vocal Socialists would feel thoroughly at home. This does great harm to the cause. The ordinary man may not flinch from a dictatorship of the proletariat, if you offer it tactfully; offer him a dictatorship of the prigs, and he gets ready to fight.” Here

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            Though seldom giving much evidence of affection for the exploited, he is perfectly capable of displaying hatred — a sort of queer, theoretical, in vacua hatred — against the exploiters.

            Replace “exploiters” with “moochers”, and it pegs the problem that always niggled me about Ayn Rand.

            And I say that as someone who found a lot of good sense in Objectivism. While it made some good points, I sometimes couldn’t help but feel that some of it was coming from the wrong place. It harped on moochers a bit too much. (Galt’s speech at the end of Atlas Shrugged, for example.)

    • benwave says:

      Oh, I’ve also just noticed that the original quote comes from a data science presentation, and there is a long and chequered history of data science used in lazy and/or fallacious ways to try and legitimise discrimination of minorities. The statement is still bad, and I wish the speaker had been more precise with her words but I think I have a better impression of where she’s coming from now.

      • quanta413 says:

        and there is a long and chequered history of data science used in lazy and/or fallacious ways to try and legitimise discrimination of minorities.

        “Data science” is a term that’s hardly old enough to have a long and chequered history. I can barely recall hearing it before 2000. You could say something similar and technically true about statistics, but statistics has also been used in all sorts of lazy and fallacious ways to “prove” discrimination. It’s not like there’s a clear tendency of statisticians or data scientists to always fail in the same direction.

        Arguably, there’s a tendency to fail in the sense of supporting whatever the current wisdom is, but making blanket statements to not fail in X direction just means you’re trying to push the failure mode to the -X direction.

        • benwave says:

          Sure, I agree. Like I said I still don’t agree with what the presenter said, I just have more of an impression now as to how she got there.

    • secondcityscientist says:

      “Demographic subgroup” and especially “outcome differences” need to be much more carefully defined before anyone should agree with that statement. If I were to measure top running speed and my demographic subgroups were “people between ages 20-30” and “people between ages 70-80”, I don’t think I’d have a broken system if I found an outcome difference.

      Beyond that, certain genetic diseases are known to associate with certain genetic backgrounds. “Cystic fibrosis is more common among people with northern European ancestry” isn’t the result of a broken system.

      • Mark V Anderson says:

        +1 great counterpoint to point out that demographic subgroup could be age. Another example would be say the demographic group of low intelligence people. That would imply that a lower number of college degrees of low intelligence people necessarily means a broken system.

        Maybe we could say that anyone who advocates that statement has a low level of nuance, by definition.

    • Don_Flamingo says:

      I don’t really get those terms “bigot” and “bigotry”.
      It sounds so biblical and a bit cringey.
      I could never take someone seriously, throwing that around. Someone here please show me a person using it, that you’d consider worthy of respect.

    • RalMirrorAd says:

      This seems so overt as to be almost self-parody. Like some sort of straw man of anti-hereditarianism.

    • DinoNerd says:

      As a progressive, I cringe reading it. If there are people who believe this – outside of the context it came from, which may add much-needed nuance – then the best I can say is that at least they are our idiot.

      • DinoNerd says:

        Note FWIW we have a commenter earlier in this sub-thread adducing an equally idiotic statement on the other side of the fence, hopefully as a spoof.

    • rahien.din says:

      You are committing the exact same root-cause error.

      Malthus only reigns among rats.

      • quanta413 says:

        Your idea is that OP and person OP is quoting both miss that the game humans are playing isn’t zero-sum? That one person or group gains is not necessarily another person or groups loss.

        Otherwise I don’t quite understand the Malthus reference.

        • rahien.din says:

          There is a finite number of outs in a baseball game. So when the second baseman makes an out, that’s an out that the shortstop doesn’t get to make. Voila – a zero-sum game.

          It would also be really stupid of the infielders to approach infielding as a zero-sum game. For example, “The second baseman made more outs than me, so he’s screwing me over!” Or, for example, “The other fielders’ problems aren’t my problem.” That’s not simply a bad baseball team – they’re not even playing baseball anymore.

          The coordination problem is not “coordination” vs. “non-coordination.” We are all going to coordinate on something, whether or not we intend to (or even realize). Malthus’ rats coordinate brilliantly on the road to cannibalism. The problem is “adaptive coordination” vs. “maladaptive coordination.” These errors only increase the chance that we coordinate maladaptively.

          We don’t all have to experience the same outcomes. It is still in everyone’s best interest to help each other.

          • EchoChaos says:

            Interestingly, this does happen. It’s common knowledge that the better a third baseman is, the less likely his shortstop is to win a Gold Glove, because he gets to a lot of the “ranging to the shortstop’s right” balls and the shortstop gets fewer dramatic plays.

            To use a current example, Nolan Arenado is probably the best defensive third baseman in baseball right now (he has won the Gold Glove every year since 2013), and Colorado hasn’t won a Gold Glove at short since, despite very good shortstops and a massive emphasis on infield defense (they also won the 2B golden glove in 2017/18).

            In fact, although it’s somewhat common for a SS/2B combo to win the GG, it’s never happened that a SS/3B combo from the same team has.

          • quanta413 says:

            The coordination problem is not “coordination” vs. “non-coordination.” We are all going to coordinate on something, whether or not we intend to (or even realize). Malthus’ rats coordinate brilliantly on the road to cannibalism. The problem is “adaptive coordination” vs. “maladaptive coordination.” These errors only increase the chance that we coordinate maladaptively.

            We don’t all have to experience the same outcomes. It is still in everyone’s best interest to help each other.

            Jokingly, I’d say then we’re doomed because humans are exquisitely sensitive to relative rankings of humans which is the only thing that has to be zero sum no matter what new things we discover.

            Fortunately, it’s far from the only thing that motivates people. I think David Friedman has said before that one big benefit of a free society is that there are a lot of separate hierarchies, which means people can choose different job, hobbies, etc. with different rankings to focus their effort on and feel good about.

            You’ll probably never be top at anything in a very large circle, but it’s not too hard to be above average at something in some local group.

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            You’ll probably never be top at anything in a very large circle, but it’s not too hard to be above average at something in some local group.

            Why do people who end up below average in that local group, stay in that group? Growth opportunity? Laziness? …How many of them like being lower in the hierarchy, I wonder?

          • Faza (TCM) says:

            Why do people who end up below average in that local group, stay in that group?

            I would hazard that that one of the principal reasons may be that they get some benefit from participation, regardless of status/hierarchy.

            An obvious example: when working for an employer, you are part of the local group of employees and may end up anywhere in the hierarchy of “valuable employee”: key man, top achiever, above average, average, below average, etc.

            Having higher status in the hierarchy may be desirable, but that’s not what you’re there for. You’re there to make money, first and foremost.

            That said, having a lower status can, in fact, be advantageous.

            My boss has higher status than me: he can tell me what to do and judge whether I’ve done it well or not. Is this unequivocally bad, from my perspective?

            Not really. By having lower status, I don’t have the measure of responsibility my boss has. I can be content to do what I’m told to and expect to be paid an agreed amount for doing so. I don’t have to care whether what I’m doing is productive, or where the money to pay my salary shall come from. I can kick problems up, because they are above my pay grade. The buck doesn’t stop with me.

    • quanta413 says:

      Just thought about this some more.

      Never mind that bigotry is actually intolerance of other’s opinions, and that the statement therefore is enormously bigoted, there are a few remarkable things about it.

      You could be a bigot about orthopraxy not just orthodoxy. Original statement is not that unusually bigoted of a statement either.

      Honestly, bigot is one of those words where the connotation is doing most of the work; it’s not helping the author of the original statement or you except in as much as you’re both using it as a boo light.

      If you’re a bigot in favor of something that almost everyone believes works (like laws against drunk driving), that’s generally considered a positive and the accusation of bigotry vanishes.

    • ARabbiAndAFrog says:

      I’m going to post a new top-level comment, because I feel previous one has led discussion astray. So ultimately, this statement seems silly because of
      a) Misplaced and easily mocked attempt at universalism – it is obvious that if you cut groups in particular way, the differences are expected, but that’s reductor at absurdum
      b) Some questionable use of word “bigotry”

      Make it a bit more precise and you just going to get run-off-the-mill progressivism

      If you conclude that outcomes differences by people of colour are a result of anything other than a broken system, that is, by definition, racism.

      Now it doesn’t look that outlandish, does it? Nobody is surprised at a claim that some races are doing worse than others not because of racial disparity of ability, but because of discrimination.

      It’s just easy to see how silly such denialism is when divorced from explicit conditioning.

      • the “a result of” phrasing makes it unclear how multiple causation is being treated. If the outcome is 50% due to the system and 50% due to innate generic differences, you might say that “outcomes differences are a result of genetic differences” is false. Or that it is true.

        • jermo sapiens says:

          If my bag contains 10 oranges and 10 bananas, and I am asked whether my bag contains oranges, there is only one correct answer.

          But @ARabbiAndAFrog proposed this

          If you conclude that outcomes differences by people of colour are a result of anything other than a broken system, that is, by definition, racism.

          So even allowing for a 1% contribution in genetic differences would be racism under this formulation.

      • jermo sapiens says:

        If you conclude that outcomes differences by people of colour are a result of anything other than a broken system, that is, by definition, racism.

        @ARabbiAndAFrog:

        Are you British or Canadian?

      • albatross11 says:

        ARabbiAndAFrog:

        This has the same problem as before: you’re using a term (racism) that has a strong moral valence and applying it to one side of a factual question. That’s a great way to sabotage your brain, but not a good way to actually figure out what the truth is.

        Note that this isn’t just about possible genetic differences. Your statement above makes it racism to come up with any explanation for different outcomes that isn’t a broken system, anywhere. If it turns out that the average income of group X is lower than that of group Y mainly because of differences in geographic distribution, that’s racism by your definition.

      • eyeballfrog says:

        This brings to mind education realist’s position that the problem is a broken system, but the system is broken precisely because it ignores differences in average innate ability. Bigotry or no?

    • Guy in TN says:

      @jermo sapiens

      It was put out by an organization called “Washington STEM”, but I would expect that most progressives would agree with it. In fact I believe that the statement is the essence of progressivism condensed in as pure a form as possible. And I would submit that this statement is a central tenet of the current state religion of progressivism, much like the resurrection of Christ is the central tenet of Christianity.

      So initially, you believed this statement is:
      1. Something that most progressives agreed with.
      2. Is the essence of pure progressivism.
      3. Is the central tenet of progressive ideology.

      These are remarkably bold and damning claims. And yet here we are, and not a single progressive has unequivocally came out in support of this statement. Far from being the ultimate “scissor statement” that you thought it was, it turns out to be perhaps the “ultimate weakman”, a statement so bizarre and factually untrue that even far-leftists such as myself disown it.

      So what to make of this?

      What I’m about to say is intended in the most sincerely constructive way possible. So please don’t take it as an attack.

      My advice, is to take this opportunity to step back, and realize that you may only have a very tenuous grasp on the actual beliefs of your progressive ideological opponents. I’m not asking you to admit that “I’m right, and your wrong”, or anything like that, but rather, to realize that you don’t actually have a very good idea of what your opponents counter-position is. So maybe, you should try to do some more philosophical investigations of your opponents (like, months of research, if not years) before posting such wide-sweeping, and ultimately untrue, claims such as in the quote above.

      I think this is the charitable reading of your post and its response. The uncharitable position is that you already knew progressives didn’t actually believe this, and just wanted to associate us with an idiot for dunking purposes. But I will try to assume good faith here.

      • DeWitt says:

        I think this is the charitable reading of your post and its response. The uncharitable position is that you already knew progressives didn’t actually believe this, and just wanted to associate us with an idiot for dunking purposes. But I will try to assume good faith here.

        OP’s last two paragraphs make it clear enough to me that he’s not trying to be charitable at all. Don’t beat yourself up too much for noticing this.

      • jermo sapiens says:

        So initially, you believed this statement is:
        1. Something that most progressives agreed with.
        2. Is the essence of pure progressivism.
        3. Is the central tenet of progressive ideology.

        My phrasing should have been more precise. @lvlln said it better than me above:

        Thus I disagree with “And I would submit that this statement is a central tenet of the current state religion of progressivism, much like the resurrection of Christ is the central tenet of Christianity.” But, in my view, the underlying sentiment is.

        I apologize for the poor phrasing. What @lvlln said better reflects what I intended to say.

        My advice, is to take this opportunity to step back, and realize that you may only have a very tenuous grasp on the actual beliefs of your progressive ideological opponents.

        I make a distinction between SSC progressives, who are willing to engage in discussion, and the guiding principles of the progressive movement as a whole. If SSC progressives were at the helm of the progressive movement, I would still disagree with progressivism but I wouldnt consider it an existential threat.

        But from my point of view, and I’m quite willing to be proved wrong here, it’s the fanatical wing of progressivism which is in control and which has greater status within progressive communities. If you disagree with the statement, fantastic. You’re one of the good guys. Go ahead and speak up against that statement, but watch your back. You could receive this type of treatment. (This is the article referred to in that tweet, FYI).

        If a conservative group said something as extreme and dangerous as the statement made by washington stem, they would be condemned. Just like alot of conservative groups are fighting right now against Nick Fuentes and America First.

    • Murphy says:

      I actually don’t think it’s a great scissors statement.

      While I can certainly think of some who would agree with it…. it’s too complex and too explicit and too easy to take soft, agreeable positions on.

      There’s too many bits that are easy to argue on from a disconnected position.

      it has absolutely nothing, nothing on the sheer power of the scissor statement I will try to partly defuse below because otherwise it will turn into a reply-storm arguing about it.

      “It’s OK to be _____”

      I can only plead that people not argue that one because we all know how it ends.

    • Ketil says:

      If you conclude that outcomes differences by demographic subgroup are a result of anything other than a broken system, that is, by definition, bigotry.

      Corollary: Bigots are often correct.

      (I guess if this is the definition of bigotry, it means that nazis and klansmen aren’t bigots if they refrain from talking about outcome differences?)

      • EchoChaos says:

        Interestingly, I think by this definition Nazis were fighting bigotry, because they thought that high Jewish performance was due to a broken system in which the Jews were exploiting Germans.

    • LadyJane says:

      I feel like this is a false dichotomy. The way I see it, there are four possible explanations here:

      1. The racialist explanation: Differences in outcomes between different racial/ethnic groups are a result of culture.
      2. The conservative explanation: Differences in outcomes between different racial/ethnic groups are a result of culture.
      3. The moderate explanation: Differences in outcomes between different racial/ethnic groups are a result of past discrimination.
      4. The progressive explanation: Differences in outcomes between different racial/ethnic groups are a result of ongoing discrimination.

      The problem is, a lot of progressive activists will act as though the second and third theories don’t exist, or treat them as mere smokescreens used exclusively by people who really believe the first theory but don’t want to admit it. As a result, the progressive view ends up being “if you don’t believe it’s a result of present-day racism, then you must believe that those unsuccessful minority groups are simply inferior, thus you must be a racist.” And the recent wave of ethno-nationalists and alt-rightists who seriously promote the first theory certainly hasn’t helped; if anything, the progressives take it as proof that their worst suspicions were right all along.

      Personally, I think the third theory is the most accurate one. There’s probably some truth to the second and fourth theories too, but I’d say past discrimination is responsible for something like 60-80% of the disparity in life outcomes, present discrimination is maybe 10-20% responsible, and culture is maybe 10-20% responsible. (The fact that African and Caribbean immigrants and their descendants tend to be notably more successful than “native” African-Americans is fairly convincing evidence for the second and third theories and against the first and fourth theories.)

      • Explanation 3 is vaguer then the others, where the theorized causality is clear.

        • LadyJane says:

          It’s been demonstrated that even among White Americans, families that were poor 100 years ago tend to still be poor today, and families that were wealthy 100 years ago tend to still be wealthy today. Now, assuming that the same holds true for Black Americans (and I see no reason to assume it shouldn’t), and keeping in mind that Black Americans were essentially prohibited from being anything other than poor 100 years ago (barring a few truly rare and exceptional cases), it would make sense that most Black Americans would be poor today, even if racial discrimination had suddenly ended in 1919. This also explains why East Asians, Indians, and other “model minorities” tend to do so well: Many of them come from families that were relatively well-off when they immigrated here!

          • jermo sapiens says:

            It’s been demonstrated that even among White Americans, families that were poor 100 years ago tend to still be poor today, and families that were wealthy 100 years ago tend to still be wealthy today.

            I’ve seen a study that said the same family names in some Italian city (I forget which) kept reappearing in the elite, for about 1000 years.

            You should keep in mind that such findings are consistent with the genetic explanation also.

          • Clutzy says:

            Poorness isn’t a magically appearing property of humans. And in particular it doesn’t explain model minorities. The incomes of model minorities coming over in the 40s, 50s, 60s in their home countries would certainly have been far below black incomes in the US, even at the time of Jim Crow.

            That is exactly why model minorities are such indictments of poor Americans who have lineages going back, as well as other immigrant groups that are not doing as well. They started with much less, and have leapfrogged them in 1-2 generations.

          • Black Americans were essentially prohibited from being anything other than poor 100 years ago (barring a few truly rare and exceptional cases)

            Nonsense, there has long been a black middle class.

            This also explains why East Asians, Indians, and other “model minorities” tend to do so well: Many of them come from families that were relatively well-off when they immigrated here!

            This is true now, it was not true before 1950, when most came as manual laborers.

          • LadyJane says:

            The incomes of model minorities coming over in the 40s, 50s, 60s in their home countries would certainly have been far below black incomes in the US, even at the time of Jim Crow.

            It’s about relative wealth, not absolute wealth. In absolute terms, a poor African-American family in the 50s might’ve had access to more material resources than a moderately well-off Vietnamese family from the same time period, but the Vietnamese family would’ve had other advantages like a better education, a more robust social network, connections in high places, and so on.

            At any rate, if you’re proposing a genetic explanation, how do you account for the fact that African and Caribbean immigrants do better than African-Americans? If anything, the racialist view should predict that African-American families who’ve been here since the days of slavery would have the advantage, due to their White admixture.

          • Clutzy says:

            It’s about relative wealth, not absolute wealth. In absolute terms, a poor African-American family in the 50s might’ve had access to more material resources than a moderately well-off Vietnamese family from the same time period, but the Vietnamese family would’ve had other advantages like a better education, a more robust social network, connections in high places, and so on.

            That is going to be a massive citation needed. There is no reason the Vietnamese, who come to new cities should have more expansive social networks than blacks who had been living in their neighborhoods for decades+. Ditto education, even segregated systems were actually far better than 3rd world groups on funding, the problem being just like with modern schools, school quality is more about the 4 and 5 years olds coming in than it is about the teachers, blackboards, desks, etc.

            At any rate, if you’re proposing a genetic explanation, how do you account for the fact that African and Caribbean immigrants do better than African-Americans? If anything, the racialist view should predict that African-American families who’ve been here since the days of slavery would have the advantage, due to their White admixture.

            Well, if I were proposing a genetic explanation, the regression for 2nd and 3rd gen immigrants from such places is fairly strong evidence for it. That immigrants from poorer countries are generally anomalies, and then descendants regress to the mean. If I wasn’t I would point to foreign born blacks critiques of black culture being even more scathing than what you would find at your average klan meeting.

          • albatross11 says:

            Lady Jane:

            Selective migration is at least a plausible explanation.

          • Aapje says:

            @LadyJane

            The evidence you give that 3 is true, can equally support the idea that 2 is true; and 2 seems more plausible if you add more evidence.

            As Clutzy notes, many migrants that came and did better than blacks and some even better than whites, initially had a worse network than American blacks.

            In my country, there is an obsolete slur ‘peanut Chinese,’ which originates from Chinese migrants selling peanut brittle in the streets. This is a way to make a living that requires almost zero capital. This quickly gave way to Chinese restaurants (and opium dens & illegal casinos), as Chinese migrants aggressively copied each other’s success stories (while remaining a very insular community, with extremely little support by the non-Chinese). Only the current generation is breaking out of this insular culture, but only after Chinese migrants escaped poverty on their own.

            You typically see Asians rise up like that:
            – migrate into poverty and no connections with the elite/middle class
            – find jobs that require little capital or a social network
            – save money aggressively and work long hours
            – invest the money into an ethnic business (with only workers from that ethnicity) & work long hours
            – demand these things from their children

            None of this seems out of reach due to a lack of initial savings, a lack of connections in high places, or a lacking social network (aside from having a strong nuclear family, which many black Americans lack, but which seems cultural to me).

            All the progressive or ‘moderate’ explanations that argue that black culture doesn’t play a significant role seems to have to deny agency to an extreme extent, where black Americans are puppets of greater forces no matter what they do.

            PS. I want to point out that ‘culture’ is only a conservative explanation when it comes to racial differences.

      • jermo sapiens says:

        1 and 2 are the same. I think 1 should say genetic instead of cultural.

  5. Well... says:

    007 famously orders his martini “shaken not stirred.”

    I basically only drink liquor neat, so I have no idea what happens to a martini when you shake it rather than stir it. Can someone enlighten me?

    • matthewravery says:

      I believe the ice chips, melts, and waters down the drink.

      Edit: According to Wikipedia, shaking chills the drink faster than stirring but also introducing air, potentially making the cocktail cloudier.

    • Statismagician says:

      According to Auntie Mame, it bruises the gin.

    • gbdub says:

      As noted already, shaking will incorporate more little bits of ice and air into the drink, watering it down. Supposedly the idea with Bond is that he recognizes this and wants a longer drink that doesn’t get him trashed as fast.

      You can’t actually “bruise” gin (and their are plenty of gin drinks that are shaken!) but you will make it cloudy.

      The general rule is that if a cocktail is all spirits, it should be stirred. If it incorporates juices, eggs, or other NA ingredients, it should be shaken. Often in those drinks some froth is desirable.

    • Lambert says:

      It’s all a load of bollocks.
      Ordering something overly specific so that it looks like you know what you’re talking about.

      • Well... says:

        My null hypothesis was it’s Bond’s way of having some random eccentric preference that creates extra demands on other people for no practical reason except as a way to flaunt power.

        • AG says:

          Yes. In the 2006 Casino Royale film, they give Bond a backstory of a man with a chip on his shoulder about coming from the lower class. He gives extremely exacting instructions about how to make his martini as a power play, to reinforce his cover as a high class high roller.

          When he’s frustrated over having lost lots of money later, and the waiter asks him shaken or stirred, he snaps back “Do I look like I give a damn?”

        • DarkTigger says:

          I often heared that con-man use seemingly random quirks just to make your mind to busy to notice that they are telling you crap. Having extremly specific not-sensical dietary habbits might be a good way to achiev that.

      • Ketil says:

        It’s all a load of bollocks.

        Alternatively, you can do an ABX test and document the results. (Whatever happened to dogfooding rationalism?)

      • JayT says:

        I’m not a martini drinker, but I do like Manhattans, and I prefer them to not be shaken, because I don’t care for the foam you end up with. So, I would say having that level of specificity on your drink isn’t completely bunk.

    • sfoil says:

      Shaking has several effects over stirring.

      It waters down the drink compared to stirring, while chilling it a bit more. Not by a lot if done properly i.e. not for too long, but it is noticeable.

      It also aerates the drink. This is usually most important for cocktails that include citrus juices, which as a general rule should be shaken. Likewise for egg whites or other frothing agents.

      As to why James Bond wanted his drink shaken, it could just be an affectation. Probably though Fleming had a good reason, and the one that makes the most sense to me is this, though I have forgotten where I heard it: Bond’s martini (now referred to as the Vesper) was made with vodka. 1950s vodkas had something of an oily aftertaste (this is still not uncommon with Russian vodkas, which were all that was around back then) and both the diluting and chilling effect of shaking helped to cover this up.

      • Eric Rall says:

        That’s similar to what I heard: vodkas tend to have a relatively harsh flavor if they aren’t cold enough, which shaking helps both by cooling the drink faster than stirring and by leaving chips of ice in the finished drink to continue cooling it for a few minutes after it’s served.

        Gins, on the other hand, generally have aromatic flavor elements that taste best a bit warmer than vodkas tend to. Vigorous shaking was traditionally also avoided because it was thought to “bruise” the gin, causing microscopic droplets of oil to come out of suspension in the gin and form a slick on the surface. Sources differ on how real the problem of gin-bruising was, and some claim that bruising was instead called by the metals used in mixing vessels and implements reacting with the alcohol. But if it was, it doesn’t seem to be a problem at all with modern distilling techniques.

        • sfoil says:

          I think most “bruising” gin is just simple dilution. It’s got a nice flavor and you’re watering it down. As far as implements, the biggest problem was/is probably not reaction but contamination from a shaker — either soap (blech) or trace leftovers from a previous drink.

      • Ketil says:

        It waters down the drink compared to stirring, while chilling it a bit more

        Chilling is the transfer of heat from the alcohol to the ice (or water, when it melts).

        Assuming you want the drink to have a certain temperature, it seems this would require a specific amount of heat to be absorbed by the ice, which would lead to the same degree of melting.

        I’m not even convinced of the speed of melting, unless the stirring is slow enough to maintain relatively large local variation in temperature in the fluid.

        What I would expect, is that using lots and lots of ice might chill the alcohol below zero (ice from the freezer being -18°C or so), resulting in little or no melting.

        Did anybody actually test any of this?

        • Jon S says:

          Shaking produces many small ice chips, significantly increasing the surface area of ice exposed to the liquid. For a given volume of ice in a liquid, a large block takes much longer to melt than many small pieces.

    • Theodoric says:

      I basically only drink liquor neat

      Just of curiosity, what liquors are best neat? I only drink whiskey that way.

      • Lambert says:

        Most things with an age statement on the front. (whisk(e)y, brandies, some rums)
        Jenever is decent neat.
        Schnapps (either after a meal, in a Heinrich Boell novel, or at 3AM in the club. There is no in-between)
        Various central european peasant moonshines Obstwassers?
        Vodka, depending on longitude.

      • Well... says:

        I basically only drink whiskey and reposado tequila, and if someone else is buying then maybe cognac, so I can only speak for those. I think rum might be good neat but I haven’t had a lot of it.

      • Ketil says:

        De gustibus… I think all alcohol can be used in cocktails or long drinks, but some more rarely than others. Rarely used I would count armagnac, calvados, grappa, and schnapps, somewhat more commonly malt whisky and aquavit, then brandy, cognac, whiskeys with ‘e’, tequila, while rum, gin and vodka are commonly used in combination with other things.

        But exceptions to everything, and more expensive and exotic brands are more often drunk neat.

      • AlphaGamma says:

        Whisky, in my opinion, should be drunk with a very small amount of water- I think 6 drops is the traditional quantity.

        My favourite place to get it, the Pot Still pub in Glasgow, used to have pipettes on the bar for customers to measure the correct amount of water into their dram.

    • Chalid says:

      I think the “watering down the drink” claim made in this thread is wrong. Ice will continue melting until the drink all reaches a temperature such that ice won’t melt in it, and in a drink this should happen really quickly. The shape of the ice doesn’t much matter (incidentally those big ice cubes are BS too, for the same reason).

      • Protagoras says:

        While there is such a thing as a rocks martini, a standard martini is mixed with ice to cool the liquor, and then a strainer is used to get rid of the ice. So the ice does not continue melting in the drink in any way, quickly or slowly.

        • Chalid says:

          Right, but with either preparation method, the martini is going to be the same temperature and have the same amount of water in it when it comes out of the strainer, because the ice and liquid should have time to reach equilibrium during preparation.

          (I guess I’d believe that a shaken martini might have tiny ice particles that make it through the strainer? If so that would make a difference).

          • Cliff says:

            I don’t think so. There have been (very simple) studies done of the “large ball” ice cubes and the cooling pattern is quite different. It cools much more slowly than standard ice cubes and the drink rarely reaches the same temperature. So I doubt you are right about equilibrium.

          • Chalid says:

            I’m skeptical and strongly suspect that any such study is not done under realistic conditions, e.g. a drink that is held unrealistically still (if you never pick up the drink, you never get any mixing and so you might have regions that are slightly different temperature) or in which the drink:ice ratio is much larger than for a normal drink (so that you can have warm regions far from the ice).

            Anytime I’ve been given a big ice cube, it’s been in a smallish glass where the ice cube takes up a large fraction of the volume, so there was *plenty* of contact area and everything would have reached equilibrium.

            The only thing I can imagine realistically being different is if you were given one single big ice cube in a highball glass, and you drank from the bottom of the glass with a straw (while being careful never to stir up the drink much while awkwardly poking your straw past the giant ice cube).

  6. Etoile says:

    I had this idea, and if anyone ever implemented it that would be awesome. Or if it exists?

    Problem: say I’m an educated, reasonably intelligent lay-person with a social science or medical hypothesis I want to test. Say that, for someone with the right access, it could be a pretty straight-forward/low-cost experiment. But I am not in academia, so I have no access to time, funds, equipment, or data. How can I suggest my idea to someone IN academia – e.g., a PhD student looking for a thesis topic – and have them research it? No credit necessary even; I just want to know the answer.

    It would be awesome if there were a more formal forum than Reddit where I could post my idea, and someone could take it up and test it.

    Edit to clarify: my “idea” is this forum; the “I” in the scenario is not me personally, but a hypothetical I.

    • matthewravery says:

      Most professors have publicly-listed email addressed. If you’ve got a brilliant idea, just send them an email.

      • Well... says:

        Yeah, they also usually list their research interests.

        What’s hard, though, is finding the right professors (researchers). Maybe what we really need is a search engine that works as well as Google but is just for finding researcher(s) whose research interests fit a given hypothesis.

    • Erusian says:

      Are you going to put up money? Because people already do that but if you want your question investigated then they’re going to want to be paid.

    • metacelsus says:

      Plenty of professors and grad students read Reddit (in particular, r/labrats). Twitter or email could also work.

    • Cheese says:

      Your main problem here is finding someone who has the money to test it, assuming it is a good idea that is likely to produce a positive result that is also suitable for publication.

      When I was in academia, the amount of grant applications written and submitted to various funding organisations by our professors compared to those which get funded would be roughly a 10:1 ratio. There’s plenty of ideas, some of which are admittedly pretty average, there’s just not that much funding sloshing around in an easily accessible form.

      If you really think you have a good idea, then as others suggest find a researcher who’s interests are adjacent to it and email them.

    • Murphy says:

      The NHS has a structure in place for pretty much exactly this for health services in the UK in regards to medical research:

      https://bnssgccg.nhs.uk/about-us/what-we-do/research-and-evidence/submit-research-idea/

    • johan_larson says:

      I think the real problem here is social. How do you convince someone in a position to do something about an idea to take you seriously and actually consider the idea? First of all, you need to be able to get through the bozo filters people put up. That means you need to know enough about the field to be able to describe your ideas within the paradigms of the field and using the terminology of it. If you can’t do that, expect to be condescendingly dismissed.

      Once you can do that, you need to find someone, probably a university professor, to give you a hearing. I think the answer there is simply shoe-leather. You need to find a lot of professors who work in the field and approach them, probably first by email with a brief description of your proposal, and then in person. Expect to be rejected a lot.

      Finally, you need someone to work on the idea. I would guess that pretty much has to be you, yourself. The chance that a professor is going to take your idea and put some grad students to work on it is basically zero. What they might do is help you work on it, either by formally accepting you as a graduate student, or becoming your informal advisor. They could certainly help you raise funding and give you pointers on research and publication; that’s what professors do. And really, someone engaged enough to get that far would probably be a really good graduate student candidate.

      But if what you are hoping for is basically writing up a brief proposal and getting someone else to take it and do the necessary research, the answer is that it is basically not possible. Things just don’t work that way. It takes much more push to make something novel happen than that. And that push has to come from you.

      • How do you convince someone in a position to do something about an idea to take you seriously and actually consider the idea?

        By having a sufficiently convincing idea.

        No money or labor was involved, but Robin Hanson convinced me, via email exchanges, that idea futures were a very clever idea, back before he went back to school to get an economics degree. If I had been looking for a project to research and had the relevant skills, I would have considered that one.

        Similarly, my interest in the implications of public key encryption and related technologies was in part due to Tim May, not an academic, and resulted in published work by me.

        • Mark V Anderson says:

          But David, I also suspect you are an outlier. I think you may be far enough outside the academic norm yourself that you are more open to ideas out of the blue than most. OF course if someone could figure out how to find other such outliers that had access to research money, that might work, but I think that wouldn’t be real easy.

  7. Nancy Lebovitz says:

    https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/11/supreme-court-criminalize-immigration-advocacy-sineneng-smith.html?fbclid=IwAR2WYJRzfETuttpDY2m6rZ5u3yFRydzbgnMDLJBZrSxFZ018MiQJHCWw0E0

    “But the government also convicted her on the encouragement provision, which on its face appears to criminalize any pro-immigration speech.

    And that has the immigrant rights community worried that the court—with its recent record of unprecedented deference to the president on immigration matters—could greenlight the Trump Justice Department to criminalize routine legal work and political speech.”

    On Facebook, Taymon Beal asked “I find it difficult to trust the author’s analysis of how worrying it is that the Supreme Court is hearing this, because they’re so obviously pushing a fear-based ideological agenda. Do we know anyone who’s well-calibrated about this sort of thing who might have opinions?”

    Anyone want to take a crack at it?

    • Clutzy says:

      the court—with its recent record of unprecedented deference to the president on immigration matters

      This is quite the knee slapper. SCOTUS’s role in the Trump administration has largely been limited to rolling back lower court judicial opinions that were clearly erroneous and would never have been entered against an Obama or Bush administration. On more legally-inclined websites, this growing number of cases are known as “Trump Law”. One such case is the “muslim ban” cases. Had Obama or Bush entered such an EO, it would never have gone to SCOTUS because probably no one would have even filed a case, and/or they would have lost at the District court and circuit court of appeals.

      Now this specific case, the law will likely be limited to only cases where conduct accompanies speech, which is how the hate crime laws were interpreted at SCOTUS.

    • Gobbobobble says:

      There’s a fair few folks with legal experience here, so I have a couple questions:
      1) Don’t lawyers have some sort of liability for what they say in a professional context? I have the impression that much importance is placed on what is and is not officially “legal advice”
      1b) Is this merely CYA civil liability or are there cases where it can be criminal?
      2) Do lawyers have any obligations regarding discovery of present crimes-in-progress? Like if you’re defending a dude charged with kidnapping and you hear muffled screaming from his basement when you go over to work on the case.
      3) Is it illegal for lawyers to advise clients on how to better get away with crimes? Like you get a client saying “Hey Esq, thanks for getting me off the last three burglary charges – any tips for the one I’m planning for next week?” and you answer with anything other than “don’t”, are you at all involved in the subsequent crime?

      In short, trying to figure out whether the “routine legal work” referenced could be code for “actively assisting in illegal activity that we support”, like Saul Goodman meets Robin Hood.

      • Cliff says:

        1) To their client, yes
        1b) Not sure how it could be criminal, but maybe? If it was actually fraud or something?
        2) Yes. They may and should report serious ongoing crimes by their clients
        3) Probably not illegal, but against their ethical obligations, yes. It could rise to conspiracy or accomplice if it’s specific enough advice I believe.

        Whether any of this applies to illegal immigration I’m not sure, as the ABA model rules limit the exception to confidentiality to cases where substantial harm will result.

      • Garrett says:

        There’s also a theoretical argument that lawyers for terrorist organizations could be considered as providing material support to terrorist organizations (even if the advice was on how *not* to break the law).

        Article here, though not the one I was thinking of.

        During oral argument in the case of Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project,[3] Solicitor General Elena Kagan argued that material support laws could properly be used to prosecute lawyers who filed briefs on behalf of groups designated foreign terrorist organizations: “to the extent that a lawyer drafts a brief for the PKK [Kurdish Workers’ Party, of Turkey] or the LTTE [Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, of Sri Lanka] . . . that would be prohibited.”

        Elena Kagan is now an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States of America.

    • Here’s what the law says:

      encourages or induces an alien to come to, enter, or reside in the United States, knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that such coming to, entry, or residence is or will be in violation of law; or

      It seems clear that this refers to inciting criminal behavior of a specific person rather than encouraging it in the abstract. Without laws like this, no gang leader would ever see time in prison.

    • J Mann says:

      Any word on whether the Supreme Court is going to review Commonwealth v Carter (the suicide encouragement case)?

      Together, they would make a good opportunity to put down some guidance on encouragement to commit crimes.

    • eyeballfrog says:

      Prediction: either a 9-0 affirm or a severe limitation of scope on the law comparable to current limitations on incitement to riot. I have considerable confidence in the conservatives commitment to free speech.

    • Statismagician says:

      The standard for legality is what the law actually says, not what we want it to. Don’t encourage people to commit something which is, in fact, a crime if you’re not willing to take the appropriate hit – getting arrested to point out how unjust a law can work pretty well, viz. all successful civil rights movements, but one can’t have one’s cake and eat it too. This is a salient reason not to try and accomplish your policy aims via executive orders or discretionary enforcement, by-the-by.

  8. Inspired by the thread on the cost of children below, why isn’t there more gaming of the government benefit system? There are many families of high-earning husbands and stay-at-home wives who could save a lot of money if they were instead two families: an unemployed single mother and a high-earning single man.

    • johan_larson says:

      By gaming, do you mean tax fraud? If in this arrangement the man gave the woman money, she would have to report it as income, wouldn’t she? And he couldn’t claim the kids as dependents, which is quite a chunk of change.

      • Mark V Anderson says:

        No money given to the woman sounds more like a gift to me, which isn’t subject to income tax. Gifts are taxable only as the estate tax / gift tax rules, which start at $5 million of gifts / estates. So probably not taxable.

        But you are right that the high paid man would lose a whole lot in tax benefits, because of higher tax brackets for singles, and no dependents credit against his income. I think Alex is thinking the woman would get welfare checks? I don’t know that this would be higher than the losses incurred from higher taxes, but probably not much. And of course the risk of going to jail for fraud.

        • quanta413 says:

          Gift taxes kick in a lot sooner than that; it’s just that the tax is usually collected from the donor. But that’s an administrative detail rather than relevant in this case. https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/frequently-asked-questions-on-gift-taxes

          $15,000 in gifts per person receiving gifts from you is the limit below which you can dodge taxes in 2019. And that includes in-kind transfers.

          Although you could try getting away with giving $15,000 to your wife-not-wife and another $15,000 per child, I suspect the IRS would not look kindly on this arrangement.

        • AFAIK it’s not fraud for a man to have children by a woman, not marry her, and provide for her and her kids.

          I think Alex is thinking the woman would get welfare checks? I don’t know that this would be higher than the losses incurred from higher taxes, but probably not much.

          There’s a time limit for literal welfare, but she could get food stamps, medicaid for herself and her kids, free/reduced price school lunches, subsidized daycare, and the kids would pay much less when they go to college. Plus the 1,400$ of the child tax credit which is refundable. Wikipedia tells us that:

          In some couples, the greater earner may benefit from filing as married, while the lesser earner from not being married. For example, consider two single people, one with an income of $100,000 (and therefore paying a marginal rate of 28%) and the other with no income (and therefore paying no income tax). By being married and filing jointly, the $100,000 earner reduces his/her bracket to the 25% rate, receiving a “marriage bonus” for a net tax savings of $364, while the nonearner goes from the 10% bracket to the 25% bracket on the first dollars earned upon entering the workforce.

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

          Going from married to non-married, the notional man would lose 364$ a year plus 600$ for each child. If the his job doesn’t generously subsidize health insurance for his wife and kids, not being married is obviously the better deal.

          • johan_larson says:

            Just to be clear, Alex, you are proposing that these two do NOT commit any sort of fraud against the government, is that right? They faithfully report income, and obey the law. And they try to live the sort of lives they would have lived if they were married, including goods and services. They just for administrative purposes present themselves as two separate households, with a rather odd amount of money going from the one to the other. Is all that correct?

            If that’s so, I don’t see how the woman can claim various benefits intended for low-income households. She clearly has income. She and her children are probably getting something like half of that her man is earning. I would expect she would have to report that when applying for any sort of assistance, and would thereby be deemed ineligible.

          • Just to be clear, Alex, you are proposing that these two do NOT commit any sort of fraud against the government, is that right? They faithfully report income, and obey the law. And they try to live the sort of lives they would have lived if they were married, including goods and services. They just for administrative purposes present themselves as two separate households, with a rather odd amount of money going from the one to the other. Is all that correct?

            Yes, tax avoidance not tax evasion. Or at least, let’s cross the bridge of tax evasion when we get there, and ask what are the risks and benefits.

            If that’s so, I don’t see how the woman can claim various benefits intended for low-income households. She clearly has income. She and her children are probably getting something like half of that her man is earning. I would expect she would have to report that when applying for any sort of assistance, and would thereby be deemed ineligible.

            It’s not taxable income. I’m not sure if cash gifts have to be reported. But I’m pretty sure if a low-income single mother gets a rich guy to buy her dinner, that doesn’t need to be reported. Does she need to report it if a rich man lets her live in his house without paying rent? I’m pretty sure she doesn’t. On and on…

          • johan_larson says:

            I’m not talking here about taxable income. Up higher, I was, but not here. The question is whether a woman applying for various benefits intended for poor households would have to report consistent income (even if not taxable) from the father of her children. Now, I don’t know this for sure. But apparently the bureaucracies administering various welfare programs tend to be on the severe side, so it wouldn’t surprise me in the least. One guy who used to post on this board told us about strict limits on how much a welfare recipient could have in assets, for example.

          • Nornagest says:

            I’m not sure if cash gifts have to be reported.

            They do — theoretically even buying someone dinner does, although of course no one’s really that anal — but they don’t generally put the recipient on the hook for taxes. They can put the donor on the hook for taxes (at 40%!), but only if they’re quite substantial — the rules for gift taxes are kinda complicated, but the gist is that you can give $15000 (currently), per recipient, per year, tax free, and after that you can either pay taxes on the remainder immediately, or count it towards your lifetime estate tax limits (currently $11.4M).

            For obvious reasons, the latter is the way to go for most people. There are various exceptions, too — you can give to your spouse tax free, for example.

          • JayT says:

            My understanding is that for the wife to be able to get all those transfers like food stamps, they would look at the father’s income and force him to pay child support. The only way to actually swing it so that the mother gets those transfers is for the father to give up his rights to the children so that they are completely dependent on the mother. At that point, if they are still living with the father, it would certainly be fraud.

            Epistemic status: I had an acquaintance doing exactly this. He didn’t marry his wife, and he gave her full control of the children. They lived in section 8 housing and got food stamps. He had a full time job and officially “lived” at his parents house. It worked out well for them, but it always seemed like a dangerous game to play.

          • Mark V Anderson says:

            Okay, I went to the actual tax schedules to find the difference. A married joint return with 100k income is 13,874 tax, for single it is 18,284 tax. As you say, the child tax credit difference is $600 per kid, so $1200 for two kids. So the high income man would pay about $5700 more taxes single instead of married. Less than I thought, probably a lot less than the woman would get in welfare.

            But there is no way the woman would get welfare without fraud. If she admits the man supports her, she won’t get welfare; if she does not, it is fraud. So there is possible gaming. I don’t know how likely they’d get caught. Probably low. There are probably lots of people doing this.

    • DinoNerd says:

      I’m not a bookkeeper or tax accountant, but IIRC common wisdom in the US at some time in the past 20 years was that a high earner + non-earner would reduce their total taxes by marrying, but two people earning similar (middle class) amounts would increase their total taxes by marrying.

      • Yes, as I quoted in my other comment:

        In some couples, the greater earner may benefit from filing as married, while the lesser earner from not being married. For example, consider two single people, one with an income of $100,000 (and therefore paying a marginal rate of 28%) and the other with no income (and therefore paying no income tax). By being married and filing jointly, the $100,000 earner reduces his/her bracket to the 25% rate, receiving a “marriage bonus” for a net tax savings of $364, while the nonearner goes from the 10% bracket to the 25% bracket on the first dollars earned upon entering the workforce.

        $364 is not much compared to the cost of free healthcare, food stamps, reduced price college tuition, ect.

        • hls2003 says:

          As I understand it, a lot of those benefits have an asset test as well as an income test. That would probably screw up some of the program availability, since there would clearly be assets. Furthermore, imputed income should be applied if, for example, the wife is living in a house rent-free.

          That being said, it is neither a crazy idea nor automatically fraudulent. As a somewhat related example, I know a person who qualified for food stamps and Medicaid despite having moderate income periodically from an irrevocable discretionary trust. There are loopholes in the system, and it is possible they could apply to the married couple; the question would be if they are sufficiently valuable to overcome the undesirable social implications.

    • ECD says:

      Because:
      1) You’re radically overestimating the value of “government benefits”
      2) You’re radically underestimating the amount of “government benefits” which aren’t relevant, or are embarrassing for a middle class person to use (great, you managed to get a housing voucher, maybe, but you can’t use it, or sell it; great, you’ve got food stamps, maybe, are you really going to use them at the store, where your neighbors can see you?)
      3) You’re radically underestimating the massive pain in the ass we’ve made getting “government benefits.”
      4) You’re radically underestimating the requirements, or costs of “government benefits,” (is the stay at home parent here looking for a job and/or doing the required training activities?)
      5) You’re missing the fact that with kids, you are required to first go after child support, before seeking government benefits (and failure to do so can mean the state goes after the other parent).
      6) You’re missing the fact that many types of benefits come with lifetime limits, so if you pull this, and then run into trouble later on…well, you’re fucked.
      7) You’re also missing the fact that most people aren’t pure economic actors and realize this is skeavy free-riding and don’t want to engage in it.

      I am not an expert in “government benefits” and a lot of this varies state-to-state despite nominally federal programs. None of the above is legal advice.

      • you’ve got food stamps, maybe, are you really going to use them at the store, where your neighbors can see you?

        Food stamps are provided through cards now, I doubt anyone would notice.

        You’re radically underestimating the massive pain in the ass we’ve made getting “government benefits.”

        What I’ve heard anecdotally is that medicaid is much less of a pain in the ass then private insurance. It was quite painless for me to get Pell grants.

        You’re missing the fact that with kids, you are required to first go after child support, before seeking government benefits (and failure to do so can mean the state goes after the other parent).

        This is certainly not the case with medicaid and higher ed subsidies. Is it the case for food stamps? Anyway, can’t the woman just claim she doesn’t know who the father is?

        You’re also missing the fact that most people aren’t pure economic actors and realize this is skeavy free-riding and don’t want to engage in it.

        Tax avoidance strategies are pretty common alongside outright tax evasion. The explanation has to be deeper than “morality.”

        • Well... says:

          Anyway, can’t the woman just claim she doesn’t know who the father is?

          If you want to try something like what you implied in the OP — tell the IRS you’re not married but otherwise live as if you are — you’re taking a big risk. Every once in a while I have to imagine the IRS looks into suspected tax evasion schemes, and one like this would be very easy to catch.

        • If she were to say she didn’t know who the father was when she didn’t, it would be tax fraud. But the rest of what I described, none of that is illegal. So long as they don’t use the term “marriage,” they are merely a cohabiting couple.

        • ECD says:

          This is certainly not the case with medicaid and higher ed subsidies.

          I know of plenty of people whose parents explicitly said ‘no, I will not contribute to your college,’ but still had sufficient money that the student didn’t qualify for aid and therefore for support. I don’t believe this is correct. Now, it may well be that there is a technical way around this due to some sort of unusual circumstances, but I bet if you look, you’ll find the number of people actually approved is…low.

          Also, a random search for medicaid turns up “The Korper kids get kicked off Medicaid when it turns out their deadbeat father can afford health insurance” and see the Louisiana AG’s website: “Do people who receive FITAP or Medicaid have to seek support from the noncustodial parent?
          Yes. To be eligible for FITAP or Medicaid, a person must give information to help identify and locate the noncustodial parent, unless the FITAP or Medicaid agency determines good cause for not cooperating.”

          Now that’s better than nothing, but a lot of this seems to vary by state, see e.g. this article on Texas.

          Is it the case for food stamps?

          This isn’t my area, but a basic google search suggests yes, though again, this may vary by state.

          Tax avoidance strategies are pretty common alongside outright tax evasion. The explanation has to be deeper than “morality.”

          Tax avoidance strategies are pretty common amongst some people. Amongst many other people, the excuse it’s avoidance not evasion is viewed as…well, an evasion. But even for the people who do make that distinction:

          1) They want their avoidance to be invisible to anyone except themselves, their accountant and the IRS. Despite your belief that this will be invisible, it won’t be.
          2) At some levels, the spending is part of the point.
          3) As I said in the first part of the quote, people aren’t pure economic actors. They generally, though not universally, want to get married, have kids, a house and the American Dream.
          4) But, if you want an economic reason, this deal has the potential (depending on state law) to fail incredibly dangerous for the unemployed pseudo-spouse.

          As before, none of this is legal advice and all of this may vary state-by-state.

          ETA: I disagree with quite a bit of Scott’s writing on Universal Basic Income, but he’s not wrong that we’ve successfully introduced a massive amount of excess cost into our “government benefits” via screening and paranoia, much of which is designed to deal with exactly this sort of nonsense (though in the personage of “deadbeat dads” who aren’t actually living in the same house and therefore are harder to find), as well as to accomplish deterrence by annoyance, on the theory that anyone who truly needs it will figure it out (which is a deeply stupid theory and just ends up adding charity and external advisor support costs to the whole pile).

          ETA2: Typo correction and precision addition.

          • Theodoric says:

            I know of plenty of people whose parents explicitly said ‘no, I will not contribute to your college,’ but still had sufficient money that the student didn’t qualify for aid and therefore for support.

            If they were going to undergrad and are under 24, the parent’s income is considered. I don’t know if, say, an 18 year old college student would technically qualify for food stamps or other types of assistance.

          • ECD says:

            If they were going to undergrad and are under 24, the parent’s income is considered. I don’t know if, say, an 18 year old college student would technically qualify for food stamps or other types of assistance.

            Right, sorry, 2 different points. Parental income matters to the student for college aid (generally). As a child, there’s usually a need to assign the right to collect child support to the state to receive benefits, which the state will then attempt to collect from the liquid (or sometimes not) parent.

          • Steven J says:

            In Illinois, there’s been some recent controversy about some parents giving up guardianship of their children in order to qualify for need-based aid. May or may not have broken any laws.

            https://www.propublica.org/article/university-of-illinois-financial-aid-fafsa-parents-guardianship-children-students

        • Damn, I didn’t know you could lose medicaid for that, that’s crazy.

          • ECD says:

            That’s without getting into issues like the asset cap:
            1) Your father died and the life insurance payment was $5,000 cash.
            2) Congratulations, you have no health insurance.
            ETA: 3) Now, you may be able to spend this down, but if you do it wrong, you may be committing medicaid fraud.

            ETA: And that’s without getting into issues like estate recovery.

            Also, none of the above is legal advice.

        • Eric Rall says:

          This is certainly not the case with medicaid and higher ed subsidies. Is it the case for food stamps?

          1. It is for food stamps:

          What counts as income? SNAP counts cash income from all sources, including earned income (before payroll taxes are deducted) and unearned income, such as cash assistance, Social Security, unemployment insurance, and child support.

          For higher ed subsidies (at least at the federal level), child support definitely does count:

          Note, however, that any child support and/or alimony received from the non-custodial parent must be included on the FAFSA.

          You do appear to be correct about medicaid, though. I was surprised to learn that upon looking it up: it seems to be a recent-ish change, probably related to the ACA Medicaid expansion.

          Anyway, can’t the woman just claim she doesn’t know who the father is?

          If she does know who the father is but claims not to, then that’s a clear-cut case of fraud if she ever slips up and gets caught. And governments seem to be wise to that trick: it looks like the standard practice is for the government to conduct an investigation to discover the father, and the mother can be denied public assistance if she’s determined to be “uncooperative” in this investigation.

          In OP’s scenario of a couple remaining unmarried on paper in order to game public benefits, the mother will probably have been living with her not-husband since before the child was born, being supported by him the whole time, and presenting themselves socially as a couple. It would be blindingly obvious to any vaguely competent investigator that the mother’s roommate/boyfriend/sugar-daddy/whatever is likely the child’s father, at which point he’d either need to take a paternity test (which would prove him to be the father) or acquiesce to being presumed to be the father and ordered to pay child support.

        • Garrett says:

          Food stamps are provided through cards now, I doubt anyone would notice.

          You mean the teal cards which roughly fade from blue to green, with bright yellow lettering on them? The ones I don’t make snide comments about people using because I don’t want to be kicked out of the store?

      • Plumber says:

        +1

        As I hint upthread getting benefits is an ordeal, if it’s an option earning wages for the money is often easier.

      • Cliff says:

        I read a paper recently that the average value of government benefits to the poorest (who essentially make no money) is over $50,000.

        I suspect the reason this doesn’t happen is that it has the potential to screw over the mother badly. If she’s married she has a claim to a large share of the assets, otherwise not so much.

        • Garrett says:

          Link to paper?

          Also, is this something which anybody could qualify for through normal means (eg. getting fired), or something which requires eg. having several intellectually-disabled children?

          • ECD says:

            Okay, I can’t access that, but I will note, we’ve shifted from ‘paper’ to ‘WSJ op-ed.’

          • Cliff says:

            Try this one

            Either it’s right or it’s not, I guess.

          • Guy in TN says:

            The data source appears to be here.

            It looks like Medicaid is accounting for a lot of that $50,000. Which leads to a funny conclusion under this formulation: bringing the cost of healthcare down, would actually result in an increase in inequality, while the more hospitals/pharma charge the government, the more the “wealth” (as measured in this manner) of the poor increases.

          • ECD says:

            I’m not sure what’s going on with the data there. The source they cite to seems to be this CBO study, which shows government transfers for the lowest quintile at $9,600, jumping to $16,200 for the second quintile, then slowly decreasing to $12,000 over the next three quintiles.

            I’m really not tracking their methodology, but they seem to be making a big pile of stuff, calling it all welfare, then adding up its appropriations and using that as the numerator, then some number (poor households? all households? poor people? I can’t tell) as the denominator. If this is correct…that is a deeply stupid methodology.

            I am not an economist, but no. I am also somewhat dubious of the alterations they’ve done to the original CBO study and that they’ve appropriately valued employer provided insurance given the alterations they make to CBO figures for medicaid, but don’t appear to make for employer-provided benefits. When combined with the S-corp pass through whining…I am deeply unconvinced by this, though a more expert review would be greatly appreciated.

        • Nick says:

          Over $50,000 what? $50,000 per year or per lifetime? Per individual or family? What is factoring into that; cash payouts or various benefits they aren’t paying their taxes into, too?

        • Guy in TN says:

          I too am interested in this paper’s methodology.

          I suppose if you totaled up the value of things such as the military, roads, public schools, national parks, you may get to something like $50,000 a year per person. But these aren’t benefits you get to claim more of if you are poor, so they would be irrelevant to the question of benefits-gaming.

      • quanta413 says:

        3) You’re radically underestimating the massive pain in the ass we’ve made getting “government benefits.”

        It can get more byzantine than that. If by clerical error or automatic submission through some other program you accidentally end up being applied for government benefits, it can be hard to get the government to reject you for benefits (at least in a timely manner). You’ll just sit in limbo neither accepted nor rejected for government benefits, which can be a problem for other reasons.

        I learned this recently by trying to buy health insurance off the covered CA healthcare exchange. By default, if you even click a button saying you might qualify for premium subsidies on the exchange at the very start of filling out the forms before you even fill out any info (I don’t even remember clicking this button honestly, but it’s the only thing I can figure out that might have triggered things), you may end up automatically having an application opened with MediCal as I did. And I knew ahead of time that I wasn’t qualified for Medi-Cal; I didn’t even realize that was a possibility of the web forms! I just wanted to comparison shop for insurance on the exchange.

        Even if as you start going through the application you put in a yearly income larger than Medi-Cal limits this can happen, and it’s not like I put in a number particularly close. You are then blocked from buying insurance off of the CA health exchange until you fill out enough info and provide enough documents to get Medi-Cal to reject you. Calling them on the phone and begging them to close your incidentally filed application or reject it will not work. Explaining that the documents they are requesting in order to reject you do not exist will not help. Explaining this is all some sort of terrible accident caused by a programming error will not save you.

        You can’t then just open a fresh application on covered CA, reject any possibility of premium subsidies, and try again. It will seem to work, but after filling everything out it knows that you have a Medi-Cal application open (that you didn’t file). You may think “Well surely I can buy insurance directly from the insurer.” Turns out a lot of the times during special enrollment you can’t! I could in August for some insurer’s websites (before I found a way to extend my insurance from my last job a few more months) but not in late October. They redirected me to the covered CA exchange website for reasons unclear to me.

        Fortunately, my wife found a way for us to buy insurance that didn’t involve making several more phone calls or having to figure out what sort of documents could potentially substitute for nonexistent documents so I could get the government to reject an application to them on my behalf that I didn’t fill out.

        To not be overly negative, since it wasn’t all bad. Thanks to the Covered CA support staff who helped fix another earlier problem I ran into that was causing my application for special enrollment to be auto-rejected because it thought I had health insurance even when the form clearly specified that I didn’t have health insurance. They were very helpful (and I expect have heard from people who have run into the exact same bug before). It’s nice to know that some part of the chain can sometimes quickly fix a problem caused by another part of the chain without a bunch of rigamarole.

        But given the way the Medi-Cal system seems to work, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were people with floating applications neither accepted nor rejected due to some snafu; now unable to buy health insurance off the exchange (and receive the premium subsidy). Which could suck pretty bad if for some reason you may or may not qualify for Medi-Cal but definitely aren’t rich enough to easily pay that fat monthly premium without assistance. I happen to be fortunate enough to be in a situation where this isn’t much difference, but not everyone is that lucky.

        • Mark V Anderson says:

          I buy my annual health insurance from ehealthinsurance.com. I very much don’t want to try to navigate my state’s system, which is meant for subsidized insurance. I know I make too much for that, so I avoid it altogether.

          • quanta413 says:

            Do you know if that works during special enrollment? I tried buying straight from insurers and couldn’t, but maybe if I tried using an intermediary…

            Weirdly, a lot of insurers didn’t make me go through the state system for special enrollment in August but did in October. My guess is because regular enrollment was opening soon.

          • Mark V Anderson says:

            Do you know if that works during special enrollment?

            Maybe not. It does seem it isn’t even open until the annual enrollment period. As I recall, when I was having problems with bugs on the website, I have gone directly to the insurers and was able to enroll that way. OF course this was during the normal enrollment period also.

            By special enrollment, you mean buying insurance mid-year because of a qualifying event like marriage or a birth of a child? I am a little surprised insurers won’t let you buy from them in such situations since they talk incessantly about these exceptions. But insurance is hard to understand. I think this is because they are so highly regulated that there are bound to be some perverse incentives built in because they are afraid of losing their entire market from doing something the government doesn’t like.

          • quanta413 says:

            By special enrollment, you mean buying insurance mid-year because of a qualifying event like marriage or a birth of a child? I am a little surprised insurers won’t let you buy from them in such situations since they talk incessantly about these exceptions. But insurance is hard to understand. I think this is because they are so highly regulated that there are bound to be some perverse incentives built in because they are afraid of losing their entire market from doing something the government doesn’t like.

            Yes. What was weird is that for most (but not all insurers) I could buy directly from their website due to a qualifying life event in August (or at least it looked like I could; I ended up extending my last job insurance instead), but their websites had subtly changed by October and I couldn’t seem to buy directly from them for a qualifying life event anymore. At this point, I was really close to open enrollment period, so I suspect it may be some sort of weird oversight in how the links to buy insurance worked.

            It’s possible that if I called them I could have worked it out.

    • ana53294 says:

      Families with a high-earning husbands and stay-at-home wives are likely to be religious, and value marriage highly.

      Besides, there are benefits to being married, for both spouses, that would be made much harder by divorce. Such rule breaking is unlikely to lead to high trust, and trust is very important in a marriage. In such an arrangement, the man may lose custody in a separation; the mother would lose the right to alimony and any common assets they accumulate.

      • matthewravery says:

        Yeah, you can’t just ignore the legal implications of marriage. There may be ways to replicate these authorities via powers of attorney and stuff like that, but IDK if you want to be in the position of having to call up your lawyer just because you want to visit your sorta-wife in the hospital after she’s been in a car accident.

    • Nancy Lebovitz says:

      What surprises me is that more Americans don’t move to countries with much cheaper but comparably good medical care.

    • Chalid says:

      I think that if you’re high income, the benefits are probably small and not worth it. I’d expect that Medicaid will give you much worse-quality insurance than being on a family plan on the wage-earner’s work, and the family plan will usually be much cheaper than two individual insurance policies (at my last couple jobs, family coverage had zero additional cost versus individual coverage). So you don’t want that. You wouldn’t be able to utilize any housing subsidies since the couple is living together. So you’re getting, what, school lunches and food stamps? Those are peanuts, not worth the trouble.

      • Garrett says:

        From what I’ve heard in our area, Medicaid is a lot easier to use than most good commercial insurance. The challenge might be in finding a provider who will take Medicaid, but once you have, it’s very easy to use and everything Just Works. If a prior authorization is required and obtained, it’s honored. Very little headache for the user and no balance-billing. So, if Medicaid is accepted by your provider, you’re almost certainly going to be better off using it.

        For providers, it can be a nightmare. In my case (EMS) we’re stuck in this case where we are required to accept it as payment and can’t balance-bill. If I’ve read the paperwork correctly (and I probably haven’t) our State recently upped the authorized Medicaid payment to a maximum of $300 for an ALS ambulance transport. Which is considerably less than we bill. It *might* be more than the marginal cost of provision, though that gets weird to measure for EMS.

    • DarkTigger says:

      I have no idea about the US-System but, in Germany this would not work.
      You are supposed to proof need to get access to the most central part of our unemployment benefits.
      Part of this proof is laying open your finances from the past months. If you have any kind of regular payments over a certain amount, or to much money at all, you get nothing.

      So either you convince your futur wife-not-wife to be very frugal the next six month. Or you hand her the amount of money she needs in chash regularly (with the regular withdrawls probably get you flagged for suspicion of money laudering/tax evasion).

      Good luck with that.

    • eyeballfrog says:

      In some states, you just get declared common law married and your scheme is over.

  9. Has anyone seen a decent research review into the relative harms of smoking vs vaping? I know the latest moral panic was mostly due to conflating contaminated black market THC pens with regular vapes, but it looks like the classic Public Health England factoid about e-cigarettes being ‘95% less harmful’ than smoking was also somewhat less than rigorous. Thanks!

    • It’s so new we can’t know much about long term health effects, though I’d bet it would be a lot better. The questions we should really be asking are:

      1. Does it help smokers quit?
      2. Does it encourage people who are not smokers and would not have previously considered smoking to start vaping?

      Question 1 sounds like a “no:”

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_cigarette#Smoking_cessation

      • Lambert says:

        IIRC, there’s a Scottsplainer on this in the archives.

        Ahh yes 2013. An excelent vintage.
        https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/28/thank-you-for-doing-something-ambiguously-between-smoking-and-not-smoking/

        • Ah, I should have guessed! To be clear, I’m already confident that vaping is much less bad than smoking – I’m trying to quantify the ‘much’ part. Until recently, I thought the same as Scott in 2013 (the effects are so trivial as to be of no more concern than, say, getting hooked on coffee). But there seems to be a spate of (vaguely-worded) articles recently suggesting that vaping might actually be Bad in a non-trivial way, and not just the contaminated THC vapes.

      • Tarpitz says:

        Anecdotally, I know several people who believe vaping was essential to them quitting. But mostly, I just think it would a priori be an incredibly weird and surprising result if vaping didn’t mostly substitute for rather than supplement smoking in smokers who took it up. It’s an alternate delivery mechanism for the same drug which you use in an analogous way in the same situations.

      • DarkTigger says:

        There is a third important question that Richard Meadows seems to be more interessted in:
        Is it safer than smoking when someone does not want to quit their nicotine addiction?

        I’m rather criticall of vaping espacially because some people who accepted to not smoke inside, started to vape inside, and I like to have my lungs clean of your cancer attractors, thank you.
        But if the question is, should someone smoke or vape, while not changing anything else, I never heard evidence why vaping shouldn’t be healthier.

    • GearRatio says:

      I’m super, SUPER in the tank for e-cigarettes so take this with a big grain of salt: I have never see a single credible study that implies any health risk whatsoever to e-cigarettes beyond that of nicotine. The closest you get is mouse studies where they keep plinking at super-high doses until they get the required result, formaldehyde production studies where they intentionally pump huge wattages through devices intended for low-power usage until they burn-instead-of-vaporize the juice, or “there’s chemicals in here that cause cancer!” rationales that, if followed, would keep you from eating any kind of food.

      Case in point: look here . This is a surgeon general’s pamphlet intended to scare people from e-cigarette use as much as possible; scroll down to page 3 to read their “harms besides nicotine”-type rationale. It’s the kind of copy you write when you couldn’t find anything bad, but desperately want people to think the product is bad anyway. It’s reefer madness writ large.

      See how they mention diacetyl and popcorn lung? Forget that the link between diacetyl and popcorn lung in humans doesn’t exist outside of lawsuits; forget that cigarette smokers get something like tens-to-hundreds time more diacetyl exposure than vapers but don’t get popcorn lung, and forget that despite frequent use by millions of vapers for years not a single case of vaping-related popcorn lung ever occured. It’s still being represented as a real and significant risk, despite the part where no remotely rational unbiased observer of the data would buy it.

      Now that the CDC/FDA have been shamed into admitting that there was never any significant link between the culprit chemical in the recent outbreak and non-THC vaping, the new push is a small study that found non-smoking people who also had never vaped who then were made to take 15 puffs on a non-nicotine e-cigarette had a significant reduction to blood flow in their legs when (and only when) their legs were put into a restrictive cuff and then released. The researchers did not include any controls accustomed to vaping or smoking, nor did they make any effort to induce coughing in any controls to see if they could produce a similar effect. They proposed no biologically plausible reasons why this affect should be observed in this particular situation.

      Despite all this, look at the typical headline this research produced. It’s scaremongering based on an uncontrolled, small sample size study like you see everywhere, and it kills me.

      From my perspective, near 100% of the “vaping kills!” research I see is on the level of that study. People go on a fishing trip, find some effect of some kind, over-represent it, and say it’s causing significant, probable harm even if that isn’t evident.

      I should say again: I’m super biased on this at this point in my life, and I’ve seen enough of these kinds of studies that I’m exhausted by them. I’d say this: Go around, read some articles, but replace the word “e-cigarette” in them with the name of a fruit you enjoy. If you find there’s a single piece of evidence anywhere that would keep you from eating peaches if the study was about them instead, fine, I have no problem with you being anti-ecigarette.

      • Thanks, this is really helpful. I appreciate you pointing out your bias too. I am fine with assuming the ‘risk’ on a personal level – I’m a filthy smoker, so I don’t have much to lose – but I wrote something recommending vaping over smoking based on the PHE claim, and started worrying whether that 95% figure was actually true.

    • Douglas Knight says:

      What was wrong with the PHE report?

      Smoking takes about 50x as much time off of your life as chewing tobacco, so you might say that chewing tobacco is 98% less harmful than cigarettes. My guess is that vaping is even safer, but it’s hard to be sure.

      • Here’s an excerpt from one of the articles that prompted me to ask the question:

        Prof McKee says while Public Health England had at one point supported vaping as being “95 percent safer” than cigarettes, they are alone in that.

        “There are very few other organisations that take that view. The World Health Organisation has extreme concern … I think yesterday the chief medical officer and the State Health Officers in Australia have come up with a fairly strong statement; the former Chief Medical Officer of Scotland wrote yesterday in The Scotsman that he was not persuaded that e-cigarettes were necessarily much safer. The European Respiratory Society, European Heart Network, many of the American organisations, I could go on.”

        He says Public Health England has also wavered in its support, particularly for the 95 percent figure anyway.

        “The 95 percent figure has no credibility whatsoever … they used a method for collective decision making which is a perfectly valid method if you have a wide range of opinions and different views – but in fact, the people around the table almost all were strong supporters of electronic cigarettes at a time when there was very little evidence.

        “They conceded in their paper that in fact there was not enough evidence to come to firm conclusions – but they did anyway – and there are very significant and still unanswered questions about the funding for that study that have been described in the British Medical Journal and elsewhere.”

        Prof Edwards agrees, saying such a specific figure was “utterly implausible”.

        • Ketil says:

          Prof Edwards agrees, saying such a specific figure was “utterly implausible”.

          As a scientist, I would agree that the specific figure is implausible. But I think there is very strong evidence that most of the harms from smoking comes from inhaling tar, and if you eliminate that, the harms are much reduced. By how much is not so clear, and I interpret Edwards to say that it is unlikely to be 95%, it could equally well be 90% or 99%.

          The fact (from Douglas Knight above, I wouldn’t know) that chewing tobacco is that much safer is a strong indication that nicotine use by itself¹ isn’t very dangerous.

          ¹ I think nicotine doses are way higher from chewing tobacco, in an ill advised moment when I tried it, I was on the verge of simultaneously fainting and throwing up.

        • GearRatio says:

          On McKee: I didn’t know on my previous post that he was part of the source of your doubts, so a quick mention of him is in order: McKee has always, and consistently, been completely anti e-cigarette. He and Stanton Glantz are probably the two most visible figures against them, and for both being against them is the defining characteristic of each of their careers in the past decade. Bpth of them have spent the last ten years saying e-cigarettes were secretly nefarious and trying to convince people that some hidden mega-harm was just under the surface of them, just about to be found.

          I’m not sure how much that should or shouldn’t affect your opinion, but that’s kind of commentary is how McKee gets in the news, and essentially “why he’s famous”.

        • Douglas Knight says:

          McKee is purely making an argument from authority, nothing about rigor. He says that PHE is out of step with the rest of the world. That’s true, but that’s because PHE is the rigorous one.

  10. With the recent brouhaha about Prince Andrew’s BBC interview and lack of “remorse,” I am reminded of the movie The Thin Blue Line, where a man was accused of being a psychopath because a psychologist found that he had “no remorse” for the murder he supposedly committed, his lawyer pointed out that if you have someone who didn’t do anything then you shouldn’t expect him to show any remorse. Should Prince Andrew be remorseful for merely being friends with Epstein? This is hardly obvious to me, but seems to be assumed by most of the media. I don’t remember anything similar happening with people who were friends with Michael Jackson.

    Particularly interesting is the fact that the Daily Mail, which is supposed to be a right-wing publication, shares this reaction:

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7693929/Friend-sex-accuser-Virginia-Roberts-hits-Prince-Andrew-total-lack-empathy.html

    My question for Brits is how is the British Right in general responding to this situation? It’s relevant to the question Britain in general and the British right in particular will be confronted with after the Queen dies: how will they respond to King Charles? Will they advocate abolition of the monarchy or remain wedded to it out of traditionalist scruples?

    • mtl1882 says:

      …his lawyer pointed out that if you have someone who didn’t do anything then you shouldn’t expect him to show any remorse. Should Prince Andrew be remorseful for merely being friends with Epstein? This is hardly obvious to me, but seems to be assumed by most of the media.

      The major news media currently optimizes for constant controversy, because that is how it makes its money at this point. One strategy that is quite effective is a mix of suggestiveness and a bait and switch type dynamic, which scrambles the conversation such that people keep screaming past each other. The framing of virtually all stories is that Prince Andrew is in some way complicit, which could be anything from not shunning Epstein to being guilty of horrific sex crimes. This implies he is at the very least insensitive to the seriousness of these acts. Therefore, lack of remorse should be the expectation. But they dwell on that issue and send the discussion in a circle.

      The framing of the stories suggests what they want is for him to pay for his complicity in wrong, but then they claim the goal is a sincere apology, dodging the issue as to what he actually did or who deserves the apology. It’s hard to see how any apology to the public could be portrayed as acceptable if he were guilty of the crimes, and if the issue is his failure to shun Epstein, then it seems obvious to me he did not see that as a huge deal, and is in fact not remorseful. Whether or not this was inherently wrong is not universally agreed upon, and making that assumption, and mixing it with suggestions that he did more than that, keeps people at each other’s throats. But the idea that someone in Prince Andrew’s position may identify more with his powerful associates more than the pain of the victims is hardly an earth-shattering controversy. It is a painfully common dynamic, and the monarchy hasn’t survived on a reputation for empathy.

      It did happen with Michael Jackson, but this dynamic hadn’t intensified to the same degree at the time, so it wasn’t as bad. It revived within the last year or two, but Michael Jackson’s life was so weird and reclusive that it is hard to frame the questions the same way. At least on the surface, there was more plausible deniability for various reasons, and he didn’t come across like a member of the “good old boys” club. Also, he had a lot of unique things going on that would explain hanging with him—it is hard to suspect a career like that was merely a cover for famous people to molest children. Epstein can be more easily seen, validly or not, as representative of a powerful network that is masked mainly by, outwardly, checking all the right boxes associated with “respectable people.” Jackson wasn’t working on the basis of that checklist, to put it mildly.

    • Murphy says:

      I find it interesting how some celebrities somehow seem to be coming out of the Epstein thing smelling like roses while others get the full “obviously he must have known”

      Some like Naomi Campbell everyone just seems to decide she could never have guessed that the girls Epstien had at her birthday were underage sex slaves…. while with others they leap straight to deciding they’re *definitely* paedophiles who knew everything.

      The impression I got re: Prince Andrew is that a lot of people don’t really care much if it’s true, rather they just see it as a golden opportunity to do away with the monarchy while other factions see it as a power play against the pro-royalist/pro-traditionalist/conservative factions to try to apply guilt by association.

      • J Mann says:

        To be fair, my understanding is that Campbell hung around with Epstein in 2001, and Prince Andrew stayed at his house in 2010. (Also, of course, Andrew is accused of sleeping with the teens that Epstein procured.)

        Campbell also came out a lot stronger, with statements like: “What he’s done is indefensible,” “When I heard what he had done, it sickened me to my stomach,” and “I stand with the victims. … They’re scarred for life. For life.”

      • that the girls Epstien had at her birthday were underage sex slaves

        Does “sex slaves” mean prostitutes? If not, what is the evidence that the women in question were slaves?

        • Lillian says:

          Just so we’re clear on what Epstein was charged with the first time around before he plead out, I found a copy of the affidavit that lead to his arrest. According to this he would recruit teenage girls to give him naked massages, would engage in sexual contact and sometimes full on intercourse with them, and paid them between $200 and $1000 a session. Morally despicable though it may be, it’s not sex slavery.

          • J Mann says:

            I think the allegation is that once you get a 14 year old girl onto a plane or an island where her only contact is your fixers, she doesn’t feel free to leave.

          • The crimes in question took place in Florida.

          • Lillian says:

            The address is in the affidavit: 538 El Brillo Way, Palm Beach. Looks like a suburban development, big ass houses, and the downtown commercial area a 15-20 minute walk north, including the Palm Beach Police Department.

          • MrApophenia says:

            The specific charges they got him on in Florida were those. (Although even that has a stink of corruption about it – he had sex with underage girls, plead guilty to it, and somehow got to plead for soliciting a prostitute, when in fact it is legally impossible for these underage girls to give consent and so by definition he plead guilty to statutory rape, a charge magically absent.)

            Anyway, it wasn’t on the charge sheet but what people are actually interested about with Epstein is not the stuff in Florida, as bad as it is. It’s the widely corroborated stories that he ran an international “Lolita Express” where he flew rich and powerful people around on his private plane, or to his private island, and provided them with underage girls to have sex with. He is also accused by multiple people of trafficking girls from the third world for this purpose – pretty standard sex slavery stuff, except for a rich and famous clientele.

            (The fact that we can prove various celebrities and world leaders flew around on his underage sex plane a bunch of times for no clear reason they will explain doesn’t hurt this interest, of course.)

            People aren’t mad at Prince Andrew because he was friends with Epstein, they’re mad because one of the girls in Epstein’s employ says he had sex with her when she was 17.

          • albatross11 says:

            Speculation: (epistemic status: very uncertain, spitballing)

            Among the very rich and famous and powerful, perhaps this sort of thing is actually not all that uncommon, and doesn’t violate local social norms. People trying to ingratiate themselves to you routinely take you to fun parties where the women (or men) are young and attractive and willing, and you don’t ask any awkward questions about exactly how old they are or what kind of compensation they’re receiving. I mean, maybe that hot teenage girl just finds overweight graying 50-ish men really sexy and can’t keep her hands off them. This isn’t even all that completely bonkers when you’re a minor celebrity–women do in fact throw themselves at actors and musicians all the time, and some women find powerful men very appealing. Even relatively obscure artists and writers sometimes get groupies.

            People who get to touch the fringes of that world quickly figure out the social norms and follow them–I mean, hey, back at the university, they wouldn’t understand, but this is just how things are done with the big boys, and I sure want to keep being invited to hang with the big boys! So I guess it’s all good. And people who get invited and react in what we’d think of as a more moral or sensible way–refusing the offers from the sweet young things and just having boring conversations with the other rich/famous/powerful and their hangers-on–they don’t get invited back and only have a story about this one really wild party they were invited to once.

            The whole dynamic of people swallowing their moral objections so they can be accepted as members of an inner circle[1] is really common, and is probably one of the easiest ways to corrupt your own morals.

            [1] Someone posted a link to a wonderful CS Lewis essay/speech about this phenomenon awhile back.

          • John Schilling says:

            It’s the widely corroborated stories that he ran an international “Lolita Express” where he flew rich and powerful people around on his private plane, or to his private island, and provided them with underage girls to have sex with.

            Is the claim that he had two separate groups of underage girls, one living openly in suburban Florida and another kept on permanent lockdown on his private island? That, having developed a technique(*) for ensuring that teenaged hotties will make themselves freely available to his guests in Florida, he went and implemented a completely different and much more dangerous technique on his private island?

            Occam’s razor suggests it was underage prosecution all around. Which is a crime, but if you don’t want people to wind up sympathizing with criminals, you do kind of need to be sure you’re accusing them of the crimes they actually did.

            * Presumably, “give them some money and gifts if they go along with it”, where “some” translates to extravagant luxury by teenage-runaway standards and pocket change by billionaire standards.

          • JonathanD says:

            As a matter of law, can a 14yo be a prostitute? If Alice (14) has sex with Jeffrey (50), we generally say that Jeffrey has raped Alice because Alice isn’t old enough to meaningfully consent. In this case Alice is the victim and Jeffrey is a criminal. But if Alice has sex with Jeffrey and Jeffrey leaves a grand on the nightstand, Alice ceases to be a victim and becomes a criminal? Is that right under the law? Anybody know?

          • Aftagley says:

            @John Schilling

            If you’re in control, or have suborned local authorities on your tiny island you can effectively import whatever heinous shit you want. If you’re in Florida or New York, you can’t – at least not as easily or with as little risk. Thus, you’re forced to source your heinous shit locally.

          • Randy M says:

            Is that right under the law? Anybody know?

            I don’t know the law, but I’d be willing to bet there’s vanishingly few jurisdictions where money gets around age of consent laws.

          • Lillian says:

            As a matter of law, can a 14yo be a prostitute? If Alice (14) has sex with Jeffrey (50), we generally say that Jeffrey has raped Alice because Alice isn’t old enough to meaningfully consent. In this case Alice is the victim and Jeffrey is a criminal. But if Alice has sex with Jeffrey and Jeffrey leaves a grand on the nightstand, Alice ceases to be a victim and becomes a criminal? Is that right under the law? Anybody know?

            This America, the authorities can and will arrest and prosecute everyone involved as a criminal. Underage girls get charged for prostitution at the same time their customers are being charged for both soliciting a prostitute and statutory rape.

            Though in some jurisdictions underage prostitutes get sent to diversion programs instead, in some the district attorneys actually have a functioning sense of right and wrong and don’t charge them at all, and in a handful the actual laws in the books have been updated so that legal minors cannot be prosecuted for prostitution.

            Generally the police hate it when the legislatures do the last one since they like having the option to threaten people, even victims, with charges so they’ll name names and the cops can arrest more people.

          • Statismagician says:

            Lillian has it right. Well, correct, anyway; I don’t think anybody could describe this as ‘right’ with a straight face.

          • albatross11 says:

            An interesting question to my mind is whether most of the teenage prostitutes employed by Epstein thought they were getting a good deal. My guess is, this was a much better situation than they were likely to get anywhere else. That doesn’t mean Petr Baelish Jeremy Epstein wasn’t a bad person or didn’t deserve jail time, but it does make a pretty big difference in terms of calling what he did “sex slavery” instead of “hiring underage prostitutes and paying them unusually well.”

            It is some kind of law of nature that police, prosecutors, and journalists will call any and all prostitution “human trafficking” or “sex slavery.” We heard that phrase tossed around when they caught that other billionaire in Florida getting a blowjob from some middle-aged prostitute working in a strip mall massage parlor. But if you want to think straight about the matter, you need to be able to call things by their proper names.

          • MrApophenia says:

            Is the claim that he had two separate groups of underage girls, one living openly in suburban Florida and another kept on permanent lockdown on his private island?

            The barrier between the groups seems to have been porous, but to some extent yes, that is the claim.

            Some girls were like the allegations he plead to in Florida – had sex and/or other sexual interactions with them, paid them once, that was the end of it. Some of them he kept paying so they would have sex with both himself and his friends, in various locations.

            But there are also allegations of him importing young girls from other countries. Virginia Giuffre, for instance, one of the original women who came forward to testify against him, says he sent her to Thailand to collect an underage girl and bring her back to the United States.

            It seems like he was mostly opportunistic- whatever method would get him young girls, he used.

            It is also worth mentioning that in at least a number of the cases we know about (a lot of this from the records from the 2008 case) he was not merely “hiring teenaged prostitutes.” He was bringing girls to his house under non-sexual pretenses, some as young as 14, having sex/molesting them, and then offering them money afterward.

            The ones who came back got added to his roster – he was running a grooming network to procure underage girls and turn them into prostitutes – and just molested a bunch of others on the side. I feel like there’s this weird undertone here that this is just people being prudish about a guy paying to sleep with seventeen year olds. This was something else than that.

            (And of course, the Justice Department found out about all of this and decided he should get sent to prison for a year, with day release most days of the week…)

        • Don_Flamingo says:

          Not in the whips and chains-sense.
          But mostly using something Randal Collins calls “emotional domination”.
          Basically scaring them into submission and acquiescence (presenting vulnerable young girls an aura of prestige, untouchability, unpredictability; isolating his victims, normalizing the relationship etc.) without really needing to resort to violence or direct threats of violence (most of the time). Lots of mindfuckery, basically.

          epestemic status: [heard on a rather sensationalist podcast series]
          Now Virginia Giuffre when asked to carry his child (and have it be adopted by Epstein and Maxwell) did manage to get her way when she insisted she wanted to finish her massage therapy education in Thailand first and then got married to an Australian and never came back….
          but it’d be a tough claim to make that Giufre wasn’t coerced.

          http://sociological-eye.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2018-03-14T21:13:00-07:00&max-results=10&start=5&by-date=false

      • Purplehermann says:

        Seems like someone’s out to get the prince, I saw this:

        https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.newsweek.com/princess-di-biographer-defends-prince-andrew-epstein-allegations-says-sex-underage-victims-not-1472853%3famp=1

        Considering the desire to call him a pedophile, which gets a much stronger reaction than ‘prostitution of minors’ or whatever statement is technically true, I’d say someone wants his reputation very dead.
        Unless the interviewer just likes to go after people in general, or is awfully ignorant.

    • anonymousskimmer says:

      Not a Brit.

      I’ve been reading that Charles doesn’t like Andrew much and is likely to force him out of the royal family spotlight. “While the queen is alive, Prince Andrew is untouchable—even after that BBC interview. But Prince Charles could strip his beleaguered brother of royal duties when he becomes king.” ( https://www.thedailybeast.com/prince-andrew-could-be-canceled-under-king-charles )

      For this reason alone people might be happy with King Charles. You’re going to have a royal family regardless of whether the monarchy is legally abolished – at least this way Prince Andrew won’t be a part of it.

      Andrew should be remorseful to the extent his ‘job’ as a member of the royal family is to have his actions positively reflect on his family and the country. He’s let them down pretty seriously, even if his only action was to affiliate with Epstein after the accusations and conviction.

      Note that he’s paid a nice allowance by his mother for this job.

      • TheAncientGeeksTAG says:

        Things are moving fast.. Andrews has already been deroyalled by the Queen on Charles’s advice.

    • spkaca says:

      “My question for Brits is how is the British Right in general responding to this situation?”
      Well, I’m British and a conservative voter, so I’m probably who this is aimed at, though I would be a non-central example. (But then so is everyone else.) In short: we know Prince Andrew is sleazy. It’s priced in. He is entertaining to those who like soap operas.

      “how will they respond to King Charles?”
      By acknowledging him as our rightful King. What would you expect? We are quite capable of telling the difference between the man and the institution. (For an American equivalent, see Band of Brothers when Major Winters tells Captain Sobel: ‘we salute the rank, not the man.’)

      “Will they advocate abolition of the monarchy or remain wedded to it out of traditionalist scruples?”
      It would take a lot more than this to become republicans. ‘Traditionalist scruples’ is a curious way of putting it to my ear. Though this might not have been your intention, it makes it sound like we all actually know that the monarchy ought to be abolished but are either just too scared or mindlessly traditionalist to do so. This is to neglect the positive case for constitutional monarchy, and also to neglect the particular historical role of the British monarchy. For Americans the last major monarchical point of reference is George III, who was a symbol (& more than a symbol) of oppression/ injustice. We have more recent points of reference. It may sound curious to Americans, but to us the monarchy, our constitutional monarchy, is a symbol of our independence and freedom. We are very conscious that republics do not have any automatic superiority in terms of freedom; conscious, also, that there are advantages to having the roles of Head of Government and Head of State separate (some republics make this distinction, IMO wisely, such as Germany, Italy and Israel). There is also value of having a generally respected, non-partisan figure who can advise the Prime Minister on the basis of several decades of practical experience.
      It is true that Charles isn’t perfect. He’s still better than some historical examples; an institution that survived George III ought to survive Charles III. It is something of a pity that Anne isn’t the heir, she appears to me the best-suited of the Queen’s children, but Charles should be tolerable. His heir then is William, who (again by appearances) is a sensible man (he appears to have chosen his wife well).

      • Garrett says:

        Her Majesty, Elizabeth II, Queen of Canada (and other lesser realms) seems to have done a good job of monarch as well. Apparently pleasant to talk to, manages to avoid most personal scandal while doing the job well. Would definitely vote for as hat-wearer-in-chief.

  11. Well... says:

    What’s the cheapest bluetooth earpiece (mic + earbud, looks kinda like this) that won’t make me grate my teeth and wish I’d kept my money?

    I’m basically trying to get a sense of how various price points are related to quality, or if the technology has become commoditized to a point where there is no longer much difference between most products.

    • If you really want to be a cheapskate, you can get a gaming headset with a cord for ~25$ at Walmart.

      • Well... says:

        I should clarify: this is for me to wear while taking my morning “team meeting” call from home, as I tend to be doing other things with my hands at that time. My flip phone doesn’t have a jack for anything but a charger cable, but it does have Bluetooth.

        I want something like in the picture I linked to: light, just goes in one ear, doesn’t go over the top of my head.

  12. ana53294 says:

    Bolivia: coup or not?

    I have seen contradicting reports that the elections may or may not have been fraudulent. While the vote count was mysteriously stopped at 85% and Evo not winning, the votes that were reported later were from Bolivia’s more indigenous regions, which do overwhelmingly vote for Evo. And while the election repeating would be fine, Evo still had his presidency until January.

    I don’t think Evo being a candidate was a good idea, especially considering the referendum and the Bolivian constitution. On the other hand, it seems like a lot of people object to Evo’s presidency for the wrong reasons. There are reports of more and more racially motivated attacks*, and it does seem like the police make more efforts to defend the non-indigenous people*.

    Although Evo should not have been a candidate, indigenous people being in the government, getting jobs in the government (sometimes preferentially, as they know the indigenous languages, and that gives them an advantage), and being proportionally represented in positions of power is rightfully due to them in a democracy. A democratic Bolivia cannot go back to indigenous people not being represented, as they make 20% of the population; that can only be reversed violently.

    *Bolivia being what it is, it’s unclear to me whether the people doing the gang attacks on the indigenous people are white, mestizo, or a combination of both. Most reports don’t specify the race of the gangs. It’s troubling either way, but Bolivia has three groups (indigenous, mestizo and whites), and the alliances could work in different ways. My guess is that it’s mestizo plus whites attacking indigenous people, as whites are too small a minority to create that much trouble (5%).

    • A democratic Bolivia cannot go back to indigenous people not being represented, as they make 20% of the population; that can only be reversed violently.

      Arabs are 20% of Israel’s population, but their parties are usually locked out of participating in government coalitions by an informal cordon sanitaire.

      • ana53294 says:

        And Israel is not non-violent, and not that democratic (equal votes, equal representation). It’s probably the most democratic and least violent country in the Middle East, but the Middle East being what it is, that’s not much.

        • It depends on how you define being democratic. It has free and fair elections, but it’s not too close to the Democratic party policy-wise.

          • ana53294 says:

            It depends on how you define being democratic.

            Letting all people in territories directly controlled by your government vote, for starters.

            EDIT: Puerto Rico and DC not having representation federally makes the US less democratic, in my opinion.

          • @ana53294,

            Should we have let the Germans in our occupation zone vote? If Israel were to annex the area and not let the residents vote, that would be clearly undemocratic. Historically it has been willing to evacuate the large majority of the occupied territory in return for a peace deal. Right now there are some noises to never ever do that even if a peace deal is offered, and if they keep that up they risk legitimizing the “apartheid” charge and being clearly undemocratic.

          • ana53294 says:

            How generous of them, to take away people’s land and help them evacuate. Many people actually want to return and get back their ancestor’s lands. How is kicking people out of their homes and denying them votes better than just denying them votes? If anything, it’s worse.

            Yes, it would have been better if the Germans were allowed to vote. But that wasn’t a permanent situation, at least. Permanency means it’s even more important to have representation. So, although it would be nice if the US stops invading countries it has no intention of formally annexing, giving universal suffrage to the peoples of the territories they control directly and permanently is more important.

          • Ketil says:

            Letting all people in territories directly controlled by your government vote, for starters.

            I think most countries only give voting rights to its citizens, and not based on residence. Arab citizens of Israel are, AFAIK, allowed to vote.

            Your argument makes sense if you consider the West Bank, Golan, and perhaps Gaza? Israeli territories and and the Palestinians living there Israeli citizens. I think most people would disagree with these definitions, including the Palestinians themselves. Residents of the annexed territories (Golan and east Jerusalem) were offered (and mostly rejected) citizenship, but still get to vote in local elections and such.

            I’m not sure what standard to hold Israel to in this regard. I’m pretty sure Russian citizens living in Svalbard are not allowed to vote in the Norwegian national elections. Other examples of territories containing non-national citizens controlled by democratic nations?

          • ana53294 says:

            If people reject citizenship, it’s OK if they don’t get to vote or be representatives. It should be offered, though. There are two peaceful solutions to the issue: Palestine becomes and independent country, or Palestinians become Israeli citizens and somehow make peace with Israel. The only way Israel gets to hold the Palestinian territories is the second one.

          • DarkTigger says:

            I mean the reason why voting rights for the Paelistines will never happen is quite obvious.
            Israel is supposed to be a Jewish Nation state, it is it’s whole reason d’être. The population from the Gaza Strip alone would raise the arabic/muslim part of the population to 33%. The population from the Westbank would raise it to almost 50%. It would stop to be what it exists to be.
            Naturally this does not explain the situation in the US Territories.

          • ana53294 says:

            @DarkTigger

            Exactly, which is why Palestine should become a state. For peace between the two countries, a contiguous territory and water rights oven the Jordan, and the EEZ that corresponds to Gaza. But somehow saying that is antisemitic, when the other non-genocidal option (citizenship to Palestinians) is even less tenable.

            Permanent occupation of territory you don’t intend to annex is undemocratic.

          • Murphy says:

            re: rejection of citizenship, it gets a little more complex if there’s implicit strings attached.

            Democracy doesn’t work well with annexation and separatist movements.

            First often accepting the vote is taken as an implicit endorsement of the legitimacy of the occupying power.

            “Here’s the right to vote… but only if you basically declare to the world that you accept and endorse our claim to this land here”

            Which can cripple any attempt to form a political party opposed to that claim.

            Northern ireland suffers that issue where a party with members elected to westminster doesn’t actually send any because they’d have to swear Oaths of allegiance to the Crown… which is basically 180 degrees to their entire position as a party.

          • J Mann says:

            Alexander Turok:

            Historically [Israel] has been willing to evacuate the large majority of the occupied territory in return for a peace deal.

            ana53294

            How generous of them, to take away people’s land and help them evacuate. Many people actually want to return and get back their ancestor’s lands. How is kicking people out of their homes and denying them votes better than just denying them votes?

            I’m pretty sure Alexander Turok meant “evacuate” to mean Israel leaving the territory, not removing the residents.

          • anonymousskimmer says:

            @ana53294

            Puerto Rico, and especially DC, are issues which should have been dealt with long, long ago.

            That said, the natural born citizens of both can federally vote to their heart’s content just by moving to a state (though this is not the case with American Samoans, who are nationals instead of citizens). Not so with those born in the Israeli occupied territories (or whatever the appropriate term is).

            Hopefully all of these issues will be resolved at some point.

          • Don_Flamingo says:

            @ana53294
            I think he means evacuate Jewish people who were already making a home for themselves, but I’m unsure which territories exactly are talked of.

          • ana53294 says:

            That doesn’t seem to fit the evidence of the settlements, which not only are not evacuated, but are encouraged. What time period is being referred to?

        • Purplehermann says:

          1. Do you think Israel is less voilent than America, Russia, or China? Please explain why if that is.

          2. The Arab parties are usually unwilling to join the government.

          2a. There are MKs in the arab parties who are quite clearly in favor of jews being killed, I’m very glad that they aren’t in the government.

          3. Israeli arabs (citizens) can vote. Non citizens cannot vote in Israeli elections.

          4.Palestinian arabs are ruled by the PLO, Hamas (and maybe the jihadists now?), not the Israeli government. Representation is for the bodies governing you.

          5. Historically Israel has tried giving up land/control for peace, this has a terrible record.
          Allowing non citizens to be governed by the PLO gave Israel the antiFadas, and to this day terrorists’ families get a check because the terrorist in question attacked the Israeli Jews and is martyr who is jailed/dead because he partipated in this “war”.
          Elections in the Gaza Strip allowed a terrorist organization which fires rockets into Israeli cities fairly often, and occasionally in great numbers.

          Why on earth would Israel give up more land?

          • ana53294 says:

            Representation is for the bodies governing you.

            And Israel governs the access (borders) to Palestine, their seas, their air. How is that not governing? Palestinians are not sovereign in their country.

            Israel also controls movement between Gaza and the West Bank.

            Historically Israel has tried giving up land/control for peace, this has a terrible record.

            They did that from a position of weakness. Have they done it from a position of strenght?

            Why on earth would Israel give up more land?

            Sea and water access is more critical than land here. But land is needed to join Gaza and the West Bank.

          • Purplehermann says:

            Regardless, Israel does not govern. If Israel made the laws for what goes on inside gaza this would be different.

            Israel has many citizens in the west bank, and many terrorists in gaza.
            Besides, every other country in the world also controls movement through its borders. (Would you be upset if Canadians weren’t allowed free passage through American borders to Mexico?).

            Any attempt to allow Palestinians more control has backfired, why would Israel try again?

          • ana53294 says:

            Regardless, Israel does not govern. If Israel made the laws for what goes on inside gaza this would be different.

            It depends what govern means for you. If it is in the modern big government style, no, it doesn’t. But historically, a lot of governments have left the people they governed to do their own business, and only controlled their external trade, as tariffs were the way to tax back then.

            Israel does control external trade, can impose tariffs, and restricts access to sea and water. They govern Palestine in the same way governments in the past governed their countries. Sure, they don’t directly tax incomes, households, impose a draft or regulate the civil affairs of Palestinians. But historically, only recently (in the last ~400 years) have modern governments began to be able to do so.

            So yes, Israel does govern Palestine, and Palestinians do partly govern themselves also.

          • Purplehermann says:

            Assuming your definition,
            Do you think a goverment should give representation to people who partially govern themselves, and who’s local government openly states they would like to kill everyone of the larger government’s citizens, along with sending rockets over the border and praising the murder of the larger government’s citizens at the hands of the local citizens?

            I think you can have representation once your interests aren’t ‘whatever is bad for everyone besides us’. Do you think differently?
            Do you think the Palestinians don’t want Israelis dead?

          • Guy in TN says:

            I think you can have representation once your interests aren’t ‘whatever is bad for everyone besides us’. Do you think differently?

            Not who you are responding to, but of course I disagree. If you are going to start disenfranchising people because of what you perceive as fundamentally immoral beliefs, there’s no end point to that logic. I turn it around and argue that “Israel should be a Jewish state” is a fundamentally inhuman and immoral belief, and that people who advocate for it should also be disenfranchised.

            Do you think the Palestinians don’t want Israelis dead?

            In 2014, Israel bombings killed ~2,200 Palestinians, with the low estime being that ~55% of these people were non-combatants.

            “But Palestinians want to kill us!” should be a level-0 tier non-argument.

          • ana53294 says:

            I think you can have representation once your interests aren’t ‘whatever is bad for everyone besides us’. Do you think differently?

            Yes, I think Nazis, genocidal maniacs, pedophiles, murderers, terrorists, convicted criminals*, imprisoned criminals, and everybody else should get a vote. A country can restrict the kind of law they vote for; that’s what Constitutions are for. So you shouldn’t be able to legally enact a law that says “kill all XXX”. But you should be able to vote if you believe that, and you should be able to vote for people who believe that. Your contry’s institutions, courts, Constitution, etc., should serve as balances against such urges by the legislature. That’s why there are three branches.

            If a country has a majority of people who would vote for a law that says “kill all XXX” you have bigger problems than Nazis voting anyway.

            EDIT: *I know in the US you don’t, but it is my sincere belief that in a healthy society, criminals would not be able to outvote non-criminals, and if they do, well, the problem isn’t criminals voting.

            I also think, like @Guy in TN, that it’s a slippery slope. Everybody should get a vote.

          • In 2014, Israel bombings killed ~2,200 Palestinians, with the low estime being that ~55% of these people were non-combatants.

            That’s very low by historical bombing standards. I tell them the same thing I tell Germans who cry about Dresden, if you don’t like the war, you shouldn’t have started it.

            The question here is not about whether you can disenfranchise a group simply because of ‘evil’ ideas. It is whether Israel is morally obliged to give voting rights the people who are not citizens, who are only under its control because they started and lost a war against it.(I count the Arabs as having started the six day war, as Egypt blockaded Israel which is generally regarded as an act of war.

          • Guy in TN says:

            It is whether Israel is morally obliged to give voting rights the people who are not citizens

            They clearly are obligated, if you believe in any of the following:
            1. Democracy
            2. Consent of the governed
            3. Any utilitarian calculus that places the same value on the life of a Palestinian as that of an Israeli

            Now, if you don’t subscribe to any of the following, then I suppose you may not be convinced.

          • Cliff says:

            They clearly are obligated, if you believe in any of the following:
            1. Democracy
            2. Consent of the governed
            3. Any utilitarian calculus that places the same value on the life of a Palestinian as that of an Israeli

            How so?

          • Cliff says:

            In 2014, Israel bombings killed ~2,200 Palestinians, with the low estime being that ~55% of these people were non-combatants.

            This was an extraordinary triumph. Israel took superhuman efforts to avoid civilian casualties and succeeded to an extent never before seen in human history. Palestinians were firing rockets from schools, hospitals, private homes with human shields. Israelis were dropping leaflets, dummy bombs to knock on the roofs of the buildings to warn people to get out. A huge bombing campaign in an extremely dense urban setting, to end a rocket and tunnel terror campaign by Hamas, resulting in so few civilian casualties is frankly miraculous.

          • Guy in TN says:

            How so?

            Well, let me start by asking which one of those three things, if any, do you support? That would help me make the case more concise.

          • Purplehermann says:

            My claim was less of a moral one, more of a self preservation one. Forget the ideas being evil, why would giving a group whose central tenets include killing you power and control be a good idea?

            (From a moral perspective I don’t really agree with the framework you are working with, but let’s stick to incentives.

            Saying other people are immoral for not working against their own survival and for those who would kill them instead is a lot easier than holding yourself to those standards. So before moralizing, please explain, decision theory wise, you think israel should do this.)

          • Guy in TN says:

            Forget the ideas being evil, why would giving a group whose central tenets include killing you power and control be a good idea?

            Saying other people are immoral for not working against their own survival and for those who would kill them instead is a lot easier than holding yourself to those standards. So before moralizing, please explain, decision theory wise, you think israel should do this.

            From an amoral self-interested perspective, there’s no argument not too, sure. There’s also no prescriptive argument for or against anything, really, if you remove from the table any notions that your actions should striving to reach a conception of justice.

            You’re trying to switch from a normative question of what Israel ought to do, to a descriptive one of “what is best for Isreal’s survival?”. But we haven’t yet established why I should care about that.

          • Aapje says:

            @Guy in TN

            A lot of those arguments are tautological too: to stay a racist state, Israel needs racist policies.

          • Cliff says:

            Well, let me start by asking which one of those three things, if any, do you support? That would help me make the case more concise.

            I really hope this is not going to end in some more of your unique definitions that nobody else uses. I would say in a loose sense I support all three.

          • They clearly are obligated, if you believe in any of the following:
            1. Democracy
            2. Consent of the governed
            3. Any utilitarian calculus that places the same value on the life of a Palestinian as that of an Israeli

            I don’t think principles 1. and 2. are absolute. I’ll repeat my question to ana53294, were we obligated to let the Germans in our occupation zone send representatives to Congress? Were we to do so even in a world where Werwolf was launching suicide bombs at us? On principle 3. I’m a citizenist, the Israeli government is obligated to respect the basic human rights of non-citizens, but may favor its own citizens.

          • Guy in TN says:

            @Cliff
            You support democracy? That seems to be change from a few months ago, when on the question of voting vs. purchasing for gauging preferences, you said:

            In fact voting is a relatively poor way to determine preference, because the vote has no impact on the voter one way or another. The only reason to vote is to feel good about yourself, so voters do not take into consideration the costs and benefits of their choices.

            So is this support of democracy a new belief of yours?

          • Guy in TN says:

            @AlexanderTurok
            I appreciate your honesty in holding that neither of the three beliefs are guiding moral principles of yours.

            Like I said earlier, if your morality isn’t guided by any of the above, I don’t think there’s anything I can argue that would change your mind.

          • Thegnskald says:

            I’d say I loosely support democracy but don’t see a lot of value in voting.

            Mostly I think democracy provides a viable alternative to violence; if you have the numbers to win a war, you have the numbers to win a vote.

            So it is valuable for maintaining a peaceful coalition of disparate actors. This value goes down for cases of, for example, occupied or otherwise hostile actors.

            ETA:

            Another way of framing this is that Democracy provides an orderly mechanism for transfer of power between groups of actors, and if your objective is to limit their power, for example their power to kill you, it is quite antithetical to that purpose to include them in your Democracy.

          • ana53294 says:

            @Alexander Turok

            I answered it somewhere, but I’ll repeat my answer anyway:

            I’ll repeat my question to ana53294, were we obligated to let the Germans in our occupation zone send representatives to Congress?

            I think I made clear that there is a moral distinction between a temporary and a permanent situation. If the US had all but annexed Germany, yes, Germans should have been allowed to vote, and have representatives in Congress, Electoral College votes, and formally join the US as a state.

            Permanently controlling another nation, in all but name annexing it, is highly irregular. At some point, you need to shit or get off the pot.

            The US chose to get off Germany. Israel is doing neither. Am I explicit enough now?

            Colonialism is not considered a legitimate form of government anymore. Consent of the governed matters.

            EDIT:

            I believe that giving people the vote and making those you govern citizens and giving them a stake and some of the levers of power also serves to delegitimize violence.

            The Basques’ stopped the violent path precisely because legitimacy was lost, in the eyes of our own people. Sure, Palestinians now view Israelis as their enemy. But the next generation, the ones who get 30% of the representatives in the Knesset, and sometimes form political alliances with the more moderate Jews, sometimes with the Haredi, and learn to live in a democracy? They won’t support violence, and won’t be willing to die, because they’ll have better options.

            A generational change may be required, but the current path won’t solve the situation ever, unless one or the other side is exterminated/ethnically cleansed (and it currently looks that the Palestinians will be wiped, but who knows how it turns out).

          • @Guy in TN

            You support democracy? That seems to be change from a few months ago, when on the question of voting vs. purchasing for gauging preferences, you said:

            In fact voting is a relatively poor way to determine preference, because the vote has no impact on the voter one way or another. The only reason to vote is to feel good about yourself, so voters do not take into consideration the costs and benefits of their choices.

            So is this support of democracy a new belief of yours?

            This is the standard internet gotcha! that this blog tries to avoid. It’s perfectly consistent to criticize the rationality of voters and the lack of voter influence on politics while still supporting the system as better than any alternative.

            @ana53294,

            Yes, you did answer, I meant to direct the question to Guy in TN.

          • Guy in TN says:

            It’s perfectly consistent to criticize the rationality of voters and the lack of voter influence on politics while still supporting the system as better than any alternative.

            Sure, but this isn’t what was happening in that thread. There was an alternative, Cliff was supporting the alternative. It wasn’t “here’s some problems with democracy”, it was “here’s why we shouldn’t do democracy, and instead do this other thing”.

          • Guy in TN says:

            I’m just looking for intellectual clarity.

            I honestly can’t see how anyone with a libertarian bent could support democracy as a guiding moral principle. It runs contrary to so much else they believe. Democracy means that two people can tell one person what to do. Democracy as a guiding moral principle means that this outcome is good.

            So yes, before someone reflexively says that they support democracy, they should honestly think about whether this is congruent with the other values they espouse. I think your answer was honest Alexander Turok: you don’t support it as an absolute. I’m glad you said this, because otherwise I would said something like “well, if you support democracy, that means x, y, z” and your response would be “ah, well that’s when I don’t support democracy” and we would been back to square one.

          • Cliff says:

            Sure, but this isn’t what was happening in that thread. There was an alternative, Cliff was supporting the alternative. It wasn’t “here’s some problems with democracy”, it was “here’s why we shouldn’t do democracy, and instead do this other thing”.

            Democracy is a form of government, which was not the topic in that other thread. I certainly was not advocating for an alternative to democracy, and for you to assert that is disingenuous in the extreme.

            Very disturbing behavior for you to try to slide that by and hope I didn’t come back to correct you.

            In fact the topic of that conversation was how, according to you, all market transactions are coercive and therefore the allocation of all resources should be decided by a vote.

            Are you now arguing that “democracy” means communism? Because if so you really should be banned from the site.

          • albatross11 says:

            Guy in TN:

            FWIW, I also don’t support democracy, the constitution, separation of powers, federalism, etc., as fundamental values. Instead, I support them as the best available way to make the kind of society I want to live in. Democratic elections can elect terrible people, the constitution has plenty of flaws and is routinely “interpreted” to mean whatever the supremes want it to mean, separation of powers and federalism can just mean you’re screwed over by some local power and the feds can’t do anything to stop it, etc.

            But I don’t know a better way to get the kind of society I want to live in–one with enormous freedom and room for invention and innovation and progress and human flourishing–except by using such mechanisms. Parliamentary vs presidential system, proportional vs first-past-the-post, common law vs Napoleonic, those all seem capable of supporting decent societies where humans can flourish. There may be many other ways to do that–maybe you really can get there with a god-king or an oligarchy or government chosen by sortition or anarchocapitalism or anarchosyndicalism or something–but I don’t think we know how to do that, whereas we have a bunch of worked examples and operational experience with democracy, rule-of-law, etc.

          • Guy in TN says:

            I too, am a supporter of democracy. I can certainly see how my post may have been unclear on that. And like you, I don’t support it as a terminal value per se, but rather as the best way to aggregate the values that a group of people have. (With some edge-case exceptions, that I remember talking about with you just a few days ago).

            Because I place equal value on the utility of each person, and I consider an increase in their utility to be “good”, the outcome of using the democratic method to gauge and implement their preferences is very close to what I consider to be morally “good”.

    • quanta413 says:

      getting jobs in the government (sometimes preferentially, as they know the indigenous languages, and that gives them an advantage)

      Just to clarify in case I’m missing something: preferring a candidate because they speak a language useful for their job that other candidates don’t seems like the sort of preference that’s a good preference to exercise.

      It sounds like a pretty classical example of a merit based criterion to me. Do you speak the languages of the people you will have to interact with as part of your job?

      • ana53294 says:

        preferring a candidate because they speak a language useful for their job that other candidates don’t seems like the sort of preference that’s a good preference to exercise.

        I guess you mean:

        preferring a candidate because they speak a language useful for their job that other candidates seems like the sort of preference that’s a good preference to exercise.

        Yes, that’s right. It is a perfectly legitimate preference, that should have happened before. Teachers, doctors, administrators, police who speak the local language will be able to serve the people better.

        And it’s a good thing, a thing that should happen, and was happening under Evo. It just meant that non-indigenous people now have a harder time getting a government job, which stokes the flames of racial/ethnic hatred.

    • Clutzy says:

      Although Evo should not have been a candidate, indigenous people being in the government, getting jobs in the government (sometimes preferentially, as they know the indigenous languages, and that gives them an advantage), and being proportionally represented in positions of power is rightfully due to them in a democracy. A democratic Bolivia cannot go back to indigenous people not being represented, as they make 20% of the population; that can only be reversed violently.

      This seems to me an odd definition of democracy, as does your entire tone about “democracy”. 20% of the people are basically guaranteed nothing in a democracy. There is no constitution that I know of that cannot be amended by 80% consensus.

      Although, your rhetoric seems to be that of democracy as a virtue in itself, which is a view I don’t really subscribe to. I value it when it results in a resistance to tyranny, as it has in England, America, etc. One man, one vote, one time democracy that is common in the Middle East and South America is bad. And its not only the dictatorial takeover that is bad, the initial vote is clearly flawed as well.

      • albatross11 says:

        It’s still democracy, but if your democracy ends up dividing starkly along racial lines, I suspect that’s usually a pretty bad sign for how things are going to go in your country.

        • Clutzy says:

          That is what commonly happens in diverse demos. They turn into a racial spoils system. See, e.g. Sunni-Shia; a lot of major US city governments.

    • Aftagley says:

      Bolivia: coup or not?

      This is an argument over definitions. A leader was forced out by the military after he did something they didn’t like and now a separate party is in control over the country. Asking whether or not this was a coup is, IMO, pointless. Better questions to ask are:

      1. Was military/new leadership of Bolivia justified in overthrowing Morales? Probably. Most of what I’ve seen indicates that the votes were almost certainly tampered with.

      2. Will the new Bolivian government be better for the people of Bolivia? Maybe, Bolivia was circling the drain of what Morales’ style of socialism could do to further improve the country.

      3. Will the new Bolivian government be better for America*. Almost certainly. Morales was highly critical of the US and didn’t really cooperate with us on a host of issues. Barring someone even further from the pink side of SA leaders becoming the next president, him leaving will almost certainly result in closer ties with the US.

      This leads me to believe that Morales being ousted was, in my eyes, probably a good thing.

      *insert your own country here.

    • Eigengrau says:

      Definitely a coup, given that he was forced out by the military. But why did it happen, and was it justified? I’m leaning towards “not justified”. The case against Morales, as far as I can tell is:

      1) He wanted to run for another term even though that was Against the Rules
      2) The country voted on a referendum to change the rules. They voted no.
      3) He somehow got the go-ahead from the courts and ran anyway.
      4) There are conflicting reports of election tampering. One elections integrity organization, known for its anti-left wing / pro-American bias, claimed there was evidence of election tampering. Another elections integrity organization, known for its pro-left wing bias, claimed there was no tampering and that the other organization didn’t cite any actual evidence.

      So I would like to learn 1) why the courts approved the elimination of term limits (was there a good reason?), and 2) the actual hard evidence for or against vote tampering.

      The case for Morales:

      1) He seemed like a pretty effective leader. He dramatically reduced poverty, successfully navigated the economy through the Global Recession and subsequent oil glut, made progress on social justice issues, while also making plenty of concessions to the centrist and right-wing sectors of the country.
      2) He declared a willingness to accept the results of the (anti-left wing / Pro-American) elections integrity organization and hold new elections.
      3) The opposition was pretty keen on promoting violence throughout the entire affair, going as far as burning Morale’s house down. They didn’t seem too interested in anything like “restoring democracy”.
      4) One of the big leaders of the coup seems like a pretty bad, Bolsonaro-type jerk. Among other things, he was implicated in the Panama Papers as a facilitator of tax fraud and money laundering.

      • AlphaGamma says:

        1) why the courts approved the elimination of term limits (was there a good reason?)

        The reason given, I think, is that term limits violate Article 23 of the American Convention on Human Rights, which states that every citizen has the right to vote and be elected, and does not mention term limits as one of the grounds on which this right can be limited (which are age, nationality, language, education, mental capacity and criminal convictions).

        By a literal reading of the Convention, this isn’t necessarily wrong, and apparently it’s not unusual in Latin America for international treaties to take precedence over a country’s constitution. However, many other signatories to the convention have term limits- for instance, the President of Mexico is limited to one term- and as far as I know they haven’t been challenged anywhere but Bolivia.

        It should also be noted that the Supreme Tribunal of Justice that ruled against term limits is a relatively recent creation (2012) and its judges are elected by popular vote, though they cannot be reelected (yes, I see the irony here- I do wonder when they are going to find that their own term limits are similarly illegal!). It replaced the previous Supreme Court whose judges were chosen by the legislature.

  13. Purplehermann says:

    Most men I know IRL really like Ben Shapiro (the smarter they are the less likely this is, the younger the more likely- smart younger guys like him but lose interest at some point), many internet people seem to disdain him.
    Can anyone explain the hype and the hate to me?

    • J Mann says:

      Not a deep scholar of Ben Shapiro, but my take on him is he’s kind of a right-wing Matt Yglesias. From what I understand:

      – He’s smart and well spoken, so if you hold similar positions to him, it’s a pleasure to hear them articulated pretty well.
      – He’s willing to deviate from the party line on some issues, so he comes across as open minded and analytical.
      – From what I understand, he has a series of talks where he engages people who disagree with him reasonably constructively, but he’s also famous for debates where he kind of goes for the jugular.

      On the other hand,

      – People who disagree with him feel that he frames issues unfairly or disingenuously.
      – He has said some stuff that offends people.

      Most of those (except maybe the debates and conversations) hold true for Yglesias as well, but I don’t think their fan base has much overlap.

      ——————-

      I’m interested in the gender split among his fans, but don’t have any insight.

      As for losing interest, that may be the effect of if someone treads the same ground long enough, sooner or later it feels like you’re getting diminishing returns from continuing to follow them. I’ve had several writers like that – at a certain point, I just feel like I’ve learned the better part of what they have to say.

      • Purplehermann says:

        Hmmm, I think I’ll check out Matt. Feeling like someone is framing a conversation to win instead of playing fair is interesting, I wonder how you would get past a difference of framing in a constructive conversation (or a detailed takedown).

    • RalMirrorAd says:

      Selection bias of your friends? Most people I know have the opposite impression.

      But awhile back there was a meme that spread that made jokes of some of the titles of his videos “Ben Shapiro Destroys [Insert thing person or idea here]” Where Ben shapiro would be destroying all sorts of things like hospitals, cities, and orphans. Which is funny even if you disagree with or dislike the person in question.

      • Purplehermann says:

        Selection bias is likely, though he does seem to be a divisive personality in general.

        I’ll check out those videos, thank you

    • broblawsky says:

      I found Shapiro to be the embodiment of the worst (non-singularitarian) aspects of the rationalsphere: right-wing tribalism disguised as something derived from reason, an unquestioning adoration of Chesterton’s fence, and a healthy dose of xenophobia. He’s good at making like you’ve accomplished something intellectually by listening to him, though.

      • Purplehermann says:

        (Xenophobia – towards left wing tribe members? Any examples?)

        So people with non-right-wing values dislike him because he holds different values, and makes it sound like his desired policies/values are better than theirs, and sounds reasonable doing this? Does anyone do detailed takedowns of his reasoning?

        I think you just enlightened me fully as to why his fans like him so much.

        • Lambert says:

          I think towards the general groups towards whom the right are often considered xenophobic.
          The things he’s said about rap and hip hop sound like they might be idk, motivated by something other than pure music theory critique?

        • Viliam says:

          I believe “xenophobia” here refers to his opinion on Muslims.

          (From left-wing perspective, discussion of Islam is taboo. Therefore, if someone criticizes Muslims, the only allowed explanation is that he hates strangers.)

          • Ant says:

            From a real left-wing perspective, attack on Islam are very often a fig leaf masking racist attack (see also anti Sionism as the fig leaf of antisemitism).

          • NostalgiaForInfinity says:

            His comments on Muslims – and Arabs – go beyond criticism of Muslims or Islam. E.g. said “Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage” and that civilian casualties are fine in the Afghan war because the Afghan civilians basically deserve it

          • Ant says:

            Case in point.

            Also, I think that I now understand why people think there are a lot of people on the left commenting here. They are confusing the stupid “For leftist, it’s ok to be as stupid and cruel” comment with genuine left-wing comments.

          • Cliff says:

            Islam is not a race and Arab is not synonymous with Islamic

          • albatross11 says:

            Nostalgia:

            So, I read Shapiro’s essay. I agree it’s pretty nasty, but I don’t believe it’s nastier than the median mainstream political commentator, including both big parties (then or now). Around that time, a hell of a lot of prominent voices in the US were talking very much like Shapiro. That’s when we got the first talk in public about having formal torture policies (and rolling out the “ticking time bomb” argument), and Thomas Friedman’s infamous “Suck. On. This.” essay[1]. (This was also around the time when I personally lost most of my remaining respect for mainstream American news sources and started looking abroad for better sources of news.)

            He’s making two arguments here (in very short form–it’s only about a page long):

            a. We should value American soldiers more highly than Afghan civilians. (I think every nation everywhere behaves this way, but the question is what the acceptable exchange rate is.)

            b. Members of a society hold some collective guilt for the policies of their country and so it’s morally acceptable to kill or hurt them in response. This is a bad moral principle, but also seems like one that’s universally accepted in practice in war and international relations. (Do you think most of the people hurt by our sanctions against Iran are the ones who drive Iranian foreign policy?) Again, I think the practical question is about the exchange rate–how much / what kind of suffering is okay to inflict on civilians to {pressure their government to change / punish them for accepting an evil government / encourage them to change their government}?

            I wonder whether he would still defend this argument today.

            [1] Though this is kicking puppies–Thomas Friedman is the very model of an overpromoted elite in media. It’s our society’s version of giving some useless member of the nobility a high-ranking commission in the military.

          • Viliam says:

            @Ant

            From a real left-wing perspective, attack on Islam are very often a fig leaf masking racist attack

            Is there any way I could convince you that I don’t care about anyone’s race, but I strongly believe that religion (any religion) is bullshit because supernatural things don’t exist, and that I hate religious or religion-inspired practices such as killing infidels, killing apostates, killing gays, genitally mutilating girls, etc.

            Because, I agree with the statement that sometimes criticism of Islam can be an indirect way of criticising ethnic groups most associated with it…

            …but it’s insane to assume that every criticism of brainwashed violent followers of a pedophile prophet must be secretly inspired by racism, because there is apparently nothing that a non-racist could dislike about it.

            (I mean, killing gays? It’s obviously a horrible thing when white people do it, but who am I to judge anyone else? Maybe from their superior moral perspective it is actually the right thing to do, dunno. If I ever see people with dark skin trying to hang a gay guy, I will check my privilege and shut up, because it would be colonialism if I tried to intervene. Same about “honor” killings, etc.)

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            Because, I agree with the statement that sometimes criticism of Islam can be an indirect way of criticising ethnic groups most associated with it…

            Theoretically, criticism of Islam could be an indirect criticism of all the non-white ethnic groups where it’s become hegemonic. But since that includes black Africans, brown Caucasoids, Indonesians, and Hui Chinese, logically only white supremacists would want to get away with criticizing all those groups on biological grounds. So it cashes out as the tired old Brown Scare of looking for a Nazi under every bed.
            And what are we to make of the Bosniaks and Albanians? White converts?

            …but it’s insane to assume that every criticism of brainwashed violent followers of a pedophile prophet must be secretly inspired by racism, because there is apparently nothing that a non-racist could dislike about it.

            (I mean, killing gays? It’s obviously a horrible thing when white people do it, but who am I to judge anyone else? Maybe from their superior moral perspective it is actually the right thing to do, dunno. If I ever see people with dark skin trying to hang a gay guy, I will check my privilege and shut up, because it would be colonialism if I tried to intervene. Same about “honor” killings, etc.)

            That does seem to be how it works. Which is extremely confusing, because there have been Christian states where sodomy was a capital crime, and that’s why Christians are evil and must be kept under surveillance and forced to bake gay wedding cakes… but if you impose that morality on anyone but Christians, it’s the atrocity of colonialism. (Trying to force Christian Uganda to celebrate sodomy instead of criminalizing it isn’t colonialism, because apparently they were brainwashed by white people?)

          • ECD says:

            Which is extremely confusing, because there have been Christian states where sodomy was a capital crime, and that’s why Christians are evil and must be kept under surveillance and forced to bake gay wedding cakes… but if you impose that morality on anyone but Christians, it’s the atrocity of colonialism.

            First thing on the HRW LGBT page: “Lebanon: End Systemic Discrimination Against Trans Women,” and see their giant collection of MENA LGBT issues. Or this website which appears left wing and has a giant collection of stories on the middle east and LGBT issues. Or this story in the Guardian on the most difficult places to be gay (Iraq, Iran, Honduras, Uganda, Egypt, Russia, Nigeria).

            Maybe, just maybe, most folks don’t in fact throw the baby out with the bigoted bathwater.

          • DeWitt says:

            (Trying to force Christian Uganda to celebrate sodomy instead of criminalizing it isn’t colonialism, because apparently they were brainwashed by white people?)

            It was tiresome when you tore down policies nobody defended last year. It was tiresome six months ago. It was tiresome when you kept doing it after getting told to knock it off by Scott. It’s tiresome now. The subject of debate is a guy who cheered on civilian deaths when those were ongoing, and you have to make it about your outgroup being in the wrong about this. Again. Stop it.

    • Aftagley says:

      Can anyone explain the hype and the hate to me?

      Sure, I hate the guy. I’ll try and give it a go.

      He’s naturally charismatic and is a skilled debater, and uses those talents to spackle over everything else. I’m not his intended audience, and I became aware of him as a result of the “Ben Shapiro destroys X” videos that have been endemic on youtube for the last half-decade or so. In these, he finds particularly weak avatars of whatever leftist idea he’s not a fan of today and absolutely savages them. He’s always prepared and poised, and when debating someone else, it’s clear he prefers opponents who don’t have his natural ability to make convincing arguments; they end up looking like fools. You could say that these people should have known better than to try and go toe-to-toe with someone more charismatic than themselves, but hey, there’s a sucker born every minute.

      He produces content where people get to see the ideas they personally agree with win against ideas they don’t like. He gives his audience the visceral pleasure of watching their ideological opponents be caught up in contradictions or stumped by his clever aphorisms. It doesn’t matter who’s wrong or right, or the trade-off in moral values – in the reality that he’s trying to sell his side is clearly right and anyone who dares argue against it will inevitably eviscerated by logic.

      This is extremely off putting to people who don’t happen to agree with him.

      • J Mann says:

        I’ve heard that he has a separate series (Sunday Suppers or something?) where he has engaging and constructive conversations. People who don’t like him take this as further evidence that he knows exactly what he’s doing in the “destroys” debates.

      • Aapje says:

        @Aftagley

        A lot of American satirical TV shows seem to do something similar, often with the extremely large advantage of editing, where they can cherry pick what to show; or even mismatch questions and answers.

        • Aftagley says:

          You know, I really like that argument. Ben Shapiro is someone who is providing us entertainment. You’re right – he’s just like a John Stewart or Steven Colbert. His prime output is content that makes us feel like our ideological opponents are obviously wrong/corrupt/moronic. He sells a feeling of superiority to an audience of true believers.

          Maybe that’s another aspect of why I don’t like him – he’s clearly an entertainer yet positions himself as some kind of thought leader. For all John Stewart’s faults, he never tried to position himself as anything other than a comic doing a show on comedy central.

          • Randy M says:

            For all John Stewart’s faults, he never tried to position himself as anything other than a comic doing a show on comedy central.

            This is the main complaint against Stewart, though. He makes his political points, then hides behind his comedian role when asked to defend them. “Clown nose on, clown nose off” is the saying.

          • acymetric says:

            So, I like John Stewart quite a bit, but I don’t think it is quite true that he never positioned himself as anything other than a comic. That is probably more accurate for Colbert than it is for Stewart.

          • Clutzy says:

            My major complaint with this framing is that it is also what non-comedic newsmagazines do. Programs like 60 minutes do exactly what Jon Stewart did, just without playing it for comedy, instead they play it for narrative. They film 60 minutes of footage, and then air 5-10 minutes of it, not necessarily in order.

            Recently Katie Couric got into hot water because her gun control documentary inserted an 8 second pause from a different part of the interview after she posed a question she wanted to frame as really hard for gun rights advocates to answer. This one example was pretty egregious, but its actually standard operating procedure for newsmags and documentaries.

            My brother’s boss gave one of these mags an interview on pharmaceuticals, he gave them a guided tour of the factory, and like 90 minutes of sit down. He ended up being on screen for like 2 minutes! The majority was just a boring voiceover into leading questions given to an “expert” who was actually a fairly unqualified professor.

            Indeed, I think its SOP for people on the right to only agree to live interviews or demand a right to film the entire interview as well.

          • Randy M says:

            Indeed, I think its SOP for people on the right to only agree to live interviews or demand a right to film the entire interview as well.

            The live interview might work (and almost certainly won’t be agreed to). Filming it yourself will be pointless if they have much greater audience than you. You can prove they lied–to people willing to listen to you. Not much help.

          • CatCube says:

            @Randy M

            They might not interview you at all if you insist on recording, with some bullshit about how your tape recorder will interfere with their equipment. Megan McArdle talked about going on the Daily Show a while back:

            [H]ere’s a guide for people who do not share the show’s politics but are considering going on it anyway:

            1. Don’t.
            2. If you must, bring two tape recorders, a video camera and a witness. Announce at the beginning that you are going to record this and reserve the right to release the entire recording to the public. When they tell you that they will not do the interview under those conditions, prepare to leave. There is no ethical reason that a reporter requires the ability to ask you questions without having those questions recorded. The reason they don’t want unedited audio is that you might release it and be revealed as a normal decent person, rather than a horrible fool.

          • Clutzy says:

            The live interview might work (and almost certainly won’t be agreed to). Filming it yourself will be pointless if they have much greater audience than you. You can prove they lied–to people willing to listen to you. Not much help.

            I am just conveying what is considered good media practice now. And it has worked out before. Like when Peterson got his entire Cathy Newman interview released.

          • Randy M says:

            @Clutzy
            Pointless may be overstating it, but I think your example may be particularly illustrative. JP Lobsterman had a significant ability to reach people before that interview. If you have less media stature, you may not be able to correct the record even with proof.

          • Clutzy says:

            Well, you typically don’t get on a large newsmagazine as a right of center figure unless you are big enough to attract a bunch of hate from left wing groups, and then the mag invites you to try and do a hit. Its not like Dave Brat (guy who beat Eric Cantor) gets on 60 minutes because they notice him polling at 25% early on. That sort of thing only happens if its a puff piece like that would occur for someone like AOC, or another candidate that is being pushed.

    • Eigengrau says:

      The hype: he destroys leftists with his incredible debate skills and scores points for Team Right Wing. A cool, charismatic, and rational intellectual who cuts through the bullshit and values “facts over feelings”. A shining example of a serious, respectable conservative fighting against the left-wing establishment.

      The hate: an obvious grifter for the Religious Right whose debate skills amount to gish gallops and smarmy “gotchas”. Hardly a reasonable thinker dedicated to logic, he frequently bases his opinions and arguments on his religious faith and bigotry (e.g. civilization will crumble if we don’t ban pornography, trans people are deluded crazies, the gay lifestyle is morally wrong, Palestinian Arabs are dirty evil subhumans who deserve to die, etc.) and his positions are about as inconsistent and hypocritical as any other mind-killed political hack.

      Read: This NYT profile on Shapiro pushing the hype, and a response by Current Affairs, pushing the hate (including a quote by our very own Dr. Alexander).

      • Purplehermann says:

        Thank you

      • Thegnskald says:

        Christ. The article promoting the love mixes criticisms in, the article promoting the hate is just a pure stream of “He’s a meanie!” without any measure of self-awareness.

        If you want to make him more appealing, you chose a good pair of articles.

    • EchoChaos says:

      Shapiro deserves almost all the hate he gets and little of the hype. He’s not only a “gotcha” debater who won’t go up against anybody with skills, but he’s also a literal “ethnically cleanse the land to keep it pure” level Israeli nationalist.

      • Aftagley says:

        he’s also a literal “ethnically cleanse the land to keep it pure” level Israeli nationalist.

        ewww, really?

          • Aftagley says:

            Holy shit. That’s, uhh, that’s really something.

            Ok, I’m notching my opinion of him down to the floor.

          • Aftagley says:

            Some on the right have proposed population transfer from the Gaza Strip or West Bank as a solution.

            No, you proposed. You don’t get to advocate for ethnic cleansing and then later “people are out here saying” it away. I don’t think that counts as renouncing a previous viewpoint, it’s just hoping people don’t look at his backlog.

          • Thegnskald says:

            So he was 19 when he wrote the first thing, and 29 when he wrote the second.

            I’m not sure forgetting what you wrote as a teenager is that unusual.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @Atlas/Thegnskald

            Once you’re a professional commentator, you don’t get to go with “I forgot”, even at 19 (which is an adult).

            I would indeed accept “I strongly disavow my prior positions”, which is allowable for anyone, but I don’t know that he’s done that.

          • Nick says:

            I don’t like to hold what people wrote when they were young against them, but holy shit does that not sound like much of an apology. Can anyone find a real disavowal from him?

          • Thegnskald says:

            You don’t get to forget?

            Or you don’t get to use forgetting as an excuse?

            I’ll agree with the latter; if someone has evidence of him refusing to disavow his earlier statement, that would be, well, evidence of something.

            As it stands we just have statements ten years apart, with the latter, later statement showing a growth in maturity and understanding, contradicting the earlier statement, and without apparent knowledge of it.

            Which is to say, disavowal or lack thereof only matters if somebody asks him about it.

            ETA:
            I henceforth dub this the rule of the king of bards:

            The statute of limitations for making determinations about a person’s current character with regard to statements, beliefs, donations, and behavior which wasn’t illegal, is henceforth ten years. If you can’t find anything meaningful in the past ten years, then you aren’t saying anything meaningful.

          • Aftagley says:

            @Atlas

            Hey, reading this thread, I realize that I said “No, you proposed” in a way that could lead you to think I’m referring to you. I meant that as a rhetorical response to Ben Shapiro, but it wasn’t clear. My apologies for sounding like I’m going after you.

            @ Nick
            It doesn’t look like it; most places I can find link to that single article as evidence he’s evolved on this point. If there’s a more nuanced explanation it doesn’t appear to be easily google-able.

          • Nick says:

            @Aftagley
            I’ve looked around a bit now (no more than 15 minutes or so) and haven’t found a disavowal, either.

          • What struck me about the ethnic cleansing argument was his historical example. He presumably didn’t know that the removal of the German population from the territory ceded to Poland involved something like half a million of them dying.

            I don’t find it shocking that a 19 year old didn’t know that and, if he didn’t, the argument “the allies solved a problem by shifting populations and it worked fine, so the Israelis should do the same” isn’t an absurd one.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @Atlas

            That reversal is so half-hearted that I personally do not accept it, and I’m rather shocked that anyone would.

            If someone supported ethnically cleansing a land, then the reasonable response for all good-hearted people is to demand a full, in writing retraction and not allow that person to be a serious commentator ever again. I see no reason to accept Shapiro’s reversal as genuine considering the article remains up and in his name to this day.

            @DavidFriedman

            Ignorance of an act that he is advocating perpetrating upon several million people condemns him almost as badly as if he just didn’t care that Germans were ethnically cleansed because he hates them.

            And given that he talks extensively about the ethnic cleansings of World War II, I see absolutely no reason to assume his ignorance.

          • albatross11 says:

            Echochaos:

            We don’t even apply that standard to people who were in positions of power in 2003 and voted/acted to basically wreck Iraq and leave us with a festering sore that persists to this day.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @albatross11

            Because the Iraq War wasn’t as immoral as ethnic cleansing. It at least had a theoretical chance to do something moral and valuable.

            Even in the disavowal interview @Atlas posted he still calls his idea “utopian”.

          • I think there is an example closer than the ones you mention. The argument for moving the Palestinians away used the previous example of the evacuation of Germans from (I think) East Prussia after the war. That actually happened, actually resulted in a very large number of deaths—the estimate I have seen is about half a million—and was supported by the governments of the U.S. (Truman), the U.K. (I think still Churchill), and presumably France (DeGaulle?). They actually did, as powerful and responsible adults, what a nineteen-year-old argued for doing.

            Do they all get written off as morally bankrupt?

          • EchoChaos says:

            @Atlas

            Thank you for the long reply. I’ll try to sit down and revisit it in a top level comment later, if you don’t mind?

            @DavidFriedman

            The French bear no responsibility, because of course they were not present there, but yes, I strongly consider the transfer condemnatory of Truman and Attlee. And of FDR and Churchill for agreeing in principle to it at Yalta. I’m not a fan of any of those four leaders, which can hardly be shocking.

            I understand why they did it, and why they wouldn’t understand the human cost it would create. Which is even more notably condemnatory of someone who can now see the human cost that transfer creates.

            Especially when you are using that exact transfer as your example, not understanding exactly what it cost is inexcusable.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @Atlas / @DavidFriedman

            I will add, in case it’s unclear, that my dislike of Churchill, Attlee, FDR and Truman has nothing to do with fighting Hitler, who I despise more.

            Churchill was a tactical and strategic fool whose love of fighting killed huge numbers at Gallipoli and whose foolish insistence on unconditional surrender extended World War II. He was also by far the best of those four.

            Attlee was a mess and a socialist, FDR was a useful idiot for Communists, and Truman betrayed Chiang, the greatest Allied leader of WWII, resulting in Communist domination of China, one of the greatest moral disasters of the 20th Century.

          • albatross11 says:

            On one hand, WW2 was a time when the Allies were up against a wall, and made some very hard choices under very hard circumstances. I think they generally did their best, but there was plenty of horrible stuff they did, too, ranging from firebombing cities to shipping Soviet refugees back to the USSR after the war.

            On the other hand, some of the best propaganda of all time went into making the Allies seem like unambiguous heroic good guys, and the war into a time of clear moral choices made by great men. This is nonsense, in the same way that turning the founding fathers of the US into perfect heroes[1] is nonsense. The Allied leaders during WW2 did a lot of morally horrible things in pursuit of victory (we allied with Joeseph Stalin), and they were humans with the normal human share of blind spots and misunderstandings and petty power plays.

            [1] Similarly, the more current thing where we make the founding fathers out to all be terrible evil bigots is silly. You can’t make history into a clean black-and-white morality play and also learn what really happened–pick one.

    • Aftagley says:

      Do people here know about the Groyper Wars? They’ve been discussed on the Motte, but I don’t think I’ve seen much talk about them here.

      It’s the far right attacking those to their center, correct? We’ve seen people on that fringe calling each other RINOs for years now, is this any different?

      I think Nick Fuentes represents/predicts the future of American conservatism far more than Ben Shapiro does.

      Nah.

      So, from my point of view, I don’t understand why anyone who is anti-conservative would bother to attack Ben Shapiro at this point, because the further right is already doing such an energetic job at it.

      Because nobody cares what the far right does. Do you honestly think that Trump’s base or conservatives who will reluctantly pull the lever for anyone not Elizabeth Warren give a shit what some 22 year old with a Youtube show says? If they notice at all (which they won’t, because most of the electorate isn’t invested in internet culture enough to know who these people are) they’ll just see at as bona fides for people like Ben Shapiro, “he can’t be racist because the REAL racists don’t like him!”

      • Aftagley says:

        I mentioned the Groyper thing because it shows that the balance of power within conservatism is shifting, and I don’t see why it won’t keep shifting in the same direction.

        I should have been clearer in my line of questioning: so far nothing I’m seeing indicates that the Groyper thing is causing a shifting in power. As far as i’m aware, the net effect of this movement has been causing Don Jr. to curtail a book signing event. Getting a C+/B- conservative figure to look like a wimp doesn’t equate to a balance of power shift.

        Just like nobody cared what communists did in 1916, or what Christians did in 311? Politics, and ideas more generally, are in Extremistan.

        I guess, but that’s the kind of reasoning that only works in hindsight. They fact that some extremist groups end up radically reorienting global politics does nothing to indicate that this particular extremist group will succeed.

      • EchoChaos says:

        It’s the far right attacking those to their center, correct?

        It’s a little more subtle than that, because in many ways the Groypers aren’t as far right.

        It’s the eternal Pat Buchanan v. George H.W. Bush confrontation arising again, really.

        Certainly the ones making noise tend to be a little more right-wing, just because anyone willing to stand up and make noise are more naturally extreme, but “far right v. center” is not quite the right formulation.

        • Nick says:

          Paleocons are often less economically/fiscally rightwing than other conservatives, though just as socially conservative or more so. So yeah, it’s not quite a matter of rightwing vs. center.

        • Randy M says:

          A matter of which priorities get emphasized or pushed at all.

        • Le Maistre Chat says:

          It’s the eternal Pat Buchanan v. George H.W. Bush confrontation arising again, really.

          Wasn’t Buchanan to the right of the Bushes on everything, not just CW? Proposing policies like shrinking the federal government through a flat tax?

          4chan-type “paleoconservatism” seems more skeptical of Actually Existing Capitalism, unironically using terms like “wage slave.” I don’t see a consensus on what to replace it with: it seems to vaguely circle around “Nordic welfare capitalism, for us Nordic types only” but with a large dose of “Go away, /pol/”.

        • Aftagley says:

          Roger, I agree that calling it extreme right vs. the center is misleading. Moving forward I’ll refer to it as general internecine conservative combat.

        • albatross11 says:

          LMC:

          I think Buchanan was opposed to interventionist foreign policy, which set him pretty far apart from most other Republicans. Though W ran partly on opposition to nation-building operations in foreign lands, and that sure didn’t stop him sticking us into a couple big ugly ones.

      • RalMirrorAd says:

        It’s a conflict between people who want general restrictionism vs people who want to staple green cards to college diplomas. Between people who want commitments to keep US Troops in Syria and those who want to want a detente, between people who say “What about the heartland” and people who say “What’s good for google is good for America”.

        So it’s not “They’re not extreme enough” it’s “I specifically requested the opposite of this”

        Is this newsworthy or significant? Well Don Jr was heckeled off a campus not by the usual suspects but by nominal supporters, and that man bites dog story was covered somewhat in the press. (So it’s not restricted to twitter debates) If that happened to the elder during a campaign rally closer to november of next year it would be worthy of national headlines i think.

      • Do you honestly think that Trump’s base or conservatives who will reluctantly pull the lever for anyone not Elizabeth Warren give a shit what some 22 year old with a Youtube show says? If they notice at all (which they won’t, because most of the electorate isn’t invested in internet culture enough to know who these people are) they’ll just see at as bona fides for people like Ben Shapiro, “he can’t be racist because the REAL racists don’t like him!”

        The average boomer conservative type doesn’t pay attention to Fuentes, nor does he pay attention to Shapiro. In 2016 all these conservative pundits united against Trump and failed to convince the Republican voters not to elect him. The Groypers are trying to do the same thing Trump did, exploit the great difference in ideology between the Republican base and Conservatism Inc.

        • Aftagley says:

          The Groypers are trying to do the same thing Trump did, exploit the great difference in ideology between the Republican base and Conservatism Inc.

          Interesting. What’s their end goal?

        • EchoChaos says:

          @Aftagley

          Interesting. What’s their end goal?

          Basically that all Republican representatives are Tucker Carlson in policy instead of Ben Shapiro.

    • I think Nick Fuentes represents/predicts the future of American conservatism far more than Ben Shapiro does.

      Maybe. A prerequisite for this to happen is that the Groypers start running candidates, and they show no sign of doing so. The weirdest aspect of this is the Christian stuff. They are never going to win a “more Christian than thou” war with their enemies because their enemies have the support of the Churches.

    • Don_Flamingo says:

      Saw a student ask question about health insurance and he gave some libertarian take.
      Well, he sure impressed the college student.
      He sounds eloquent, but I thought I could have done better on the spot just by channeling what I saw from Milton Friedman in “Free to Choose”-clips.
      So I think he’s just not that sharp.
      He appears smart to some, because there are no people around making any bettter libertarian arguments (in that go-to-campus-talk-to-the-students format).
      And other sound-bite personalities, activists, pundits and politicians are usually dumber than him.

  14. Nancy Lebovitz says:

    https://lithub.com/what-if-we-called-it-the-flax-age-instead-of-the-iron-age/?fbclid=IwAR1fHt85-LLvI_2YBDGV7YIBy9-Gsho3_2j-w5xVR3k7dPVK5319cWA4-io

    I’d never thought about how eras get named, but it seems like an interesting question. I don’t have a strong opinion about whether there should be a flax age or a weaving age or a ceramic age, but they probably don’t match up exactly with the stone age, bronze age, or iron age.

    • MorningGaul says:

      Assuming the title isn’t rethorical, then the answer seems fairly obvious to my non-archeologue self: because it’s a (much) less useful distinction.

      Making tools out of stone, bronze, or iron make a big difference in what can and cannot be done.. Wearing flax, wool, cotton, fur or silk is relevant for where you live, and how much efforts you have to put on your clothing, but I don’t see anything else to it.

      • Lambert says:

        Or hemp.
        Hetrodotus writes about how the Scythians on the shores of the Black Sea were massive stoners.
        They’d hotbox instead of bathing.

        Also flax rots away.
        Iron rusts, but kind of survives. Bronze and copper are fine after millenia.
        Ceramic smashes but then the shards last forever. Also it’s an easy thing to decorate in your culture’s own distinctive style. So potsherds make up like half of archaeology.

      • Nancy Lebovitz says:

        Clothes are only part of what’s done with fiber– there’s also ropes, sails, and bags.

        • Lambert says:

          I’d rather have bronze tools and primitive cotton/wool/whatever bags than stone tools and even the most high-tech sailcloth bags.

    • eyeballfrog says:

      The first paragraph of that article is bizarre. It states a supposed problem, gives a completely reasonable explanation as to why that is the case, then inexplicably blames the patriarchy. The rest of the article is pretty interesting, but what a horrible first impression.

    • Douglas Knight says:

      First of all, the Bronze and Iron ages were named by Hesiod 2700 years ago. He was telling a story of moral decline and modern usage is, in part, an ironic reversal.

      You (and the author) seem to be saying that there is continuous technological progress and you can get different breakpoints by choosing different technologies, so the breakpoints are arbitrary. Maybe the first modern revival of this language in the 18th century was totally arbitrary, focusing on metal because it was cool or because it echoed Hesiod. Maybe Thomsen’s 19th century system was also arbitrary, but he explicitly explained that it was useful: iron knives abruptly displaced bronze knives, which abruptly displaced stone knives, so they are clear points on the timeline. Whereas, with most technologies lingered on in parallel with their successors.

      But the modern system claims (and maybe Thomsen did too, I’m not sure) that there is a whole bundle of technologies that appeared at once and anyone who didn’t make an arbitrary focus on one technology would define the same periods (at least in Eurasia). Maybe this is wrong, but it’s not arbitrary. Bronze is associated with writing and draft animals. Maybe this should be called the Urban Age. Maybe this bundle is made possible by cities or the artifacts are concentrated by cities, producing an illusion of abrupt introduction. But it seems to match Thomsen’s Bronze Age, which I think had nothing to do with cities.

      • John Schilling says:

        Bronze production requires stable long-distance trade networks. That probably comes bundled with a whole lot of other “civilized” technologies and institutions.

      • Nancy Lebovitz says:

        I don’t think the current divisions are arbitrary, just that there might be other good divisions.

    • Faza (TCM) says:

      It is an interesting question, so let’s remind ourselves how we got here.

      The Bronze/Iron Age nomenclature goes way back to Hesiod’s Ages of Man and it’s worth pointing out that he was very much using the metals metaphorically – Gold being the noblest; iron – the basest – rather than aiming to reconstruct the material culture of ages past.

      A more “scientific” approach is undertaken by Lucretius, centuries later, who proposes a model of material progress roughly similar to the current three-age system:

      The earliest weapons were hands, nails and teeth. Next came stones and branches wrenched from trees, and fire and flame as soon as these were discovered. Then men learnt to use tough iron and copper. With copper they tilled the soil. With copper they whipped up the clashing waves of war, … Then by slow degrees the iron sword came to the fore; the bronze sickle fell into disrepute; the ploughman began to cleave the earth with iron, …

      The modern conception of the three-age (Stone, Bronze, Iron) system comes from C. J. Thomsen in the Nineteenth Century, who observed:

      nothing is more important than to point out that hitherto we have not paid enough attention to what was found together

      and it turned out that when you start paying attention, it turns out the ancients were onto something:

      To put artifacts in their proper context I consider it most important to pay attention to the chronological sequence, and I believe that the old idea of first stone, then copper, and finally iron, appears to be ever more firmly established as far as Scandinavia is concerned.

      We use the three-age system mostly because the idea had been a part of our culture for millennia and it – perhaps surprisingly – has turned out to have predictive value, as far as archaeology is concerned. It turns out that there are good reasons for this: both bronze and iron are superior to stone when it comes to various technological applications and copper/bronze are easier to work with than iron.

      That said, what about alternative naming systems?

      Textile cultures are problematic for reasons that are adequately explained in the linked post – textiles don’t keep very well and it’s hard to form a detailed picture of material sophistication without a wide variety of preserved artifacts.

      How about pottery?

      Well, it so happens that we actually do use pottery to name prehistoric cultures and periods: Corded Ware culture is just one example. I believe, though I could be wrong, that pottery and ceramics are possibly the foremost method of tracking material culture, because pottery keeps well and follows identifiable trends in design/ornamentation (such as the cord-like impressions on the aforementioned Corded Ware).

      Would “Pottery Age” or “Ceramic Age” be a useful category, though?

      Not really. The oldest known pottery vessels have been dated all the way back to the Paleolithic. The earliest example of ceramics we know of – such as the Venus of Dolní Věstonice – are dated even earlier (between 29,000 BC and 25,000 BC).

      The problem with “Pottery Age” or “Ceramic Age” is that they encompass too much.

      It’s even worse with textiles. The earliest dyed flax fibres found have been dated back to 36,000 BC and we have examples of sewing needles dating back to 50,000 BC. The “Flax Age” doesn’t tell us very much, because we’re unlikely to find out a great deal about the “Pre-flax Age”.

  15. ana53294 says:

    How binding would the NPVIC be once it enters legal force?

    Let’s say that in enters into force before 2020. All the states that have the legislation pending enact it. And Trump wins the popular vote but would lose the electoral college. Most of the states that form the NPVIC are very blue; would they keep the law? Would they be able to avoid giving their delegates to Trump?

    • Statismagician says:

      Hard to tell. Past interstate compacts have mostly been about economic development or unobjectionable things like child welfare – this one will, 99%-confidence, have to be sorted out by the Supreme Court and I don’t know enough about the relevant law to speculate.

    • Erusian says:

      Not very. Interstate compacts need to be approved by Congress, at which point they can have Federal force, but states would be able to leave. Even then it’s not generally an accepted way to change law or the constitution like the NPVIC would: it mostly deals with things like fishing rights or trade. (Some argue it’s not an interstate compact… but then there’s no enforcement mechanism at all, is there?) Individual states can appoint their electors any way they wish but there’s nothing stopping any state from changing that at any time.

      So yes, if the NPVIC is in effect and Trump wins a majority of the popular vote but a minority of the EC then California could just pass the Stop Russian Collusion Act of 2020 and allocate their seats to favor the Democrat. Likewise, if the compact did get Congressional approval, they could just vote to leave the Compact and allocate their electors to favor the Democrat. At best they would get sued because the Compact might have no exit mechanism (which would be highly unusual) but this wouldn’t change the outcome. The Constitution takes precedence and it says the electors pick the president and the states set who the electors are. There is no mechanism to delay the vote until after the lawsuit resolves.

      Really, if you want to have a direct popular vote, you need a Constitutional amendment. Maybe we’ll get it if the Electoral College puts a Democrat in over a Republican (which almost happened in 2004 and was a speculated outcome in 2012). Of course, that presumes the Democrats would maintain a principled anti-EC stance rather than suddenly singing paeans to the institution that gave them power. Changing major parts of the infrastructure require broad bipartisan consensus, something it doesn’t have right now.

    • Phigment says:

      My first, cynical opinion is that it wouldn’t be very binding. State mechanisms are reasonably good at fudging rules to not annoy their constituent citizenry too much, at the end of the day. See, for instance every time there’s a presidential election, and one major candidate or the other misses a filing date to get on the ballot for a primary or the actual election.

      The state officials do not shrug and say the rules are the rules, and now this primary will be Joe Biden vs. Tulsi Gabbard only because Elizabeth Warren was late with the paperwork. They make an exception and work it out, because overall it doesn’t serve many interests to decide major issues on flagrant legalism.

      So, if state X had a strong majority of voters who wanted candidate A but the national popular vote was for Candidate B, State X would, shortly, figure out a way to give electoral votes to Candidate A.

      My second, more cynical take is that the idea of California, specifically, having to assign electors against its own state-level vote means something has failed catastrophically, because the logic behind the NPVIC is explicitly that California is so large and such a political monoculture that its popular vote will overwhelm the national popular vote totals, as seen in 2016. The margin by which Donald Trump lost the national popular vote is smaller than the margin by which he lost the California popular vote.

      The whole point of the proposed compact is that it makes other, smaller states move in formation with California. For the other states to spin it around and compel California to move in formation with them would take some weird, weird events.

      • ana53294 says:

        California has around 20% of registered Republicans, or around 4.7 million people (and in elections, you usually get more voters than just the registered people). I guess quite a few California Republicans don’t bother voting because they know it wouldn’t make a difference. Wouldn’t more Californian Republicans vote if their vote counted?

        That’s the equivalent of the combined populations of Wyoming, Vermont, DC, Alaska, North and South Dakota, and Delaware, which combined have 21 electoral votes. 20% of California’s 55 electoral votes would be 11 Electoral Votes.

        I thought (in my less cynical moments) that the point of the compact was to give representation to voters who happen to be a minority in their state and thus get no electoral college votes, regardless of whether those voters are Republican or Democrat. Aren’t the protest about the unfairness of the Electoral College about the lack of representation of Texas Democrats and California Republicans?

        Though I agree that California being what it is, they are not sincere.

        • Phigment says:

          The specific vote compact being discussed though, doesn’t apportion electoral votes proportionally to popular vote share.

          It apportions them all to the winner of the national popular vote.

          This isn’t going to cause the 20% of California Republicans to get electors voting their preference, unless the Republican Party candidate wins the popular vote, in which case the 80% of California Democrats get their preferences overruled instead.

          Which seems even less fair, not more fair.

          It’s not a measure to give regional numerical minorities a share of the megaphone, it’s a measure to take the megaphone away from regional numerical majorities and give it to the regional numerical minority instead.

          • Lambert says:

            I’m not an American, so I don’t exactly know the system, but it’s not like the exact number of electoral college votes matters, is it? Only who gets the most. Winner-takes-all.

            So it’s little consolation to the people who voted for Clinton in places where the EC voted for her. Seems more important to do away with all the excessive focus on marginal states, low-population states etc.

          • Nornagest says:

            States can allocate their electoral college votes however they want. Almost all of them do it in a winner-take-all fashion, solid states because the controlling party doesn’t want to hand a few votes over to the other guys and swing states because that amplifies the state’s influence at the federal level (a swing of three to twenty-ish votes rather than one or two), but allocating proportionally isn’t unheard of.

    • Douglas Knight says:

      What binds the states now?

      What stops a state from ignoring the results of its election and choosing electors as its legislature desires? In a close election, a swing state, particularly a gerrymandered state, might choose to throw out the popular vote. Indeed, in 2000 the Florida legislature threatened to do this, on the grounds that the vote was too close to call. Has any other state ever threatened this? Of course, with NPVIC, a lot more and different states would be tempted than before, because the national vote would diverge from the state vote.

      Someone advocating NPVIC once told me that there is some legal mechanism binding the legislature today, but a quick google search doesn’t find anything. I think he proposed that the NPVIC be enacted as state constitutional amendments, which would make it slow to reverse. But I think it is mainly proposed as simple law.

      • ana53294 says:

        Aren’t there state constitution rules about how to assign electors? It sounds like a thing that should exist.

      • jermo sapiens says:

        Which of the 50 states is gerrymandered?

        • anonymousskimmer says:

          I don’t have a definitive list, but Ohio and Pennsylvania are/have been (in favor of Republicans). I believe there are states which are gerrymandered in favor of Democrats, but don’t want to expend the effort googling them.

          Both of these states have historically been swing states.

          https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/29/us/politics/north-carolina-gerrymandering.html

          in the Ohio House, Republicans maintained a veto-proof supermajority with a bare majority of the popular vote.

          By contrast, Pennsylvania, which voted under a new nonpartisan, court-ordered map, went from 13 Republicans and five Democrats to nine Republicans and nine Democrats. This didn’t quite match the popular vote, which broke for Democrats 55 percent to 45 percent, but the shift underscored that voting lines can matter as much as votes.

          Note that the Ohio example is the state legislature, while the Pennsylvania example is the US house.

          • Jaskologist says:

            All states are gerrymandered. This impacts the House of Representatives and various state-level houses, but not the Senate, governorships, or the presidential votes in any of the swing states.

            A few states allocate their electoral votes according to districts, but not enough for gerrymandering to have had any impact on the presidential winner in our lifetimes.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @Jaskologist

            I will state that state level gerrymandering often has a fairly dramatic impact on actual vote numbers in the state, even if not in results. My brother-in-law is a conservative Republican living in Boston, so his vote is between “Democrat A” and “Democrat B” in local races. He doesn’t vote in non-gubernatorial years, because it doesn’t matter to him.

            There was a large increase in turnout for Alabama Democrats similarly in the recent special election for Senator because they finally felt like they had a chance to win for the same reason.

          • anonymousskimmer says:

            @Jaskologist

            At various points people semi-, or completely-arbitrarily decided where to draw state borders, sometimes for gerrymandering reasons (e.g. Slave vs Free states). This indeed affects the US Senate.

          • John Schilling says:

            At various points people semi-, or completely-arbitrarily decided where to draw state borders, sometimes for gerrymandering reasons

            Could you give us some examples of state borders that you believe were drawn for gerrymandering reasons? This seems at very least to be a noncentral use of the term.

          • cassander says:

            @John Schilling says:

            Could you give us some examples of state borders that you believe were drawn for gerrymandering reasons? This seems at very least to be a noncentral use of the term.

            I believe that the dakota territory was split into two states to get two extra republican senators, but that’s the only example I can think of, and it’s pretty marginal.

          • CatCube says:

            @cassander

            The division of the Dakota Territory occurred in 1887, and had quite a bit of precedent.

            The original territory spanned from 43°N to 49°N, or 6° of latitude tall. The southern border of Kansas was set at 37°N, which gave 12° of latitude to the Canadian border, perfect for cutting into 4 states 3° tall, as was eventually done (well, they set the border between the Dakotas at 45°55′, apparently because the northern tip of the Couteau des Praries seemed a good place for a border and it was almost exactly on the desired line).

            The Dakota territory was at this point about 7° wide, the same width as Washington, Oregon, Colorado, and Wyoming. That fact doesn’t directly impact the N/S split we’re discussing of course, but I point it out to show that they were circling in on some “preferred” layouts for state borders by the late 1800s, and the Dakotas as created fit perfectly into them.

          • anonymousskimmer says:

            @John Schilling

            An additional one would be West Virginia cut from Virginia (with the addition of this being along county lines). The margin of victory in 2014 US Senate elections between Warner (D) in Virginia is less than the margin of victory for Capito (R) in West Virginia, effectively handing the Democrats an extra two votes in the US Senate (47 – 53 versus 45 – 53, all else held equal). Back in the the day this handed the Unionists(during the Civil War)/Republicans(following the Civil war) extra votes in Congress. This would be “cracking”.

            The next day convention delegates chose Francis H. Pierpont as governor of Virginia, and elected other officers to a rival state government and two U.S. senators (Willey and Carlile) to replace secessionists before adjourning. The federal government in Washington, D.C. promptly recognized the new government and seated the two new senators.

            The annexation of Texas as a single state. This would be “packing”.

            I honestly have no clue what was happening and why with the Provinces and Colonies prior to the American Revolution, but there were a bunch of trades and cutouts happening, else we would have only had about 8 or 9 original states.

            Oh yeah, let’s not forget Washington D.C., which has three electoral votes by amendment 23.

          • Jaskologist says:

            @EchoChaos

            Indeed, there are many other ways politicians can tilt the playing field. In California, for example, they have adopted a top 2 primary system which meant that both Senate candidates were Democrats, ensuring that Republicans had no one to vote for and that they could always claim that Democratic Senators won the popular vote.

            But gerrymandering is a fairly specific term referring to drawing unnatural districts in order to give your party and edge. Plus, people who complain about voter suppression and gerrymandering don’t generally find things like California Senate thing worth noting, for some reason.

          • John Schilling says:

            An additional one would be West Virginia cut from Virginia

            Your language suggests that this was a thing that was done to Virginia, or to West Virginia. And if it had been, you might have a point. But Virginia deciding to do this to itself, at a time when Not-West Virginia clearly held to the legitimacy of secession, and had just as clearly indicated it was no longer concerned with representation in DC, is indeed a highly non-central example of gerrymandering.

            The annexation of Texas as a single state. This would be “packing”.

            This would be a sovereign nation asking to be admitted to a larger federation as a single entity under its existing borders. Also not gerrymandering, unless maybe you’re going to define the European Union as hopelessly gerrymandered for not insisting that France and Germany be broken up into sub-nations before admission. In which case, again, highly non-central.

      • anonymousskimmer says:

        You’d probably have a challenge under the 14th amendment’s equal protection clause, and possibly under Article 4, section 4’s “republican form of government” clause (though SCOTUS has been loathe to overrule states using that clause).

      • Controls Freak says:

        What binds the states now?

        The Fourteenth Amendment says:

        But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States… is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such state, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such state.

        I mentioned long ago that I think the NPVIC could be vulnerable to a Constitutional challenge. For completeness, the Article II electors clause states:

        Each state shall appoint, in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors, equal to the whole number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress…

        So, the question is, does 14A actually forbid a variety of vote dilution strategies? Clearly, the natural Schelling point is, “whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State” (adjusted by the 19th and 26th Amendments), but is it actually mandated that this is the scoping unit? I think if a case ever went to the Supremes, you’d see an argument along the lines of, “Folks aren’t being denied the right to vote. They voted, their vote was counted, and it was just put in this big pot, and they lost.” This is similar to pro-gerrymandering and other vote dilution arguments (however, anti-gerrymandering within states doesn’t have nearly the same natural Schelling point to fall back on).

        The parade of horribles that will be trotted out to counter this argument goes as follows. Well, Hillary Clinton won California by 4.2M votes. There were 300k total voters in Alaska. If a blue state gov’t took control long enough to enter in an interstate compact, pledging both Alaska/California electoral votes to the winner of the Alaska/California combined popular vote, aren’t you doing essentially the most extreme version of “cracking”, in the terminology of gerrymandering? We tend to view the extremely large Californian skew as a sort of ‘fixed block’ (this is a feature of most gerrymandering schemes and all anti-gerrymandering arguments), and reason that there is literally no way for the 300k voters in Alaska to choose whether Alaska’s electors will be red/blue. California has ensured that Alaska’s electors will be blue. Maybe this still isn’t enough to revert to the Schelling point. After all, “Their vote was counted; the state legislature just decided that the method of selection was to put the votes in a big pot with these other votes, and they lost.”

        Well, suppose Alaska’s state legislature says, “The electors will be selected in the following process. We’ll count the votes, and that candidate will be the winner unless the Board of Trustees for the University of Alaska votes unanimously for a different candidate.” All of a sudden, our really restricted readings of “denied votes” and “manner as the Legislature thereof may direct” are starting to look problematic. We were relying on a technical reading that they got to vote… and their votes got counted… they just got put through a process decided by the legislature, and they lost. And besides, their votes “could” determine the electors. I mean, the UA BoT might not be unanimous (just like Californian voters might not produce a margin of victory an order of magnitude higher than the number of total Alaskan voters). But somehow, this just feels dirtier. “Votes of Alaskan voters count for determining Alaska’s electors if Californian voters don’t disagree too strongly,” seems hard to distinguish from, “Votes of Alaskan voters count for determining Alaska’s electors if UA BoT voters don’t disagree too strongly.”

        Let’s go nuts in a different direction. Let’s think of elections for representatives. Article I, Section 2 says:

        The House of Representatives shall be composed of members chosen every second year by the people of the several states…

        Section 4 says:

        The times, places and manner of holding elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof

        That’s about it. One thing is that there’s no requirement for districts. I can’t wait until states realize this and just make all congressional elections statewide (/s). But also, you’d need some wild historical linguistic analysis to prevent the exact same thing from happening here. “Oh, we’re just going to enter into an interstate compact with other states, and we’ll select all of our representatives using the popular vote across the “several states” involved. Mayyyybe we start thinking that we can’t fit such ridiculous schemes into “prescribing/directing the manner” of elections. Instead, maybe we revert to the Schelling point and just say, “Look, literally every section of the Constitution we’re talking about here speaks of the ‘state’ as a natural scoping unit. We’re gonna use that scoping unit.”

        Little note: the best thing about the Seventeenth Amendment is that it fixes this problem for Senators. It explicitly says:

        The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each state, elected by the people thereof…

        So, you’ll have slightly more support for, “This is actually a Constitutional loophole; the fact that the 17th Amendment fixes it for Senators but not representatives/presidential electors supports that the loophole is open,” trying to counter, “Every indication of the structure of the document is pointing to the Schelling point that the correct scoping unit is the state.” Having this debate in SCOTUS isn’t quite the nightmare scenario, until you include another hypothetical I suggested before:

        Some group of states (>=270EV) decides to always align their electors with the result of the popular vote among those states.

        Every pro-NPVIC argument to this point would necessarily allow this, and strictly speaking, it’s even less voter dilution (in terms of the states involved in the compact; scoping units are f’in important), but if such a scheme were implemented, I honestly think the only result could be civil war.

        • Douglas Knight says:

          Yeah, I guess, but that isn’t the point. If the NPVIC is enacted, it will be determined ahead of time whether it is constitutional. Ana’s question was that if it is accepted as constitutional, then what is to stop a signatory from switching to some other also constitutional method at the last minute. I asked the same about the current system. Sure, the example I mentioned might not be constitutional, but what if Nebraska decided after the election to go with winner-take-all? Super rare that that would be tempting, but the opposite is almost what I suggested. That isolates Ana’s question in the current environment.

          • John Schilling says:

            If the NPVIC is enacted, it will be determined ahead of time whether it is constitutional.

            How? The United States presently acknowledges no clear determination of whether or not a thing is constitutional than a judicial ruling (preferably SCOTUS), and US courts do not make rulings of any kind until a person credibly claims to have been injured, past tense, by the thing under dispute.

    • Eric Rall says:

      My three big questions about it are:

      1. What happens if the popular vote winner is disputed? For example, let’s say the official certified results from each state add up to give a margin of victory of much less than half a percent (the average recount changes the election result by about 0.2%), and non-NPVIC states refuse to do recounts because 1) they know with confidence who won their states’ electoral votes so it’s not their problem, and 2) recounts cost money. Currently, any recount would be based only in states with disputed state-level outcomes.

      Or worse, consider a case where there’s serious evidence of widespread fraud, voter suppression, or large counting errors (e.g. voting machines with a bug that miscounts a large number of ballots) in one or two states, of large enough magnitude to swing the popular vote. Is there a mechanism for NPVIC states to review the legitimacy of that state’s election returns, either collectively or individually, or are they forced to accept the official tally at face value?

      2. What happens if non-NPVIC states move to a different system of choosing electors that doesn’t produce a popular vote total at all (e.g. legislative appointment) or produces a popular vote total that isn’t directly comparable to NPVIC states’ totals (e.g. approval voting or Borda count)?

      3. What if Unpledged Electors come into fashion again in non-NPVIC states? Are votes for unpledged electors counted by NPVIC states for the slate’s party (if there is one), completely disregarded, or something else?

  16. Due to the likelihood of American taxes being increased considerably in the 2020s, I’m considering moving my money into one of Vanguard’s international stock index funds. Anyone have a reason I shouldn’t do this?

    • hls2003 says:

      I’m not an accountant, but I think it’d be pointless. The U.S. taxes on all income worldwide, so even if the fund is considered “overseas” you will still be on the hook for the income.

      • Eric Rall says:

        Looking just at taxes paid directly be the investor, this is correct. The big difference comes in corporate taxes: US-based corporations pay full US taxes on their US income andat least partial US taxes on their worldwide income. Foreign-based corporations only owe US taxes on their US-sourced income.

        So if you think US corporate income taxes in particular are going to go up while most other countries are going to keep their corporate income taxes about the same, then increasing your allocation in international stock funds is a reasonable way to place a bet on that. At least to the extent that you expect the tax change to happen more than the rest of the market expects it. [Insert standard caution about the efficient markets hypothesis here]

        Another difference that might come into play here would be if you expect something like Warren’s semi-confiscatory wealth tax to go into effect. Even though you’re almost certainly not paying the tax directly, and even though the tax is facially neutral between US and foreign assets, there’s likely to be differential effects. Stocks owned in large quantities by affected multi-millionaires and billionaires are going to go down in price by a lot, since e.g. Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer are going to have to sell off upwards of 6% of their holdings of Microsoft each year in order to cover their wealth tax bill, and that’s going to bid the stock price down. Assuming US-based billionaires own a larger share of the US stock market than they do of international markets, then US stocks are going to be moved more by this effect than international stocks.

    • Erusian says:

      Unless you’re planning to renounce your citizenship to avoid taxes, probably an irrelevant idea. It’s not bad: the foreign market is fine. But it doesn’t give you tax advantages. The US taxes income worldwide above a certain amount and I’m sure they’d squeeze the ex-pats if they’re going to increase taxes. If you are planning to renounce, then that’s a far bigger consideration than moving your money into an international stock index fund.

      One exception: if you think the 2020s will be a time of slow growth or economic decline/collapse, putting your money in a society you believe won’t would be a good idea. The Venezuelans with foreign assets and access to hard currency are living it up right now.

      • I’m not looking to avoid capital-gains/dividend taxes, I’m looking to avoid loss of value due to higher corporate taxes and higher labor costs.

        • Erusian says:

          If you believe that taxes are going to damage the economy, the solution would seem to be the same as if you believe anything is going to damage the economy or make the investment less desirable. Move your money to where you think you’ll get the best return.

          Of course, if you have specific ideas of what happens then it might be simpler just to move into what industries you think will benefit. For example, high taxes and especially high labor cost would tend to be a boon to the technical companies that sell to the government.

    • broblawsky says:

      The simplest way to look at this is whether you think that the rest of the world is going to grow faster than the US in the 2020s. I personally don’t think this is very likely – comparing the Vanguard Emerging Markets mutual fund (VEIEX) to the S&P 500, the S&P has managed to beat VEIEX over the last 5 years by almost 50%, and that’s with the relatively slow US economic growth we’ve seen since 2014. The time to invest in EM was ~2001; I think most of the big gains are already gone by now.

      • The simplest way to look at this is whether you think that the rest of the world is going to grow faster than the US in the 2020s.

        It’s not growth, it’s how much of that growth is likely to go to investors versus the government.

        the S&P has managed to beat VEIEX over the last 5 years by almost 50%, and that’s with the relatively slow US economic growth we’ve seen since 2014.

        This sounds to me like an argument against betting on U.S. stocks.

        • broblawsky says:

          It’s not growth, it’s how much of that growth is likely to go to investors versus the government.

          Only if you assume that the government is a money-pit that returns nothing from the resources it takes in.

          This sounds to me like an argument against betting on U.S. stocks.

          I don’t think I understand your point – the S&P gave better returns than VEIEX, even with the US growing slower than emerging markets. You’d have to assume that the US will slow down dramatically, to substantially below our current ~2% growth rate, or that emerging markets will undergo another exponential growth spurt. The former appears unlikely from past observations; the latter seems unlikely, given that global monetary policy can’t get much looser than it is now.

          • Only if you assume that the government is a money-pit that returns nothing from the resources it takes in.

            I don’t expect a lot of personal benefit from it, and to the extent that I would benefit from it, that would happen regardless of where I invest.

            I don’t think I understand your point – the S&P gave better returns than VEIEX, even with the US growing slower than emerging markets.

            What I mean is that the growth in the stock market of 2011-2019 was not backed by increases in productivity, it is likely to be a bubble waiting to deflate.

          • EchoChaos says:

            @Alexander Turok

            Betting on a bubble, even an obvious one (which I don’t think the current economy is), to burst is very bad for your personal wealthy unless you’re very accurate.

            And betting that a US bubble bursting won’t hurt emerging markets even worse is pretty risky.

          • It doesn’t have to burst, just earn below average returns. The VTSMX has had 2.8% over the last year, so it’s already happening:

            https://investor.vanguard.com/mutual-funds/profile/VTSMX

          • broblawsky says:

            What I mean is that the growth in the stock market of 2011-2019 was not backed by increases in productivity, it is likely to be a bubble waiting to deflate.

            Just because there’s a financial bubble doesn’t mean there isn’t growth as well.

            Also, (epistemic status: poor) I suspect that the current bubble is in corporate bonds, not stocks. If true, one might expect the collapse of the current bubble to drive up interest rates and potentially benefit some stocks, although the market will still most likely go up on net.

        • Ketil says:

          I don’t think the wealth tax proposed by Warren or Sanders is likely to happen. But if it does, it will profoundly affect corporations where rich individuals own a large share – they may have to pay out annual dividends approximately equal to the tax rate. Might be good for investors looking for high short term returns? Alternatively, the rich owners will be forced to sell their stock at a fairly high rate, which will lower the share price. Either way, the company is likely to suffer, and will probably be a poor investment in the long run.

    • Urstoff says:

      What likelihood? Even with president Warren, I doubt there is going to be any extreme tax hike pushed through congress.

  17. Dan L says:

    [mispost]

  18. Statismagician says:

    Congratulations! Your report on the recent expedition to Sol-III has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Exo-Archaeological Studies of Alpha Centauri.

    We were especially intrigued by your section on the non-physical culture of the period the extinct ape-beings apparently referred to as the ‘early 2000s.’ Could you please summarize your findings and how you discovered them for an upcoming press release?

    (Prompted by a Facebook post wondering what future history books are going to make of memes.)

  19. Friendly AI With Benefits says:

    Help me out. I’m looking for a short story I read recently and despite being surprisingly distinct I can’t find anything about it.
    The premise is that in the cold war giant squids were trained to hunt down Russian submarines, and now one is having a solipsistic crisis and about to kick off nuclear war. The government seeks aid from a disgraced previous trainer and the whole piece is really just a way to explain and get the reader to feel they understand a very alien mind. Thanks in advance!

  20. An Fírinne says:

    I was curious what response anti-communists would make to the idea of Fully Automated Luxury Communism which would seem to dispel all historically-rooted and human nature anti-communist arguments.

    • Statismagician says:

      Who’s going to fix your robot when the neighborhood network hits a spool space error?

    • EchoChaos says:

      We already live in it and it hasn’t changed human nature a bit.

      There are, to a close approximation, zero people in the United States who die because of unpreventable starvation or lack of emergency healthcare.

      We have a degree of wealth amongst our poorest citizens that would boggle the minds of the poor or even the middle class merely a hundred years ago.

      If you want to live without working on some form of welfare for your entire life, that’s possible. In some places in the American South close to a majority of the county is living on Social Security Disability.

      • metacelsus says:

        There are, to a close approximation, zero people in the United States who die because of unpreventable starvation or lack of emergency healthcare.

        Really? Especially for lack of emergency healthcare. I’m sure people in rural areas where the nearest hospital is a 2-hour drive away would beg to differ.

        • Garrett says:

          For people who aren’t near a hospital, we have ambulances. They are surprisingly effective at caring for people between where they are and the hospital (yes, yes, I’m ignoring some studies, whatever). They are certainly able to make the trek and can perform life-saving and life-sustaining medical interventions on-board.

          And my experience in the suburbs and exurbs is that a good number of people who phone for an ambulance don’t actually need an ambulance. No idea if that carries across to deep rural areas, though.

      • MrApophenia says:

        I think you’re underestimating just how poor the poor in America actually are. The UN did a report on this in 2017 and found that about 5 million Americans live in poverty equivalent to the poor in the third world.

        America is unusual in that a smaller portion of the population are in deep poverty than in most of history or in many other countries, but we absolutely do have real poverty.

        • cassander says:

          Of that 5 million, how many are just too mentally ill to care for themselves?

        • The Nybbler says:

          That would be this opinion piece, which is based on a World Bank survey plus some handwavery. The Heritage Foundation does some handwavery of its own to make the number disappear.

          What the original World Bank data says, I don’t know; the reference Deaton makes is not specific enough for me to locate it.

    • If you have robots doing all the labor, and making all the capital-allocation decisions, then human property is just passive capital and there’s no disincentive to seize and redistribute it so long as you are confident none of it can be hidden from the authorities.

      I don’t see how this should change our view of our own political system, if that’s what they’re getting at. I had heard of the phrase, but didn’t know anyone took it that seriously.

    • Lambert says:

      *fully automated luxury gay space communism

    • Nornagest says:

      My first inclination is to dismiss it as a stupid Internet meme, and that’s my second, third, and fourth inclination too, but it does have a non-meme and at least somewhat less stupid backing in so-called post-scarcity economics. Which is, of course, impractical now or anytime soon, unless MIRI’s right and a benevolent AI god is right around the corner. But let’s just take it as given that all material goods are too cheap to meter. Then what?

      Well, there’s a couple of important areas that we can’t get around: services and real estate. Services because tasks involving human interaction can only be performed by a human, and real estate because even if you can make habitats for free, their actual value is going to be determined by proximity to the stuff people care about (meaning, mainly, other people) — even now you can get land in places no one cares about for just this side of free. Which means we still have inequality (even if the only skills that matter are people skills, some people are going to be better at doing people stuff), and we still have scarce resources after all. So we still need an economic system, and human status instincts still matter, and waving our hands and giving it a cutesy name doesn’t actually solve any problems.

      There’s also the question of how we get there from here.

      • a benevolent AI god is right around the corner. But let’s just take it as given that all material goods are too cheap to meter. Then what?

        If that ever happens, it will surely be temporary, as population growth will lead to an eventual return to scarcity.

        • albatross11 says:

          The wealthiest societies (mostly) currently have negative population growth,so it’s not at all clear that vast wealth available to all will lead to exponential population growth to the point that the robots/AI can’t support us all. The iron law of wages hasn’t actually been a good description of reality for the last couple centuries.

          • And the personality types that lead to that behavior are being selected out of the population. This is basic natural selection.

          • Well... says:

            How well does the heritable part of “personality type” predict how many kids you’ll have? It seems like there’s lots of other factors at play, otherwise it begs the question of why there are any “won’t have kids” personality types around when they should have been naturally selected against by evolution.

          • How well does the heritable part of “personality type” predict how many kids you’ll have?

            Heritability estimates are around .2-.4

            It seems like there’s lots of other factors at play, otherwise it begs the question of why there are any “won’t have kids” personality types around when they should have been naturally selected against by evolution.

            This treats “having kids” as a behavior that should be constant across cultures, when it clearly isn’t, the people who are having 1.5 kids are descended from those who had 7.0 kids in their ancestral culture.

          • Statismagician says:

            @Alexander Turok – source, please? This seems very susceptible to confounding.

          • In modern populations it tends to be estimated in the range of 0.2 to 0.4

            https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1090513817302799

          • Statismagician says:

            I can’t help but notice that the paper that article says proves fertility is meaningfully heritable in modern populations actually says “the environment has achieved an evolutionary override;” while I’m not an evolutionary biologist, I think this may be one of those cases where the authors let their own theory get away from them.

            Also their estimate is derived by splitting the difference between a 1930s paper and a few Danish ones from 1999-2001, which (especially in genetics) is a really weird thing to do while claiming modern worldwide generalizability.

        • Nick says:

          Silly, that’s what overbearing birth control campaigns are for.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        let’s just take it as given that all material goods are too cheap to meter. Then what?

        Well, there’s a couple of important areas that we can’t get around: services and real estate.

        You’re correct, and I feel like your argument has been around ever since the day after Drexler et al started predicting nanotech manufacturing. “OK, let’s assume factories are replaced by nanobots that can turn any carbon into diamond houses. But real estate would be scarce, as would people skills…”
        So rather than gay space communism, you’d have fully automated feudalism. All capital is too cheap to price except human capital, and land is the most important thing.

    • ARabbiAndAFrog says:

      We’ve been here before, but previous times our slaves were made of meat and not out of metal.

    • Viliam says:

      The “fully automated luxury” part sounds good; I see a problem with the “communism” part. Does it mean no freedom of speech, and millions tortured and killed for crazy reasons? You know, just like any other communism before. Only now the extermination camps would also be fully automated, of course.

      • An Fírinne says:

        Communism has to do with abolished wealth inequality and class hierarchy. It has nothing to do with totalitarianism. It makes no sense to tie communism to totalitarianism due to historical totalitarianism anymore then it makes sense to tie totalitarianism to capitalism due to past totalitarianism (Nazi Germany, Chile and Fascist Italy becoming prominent examples)

        • cassander says:

          >It has nothing to do with totalitarianism.

          you know, except for that little bit about establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat and liquidating the bourgeoisie. And the fact that every single communist power that ever came to power set up a totalitarian state that killed more people than pinochet ever dreamed of doing. But sure, if you ignore theory and practice, communism has nothing to do totalitarianism

          • albatross11 says:

            How is it different from luxury gay space fascism?

          • An Fírinne says:

            you know, except for that little bit about establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat and liquidating the bourgeoisie.

            Dictatorship in the sense of the phrase above is not meant in the conventional sense of the word in the year of 2019. Dictatorship is just a fancy way of saying social ownership of the means of production.

            And the fact that every single communist power that ever came to power set up a totalitarian state that killed more people than pinochet ever dreamed of doing

            Well putting aside the fact that you’re acting like Marxist Leninists are the only ones who have came to power (patently false), you are still wrong. Communists are a diverse body ranging from anarchists to libertarian socialists to democratic socialists to Leninists. Leninism back in the days of the Cold War was the most popular Marxist form. So is it any surprise most were totalitarian? Not really.

          • cassander says:

            Dictatorship in the sense of the phrase above is not meant in the conventional sense of the word in the year of 2019. Dictatorship is just a fancy way of saying social ownership of the means of production.

            No, it isn’t. It’s the absolute rule of one segment of society (the proles) over everyone else utterly unrestrained by law or custom. Shockingly, this theory tends to result in abuse of power.

            . Communists are a diverse body ranging from anarchists to libertarian socialists to democratic socialists to Leninists.

            No, they aren’t. Marx, who must be regarded as something of an authority on Communism, spent his life campaigning to drive the democrats out of the movement and largely succeeded. There is nothing in Lenin that contradicts Marx. The only difference is lenin didn’t bother hiding his lust for violence and marx usually did.

            As for the idea that one can be both an anarchist and a supporter of communal ownership of everything that matters, well, people are welcome to declare themselves in favor of square circles and dry water if they want, but I’m not obligated to take them seriously.

          • Clutzy says:

            social ownership of the means of production.

            Enforcement of this, however, is where the trick is. The transition to social ownership seems to inevitably involve violence. Then afterwards it seems to inevitably cause a deterioration of the means of production.

            And I know that there are theoretical discussions of how this could all be done peacefully and openly, but they always come off to me as special pleadings. That is because if humans acted in the way they are supposed to in these scenarios, a capitalist system would actually no longer have most, or all, of the flaws that socialists point out about it.

          • An Fírinne says:

            @cassander

            No, it isn’t. It’s the absolute rule of one segment of society (the proles) over everyone else utterly unrestrained by law or custom. Shockingly, this theory tends to result in abuse of power.

            I don’t mean this to offend or insutl but you really know nothing about communism. Communism intends to abolish the proletariat class. We don’t want proles. We just want human beings. No nonsense categories like proletarian would be allowed.

            No, they aren’t. Marx, who must be regarded as something of an authority on Communism, spent his life campaigning to drive the democrats out of the movement and largely succeeded. There is nothing in Lenin that contradicts Marx. The only difference is lenin didn’t bother hiding his lust for violence and marx usually did.

            Even if true, Marxists are not religious worshippers of Marx. Marxism has a rich, varied and contrasting history. Google Marxist revisionism for instance.

            Not all communists are Marxists btw. A fact you once again ignore.

            As for the idea that one can be both an anarchist and a supporter of communal ownership of everything that matters, well, people are welcome to declare themselves in favor of square circles and dry water if they want, but I’m not obligated to take them seriously.

            So how do you explain the occurance of anarchist communism in the manifestation of the Free Territory of Ukraine and the Korean Peoples Association?

          • cassander says:

            I don’t mean this to offend or insutl but you really know nothing about communism. Communism intends to abolish the proletariat class. We don’t want proles. We just want human beings. No nonsense categories like proletarian would be allowed.

            You don’t want to abolish the proles, you want to liquidate the non-proles. It is, after all, the dictatorship of the proletariat, not the dictatorship of everyone.

            Even if true, Marxists are not religious worshippers of Marx.

            In practice, they seem to be. They certainly have sacrificed an awful lot of people in his name.

            Marxism has a rich, varied and contrasting history. Google Marxist revisionism for instance.

            If you want to abandon marx, fine, feel free to do so. but if you don’t drop the name, then you can’t get mad when I point out the crimes committed in it. You don’t let Nazis say “Oh, sure, I’m a Nazi, but I’ve got nothing to do with that Hitler fellow.”

            So how do you explain the occurance of anarchist communism in the manifestation of the Free Territory of Ukraine and the Korean Peoples Association?

            Again, calling yourself a square circle doesn’t make you one. Anarchy can certainly exist. What can’t exist is anarchy (the absence of monopoly providers of violence) and a community entity powerful enough to own everything worth owning. Such an entity, almost by definition, is going to be powerful enough to be a monopoly provider of violence. The Ukraine Free State didn’t feed its army on donated food.

            Socialism or anarchy, you can have one or the other, but not both. At least not for any group of people much above the dunbar limit.

          • Faza (TCM) says:

            An Fírinne,
            With respect, what do you know about communism? Have you lived in a communist (should be: communist-aspiring, for reasons stated elsewhere) country? I have.

            And please don’t “no true Scotsman” this, because it really isn’t fitting a serious conversation.

            No nonsense categories like proletarian would be allowed.

            That doesn’t sound like any version of real-world communism I’m familiar with. The dissolution of class postulated by Marx simply means that if everyone’s part of the working class, which happens to also own and control the means of production, then the term “proletarian” stops making sense.

            This does not, however, mean that the semantics of “proletarian” somehow disappear. If nothing else, you still have the potential distinction between the working and idle class.

            Dictatorship is just a fancy way of saying social ownership of the means of production.

            I think you’ll find that this isn’t, in fact, the case.

            “Ownership” is an overrated concept. What really matters is who gets to control the means of production.

            Let’s assume that society does indeed own all the means of production (been there, done that, T-shirts ran out). You still need to decide what gets produced and how it gets distributed.

            Now, even in a moderately-sized country – couple of tens of millions of people – you clearly can’t ask everyone their opinion about every single facet of day-to-day production and distribution, ‘coz you’d never get anything done.

            Instead, you must have someone in charge who’s job – and sole job – is to make those decisions.

            The standard answer is that it shall be the job of the elected representatives of the people. Except, we probably should limit electable people to just members of the Vanguard Party, because if you let just anyone be in charge, they might do something terrible like abolish communism and reintroduce capitalism.

            The “dictatorship” element is, therefore, built in – at least to the extent that not all views are welcome in those aspiring to have capacity for decision making.

            You might not think this to be a big deal: so what if someone doesn’t get to be the ruler?

            Actually, there’s a rather more naked form of dictatorship that is necessarily involved in communism and it stems directly from “everyone owns everything and everything is working for everyone”.

            Actually, that should be: “everyone works for everyone”.

            Under a capitalist/competition model, the allocation of the means of production – crucially, including labour – is an emergent process. Ultimately, the worker decides what work they are prepared to do and for what reward. If you can’t find workers to do the work, the work simply doesn’t get done. Employers who aren’t able to secure a sufficient workforce either downsize or go under.

            You can’t do that in a communist system.

            The central planning aspect of real-world communism is a fundamental outcome of “everyone owns everything”. You can’t go to a different supplier, because there is only one supplier. At the end of the day, the state – being the organisation that represents and serves society – is the sole decider of all economic questions.

            The economy is a complex system. Outputs in one branch of the economy depend on the outputs of other branches, which constitute its inputs. If you, as the God Emperor Enlightened Philosopher King Appointed Central Planner, determine that you need to produce x pairs of shoes, you’ll know not only how many people you need working in shoe-making, but also how much of everything else (materials, fuel, electricity, etc.) you’ll need and – therefore – how many people you’ll need working on providing those.

            I must stress: you need these people doing exactly that and not some other thing, otherwise those shoes won’t get made. It doesn’t matter if those people particularly want to do what you need them to: it must be done.

            You could try to entice them by offering disproportionate rewards for doing what you want, except:
            a. You’ll need to repeat the exact same process for everything in the economy, so everyone gets their disproportionate reward (and it is therefore no longer disproportionate),

            b. If you only offer some of your workers disproportionate rewards, your system is no longer egalitarian and you will get resentments,

            c. Offering disproportionate rewards means you need more of whatever it is you’re rewarding them with than you had originally planned, which means you need more workers engaged in producing that and you’re back where you started,

            d. Your putative workers might not be interested in whatever it is you’re willing to offer, because, e.g. the job is really shitty, or they would have to move, or they would rather spend their time doing something else.

            You still need those shoes made and you don’t have that much available in terms of positive incentives. What do you do?

            If positive incentives aren’t possible/feasible/workable, you’re left with negative incentives – which is exactly what real-world communist countries did. As a citizen of such, you were expected to get your work order – as in: a literal order to go work in a particular location – and go do it. Nobody cared if you wanted to go do that job – it need to be done and society chose you.

            ETA:

            You might try to escape these issues by postulating nobody having to do any work whatsoever (Fully Automated is what we’re talking about, after all), in which case see my other post.

          • An Fírinne says:

            @cassander

            You don’t want to abolish the proles, you want to liquidate the non-proles. It is, after all, the dictatorship of the proletariat, not the dictatorship of everyone.

            Oh so you’re a mind reader.

            If you want to abandon marx, fine, feel free to do so. but if you don’t drop the name, then you can’t get mad when I point out the crimes committed in it

            No, as I already said Marxism is a very diverse spectrum and in many instances classical Marxist thought has been abandoned. Marxists are not ideologically monolithic.

          • cassander says:

            @An Fírinne says:

            Oh so you’re a mind reader.

            No, just a reader. I’ve read marx, he’s not shy about his goals and his endorsement of terror.

            No, as I already said Marxism is a very diverse spectrum and in many instances classical Marxist thought has been abandoned. Marxists are not ideologically monolithic.

            If you’re calling yourself a marxist, you’re endorsing revolutionary violence, full stop. Marx’s core claim was that societal transition by mass violence was inevitable and beneficial. If you want to reject that claim, feel free, but then you’re no more a marxist than I am a Zoroastrian.

          • Ketil says:

            Faza says:

            You might try to escape these issues by postulating nobody having to do any work whatsoever

            Like you can get total equality of outcome by killing everybody. If you are in favor of that, nobody gets to call you a bigot.

          • Faza (TCM) says:

            Ketil,
            That is, hands-down, my favourite argument about utilitarianism – for it’s name, if nothing else.

        • Civilis says:

          Communism has to do with abolished wealth inequality and class hierarchy. It has nothing to do with totalitarianism.

          There’s a massive inherent contradiction in this statement. In order to abolish wealth inequality, you need to define equality, which means assigning a value to everything, and then stripping that which you deem excess wealth from those that have too much. A body which can dictate the value of everything is by its very nature totalitarian, before getting to the power required to carry out the process of equalization.

          Further, the process generates a class system; whether the evaluation of value is done by politicians or bureaucrats, the people that end up deciding on what value everything has are going to be a superior class over the rest of the population (as are the people that enforce that equality). Even in a small democratic group, some people are better at politicking than others, and some people are more comfortable with using violence to enforce social norms than others, and those people will have a different experience than those who aren’t comfortable with politics or violence. The two will have a fundamentally different view on the value of a system predicated on democratic violence, thus throwing the whole equality ideal out the window. The people that advocate communism seem to come from a class that believes it will rise higher in a society where power is allocated through politics than one where power is allocated through the market.

          Second to all this, there are things even automated luxury communism can’t eliminate the scarcity of, most notably land. Even if making a house is so cheap is to be free, not everyone can have prime beachfront real estate to put their free house on. Any method of land allocation is going to generate classes of winners and losers.

        • Viliam says:

          Communism has to do with abolished wealth inequality and class hierarchy. It has nothing to do with totalitarianism.

          Apparently you never lived in a communist regime. I did. Yeah, it wasn’t the true communism, I know.

          Fascism defined itself as an opposition to both capitalism and communism.

          But even ignoring the history… the real problem is that abolishing economical scarcity doesn’t solve all problems. Even if we assume enough free energy that everyone could terraform their own planet, it is not obvious that everyone would be left alone as long as they don’t attack their neighbors’ planets. People care about what other people do, for both good and bad reasons. There would likely be laws, and a fully automated surveillance to make sure the laws are followed. The question is who would make the laws, and what would those laws be.

          What about reproduction? If the population grows exponencially, sooner or later the scarcity would return, because (assuming we can’t overcome the speed of light) available resources cannot grow exponentially to match the needs of growing population. So to keep the system sustainable, you need at least some laws to regulate reproduction.

          But the laws probably wouldn’t stop there. People enjoy making rules that other people have to follow. Having power over real people would become the scarce resource some people would fight for. It is unlikely that people with most power (i.e. those who would make the rules) would choose to give up this specific form of power, if they don’t have to. More likely, they would keep the right to define what other people can and can’t say or do, such as no blasphemy, no porn, no copyright violation, etc.

          And if it’s literally “communism”, there would be a specific ideology everyone is forced to believe. (With perfect surveillance, and probably even mind-reading.) So the list of forbidden activities would include everything that goes against the ideology.

          • Guy in TN says:

            Apparently you never lived in a communist regime. I did. Yeah, it wasn’t the true communism [link to No True Scotsman], I know.

            Not following the thread or anything, just wanted to chime in and say that this isn’t how that fallacy works.

            Here watch: “I’m a survivor of the horrors of free market capitalism in the United States. Yeah, it wasn’t “true” free market capitalism , but don’t try to clarify your meaning while I strawman you, or you are committing the no true Scotsman fallacy”

          • Faza (TCM) says:

            Guy in TN,
            In this case, you may want to actually follow the thread.

            You see, upthread we have certain claims made about what communism entails being made by someone who, I suspect, has no actual experience with living in a communist, or communist-aspiring, society.

            These claims sound absolutely ridiculous to people who have, such as myself or Viliam. Bringing up the No True Scotsman fallacy is simply heading off claims that what people like us have experienced isn’t “true communism”, but some manner of “errors and distortions” – a claim, notably, made to exonerate the system by laying the blame on specific persons in charge of implementing it.

            As it turns out, the system proved itself to be broken regardless of who was in charge. People were still worse off than under Western capitalist systems. The state still used censorship and violence to suppress dissent. The “dictatorship of the proletariat” was still a plain ol’ dictatorship of the Party apparatus.

            Your application of NTS to “true” free market capitalism adds absolutely nothing, because you aren’t arguing against proponents of “true” free market capitalism.

            There’s a different fallacy involved here.

          • Guy in TN says:

            Bringing up the No True Scotsman fallacy is simply heading off claims that what people like us have experienced isn’t “true communism”,

            No, no, no. Again, that’s not the fallacy. That’s just a debate over a definition.

            You don’t get to “lock down” your preferred definition by heading off any debate over it as “No True Scotsmanning”.

            For example if I say: “I’ve experienced true free market capitalism. My family was drafted to go fight in the horrors of imperialist wars overseas. Now, don’t try to tell me that wasn’t true free market capitalism, because I’ve lived it”, that would be ridiculous.

            (And “whataboutism” isn’t a fallacy, but a sign of intellectual integrity. All my heroes are Whataboutsits)

          • cassander says:

            @Guy in TN says:

            For example if I say: “I’ve experienced true free market capitalism. My family was drafted to go fight in the horrors of imperialist wars overseas. Now, don’t try to tell me that wasn’t true free market capitalism, because I’ve lived it”, that would be ridiculous.

            The trouble with communists and not real communism is the argument always tends to be “the USSR et al weren’t communist and never claimed to be. they merely claimed to be building to communism. we’ve never had actual communism so it’s never been tried and can’t be called a failure.”

            This is not an issue of establishing reasonable definitions, it’s an attempt to render the the failure of an ideology to achieve it’s goals as illegitimate criticism of that ideology. It’s tantamount to arguing that we can’t use the 3rd reich’s actions to evaluate naziism because hitler never got the lebensraum he wanted.

          • Guy in TN says:

            This is not an issue of establishing reasonable definitions, it’s an attempt to render the the failure of an ideology to achieve it’s goals as illegitimate criticism of that ideology.

            Then come up with another catchy fallacy name- because “No True Scotsman” ain’t it.

          • cassander says:

            @Guy in TN says:

            Then come up with another catchy fallacy name- because “No True Scotsman” ain’t it.

            that’s exactly what a no true scottsman is, defining away criticism by saying “no true communist…” It’s setting reasonable definitions that isn’t the fallacy.

          • Guy in TN says:

            that’s exactly what a no true scottsman is, defining away criticism by saying “no true communist…”

            No, it’s not. What you describe as “defining away criticism” is a debate over a definition. In order for it to be “No True Scotsmanning”, he would have to switching his definition around to suit his argumentative needs.

            Insisting on using a certain definition, even if that definition is in his argumentative favor, is not “No True Scotsmanning”.

          • Clutzy says:

            (And “whataboutism” isn’t a fallacy, but a sign of intellectual integrity. All my heroes are Whataboutsits)

            Hat tip to you. Whataboutism is just applying precedent.

          • bullseye says:

            There are two kinds of whataboutism:

            1. “My guy did a bad thing, but your guy did too and you didn’t complain. Therefore you’re a hypocrite.” That’s a solid argument; we should condemn wrongdoing on both sides.

            2. “My guy did a bad thing, but your guy did too, so what my guy did is actually ok.” We should punish the guilty, even if someone else got away with in the past. This type of whataboutism is arguing for no one in power to be punished for anything ever.

          • The Nybbler says:

            @bullseye

            I think the second kind of “whataboutism” can be valid as well. Expanding it a bit: “My guy did a thing that violated some principle you profess to hold, but I do not. Your guy did something violating the same principle, and you didn’t complain, therefore you don’t actually hold that principle and it’s OK.” Or the realpolitik version: “My guy did a thing which violated some rule you and I both wish held, and you claim does. But your guy did something violating the same rule and you made no complaint (and perhaps I did, but it was dismissed), so clearly the rule does not hold.”

            The main distinction I’d make between a valid “whataboutism” and an invalid one (given that the facts are correct) is whether it’s the same principle in both cases.

          • Clutzy says:

            2. “My guy did a bad thing, but your guy did too, so what my guy did is actually ok.” We should punish the guilty, even if someone else got away with in the past. This type of whataboutism is arguing for no one in power to be punished for anything ever.

            No, that is a straw man of that second version. Its simply demanding for the other side, which violated the law/norm first, to be convicted first.

          • Guy in TN says:

            I hate to pile on too much, but one of the more interesting things about accusations of Whataboutism, is how it gives so much more rhetorical power to the accuser vs. the accused. Use of Whataboutism is a “fallacy” in the sense that it doesn’t attempt answer the accusers original question, but this plays on our assumption that the original question was one worth asking, or even that it was answerable.

            For example, if I ask “What is two minus the color blue?” and someone’s response is “that’s a bad question”, they are committing the same underlying fallacy: Deflection, failure to answer, and an ad hominem against the question itself. The only “non-fallacious” response would be to attempt to provide an actual good-faith answer.

            In such an absurd example question, it is easy to see when committing such a fallacy is a reasonable, even ethically appropriate, response. Why we seem to forget this when the question is applied to geopolitcal topics, I’m not sure.

          • ARabbiAndAFrog says:

            Whataboutism is also a completely valid refutation of questionable claims of causation such as trying to promote one’s ideology by only ever mentioning downsides of the opposition you are guilty of yourself or promoting someone’s victim status by focusing on them experiencing universal phenomenon.

            And of course strategic concerns – there’s no point in playing nice when your opponent being naughty, if you go to war, you forfeit your right to complain about being killed.

          • John Schilling says:

            And of course strategic concerns – there’s no point in playing nice when your opponent being naughty,

            If you’re certain you can win without allies, perhaps. Really, you’re going to want to be sure you can win if the other side has all the allies, because one of the standard cognitive biases is to reach the “I’m being just as nasty as the other guy, so this is a fair fight” point at a place where everyone else thinks you’re being much worse than the other guy.

          • ARabbiAndAFrog says:

            That’s why it’s so important to regularly remind that they too are guilty.

          • John Schilling says:

            That’s why it’s so important to regularly remind that they too are guilty.

            s/”they too”/”they only”, or you’ll find that it doesn’t do much to either win you allies or deny them to the other side.

          • albatross11 says:

            I think of whataboutism in terms of just trying to change the subject. How dare you talk about US war crimes when the Saudis are so much worse, how dare you talk about the cultural genocide of the Uighurs when America did worse to its natives, etc. It’s not a fallacy, it’s just an attempt to change the subject via an appeal to guilt or moral outrage.

            The other side of whataboutism is the isolated demand for rigor. It’s entirely legitimate to point out that the speaker is applying different standards of {evidence, morality} to people they like vs people they hate, or change their standards for what’s outrageous depending on who’s being judged or who’s in office. I don’t think it’s whataboutism to point out that a hell of a lot of people outraged about Trump’s cozy relations with Saudi Arabia were fine with similarly cozy relations under past Democratic presidents, nor to have pointed out the same thing when it was Republican shills attacking Obama for being too cozy with the Saudis instead of Democratic shills attacking Trump for it.

    • Faza (TCM) says:

      Having experienced the “wonders” of communism first hand – up to and including family members killed – I guess I sufficiently qualify as “anti-communist”.

      My response to FALC is that it is not communism in any meaningful sense. If the premise is:

      Let the robots do all the work, and let humans enjoy the fruits of their labor in equal measure.

      then what you have is a Fully Automated Leisure Class.

      Interestingly enough, the idea goes all the way back to Marx – except for the “automated” part – which is kind of important.

      There’s a reason why Marx singles out the working class as the main progressive element of society:

      In a higher phase of communist society […] labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want

      Critique of the Gotha Programme

      The slogan of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” that comes at the end of the cited passage should be understood as meaning: everyone works for the common good and everyone benefits from everyone’s work.

      With FALC, nobody works, everyone benefits. Okay, strictly speaking, nobody’s gonna stop you if you want to do some manner of work. The question is: whether it makes any sense to do so.

      Consider what Fully Automated means: machines can do everything that humans do and probably better, to boot. We’re not talking simply material production either; if we assume that intellectual production remains outside the reach of automation, we introduce a scarcity into the system and that has consequences.

      Consider the other feature: equality of participation in the fruits of society’s production. As long as machines are producing everything in abundance – and the machines don’t care about being rewarded – we’re doing fine.

      However, if there’s anything that humans produce, we run into trouble – unless we assume that humans don’t care about being rewarded either, which I don’t consider warranted.

      What happens if the productive people care about being rewarded, but aren’t? Quite likely, they’ll decide that doing anything isn’t worth the bother, given that they’ll be no better off than if they do what everyone else is doing (nothing). Would you go to work if you weren’t getting paid? I wouldn’t. I’ve got better ways of spending my time (such as SSC).

      The only way to get people that don’t see it in their interest to work under certain conditions to nevertheless do so is to force them. Funnily enough, that’s exactly what happened under real-life “communism” (strictly speaking, nobody – including the Communist Parties – claimed that the Soviet-sphere countries were actually communist, yet; they were getting there… eventually.)

      What happens if the productive people care about being rewarded and are? Suddenly you’ve introduced inequalities into a system that was meant to eliminate them. Not all people are going to be capable of being productive members of a society where machines can do the vast majority of the necessary work. You will get differences in status, if nothing else (let’s be honest: that’s probably gonna happen anyway), and you will get resentments.

      The endgame would be calls to abolish any additional rewards for the productive members of society, in order to equalize their outcomes with those of the people incapable of being productive, or unwilling to do so – which takes us back to the previous case.

      It’s also worth mentioning that the “automated” postulate necessarily entails a full shift towards machinery – that is: capital – as the main and sole means of production (well, there’s land, too, but the distinction isn’t that important even today). Therefore, a more appropriate name might be: Fully Automated Luxury Capitalism – organised on the lines of M&M Enterprises: everyone gets a share.

    • John Schilling says:

      This is not a new idea; just a new name. We used to call it “post-scarcity economics” and we still mostly think it is a nice fantasy.

      If it really means that everyone gets their very own Gulfstream G700 just by asking Alexa and having Amazon Hyperprime fly it out to the local airport, with free fuel and everyone telling Greta Thunberg to suck it because of all the robots building carbon-sequestration plants, then you might be on to something. Except that some of us want ginormous antimatter-powered relativistic starships. Can your fully automated luxury communism swing that?

      If the idea is that fully automated luxury communism is going to give everyone a nice upper-middle-class lifestyle and everyone who asks for a G700 is told to shut up and go away by the resource allocation board, then you’ve just got plain old ordinary communism with bigger ration cards. The problem with plain old ordinary communism was never that the ration was just a little bit too small.

      Also, anyone imagining that making communism fully automated and luxurious will be simplified by the fact that nobody really wants anything more than a middle-class lifestyle maybe a few ticks above that of the economics professor coming up with the idea, is dead wrong. And not the version where only a few greedy evil people hold such desires and no harm will come from bringing them low. If you really mean fully-automated luxury communism, then you need to figure out how you’re going to swing G700s for everyone.

      Also also, both plain old ordinary communism and mostly-automated limited-luxury communism absolutely are going to have an elite minority that gets to fly wherever they want in G700s, and to live in penthouse apartments have human secretaries that they can order about at will and in Weinsteinian fashion, because mumble something necessary to the interests of society. But I gather that’s supposed to be OK because they got those things by trading connections rather than filthy cash money.

      • blipnickels says:

        Also, anyone imagining that making communism fully automated and luxurious will be simplified by the fact that nobody really wants anything more than a middle-class lifestyle maybe a few ticks above that of the economics professor coming up with the idea, is dead wrong.

        This, basically. For better or worse, we’re amazingly good at constantly increasing what we want.

        Like, the actual material goods that marked middle class prosperity in the 1950’s were:
        A house
        A car
        A black-and white TV
        A phone.

        I’m pretty sure even someone on minimum wage could meet this material standard of living, as long as they were willing to live in Indianapolis or Georgia or, you know, where people in the 50’s lived. By the 50’s standards America is basically post-scarcity already but no body is satisfied with that standard of living anymore.

        • Ketil says:

          but no body is satisfied with that standard of living anymore.

          Not sure I agree. I don’t particularly want a Gulfstream G700, and while I could probably increase my income (and thus my access to luxury goods) by changing jobs, I don’t make much of an effort beyond asking for an occasional rise. So while I think we aren’t, and will never be, totally post-scarcity, but we are relatively post scarcity, and as affluence grows, we aren’t merely moving the goal post, but also diminishing their importance.

          • John Schilling says:

            Not sure I agree. I don’t particularly want a Gulfstream G700,

            But are you willing to settle for a house, a car, a black-and-white TV, and a landline phone?

            I’m pretty sure want what your (virtual) neighbors have got. You’ll be the one following your neighbors into everybody-has-a-G700 land, not leading, but you’ll get there in the end.

          • Randy M says:

            settle for a house, a car, a black-and-white TV, and a landline phone?

            “Settle” for a house? Sign me up.

          • Ketil says:

            But are you willing to settle for a house, a car, a black-and-white TV, and a landline phone?

            While I consider myself reasonably well off, I don’t own a house, a car, a TV, or a landline phone. I do have an apartment, membership in a car sharing pool, and the ability to view shows over the internet, though. The apartment is the only thing that isn’t affordable to almost everyone.

            But I have neighbors and colleagues and friends who own expensive cars, take their family on exotic vacations, or go to more fashionable and costly restaurants. I don’t envy them enough to make much of an effort to keep up.

            In short, I do think there are limits, and that the importance of material wealth diminishes. I’m sure it varies with culture and social stratum, but it’s a long time since conspicuous consumption was regarded a status symbol, and in the well-off neighborhood I used to live, the more fashionable thing to do was to buy second hand sports equipment.

            Granted, this may be an observation in my particular bubble, or it may be a trend that will reverse.

        • Randy M says:

          as long as they were willing to live in Indianapolis or Georgia or, you know, where people in the 50’s lived.

          I’m not sure this is true, if it implies what I think it does.

          A lot of small poor communities are getting smaller and poorer. Is seems to be easier to be poor/working class in a city amidst the rich than in an out of the way community.

    • Aftagley says:

      Have we already moved past the term “post scarcity?” I liked that term, please don’t replace it with one that needs to carry around communism’s baggage.

      Side note – if work became un-tethered from material goods, is there anyone else besides me who would keep working? Like, I find value in doing a job; not having to worry about paying the rent might influence what jobs I took, but I’d still work. I have literally 0 clue how I would find value in myself or fill my day if I wasn’t working towards or on something.

      • Randy M says:

        Side note – if work became un-tethered from material goods, is there anyone else besides me who would keep working?

        Surely, but I’d not be one looking to ‘get a job’.
        I’d like to think I’d be doing a lot that was useful to other people, but on my own terms and particularly for those I care about.

      • Nornagest says:

        Sure. I was doing work before I got paid for it and I’ll probably still do work after I retire. But it’s much less likely to be work that’s useful to other people, or at the very most people outside a very narrow fandom or social scene.

      • Nick says:

        I would be doing work, but it wouldn’t be work.

      • Lambert says:

        It’d probably be more like an organised hobby or charity volunteering than paid work, but yes.

      • Faza (TCM) says:

        I would be doing work, but it wouldn’t be work.

        That’s a point that is probably worth expanding upon. Yes, quite a few people would probably be willing to do things that today might be classified as “work”. What we probably shouldn’t expect, however, is that they’d be doing:

        – What we want,
        – When we want it,
        – How we want it done.

        In other words, they’d be doing what they want to do and any benefit the rest of society might derive from that would probably be a secondary consideration, at best.

        • Randy M says:

          Unless you breed a more altruistic sort of person (now there’s an interesting premise) or perfect the nervious tissue modification, generally people do things for others because they get something out of it.

          What’s the point of coming over to repair a stranger’s diaper-changing drone at 3:00 am when you get your allotment of space luxury regardless?

        • Faza (TCM) says:

          The inference, I think, is inevitable: we must abolish our current society humanity and elect a better one.

        • LesHapablap says:

          There’s a few things you might earn from doing work at a company in a post-scarcity economy:
          -status
          -pride in a team effort and accomplishment
          -sense of individual accomplishment and personal growth
          -they enjoy it
          -social life

          Work might become like exercise (and working at a company would be like amateur team sports): something people used to have to do to just to survive that is now recognized as necessary to be healthy. People exercise and do team sports for all the above reasons.

          • albatross11 says:

            In the Culture stories, Banks has various volunteer organizations into which ambitious humanoids can try to gain acceptance. They seem to do useful work in those organizations, though it’s pretty clear the humanoids aren’t necessary for most stuff other than maybe being non-scary ambassadors to the non-Culture normals and trying to press them for AI and robot manumission. Being accepted into Contact (State Dept/Peace Corps), Special Circumstances (CIA), etc., is a major source of prestige. On the other hand, there’s no need for more than a tiny, tiny fraction of the humanoids to do that stuff, so its not necessary to have a major incentivization mechanism to get everyone working at useful jobs.

            There are also internal hierarchies–social, artistic, literary, games, etc. With the implicit understanding that even the best artists/composers/etc. couldn’t really compete with the top-tier AIs that run the society at anything. There’s also a mention of a tiny class of what I guess you’d call superpredictors who mysteriously seem to have intuitions/insights that are valuable to the civilization-running AIs.

            I’m not sure that’s a plausible model for a post-scarcity world, but it does sort-of make sense.

          • LesHapablap says:

            Some of the more interesting parts of the Culture series are when Banks deals with how in this FALC world, with all the wireheading etc, people are still people and they still suffer and have petty hierarchies.

            Without work the hierarchies and social life would probably get more petty with all the inherent politicking and backstabbing of life at court, which is presented occasionally in the books. As you say, who knows?

            To extend the work and exercise analogy a little further, I think few people will really work the way we work today, and the closer we get toward FALC the more the ‘work’ will be like cosplaying. People will fantasize about living back in our day when survival meant actually having to work, the days before the real restless ennui set in.

            Just as today a small portion of people go to mock ‘boot camps’ and gyms have big chains, big ropes and tires, in the future some people will go to a mock software company, put on a collared shirt and pocket protector for an hour in the afternoon and play Math Blaster or solve puzzles on an ‘old’ computer. Or a mock drilling rig where they can throw chains around pipes: whatever jobs get fetishized as ‘real work.’ You could either go at your own pace, or pay a personal trainer to act as a genuine 21st century boss.

        • Faza (TCM) says:

          And yet there’s a whole lot of people who don’t exercise, at all.

          For me, personally, any upsides to exercise are completely outweighed by the downsides, so I don’t (other than walking a lot, but that’s mostly because I don’t have a car and don’t like waiting for public transport).

          Regardless, whatever your thoughts on exercise, or work, the problem remains that either someone is doing what you want/need or what they want/need. Sometimes, the two coincide, but a lot of the times they don’t.

          As long as you don’t depend on someone doing what you need done in anyway, it’s not much of an issue. As soon as it matters – you have a problem.

      • Baeraad says:

        Yes, I would keep working. In fact, I was recently offered several weeks of full sick leave for my depression – so not even a lifetime of idleness, just a few weeks extra paid vacation. I still turned it down, because sitting at home just makes me more depressed.

        And I don’t even like my job or find it especially meaningful. It’s just that idleness is dangerous, and not everyone is capable of putting themselves to work absent outside pressure.

        So yes, even if there were no financial incentives at all, I’d want to be put to work. I’d worry less about getting fired, but I’d still put in the effort.

        • Some years back, I assigned myself two hours a day of work on writing projects, seven days a week. It wasn’t for money, which is not my main incentive for writing. It was because I found that playing all of the time (which includes commenting here, playing WoW, reading fiction) left me feeling a bit stale, and two hours a day of work seemed like about enough to solve the problem.

    • Erusian says:

      dispel all historically-rooted and human nature anti-communist arguments.

      How? I don’t see how it dispels any of those.

      Anyway, some issues:
      -The calculation problem has never had a satisfactory answer and remains so devastating to Communist theory that the closest solution they’ve come up with is, “Have a bunch of robots compete capitalistically and then use the wealth that generates to sustain Communism among humans.” While a workable idea, this effectively concedes Communism is not an effective economic engine and reduces humanity to parasites.
      -Automation cannot eliminate scarcity. There will always be scarcity even in things so abundant as to be almost free like what and price mechanisms continue to make sense as a way to meter and distribute them.
      -Human wealth will increase but human expectations will increase along with it. This is the trend of history: as we get wealthier we expect bigger houses, better food, safer cars, and so on. The hedonic treadmill is very real. We could all live at maybe a 19th century level without working if we just lived off our current capital stock. Instead, we choose to have iPhones.
      -Communism does not make sense in a post-scarcity context. Economics of any sort, even Marxist, only makes sense in a scarce system.
      -Some goods cannot be automated. The article mentions having no college debt. Yet seats in a classroom, especially where the small size is part of the draw, are always going to be scarce. The professor’s attention will be scarce. We can increase the number of professors but some will be better or worse and that will continue to create scarcity.
      -Even if this is the future, it is either so far off we only need to make very limited preparations or so unexpected that we cannot make effective preparations. The day where things are so abundant we can afford all these programs and ideas with any ease is at best far off and at worst a fantasy.

      Ultimately, this is all irrelevant speculation. We are not in a scenario where FALC is possible nor is there a conceivable way for it to be possible right now. The article appears to be vaguely handwaving at the glorious utopian ends of far left policies. Notably, it makes absolutely no attempt (nor does their citation) to calculate actual costs and show how it would be possible. The closes it comes to is a work of fiction with a device that is probably physically impossible as portrayed.

      To summarize my overall thoughts on this type of stuff, I believe it was CS Lewis who said the dentist who cures one tootache has done more good in the world than all the utopian theoreticians of any party or allegiance.

    • ARabbiAndAFrog says:

      It’s not really communism if you have enslaved robots. You have just promote everyone into slave-owners and made slaves a bit more robust and obedient. I don’t think the call for debate makes any more sense than asking homophobes to make response to homosexualism being conducted between a man and a woman thus dispensing all historically-rooted anti-gay arguments. But I’d still like to voice some general concerns.

      – Widespread welfare will create population with identifiable negative value. I suppose right now there’s already welfare leeches, but it will create much wider application. Something might be needed to be done with that, either actively in form of some kind of euthanasia or passively, by withdrawing from protecting people who aren’t good for anything anyway.
      – The transition from the first batch of people who own all-purpose robots to benefiting all is not guaranteed. If the leap is significant enough, those who own access codes to production lines will have no more use for the rest of the population than they have for residents of Sentinel Island.
      – I believe people have psychological need to feel useful. Those aren’t creative enough to not be substituted by robots (If such people will exist at all and AI won’t crack the art code) will lead miserable existence. That’s actually something I always wondered about Star Trek universe. There’s space explorers and scientists and all, but they are few and population of planets is in billions. What’s it like living in Federation but not being able to cut it in as a Starfleet officer.

      • Gobbobobble says:

        Ah yes, like how we’ve enslaved our cars, our hammers, our tableware, our roofs, and our socks. Such dastardly humans we are.

        • Statismagician says:

          The means of production themselves are the only proper owners of the means of production!

        • ARabbiAndAFrog says:

          All those things still requires meatbags operating them – who may be compensated or enslaved or maybe work for themselves exclusively. In robocommunism meatbags will not participate in workforce. True communism will do away with employer class which isn’t true for FALC, which would transfer everyone into employer class instead.

          In either case, it’s not a moral condemnation of automation, merely a comparison with a different system.

    • JayT says:

      I basically read this question as “if the world was perfect in exactly the way I imagine a perfect world, would my preferred style of government be perfect?”

      I just find the whole idea silly, because there is no such thing as a post-scarcity world, because there are certain things that no amount of technology will make plentiful. I like the Bay Area largely because of the mix of a big city and good weather. For me to live what I would consider a “luxurious” life, I would need to own a mansion close to downtown San Francisco. Not a really nice condo, but a huge house with a big yard where my dog can run around and my wife can garden. There are basically no other places in the US that would meet my requirements, and only a few around the world. Judging by the cost of houses that fit that description, I’m going to guess that I’m not the only one that wants that. How do you decide who gets it?

      • Aapje says:

        Exactly. Fully free labor will merely eliminate some of the scarce things, but very far from all of them.

        It’s a bit similar to how automation made some jobs far more productive, but did far less for other jobs, so we now spend much more money on the jobs that resist automation.

        Similarly, in a post-labor society, stuff that can’t be produced by labor becomes relatively more expensive. The rich people of that society will have more of that stuff.

    • proyas says:

      “Fully Automated Luxury Communism” would exist within a capitalist economic system. The human race would be akin to a trust fund baby who lives in a free luxury condo, gets a $20,000/mo allowance from daddy (AIs and human tycoons like Jeff Bezos), and has chauffers, maids and butlers to do all of his menial work. From his perspective, everything is fully automated since he has to do no work, he lives a luxurious lifestyle, and he gets all essential and intermediate-level needs met “for free” since they’re trivially cheap compared to his “income.” However, his lifestyle is only possible thanks to daddy’s capitalist enterprise, which creates wealth in the market and funnels a little bit of it to junior.

      https://www.militantfuturist.com/will-future-technologies-end-capitalism-no/

    • Communism isn’t communism unless it abolishes the institution of property rights and money. Full automation means no more human labor not no more scarcity, so choosing between different scarce uses of resources would still be important. An easy way to go forwards to that without a disruptive revolution would be to take the system of welfare capitalism we already have, and then make the welfare system universal AKA UBI.

      More importantly, “full automation” can be taken one of two ways; one is that machines will perform all wage labor including manufacturing machines, and the other is that capital allocation is also automated. If capital allocation is automated, then the government will also need to be automated to keep up and regulate the system. So at the lower level interpretation of full automation capitalists will still be producing greater or lesser value based on how they apply an automated workforce, and at the higher level the capitalists themselves are automated and in reaction also the government, and so you eventually just have a regular society only run by hyper-intelligent machines. There seems little room at any stage in this historical process to fit a stateless, classless, moneyless, society built on common ownership of the means of production.

      We could have the state allocating capital and deciding between alternate uses of an automated workforce, but I think you get something that looks like a Fully Automated Luxury Soviet Command Economy, and not end stage communism. An actually existing socialism that no longer needs to coerce workers, but still needs to decide between alternate uses of scarce resources, and still gets wrapped up in debates over whether allowing the command center to compute shadow prices is ideologically authentic, or whether going further and just putting a computer in charge of the capital allocation is taking away control from the proletariat and so on. Again it depends on how literally we interpret “fully automated”.

      If machines are under our control, then economic allocation and the whole kit and kaboodle that comes with it matters, and if machines are not under our control, then we are in fact under their control and the whole question about organizing our society gets shelved. As soon as they start thinking for us, it really becomes their society.

    • RalMirrorAd says:

      1. If things are truly fully automated then humans are of no value to eachother if they don’t derive any positive social interactions. I.E. the strangers that live in another country could all be eradicated and it would only serve to increase the wealth of the remaining individuals simply because it increases their share of robots. (controlling for destructive risk of war) The marginal economic value of adding an extra human is always zero but the marginal cost is not since physical resources, time, and space are still limited even if labor doesn’t require any human input.

      2. Full automation doesn’t guaranty the kind of heavily non-egoistic behavior that’s associated with working communism. Ambition isn’t driven solely by desperation and so abolishing poverty won’t change the desire of some people to be at the top of hierarchies.

    • eigenmoon says:

      If you’re into Russian synth/techno operas, here’s one about Fully Automated Luxury Communism. In the opera USSR still exists in 2032 and has a working AI-controlled planned economy. As the AI prepares a transition to Fully Automated Luxury Communism, the Politburo realizes that nobody will need the government anymore and decides to block the transition. They insert a new axiom into the AI: humans need to work in order to fulfill their full potential and achieve maximum utility. Soon the AI figures out that the continuing existence of Fully Automated Luxury Capitalist countries is not optimal because people there don’t work.

  21. Reading Caplan’s Open Borders, I decided to go back and look at the origin of the “double world GDP” claim. The study cites four different papers with estimates of a 67-147.3% increase in world GDP. Taking the most recent one by Klein and Ventura, I’ll just quote the following:

    This paper deals with the long-run consequences of Total Factor Productivity (TFP) differences for the optimal allocation of factors of production across locations. We ask: in the presence of TFP differences, what would the world’s distribution of the labor force be in the long run if labor and capital were allocated optimally across locations? What does such an efficient allocation imply for world output and other variables? We provide answers to
    these questions at two levels. First, we analytically derive the implications for labor movements and capital accumulation of TFP differences in a two location, one-sector growth model in a number of cases. Second, we assess
    the quantitative implications of efficient allocations in such a model. We find that even moderate differences in TFP lead to large effects on the optimal location of labor, as well as sizeable increases in total (world) output, capital
    and its division across locations.

    {Snip}

    It is perhaps worth stressing that we take TFP differences as exogenous. We do not take a stand here on the origins of these differences; rather, we take the view that our results are robust to several possible origins. In particular, it should be clear that our results remain valid if TFP differences arise from barriers to technology adoption, poor protection of property rights, inefficient regulation or, generally speaking, bad institutions. There is one important
    caveat to this, however. It could be possible that, under the correct theory of the origins of TFP, large movements of workers, as the ones emerging in our analysis, have an impact on TFP in either or both locations. We ignore this potential effect here. Taking this effect into account would require an appropriate theory of the origins of TFP, and we are not aware of one.

    The last sentence is hilarious especially given the fact that it follows “poor protection of property rights, inefficient regulation or, generally speaking, bad institutions.”

    • Clutzy says:

      So the model assumes extremely high rates of assimilation?

      • RalMirrorAd says:

        More that whatever mystery variable[s] that cause high productivity in one area of the world doesn’t change through massive transfers of population. Talking about assimilation makes certain implicit assumptions about the cause.

        • Ketil says:

          I’m not sure what the controversy is – are you implying that the causes of differences may be inherent to the people, rather than caused by societal or governmental properties?

          I think there is a lot of evidence that people moving from $(poor country) to $(rich country) tend to get better off than those remaining behind, and that people of the same genetic material perform vastly different under different regimes (East/West Germany, South/North Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan vs PRC, and so on).

          And market forces/greed would make people move in the direction of opportunity, as if handed the tickets by an invisible hand.

          • Clutzy says:

            I think the point is that by focusing on those things you are simply pointing out a free-rider problem, but doing so positively. If you aren’t making the economic and political structures better, you are just benefiting from them, not really contributing.

            This is like the old Connecticut complaint of people moving there from New York for the lower taxes, only for those people to vote for higher taxes in Connecticut.

          • RalMirrorAd says:

            I didn’t use the word controversy. All i said was, the authors assume that whatever factor explains differences in productivity between regions is not affected by shifting billions of people around the planet. Making people from low productivity regions of the world supermajorities eveywhere will have no negative effects on productivity anywhere, for any reason.

            For example you *could* chalk high productivity 100% to example, “legal System” and even more so that collective genetic tendencies has no effect on productivity and no effect on influencing variables that influence productivity. But if you live under a more “corrupt” or dysfunctional system you are more likely to tacticly or actively support bringing such a system along with you. That support isn’t normally felt at the standard pace of migration but would be if you’re talking about tens of millions across all nations in a very short span of time.

            My own model of explaining productivity which is obviously not shared by the author would be something like: Basket of laws + Basket of behavioural genetic tendencies + interaction between the prior two.

            You need to explain things like east-west germany and north-south korea where a legal system was imposed and you have a natural experiment where behavioral genetics were controlled for (basket of laws)

            Then you need to explain the opposite, why communities of distinct ethnic groups within a country that has roughly similar laws can result in vastly different qualities of life for those communities. (your behavioral variable )

            Lastly you also need to explain why western legal systems simply don’t “take” easily in certain parts of the world unless they are imposed from the outside or dictatorially (Your interaction term)

            (obviously each of the 3 ‘variables’ would likely be a combination of several smaller variables.

          • albatross11 says:

            Clutzy:

            I think culture and to some extent even instutitions/governance structures are non-rivalrous. When a Nigerian economist and a Chinese engineer and an Indian doctor come to the US, they benefit from our culture and institutions, but they don’t deplete them. Indeed, we’re almost certainly gaining a lot from their presence, since they’re now here doing their work as part of *our* economy and society. This seems like almost the definition of a win-win transaction.

            There are some limits there–if a billion Chinese all show up tomorrow, our culture and institutions will be swamped[1]. But for anything like current rates of immigration, I don’t think that’s a major problem. At least, I’d like to see evidence that it’s a major problem before accepting the claim.

            [1] This is one reason I’m not convinced by the open-borders arguments.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            @albatross11: Indeed, we benefit from controlled immigration each time one of those highly-educated immigrants takes a job within our borders (the wage-depressing effect of increasing supply is swamped in utility by being able to increase the total number of jobs above what our institutions can even supply that day).
            This is pretty much unrelated to open borders, which would attract low-productivity people seeking benefits.

          • Clutzy says:

            There are some limits there–if a billion Chinese all show up tomorrow, our culture and institutions will be swamped[1]. But for anything like current rates of immigration, I don’t think that’s a major problem. At least, I’d like to see evidence that it’s a major problem before accepting the claim.

            A decent steelman for current rates of immigration is in scott’s old reactionary explainer, or for a favorable view of it see the book, “The Emerging Democratic Majority.” I’ve warmed to this view over the years.

          • This is pretty much unrelated to open borders, which would attract low-productivity people seeking benefits.

            Does Caplan assume that immigrants to rich countries are eligible for welfare?

            If not, then low productivity people are also a gain for the rest of us, along standard comparative advantage lines. Possibly more of a gain than the high productivity people, lots of which we already have.

          • The Nybbler says:

            Depends on how widely you define welfare. What’s the cost to all levels of government to support one immigrant family that’s not on welfare? Schools, municipal services, etc? Any household that pays less in taxes than costs they impose is a net negative for taxpayers, even if it’s not due to what we call welfare.

          • Any household that pays less in taxes than costs they impose is a net negative for taxpayers, even if it’s not due to what we call welfare.

            Correct on the tax/govt expenditure part of the interaction, but the household still might provide net benefits due to gains from trade.

            Also, if the immigrants do not qualify for welfare, they are paying for something they are not getting, so if they were average they would be a net positive. That means they can be some distance below average in income (hence tax payments) and still not net negative.

          • Clutzy says:

            Does Caplan assume that immigrants to rich countries are eligible for welfare?

            If not, then low productivity people are also a gain for the rest of us, along standard comparative advantage lines. Possibly more of a gain than the high productivity people, lots of which we already have.

            He does assume they will not get welfare (although he skirts around the important point of natural born citizens and households in general). But I don’t think its a rational position to assume that is a politically stable environment. Maintaining that large of an underclass would be like managing the slave populations in the antebellum south x10.

          • The Nybbler says:

            Correct on the tax/govt expenditure part of the interaction, but the household still might provide net benefits due to gains from trade.

            They might, but they might not. And those gains might go to other people; their employers is likely get the lions share of the gains (other than the gains to themselves) while their neighbors get the lions share of the losses.

            (and as Clutzy points out, you can’t deny them welfare; you’ll have political ads featuring cute-but-pitiful crying Hispanic baby girls as soon as the policy goes into effect if not sooner, and that’ll be the end of that)

          • albatross11 says:

            There are public services we can’t reasonably deny them–particularly public education (unless we want a permanent class of uneducated helots) and emergency medical assistance (unless we want losing your papers to mean the hospital won’t treat your heart attack). There are other public services whose benefit is largely in having them available to everyone in your society–making sure nobody in my community is literally starving has a lot more value than making sure that only the noncitizens in my society aren’t starving. Some public health measures (widespread vaccinations, a lot of hygiene requirements) lose much of their benefit when they leave a big chunk of the population out.

          • BlueSam says:

            About the fiscal effects of immigration, the arguments in the book rely mostly on this report from the National Academy of Sciences:

            https://d279m997dpfwgl.cloudfront.net/wp/2016/09/0922_immigrant-economics-full-report.pdf

            He focuses on the long-run net fiscal cost of immigrants, considering discounted costs and contributions of their children, grandchildren, etc, considering they will be citizens. They find that immigrants in general are net contributors. If you breakdown their demographics, older immigrants (>65 if I recall correctly) are costlier than younger immigrants, and low skilled immigrants are costlier than high skilled immigrants. Combining these effects, only immigrants who are both older AND low-skilled are a net fiscal cost.

            Of course, this study is based on the current immigrants and the current welfare system.

    • teneditica says:

      You must laugh a lot if you find everything you read that makes some simplifying assumptions hilarious.

    • Caplan believes in a modified form of Magic Dirt Theory, so it’s not surprising he would uncritically accept this argument.

  22. proyas says:

    “Biological technology” is a common sci-fi trope, and is used to emphasize the “alien-ness” of aliens. Instead of having a division between mechanical technology and biological life forms like we do, an alien species will have “organic technology.” Typically this allows them to do things like rapidly heal their damaged space ships or bodies, or to directly interface their minds with their technology, removing the need to input data or commands by pushing buttons.

    Is there any reason to think biological technology will actually hold any advantages over nonbiological technology?

    • Rapid healing of ones body is obviously advantageous. For the spaceships, self-healing requires an organism to turn resources from elsewhere into new cells, if your spaceship is in deep space, you can’t cut it in two and expect two spaceships to appear the way you can cut up a worm. It would have to self-heal by moving stuff from one part of the spaceship to another. While aliens may take inspiration from biological systems, they have a lot of redundancies they’d want to eliminate. So the ship wouldn’t look like the aliens the way it does in sci-fi, where purple aliens fly around in a purple starship. Nanomachines are a better analogy than parts of a living organism.

    • Urstoff says:

      I really don’t want to have to feed my television and then have to clean up its poop

      • CatCube says:

        I really want to see this updated gritty version of The Flintstones, now. “Wilma, the toaster peed on the floor again!”

        • MrApophenia says:

          They did a gritty comic reboot of the Flintstones a couple years ago. It’s wild. There’s a whole plot line about how Fred and Barney participated in a genocide of the Neanderthals back in their army days.

    • John Schilling says:

      I can get a body shop to rebuild a car after a pretty bad wreck in a week or two. How long does it take biology to heal a broken leg, again? The usual science-fiction version of “biological technology” is just magic plus handwaving plus the right buzzwords.

    • Protagoras says:

      None whatsoever. Biological technology is using horses instead of cars; sure, there are a lot of ways that future technology will enable improvements to horses, but absolutely no reason to think they’ll ever be preferable to cars in any but niche applications, insofar as all indications are that future cars will have improved even more. As Schilling notes, living things do not for the most part heal rapidly, organic technology doing that is SF magic. They also only heal from some kinds of injuries, they don’t regenerate any damage whatever to good as new condition. Organic technology could try to improve on that, but there’s no reason self-repair couldn’t also be implemented in mechanical technology; in admittedly very limited ways it already is. But the self-repair systems are likely to themselves be fragile, and finicky, and slow, and require resources to operate. So building things more robust to require less repair, and doing the repairs in a repair shop if they do become necessary, is and probably will always remain better for most applications. Living things don’t work that way because there isn’t an evolutionary path to repair shops.

      • proyas says:

        The advantage of horses over cars is that horses can get “fuel” nearly anywhere, and can seek it out on their own.

        • John Schilling says:

          So can cars, if we want them to and especially if we are willing to limit them to 1-2 horsepower. Wouldn’t even require much in the way of new technology; wood gasifiers were a thing in WW2, hook one of those up to a gang mower and a bit of self-driving smartness, and let your car loose on the nearest pasture.

          Though really, specialization is a thing and there’s no reason for nature to have optimized it for our benefit. Almost certainly the transportation and fuel-acquisition functions will be split between specialized systems.

          • What about the fact that horses require nothing in the way of advanced tech in the way of upkeep? You can theoretically have a pack of horses on your farm and be completely self sustaining indefinitely. If your horse “breaks”, you can use one of the offspring. Is there an equivalent for that in terms of car design, where once you get the necessary tech, you don’t have to rely on sophisticated trade networks to get the necessary parts when things break?

          • Protagoras says:

            These pro-horse replies are bizarre. Obviously, horses have some limited advantages which make them superior in certain niche applications (I did mention niche applications), but equally obviously they have been almost completely replaced as a means of getting around, for reasons that far from showing any sign of reversing themselves seem overwhelmingly likely to grow stronger with time.

          • Ketil says:

            hook one of those up to a gang mower and a bit of self-driving smartness, and let your car loose on the nearest pasture.

            Makes for more vivid imagery than paperclip optimizers, if nothing else.

          • Lambert says:

            > What about the fact that horses require nothing in the way of advanced tech in the way of upkeep?

            Have you never heard of farriery?

          • @Lambert

            Horses don’t need it in the way that cars need mechanics. People were able to ride horses before horseshoes existed.

          • John Schilling says:

            I’m pretty sure the number of veterinarian-hours per passenger-mile for the horse, is higher than the number of mechanic-hours per passenger-mile for the car. And no, the veterinarian is not optional except insofar as you can demand that everyone who ride a horse do their own amateur veterinary work.

            Horses are, and always have been, about the highest-maintenance draft animals around. The idea that you can just leave one grazing in the back 40 and, whenever you need to go someplace, just hop on and ride, will get you a dead horse about as quickly as driving a car without ever changing the oil will get you a dead car. Really, y’all should be using donkeys for this hypothetical, with any horses in the system being used mostly to turn donkeys into mules.

          • Ariel Ben-Yehuda says:

            A horse can operate quite well given some food and a small group of people with some skill in maintaining horses.

            A car needs not only a mechanic to operate, but also a source of spare parts, which requires a very large amount of specialized workers and capital to create and manage.

            Of course, these can be amortized over many, many cars, so if you live in a civilization you don’t need to care about it much.

      • fibio says:

        no reason to think they’ll [horses] ever be preferable to cars in any but niche applications

        Funny, I’d say it’s almost the complete opposite way. The horse is the generalist, good at most things but never fantastic at any of them, while the car is the specialist, focused on getting objects from A to B.

        • Protagoras says:

          No inconsistency; it’s entirely possible for it to be the case that a generalist is only superior in niche applications, because most applications require only a narrow range of abilities.

    • ARabbiAndAFrog says:

      One thing that just occured to me is that if something is growing on its own, it might not need the same kind of access it would take to bring people or machines to build it. Not sure if this is good for anything in particular.

      A spaceship made of flesh is ultimately not very useful, but a technology that can fit into an ecosystem and function and grow by eating stuff might be of some use.

    • Incurian says:

      Tiny machines might end up resembling cells. Dunno how the metaphor holds at the macro level.

      • proyas says:

        Maybe it means that it would be useful for mechanical technology to copy some aspects of biological systems, such as cells. Your mechanical space ship made of metal might have a whole bunch of multipurpose robots inside of it of different shapes and sizes that can fix and modify themselves, each other, and the ship. If the ship were damaged, the robots could work together like ants or immune cells to rapidly fix it.

        However, it would be a bad idea to take the idea to the next level by making the ship and the robots organic instead of metal.

        • beleester says:

          There are real proposals for “self-healing concrete” containing tiny chemical capsules that break and seal cracks automatically. One can easily imagine that, if you were designing something to be self-healing in an even more hostile environment (say, space battleships), you might have the equivalent of a “circulatory system” to deliver repair materials to damaged areas, or other larger-scale biological features.

          It wouldn’t look like a biological organism, though – it would be more like the Espees in Schlock Mercenary where their skin and bones are actually made of sci-fi composites. Not something that evolved as we know it, something that’s the end result of a self-improving machine running for a few hundred years.

          • bean says:

            Warships are already self-healing to a limited extent. It’s called damage control. The corridors the DC teams run down, carrying their materials? That’s the circulatory system.

            I’d also point out that in space, the two main sources of progressive damage, fire and flood, are absent, which greatly reduces the need for damage control.

          • The Nybbler says:

            Flood is absent, but fire certainly is not; there was a 1997 fire on Mir, for instance. I’m not sure how it would work on a warship, whether or not sealing-off and venting fire areas would be sufficient or whether there would be too many materials that could burn in the absence of oxygen.

          • Incurian says:

            “Well, the good news is that once the oxygen ran out, it stopped the fire from spreading. The bad news is all our oxygen ran out.”

    • proyas says:

      BTW, I can imagine a narrow application where something like this would be useful. If you had an implant in your brain that let you mentally interface with computers around you through WiFi, it could help since you’d always have some means of communication even if you lost your smartphone or if there weren’t any video displays or keyboards around you. (Yes, this isn’t exactly the same as the “biological technology” I was describing in my OP.)

      If your brain implant has been forcefully removed, then it probably means you’re dead, so you’ve got nothing to worry about.

    • Radu Floricica says:

      Colonization, or anything that’s remote and could benefit from multiplication and independence. Mechanical technology usually need a heavily industrialized foundation. You can print mechanical parts, but I predict you’ll hit hard limits on what you can build pretty early, and you still need a finite stock of electronics.

      In this respect Alien was pretty realistic. Send a bunch of eggs, wait a few decades, have a new planet terraformed/conquered.

      • Protagoras says:

        Bah. Industrial operations are large scale much more because they’re more efficient that way than because it’s the only way to do things. I see no basis for your prediction of “hard limits” on what can be done with small scale stuff like printing. Anyway for colonization specifically you really want the efficiency, so you want to find a way to set up large scale industrial operations, not a way to bypass them.

        • Radu Floricica says:

          How do you make a pen on Mars from raw materials? Let’s assume for the sake of the argument that you need a regular pen, not a pen-like instrument. How do you print a spring? paint? ink? how do you bore the channel where ink flows?

          And I don’t really see the need for efficiency in colonization – if we could make biological agents that use Mars raw materials to reproduce, exponential growth makes the actual growth rate almost irrelevant.

          • Lambert says:

            Hand forge a length of wire from some billet.
            Heat and wind around a rod to make the spring.
            Heat treat.
            Make body using lathe.
            Build spherical centreless grinding machine in shop, centreless grind rollerball.
            Synthesize azide ink from carbon/hydrocarbons of some kind and ammonia.

          • Protagoras says:

            Your biological agents also need to be able to survive on what’s available on Mars, and if you’re using them to terraform they need to be able to survive the changing conditions they themselves create. The task of designing such a lifeform seems challenging, and much more challenging to make one which will do the job quickly. As a result, my money is still on the task of figuring out how to establish an industrial base and get exponential economic growth going being easier (not easy, of course, just easier).

          • Radu Floricica says:

            @Lambert @Protagoras

            Question was of potential advantages. I admit the difficulty is high right now – though there are quite a lot of unknown unknowns, and it’s hard to tell if over 50-100 years bio or mechanical will hold the advantage for this type of application.

            But the key in my point is how likely it is that you’ll need an exact replica of a pen, vs “any writing ustensil”. With mechanical tech you don’t really do approximations – for large scale industrialization, a truck part is a truck part, and trying to make do with ad hoc replacements means basically redesigning what an industrial base means. More often than not you’ll need earth-standard-parts – not because they’re the best solution on mars, but because replacing them means tweaking something else, and in the end you’re left with redesigning everything from scratch.

            I’m not talking about making a pen per se – Lamber’s answer is pretty good with that. I’m saying most parts will need to have an improvised alternate process for building them, while on earth this process is called “looking for a supplier”.

            Biology is much more forgiving at this level. Given advances that don’t exist yet, you engineer a set of organisms that create an atmosphere-producing ecology. You probably end up needing a few dozen species, most of them bacteria and lichen. For actual landscape modifications you might build lichen eating moles with the instinct of burrowing tunnels in a certain pattern. Future-tech, sure, but the complexity you’re dealing with seems to be somewhat more contained.

      • John Schilling says:

        You can print mechanical parts, but I predict you’ll hit hard limits on what you can build pretty early

        You’ll hit limits on what you can grow even earlier. Try growing something with a wheel or a rotating shaft, for example. One of the most basic, awesomely useful mechanical technologies, and biology basically can’t do it. And you can say that biology does legs which are a perfectly good substitute for wheels because mumble something I need an excuse to turn down this guy challenging me to a foot race where he gets a bicycle.

        You can find biological hacks around most of the limitations of biology, but that’s like saying you can find mechanical hacks around the limitations of 3-D printing. With 3-D printing, people can articulate the advantages that might sometimes be worth those disadvantages. With “biotech”, it’s mostly handwaving about how biology does everything all by itself, pay no attention to the pissed-off farmers and veterinarians and whatnot whose skilled trades you have just implicitly devalued.

    • fibio says:

      I can think of three specific reasons and one general umbrella reason. To start with the specifics.

      1) No builder knowledge required. Biology is fantastic in that, for most of human history, it was capable of producing the most powerful and flexible computer system using nothing but a pair of monkeys and some peanuts. If you don’t know how to build a car, or don’t have the resources to build a car, it is a fantastic thing to be able to get a new ‘car’ (or horse, or whatever biological machine you’re using instead) just by leaving two together in a room and waiting. If you do know how to build a car then the biological option is by far the slowest way of getting something to take you from A to B. Case in point, the 20th century and the incredibly rapid shift from horsepower transport to combustion powered transport.

      Complete aside but I now need to go off and write a story about an alien species putting their battleship out to stud. Is that weird?

      2) Redundancy and repair. Biological systems are, almost universally, specialized towards continuing to function regardless of what you throw at them. There are some obvious exceptions, for example a horse going lame from a broken leg, but for the most part if you injure your ride it’ll be better in a few weeks to months. If you destroy a tire or axle in a car you have to replace it. Great if you have the replacement to hand, crippling if you don’t or don’t even know how to replace it.

      This ease of use also extends to the inputs, a biological system is capable of producing its own fuel and materials from stuff you find just lying around, but at a fraction of the efficiency of a dedicated production line. Awful if you have that infrastructure but fantastic if you don’t. There’s probably also a benefit that your organic technology is probably edible in a pinch, but that’s another catastrophe only benefit.

      3) Flexibility. Biological systems are adaptable within their niche and are even capable of limited problem solving, brain or no brain. There are many stories of people being injured in the saddle and being saved by dint of their horse knowing the route home, or by their dog being smart enough to go and get help in a crisis. To bang the drum, this is pretty useless when you’re using a system to do something predictable and repetitive, but a big advantage when off the edge of the map.

      Altogether these point to a big general advantage which is catastrophe proofing a civilization. If you don’t have the roads, the tools or the fuel then a car will barely get you over the horizon while horses have been known to take people across Eurasia and back. If you do have all those things you’d be better using a car.

    • Garrett says:

      On the large-scale, mind/computer interfaces might be useful in cases where we don’t yet have a good way to automate a process which requires fast response. Or as a way of facilitating input in 0g or maneuvering.

      On the small-scale, the emergent properties of biology are fascinating and you might imagine that future computers are powered by neurons-in-a-box. We’re currently genetically engineering yeast to make insulin in vats for medical purposes. I can see a bunch of “biology does it better than metal” approaches, but that’s very application-specific.

      • albatross11 says:

        In some sense, that’s taking biological systems and using them as components in an industrial process–engineered yeast making some protein we need, growing copies of a vaccine strain of influenza in eggs, industrial fermentation processes for making ethanol, etc. It’s quite likely that we’ll continue doing this, and maybe expand it as our command of biology grows. In some sense, this is kind-of what factory farms look like, too.

    • Paul Brinkley says:

      The most likely advantage I see to a seamless fusion of biology with technology is that you can scare the hell out of neighboring sentient races.

  23. sunnydestroy says:

    For all those interested in finance/investing:

    AQR Capital, a major quant heavy investing firm, says value stocks are looking cheap and overlooked right now.

  24. Black Ice says:

    I just had an idea for a new type of playing cards.

    There would be one “0” card that looks like this:

    000
    000
    000

    Nine “1” cards that look e.g. like this:

    000
    00X
    000

    A “5” card might happen to look like this:

    XX0
    0X0
    XX0

    And there would be one “9” card that looks like this:

    XXX
    XXX
    XXX

    These cards would have two values, as it were: the number written on them (8, say) plus some particular configuration of X and 0 out of all the possible ways to represents that value.

    Two questions:

    1. How many playing cards would there be in total in this set, and how many of each “suit” (number)? I’m not that clever with factorials…

    2. What kind of games (gambling or otherwise) might be possible using these cards?

    • Don_Flamingo says:

      2^9 in the deck, since each card has an equivalent binary number. Unless you’re insisting that:

      0x
      xx
      0x

      is the same card as:

      x0
      xx
      x0

      then I’d have to use my brain, which is preoccupied at the moment.
      2^9 = 512 cards.
      That’s a lot.
      Card game with the most cards I ever played was Skyjo which has 12*13 + 20ish cards. Less than half. But probably something like that.
      A game with many people who are trying to optimize/minimize their matrix/table in front of them plus a large drawstack. Perhaps just simply upscale Skyjo.

      • johan_larson says:

        512 is roughly the number of cards in a box of Magic boosters: 36 packs times 14 cards per pack, excluding lands and tokens. Games like Trivial Pursuit and Cards Against Humanity have similar numbers of cards, too. If you’re playing with a full set, in each hand, the players will be handling way less than the full set of cards.

        But just to start with, you could play something like this. Your goal is to assemble a set of cards that add up to an XXX/XXX/XXX hand, with none of the Xes overlapping. You can knock any time you have a set with coverage of at least 6 Xes, and score the difference between your coverage and the opponent’s. If you can assemble XXX/XXX/XXX you score extra. Like in Gin Rummy, you play with a deck face down and a discards pile face up. Every turn, you must draw a card from either the face-up or face-down pile, and you must also discard a card.

        To be clear, suppose you have cards XX0/000/000 and 00X/00X/000 and 000/0X0/000. These combine to XXX/0XX/000, for a score of 5. You could add 000/000/XX0, improving the score to 7, but you could not add X00/X00/X00 because it has an X overlapping with the first card.

        For a game like this, it would probably be best to take out all the high-coverage cards, like XXX/XXX/XXX, which basically win the hand on their own. Or maybe stipulate that only hands with at least three cards are valid. I’m not sure. It would take some tuning.

        • johan_larson says:

          And to add a defensive aspect, let non-scoring cards knock out scoring cards, but only if they are a strict subset of the scoring card. So 0XX/000/000 could knock out XXX/000/000, but it could not knock out XX0/000/000.

      • Viliam says:

        2^9 = 512 cards.
        That’s a lot.

        From the description, the fact that there are 9 symbols on a card (or that they are in a 3×3 grid) seems irrelevant, so I would recommend to play-test the idea with e.g. 6 symbols, which gives 2^6 = 64 cards. Or maybe even 5 symbols and 32 cards.

    • meh says:

      for ‘n’ x’s there are 9 choose ‘n’ cards.

    • littskad says:

      You can use the Lemma that is not Burnside’s to count the number of cards.

      Although there are 512 cards if you can tell which way is up on each card, we can take symmetries into account to get that:

      There are 140 different cards if each card is square and you remove cards which would be duplicates under 90 degree rotations.

      There are 272 different cards if each card is rectangular, and only 180 degree rotations would count for duplicates.

      • Eric Rall says:

        I was disappointed to click the link and find that the lemma was named for the English mathematician William Burnside. I was really, really hoping to find out that Ambrose Burnside was an accomplished mathematician in addition to his distinctions as a mediocre General in the US Civil War and as a pioneer of facial hair styling.

  25. johan_larson says:

    Our friends with the giant spaceships have decided to get into the ditch-digging business. They are offering to dig you up to 1000 km of ditches. These are very big ditches, at 10 m deep and 10 m wide at the bottom; the tops are wider still, with the exact width depending on the angle of repose required by the surrounding soil. These ditches could be dug anywhere on the surface of the earth, and you may divide the 1000 km into as many as 10 segments of at least 1 km each.

    Where do we have too much ground and not enough hole?

    (Let me add that our friends are offering ditches, not mines, so the ditches can’t be overlapping. But they can be right next to each other. Done this way, you could have a single hole, 10 m deep, measuring roughly 3 km by 3 km.)

    • Tatterdemalion says:

      The plan to connect the Qattara depression to the Med that Scott mentioned a few weeks ago seems like an obvious use.

      • beleester says:

        The ditches are too shallow, I think. You would need a continuous path of land that’s no more than 10m above sea level, otherwise the aliens won’t dig deep enough. Checking a map, it looks like there’s some 200m high hills between the Depression and the ocean.

      • Grek says:

        How about a nice long channel north from the Niger in Mali into the Sahara? Double thick.

    • JPNunez says:

      Gonna build another Maginot Line.

      This time it’s gonna work!

      Given it’s 1000km and the Maginot line was 1500km Imma leave some parts of Belgium unguarded. I am sure it will be fine.

    • Chalid says:

      Make a kind of inverted Palm Jumeirah near Dubai. Dubai is the sort of place that would effectively take advantage of having a whole lot of extra waterfront property open up, and there’s lots of empty desert to do it in.

    • Garrett says:

      At almost exactly the right length, a path from Yakutsk, Sakha Republic, Russia to Talon, Magadan Oblast, Russia, 685941 on top of which a railway could be built.

      It would open up a mineral-rich, economically-poor area. More importantly, it would facilitate the eventual construction of a useful bridge across the Bering Strait.

      • johan_larson says:

        You want them to dig a ditch, pile the dirt in a berm next to it, and then you’ll build a railway on the berm?

        • Garrett says:

          Or use it as a tench to be filled in with gravel, with the trench smoothing out a lot of the terrain.

    • The Nybbler says:

      Digging ditches is something man is pretty darned good at; shallow ditches like that don’t need giant spaceships, just heavy equipment or a whole lot of men with shovels. So the only reason to get the spaceship people to help are places we can’t easily dig for whatever reason, e.g. high granite mountains.

      It would be tempting to open up road access to Juneau, Alaska… but the ditch probably isn’t really deep enough to be a help, and besides, Alaskans probably prefer their capital isolated. So I’d say “Thanks, but no thanks”.

      • johan_larson says:

        Could one of the civil engineers in this forum give us an approximate price for one of these ditches, if it were dug with modern equipment by humans? Presumably this would vary by soil conditions and weather and whatnot, but let’s try.

        • CatCube says:

          It’ll vary significantly by soil conditions and whatnot, by several orders of magnitude.

          I’m not one of our cost estimators so I don’t have super-detailed information on pricing, but just as an example of the possible cost differentials: we’re paying an average of something like $16/CY for cutter dredging (that’s not including fixed mobilization/demobilization costs, which brings it up to nearer $23/CY, though that’s going to be heavily influenced by job size; a bigger job will have more amortization). If you’re using a hopper dredge, appropriate for softer material (think silt instead of gravel), you’re closer to $1.80/CY

          This is excavating underwater, but maintenance dredging, i.e., all material that’s been deposited since the last time it was dredged, so it’s relatively easy diggings that’s done efficiently with purpose-built ships.

          Rock excavation is much harder. I think we’re nearer $200/CY, and that’s in the dry. If the rock has to go somewhere you can be looking at significant costs there as well. While not directly comparable, we’re buying rock for jetties at about $400/CY, but those are also very large pieces and good rock both of which will make it very expensive since they have to come from pretty far away; however, they can also be transported by barge which is cheap (since, well, a breakwater is of necessity easily accessible by ship). If the spoil has to go too far, it might not be a bad estimate to double the cost.

          I am going to note that contra your OP, 10m×10m ditches aren’t “very big”–the locks on the Mississippi are 110′ (33.5m) wide, and the Chesapeake & Delaware Canal is 450′ (or 137m) wide (and has a main cut over 100′ deep, but I don’t recall the exact figure). The locks on the Columbia are only 86′ wide, but that’s still more than twice your 10m limit. These design trapezoid of these ditches (without putting them side-by-side) isn’t even sufficient to make a useful modern shipping canal, at least in width; a 10m depth can pass smaller ocean-going ships, and most barge tows, though.

          You could probably use them efficiently for some irrigation and drinking water transport, but frankly we’re more than capable of building canals of this dimension if we want. The “doing it for free” is the big thing the aliens bring to the table, but I acknowledge that is a big difference.

    • Paul Zrimsek says:

      I would dig a great ditch, and nobody digs ditches better than me, believe me, and I’ll dig them very inexpensively. I will dig a great great ditch on our southern border and I’ll have aliens pay for that ditch.

    • Jaskologist says:

      The words “placed here by Satan” written on the ocean floor near a fossil formation likely to be discovered in about 20 years. Let the paleontologists try and figure that one out!

    • tossrock says:

      100 km across the isthmus of Kra, to circumvent the Straits of Malacca would be a big win economically (but a big loss ecologically). Also 10m wide and deep doesn’t really cut it for heavy shipping.

    • Phigment says:

      I suspect that 1000 KM is enough to dig a ditch around Washington DC and then connect it to the Chesapeake Bay.

      This would conveniently contain most of the federal government inside a moat until they were able to coordinate bridge construction, giving the rest of us several days of peace and something interesting to talk about.

      • Aftagley says:

        As the crow flies, a ditch straight from the Chesapeake to DC is approximately 37 KM. Encircling the entire DMV only takes around 67 KM. If you wanted, you could make a dozen or so moats in a row around the national capital region.

        • Phigment says:

          Well, then, the plan is perfect.

          We’ll make 13 concentric moats, one for each of the original 13 colonies.

          This will add a layer of historical sentimentality and national pride to the whole thing, disguising the fundamentally arbitrary and capricious decisionmaking involved and conferring unearned gravitas to the construction.

      • b_jonas says:

        It wouldn’t be a moat. Washington D.C. is not flat enough for that, so most of the ditches won’t fill with water.

    • Thegnskald says:

      What is the depth of the ditch relative to?

      For example, if you had a kilometer-wide mountain, would they level it if you centered your 3kmx3km hole on it?

      • johan_larson says:

        Good question. Let’s say that it’s 10 m down from the current surface, but there would be some averaging and loss of detail, since this is an exercise in excavation, not sculpture.

        So if you centered the digging on a mountain, you’d get a mountain that’s 10 m shorter on average. But if it had a really pointed peak, that might be 20 or 30 m shorter.

    • Paul Brinkley says:

      Are we allowed to dig part of that ditch in the bottom of another part of that ditch?

      The border between Tibet and China-minus-Xinjiang appears to be about 500 miles. And I only count about five major throughways through what I presume is mostly mountains. Just throwing that out there.

      • johan_larson says:

        Are we allowed to dig part of that ditch in the bottom of another part of that ditch?

        Nope. That’s why I said, “…the ditches can’t be overlapping.” You can dig them right next to each other, though, so effectively you can go wider if you want. But you can’t go deeper.

    • b_jonas says:

      I still (“https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/24/open-thread-137-25/#comment-804516”) suggest asking them to help in the Bosporus canal, to improve ship routes. 10 meters deep doesn’t get us all the way, but it would be a start and would reduce the cost of the canal significantly.

  26. Roebuck says:

    Not sure if people here already discussed the psychological differences between Chinese people born in wheat vs rice regions (I think there may be problems with accessing the article by clicking this link – if so, Google “wheat vs rice farming cultures china collectivist” and you should be able to see the article after you click the Google link).

    The idea that different farming styles influence cultures seems appealing. After all, in ye olden times (which lasted much longer than the modern ones), minority of people did anything else than farming. Rice farming really does seem different than wheat farming in terms of requiring a larger number of people working on a single thing at once. I would be easily convinced that the psychological differences are carried not just by culture, but by genes.

    On the other hand, the regressions do show some additional impact of ‘modernisation’ on thinking and in some regressions the authors seem to claim that their results are more reliable because they are controlled for confounders (and that gives me replication crisis flashbacks).

    On the first hand again, the authors perform a range of analyses, some of which bear resemblance to regression discontinuity design (in the part where they explore differences between county lines) and should reliably get rid of confounders. The results seem to hold. And, in general, each of the several different methodologies and datasets they use seem to point to wheat-rice differences.

    On the other hand, the thing still seems susceptible to p-hacking. The county-level borders in Figure 1 could be a bit dishonest since the authors only show a >50% rice and >50% wheat distinction, without finer detail (which would not be evidence of p-hacking, but behaviour that correlates with it). Who knows how many other regressions they have run without getting interesting results and without reporting them.

    On the balance, I’m slightly inclined to believe the article. Any thoughts from you?

  27. ARabbiAndAFrog says:

    The other day I set out to come up with a simple poker-like card game for some fictional characters to play. I settled on the following:
    – Each player is dealt 3 cards worth 1-6 points
    – They make a round of betting, similar to poker
    – A 6-sided die is rolled. It can be substituted with another card placed on the table face-up if necessary.
    – Another round of betting
    – Whoever has higher total sum on his cards wins, but only cards worth less or equal to the die count.
    So for example, if your hand is 3-4-5, you will score 0 if die is 1 or 2, 3 if it is 3, 7 if it is 4, and 12 if it is 5 or 6. And if your opponent has 2-3-4 they will beat you with die up to 4, but lose on 5 or 6.

    On one hand randomly devaluing otherwise valuable cards has certain allegorical value. On the other hand it feels to me a bit counter-intuititve to for people to actually want to play it.

    • JPNunez says:

      It’s not bad but I’d go with: dealing, die roll, card replacement, betting. If you play with some community cards, maybe those cards that are left out by the die can be replaced too.

      Also whatever game needs to filter the cards for the game so much is gonna be a chore; just throw 2 dice, and say that J = 10, Q = 11 and K = 12 and it’s done.

      Maybe flushes that _start_ with a card under the die roll are still valid even if they end on cards over the die roll.

      I remember watching an episode of Kakegurui (anime about some gambling school…yeah) where they played Poker but whether the winning hands would be the higher or lower (ie: a single pair of twos would be the strongest hand) was determined by bidding…with the same money you won on the previous hands.

      You could throw a coin to determine whether high or low hands win. Either at the start of the hand or at the end.

      If you are really into incorporating the die I’d go with 1, 5 and 6 doing nothing, and 2, 3 and 4 making hands with a pair, a trio or four of a kind are the strongest hands. Of course, four of a kind is the strongest hand most of the time given how rare flushes are.

      • Thegnskald says:

        I’d guess, by the fictional setting, that part of the intent is to create a game with a different history; that is, it would be very weird for them to arrive at the same deck of cards we use.

      • Aron Wall says:

        I like the idea of adding a round of bidding to modify the die roll, but I think it’s important for the bidding not to subvert things by too much (or it removes too much information from the previous round of betting).

        Perhaps the bidding outcomes could be restricted to either increasing the d6 roll by 1, decreasing it by 1, or keeping it the same. You have to say which outcome you are bidding for, and if 2 or more players bid for the same outcome, their money is additive. (This makes it more likely that there are still multiple players with strong hands after the bidding is over.) Whichever set of players “wins” the bidding phase adds the money they bid to the pot, while the other players get to keep theirs. (Thus, if you succeed in winning the hand, you get your money back.) You’d play it in this order: bets-roll-more bets-reveal.

        I think it would usually be foolish to bid too much money in the bidding round, because it would give away too much information without drawing other people into the pot…

        (Of course for a story, you want the game to reveal interesting character information through their play style.)

    • Thegnskald says:

      I’d recommend adding some equivalent to a suite, aiming for a set of criteria that rules out potential ties.

      One thing you could change/add: Discarding a card to re-roll the die, and then an additional round of betting. This permits an additional measure of bluffing/signaling what is in your hand

    • beleester says:

      I think it’s playable, just too simple. The bet-roll-bet design is good – you can gamble on the expected value of your cards (3 and 4 are more valuable, 1 and 6 less so), but the die roll gives you a chance for dramatic reversals like the river in Hold’Em.

      The trouble is, there are only 56 possible hands. It wouldn’t be too hard to enumerate them all and find an optimal betting strategy. Maybe take a standard deck, remove the kings (or make them special cards in some way), and roll 2d6? Then you’d have many more permutations, and a more interesting probability curve.

      • ARabbiAndAFrog says:

        Since it’s a fictional game, it doesn’t need to have faces, and it can naturally be scaled, especially if another card is used for scaling (Thus avoiding awkward curve in probabilities)

        You talking about kings being special gave me an idea for a card that is instant win as long as nobody else has the same card, then it’s worthless. Which would also make game fortunes change.

        • Aron Wall says:

          Your special card would actually make the game less interesting. In general, poker-like games require that the value of a hand be sufficiently predictable to be worth betting on.

          This rule variant would strongly discourage people from making large bets, because the special card makes it impossible to be confident that you have a strong hand.

          In general, chaos is not what you want to go for with (skill-based) betting games.

          You could, however, include a special wild card whose value is always the same as the die roll–that wouldn’t cause too much damage.

    • Aron Wall says:

      I think this is a very interesting idea. But if you want to see whether it is a fun game, there’s no substitute for actually play-testing it a bunch, and seeing how it works. (This is one thing sibilings are for.)

      I don’t think this game is very simple. Most of the interest would come from the betting psychology, so even if players were dealt the exact same hand it could turn out quite different.

      Before the die is rolled, it would be most valuable to have multiple copies of the same number, because you aren’t really interested in the expectation value but rather to maximize the chances you have the *best* hand in the game. So for example, 1-1-1 or 6-6-5 would be significantly more valuable than 2-3-4, because on a 1 or a 6 you could respectively know or be quite sure that your hand was the best, whereas 2-3-4 is only great if you roll a 4 and even then there are a number of ways to lose.

      It would be best if there is a possibility to have at least 5 cards of each number dealt out, so that even if you have two of the X’s, where X is the die rolled, there is still the possibility of a freak X-X-X hand to kill you.

      You still need to decide a number of important details, such as the precise betting rules and what to do if there is a tie. It’s tempting to just use the poker rules, but making the rules slightly different (e.g. ties mean all the money goes to the next hand’s pot, rewarding those who folded early) could give it a more convincingly exotic flavor.

      BTW there’s a very interesting card game played by the mercenaries in Glen Cook’s series “The Black Company”; if you haven’t read this already you might want to in order to see a good example of integrating a game into a novel. (My favorite example of a game in a book is Interstellar Pig, but that game is in a class of its own.)

  28. Well... says:

    Has it ever happened that an orderly, stable society collapsed into post-apocalyptic ruin within the course of 24 hours due to something besides a natural disaster? (I’m thinking war, invasion, revolution, etc.) If so, do any first-hand accounts of this exist?

    • Thegnskald says:

      The sacking of a city state?

      Really the issue is that your time limit isn’t compatible with non-modern technology; an entire nation can’t coordinate or share information fast enough to meet it without technology that only recently came into existence.

    • Two McMillion says:

      The real question here is how you define “orderly” and “stable”. The dissolution of the Soviet Union might count. Or the Anglo-Zanzibar War.

      • The Nybbler says:

        The collapse of the Soviet Union took more than 24 hours, it wasn’t all that stable, and didn’t result in post-apocalyptic ruin.

    • albatross11 says:

      I guess it depends on what you mean by “collapse.” A very large society seems likely to take longer than 24 hours to collapse.

      The closest I can think of would be some precipitating event which:

      a. Triggers widespread disruption and chaos…
      b. …from which the existing society never recovers.

      I imagine the best condition for this would be some widely-believed idea holding the society together is suddenly disproven. The model I’m thinking of here is how a dictatorship can stay in power as long as each individual citizen can’t know that all the other citizens also wish the dictator was dead, but once all the citizens know that at once, the dictator is doomed.

    • The Nybbler says:

      The 1977 New York blackout came close, but it recovered after the lights came back on. (note the other New York blackouts did not result in similar disorder)

      Rome wasn’t built in a day, nor was it destroyed in such. I believe the sack of Carthage only took a day (after a long siege), and did result in post-apocalyptic ruin. I am unaware of any accounts by the losers.

    • Jake says:

      Hiroshima, August 6, 1945?

    • Revolutions tend to be either drawn-out processes which take a long time as people slowly realize they can organize and demonstrate without consequence due to weak government,(Iran, Russia, the dissolution of the Soviet Union) or sudden affairs where the army throws out the current government without warning and is there to establish control.

    • Paul Brinkley says:

      Branch Davidians?

    • Mark V Anderson says:

      Sack of Baghdad by the Mongols? I don’t really know much about Baghdad in those days, but it was big and wealthy, and it is my understanding that the Mongols destroyed it.

  29. Faza (TCM) says:

    I’d been thinking about Scott’s non-empirical science posts for a while and have come up with a koan that I thought fitting to share here:

    If your theory can explain anything, it can’t explain anything.

    Enlightenment guaranteed.

    • Nick says:

      There’s a similar one I saw ages back on irony/cynicism, to the effect that the man who sees through everything sees nothing.

      • The Pachyderminator says:

        C.S. Lewis said “To see through all things is the same as not to see,” IIRC. (I don’t remember the context – it might have been about reductionism and/or materialism.)

  30. Nancy Lebovitz says:

    The History of the Screwdriver

    17 minutes, lots of good geeky details about fist uses of screws, screws and the world wars, patents, physics and practicality of different kinds of screw heads, etc.

    Also, Robertson screwdrivers, which I’d never heard of.

  31. Nick says:

    For those interested in the continuing discussion of liberalism and illiberalism, integralism, and the French-Ahmari conflict, Daniel Burns’ essay in National Affairs is the most recent to advance things. I’ll try to summarize it, but I recommend reading the whole thing.

    He first distinguishes between liberal theory and liberal practice. Liberal practice is rights and rule of law, government by representation and widespread civic participation, separation of powers and checks and balance. These are not, Burns says, mere ideals; they are observable facts about liberal nations. They aren’t always or everywhere lived up to, but they often and mostly are, and that should redound to a liberal nation’s credit.

    Liberal practices tend to have certain disadvantages, too. I’ll just quote Burns:

    Like all real political goods (and unlike ideals), the features of liberal politics include unavoidable disadvantages. Our majoritarianism tends to encourage mediocrity. Our tolerance can and often does turn into indifferentism. Our personal liberty too easily becomes license. Our freedom of commerce is a breeding ground for pettiness and greed. Our rule of law can become cruelty toward criminals. Our reverence for science and expertise has left us prey to all manner of snake-oil salesmen, to say nothing of the obvious ambivalence of our technological progress. Our egalitarianism often leaves the natural human desire for hierarchy to be channeled into an unhealthy admiration for large and efficient top-down structures (such as the military, multinational corporations, and occasionally the governments of our enemies). Even our public spirit is sometimes hard to distinguish from jingoism and crude self-satisfaction.

    Liberal theory, meanwhile, is Hobbes and Locke, Kant and Mill, Rawls. It’s freedom as autonomy, enlightened self-interest, rule of law and an untrammeled state as guarantor of this freedom against “family, ancestry, history, tradition, culture.”

    Burns draws attention to the fact that there are and have always been significant differences between liberal practices and liberal theory. Federalism, for example, has no place in liberal theory; splitting up sovereignty between federal and sub-federal governments makes no sense, it’s introducing arbitrary distinctions between the governed. Liberal theory requires strict government neutrality in religion, Burns says, but no liberal country has ever done this or much tried to do it; we’re too democratic for it. The example most striking to me is the way liberal politics as practiced relies on reverence for our founders, the Constitution, and American history—the same stuff, I think, Scott has sometimes called American civic religion. It’s easy to see how important it is for persuading any American toward a more ‘liberal’ conclusion—and yet how odd it is to appeal to it in persuading an autonomous rational individual.

    Where Burns departs explicitly from illiberal critiques is in thinking that, until recently, liberal theory hasn’t been that important. The American founders seemed, admittedly, to have adopted Lockean thought wholesale. But not so, he says; they adopted the language, but repurposed it as they went. We’ve been too practical-minded, too practice-minded, to wed ourselves to ideology, so it’s only in the last few decades that intellectuals have really adopted liberal theory. This is me and not Burns, but if we’d adopted liberal theory, how would we have solved the slavery question? Stephen Douglas was defending the peculiar institution on liberal-theoretical grounds, h/t Susannah Black:

    I deny their right to force a free State upon an unwilling people. I deny their right to force a good thing upon a people who are unwilling to receive it. The great principle is the right of every community to judge and decide for itself whether a thing is right or wrong, whether it would be good or evil for them to adopt it; and the right of free action, the right of free judgment upon the question is dearer to every true American than any other under a free government.

    Back to Burns, anyway. Liberal theory put into practice—not to be confused with liberal practice as I’ve been speaking above—is doomed to failure, because it ironically falls into an illiberalism of its own. Dismantle the American religious establishment, and in a few years you’re making illiberal demands on florists and bakers. This critique of liberal theory Patrick Deneen and friends are happy to agree with, but I find it rather odd Burns seems to think this settles things. Clearly for the left-illiberals things are not settled. On the contrary, they’re just gearing up. Burns’ departure from Deneen, as should be clear here, is in thinking that liberal theory is an alien imposition on preexisting liberal practice, but it seems to me he underestimates how easily liberal theorists conquered the prior liberal practitioner. Adopting Lockean language didn’t mean adopting Lockean thought, sure—but perhaps it made it more susceptible to conquering.

    The alternative to liberal theory is, in Burns’ view, a return to liberal practice before this conquering. Back to the classics of political thought—Thucydides and Xenophon, Plato and Aristotle, Cicero and Livy—and back to a non-ideological form of politics he calls statesmanship. Formed by human experience and unafraid to ask questions about the constitution of our ruling class, the mental and moral habits our communities instill, and how to make the best of an imperfect regime. One that can really ground things necessary to our nation, like our obligation to die for it if necessary, and not hostile in theory to things like American civic religion.

    While Burns affects to distance himself from post-liberalism, he’s not so far after all. His prescription to return to an education in the classics could have been lifted directly from Deneen. He repeatedly dances around the subject of the common good, which is just what integralists (left-wing and right-wing) have been yammering about the most, and now Marco Rubio (!), too.

    I’m ambivalent on the description of statesmanship; what I find most helpful about the essay is its distinction between liberal theory and practice. Faint-hearted critics of liberalism like Michael Brendan Dougherty are unwilling to give up the fruits of the American political order. But Burns has given MBD ammunition for a stronger critique of liberal theory, which he is certainly opposed to. Burns would have to concede we can retain most of the features we like about liberalism, and revivify features under siege, without thereby sustaining myths about the noble savage or fictions like the autonomous individual. If there’s one thing missing from the essay, it’s tracing the origins of our liberal practices to before liberal theory, which would show handily how the two are distinct. Burns alludes to this fact—he says liberal theory was developed to explain why the liberal practices they cherished seemed to work—but my interest here is in models beyond, say, Lincoln’s reply to Douglas, as alternatives to liberal theory. As the lovers of theory gear up to replace our liberal order with liberalism, these alternatives only become more important.

    • Guy in TN says:

      I just wanted to say that this is a very good summary essay, and I appreciate you taking the time to write it.

    • blipnickels says:

      I don’t see this significantly advancing the conversation.

      To be fair, it is refreshingly well written and it frames the issue very well. I especially loved this paragraph:

      Yet liberalism’s critics rightly insist that such commonplace rejoinders fail to engage their real arguments. Liberalism’s defenders, for their part, often feel themselves in the position of the theologian confronted with an atheist: The “liberalism” they hear attacked is one that they, too, do not believe in. Thus the parties have often been talking past each other, and not only because of an above-average amount of strawmanning on both sides. What one party sincerely regards as its clinching argument will seem a trivial observation to the other, and vice versa.

      (Italics mine)

      I’ve had that exact experience and it’s immensely frustrating and profoundly true.

      But at it’s core, I can’t imagine referencing liberal theory vs liberal practice in an argument or using it as an analytical tool, mostly because liberal theory is pretty dead outside of college philosophy classes. Like, I don’t see anyone on the Left referencing Locke or Hobbes or some other Enlightenment philosopher; if they want to argue for individual autonomy they have other newer and more radical references. There’s a few on the Right who reference them but they’re a distinct minority in the Trump Age and with few prospects in the future of the Right.

      Or, basically, no Leftist feminist, anti-racist, socialist, progressive et al quotes Locke. The libertarian branch on the Right might reference Locke but the rest are by and large nationalists (Rock, Flag, & Eagle) or Christians who suspect/fear that liberalism inevitably leads to secularism. Like, liberal Enlightenment theory might have been original source for these laws, but they’re not really the modern justification.

      So I think the focus on dead theory is pretty irrelevant/useless and the prescription, a return to “ideology-free” practicality with a focus on the classics is an old right-wing proposal without much success. I mean, didn’t Allan Bloom basically write this 30 years ago?

    • broblawsky says:

      How can any liberal practice that – as you claim – denies freedom to slaves be considered anything other than base hypocrisy? You can’t have a liberal society when people are born in chains. You suggest that the founding fathers didn’t implement liberal theory out of some kind of forward-thinking pragmatism, but I would suggest that they failed to do so because there was no way to forge a nation out of both slave states and free states without conceding at least some of their principles to the slave power. AFAIK, there’s far more evidence in support of the latter position than the former.

    • Plumber says:

      Great bunch of links @Nick, thanks! 

      This discussion has rekindled some inchoate thoughts of mine, Eistemic-whatsit Status: pulled out of my felt more than  researched.

      I suspect that a lot of what many think of as “normal” and “traditional” is actually just how things were for a few short decades of the 20th century, and I’m going to start from there. 

      I’ve only ever heard child-eyed views of the 1920’s from my grandfather but from some reading the impression that I get is a big economic and cultural metropolitan/rural divide not that dissimilar from today’s “culture war“, judging by the newsreels and publications made then (WPA guidebooks, oral histories collected) in the wake of the Great Depression the New Deal administrative State and Hollywood “culture leaders” really did seem to be trying to unify a Nation with disperate regional cultures, a lot of it looked a bit patronizing but I definitely get a sense of a deliberate “All in this together” ethos building effort that went into overdrive during the second world war.

      With the war you have the “Immortal Four Chaplains” inter-faith ecumenical patriotism and sacrifice deliberately encouraged with a “mainline protestant” ruling/managerial class, plus an evangelical south, Mormon Utah, a more Catholic and unionized working class in the north, ‘Christian morality’ becomes “Judeo-Christian values” and Judaism is incorporated (this is helped by the Reform and Conservative branches evolving in an American social context), the Catholic “Americanism” heresy is quietly no longer suppressed, “under God” is added to the pledge of allegiance, church attendance peaks in the 1950’s, all trending towards a sort of ruling de jure Unitarianist overall vision of a common good and morality uniting a diverse nation with “The Great Society” mop up operation to eliminate racial divisions.

      This almost lasts for two generations.

      After the Vietnam war and the Watergate break in the vision of a wise and benevolent “Uncle Sam” is lost, the generations that have no memory of the Depression and second world war are more secular and a “gap” grows similar to the “generation gap” of the 1960’s (an artifact of so few being born in the ’30’s and early ’40’s making it so there’s few who are in-between the ages of the children and parents to be a cultural ‘bridge’) as with the sharp decline of the “mainline protestant” denominations there’s no ‘bridge’ between the conservative religious and the secular liberal, so a disunited nation without a common vision of morality and “the good”.

      “Interfaith in action” (as in the words on the 1948 U.S. postage stamp) worked when there was a majority with faith that respected those of other faiths, now there’s a large and growing secular faction, a large conservative religious faction, and a tiny much reduced sliver of the liberal religious. I suppose African Americans (being generally more religious and a bit more conservative but voting with liberals) could be a ‘bridge’, but with their social position they seem ill placed to assume that burden, and certainly not as a ruling class like the old “Protestant establishment”.

      Patriotism plus solidarity worked (for a while) with a generation that shared the experience of Depression, war, re-building, and resistance against first one then another totalitarian system, but it didn’t last, “peaceful co-existence” and mutual respect of our host’s “tribes” (except for “Grey”, as they’re just too weird seems a fine idea, but I don’t think enough want that. 

      I’ve no idea how you keep Americans from becoming even more individualist and insular @Nick, if you have a plan please share it as I’d like to hear it.

  32. DinoNerd says:

    Are there any political movements in favour of common sense, in that they actually manage to eject and disown “allies” who over-emphasize their good ideas to the point of absurdity? Or better yet, take a position that’s consciously between extremes? Ideally with solid reasons for the specifics of their position, beyond “polling says we’ll get the most votes this way”.

    [I hesitate to give specific hypothetical examples, particularly ones involving current hot button issues, lest the discussion come to be about those issues, or precisely where a common-sense middle ground would be located.]

    What sort of political systems would make such movements more successful?

    • RalMirrorAd says:

      1. Positioning between the extremes means your views are dependent upon the extremists. It’s not like extremists have gentleman’s agreements to keep themselves at equal measure so the center doesn’t shift. The goal becomes purging the other side so that the center moves closer to you.
      2. Nobody claims to not be in favor of common sense although it’s usually ‘common moral sense’ vs ‘common causal sense’

      Sorry if that comes across as rude or terse, just my two thoughts.

      • DinoNerd says:

        Interesting response. I think misphrased what I had in mind, and you succinctly pointed out what was wrong with it. I’m not sure how much was just bad phrasing.

        I’m struggling to find a good hypothetical for what I had in mind, and mostly failing. I’m not looking for a group having “being in the middle” as a goal, but a group with a thought out position that puts them in the middle. They may well have got there in part because of the processes you suggest, many of them unconsciously. But they have a specific position they can more or less define.

        The best example I can give is people who favour limited wealth inequality and mixed economies – neither fully capitalist nor fully socialist. They agree that human nature can’t and won’t manage full equality, but they want to limit the range of inequality, using social services/wealth transfers for the purpose. They want some level of political/collective control of externalities, not relying on e.g. law suits for damages, but they don’t want the government planning who produces what. They want e.g. safety standards, politically enforced. etc. And they (these hypothetical people) have a specific mix in mind, or a specific idea of how to judge whether which things their government should and should not touch, and how heavy a hand it should use if it does.

    • Erusian says:

      There’s the Common Sense Caucus, a bipartisan group of moderate Senators. They mostly seem to emphasize compromise, centrism, and getting things done. They’ve been fairly diligent about policing members who drift too far right or left. Of course, whether this is a vice or a virtue depends on your point of view: this bias towards passing legislation might not sit well with certain political leanings and not everyone agrees with centrism or an approach of ‘let’s pass what priorities we can tolerate from each other’. For example, their immigration plan was to give Dreamers a path to citizenship and to simplify/expedite the legal process. However, they also would step up enforcement, increase short term and long term funding of borders, and move towards a more merit based system. There was also talk of a possible more general amnesty once the enforcement was implemented.

      Whether this is savvy political compromise or wishy-washy cowardice, it’s not popular enough with either party’s base that they have much influence. Though they do have their odd victories.

      If you wanted to design a system that forced compromise, my natural thought would be that you’d want to incentivize passing legislation on a schedule no one purposefully sets. If the bill is definitely going to happen and you can’t time the debate, then you have to work on making the bill as tolerable as possible. But I’m not sure that the bias the US system has towards inaction is actually bad. It certainly frustrates narrow majorities who want their priorities yesterday. But I’m not sure that’s a bad thing either.

      • Nick says:

        Simplifying the process, stepping up enforcement, and increasing funding I would support (and in fact, we got increased enforcement starting under Obama!); iffy on Dreamer path and neutral on merit-based system, but I’d support them in a compromise plan. How much overlap does this have with the Gang of Eight plan, which got 68-32 in the Senate? It looks like it shares the path to citizenship, but the other key points of their plan seem to be different.

    • Douglas Knight says:

      A funny thing about centrism is that there is a type of centrist whose cold technocratic rationalism makes him appear more right-wing than actual right-wingers to someone on the left and more left-wing than actual left-wingers to someone on the right. — A.S.

    • albatross11 says:

      Isn’t this basically the Blair/Clinton “third way” idea?

      Though it’s worth remembering that “common sense” and “extreme” are very much defined in terms of current widely-held ideas, and aren’t really objectively defined. A common sense, moderate position in the current US is that we keep troops in Afghanistan forever, our spy agencies eavesdrop on everyone all the time (but promise not to have any humans review the collected material without a good reason), and a bunch of former Bush administration officials who are literal war criminals will never face any consequences for that other than maybe having to be careful about taking overseas vacations. Proposing a different path on any of those policies is an extreme position.

    • Eric Rall says:

      My experience in low-level politics tells me that there are two clusters of motivations that drive people to get actively involved (as staffers, volunteers, advocates, or candidates): personal ambition for a career in politics from which they hope to derive wealth, power, status, etc; or a deep ideological passion for or against a particular candidate, issue, or ideology. Or to describe them extremely uncharitably, crooks and kooks.

      The big political reform movements of the past century or so (at least in the US) have largely been focused on incrementally cleaning the crooks out of the system, particularly by checking the ability of elected officials to abuse their offices for personal or political gain, and by structural changes to the political parties to disempower machine-politics power brokers in favor of activist groups and primary voters.

      To the extent these reform movements have succeeded in taking power away from crooks, they’ve done so by giving it to kooks instead. And the incentives have changed, so the remaining crooks at the higher levels of government (or aspiring to get there) now generally spend a lot of their time pandering to the kooks who dominate the lower levels.

      If you want a political system that encourages politicians to reject the lunatic fringe and present themselves as moderate and reasonable, I can think of a few ways that might do it:

      – Bit the bullet and accept a certain level of graft, patronage, and machine politics. Let politicians and the party apparatchiks behind them get their beaks wet. One way to think of this is to imagine the parties as two rival contracting firms bidding for the next contract to run the government for a few years, and of course they’re going to try to turn a profit on it, but that’s okay as long as they produce value for their money.

      – Abandon mass democracy in favor of a system that doesn’t advantage an ecosystem of competing groups (formal parties, advocacy groups, political machines, etc) dedicated to persuading people to support one candidate or another. The main alternatives I can think of off the top of my head are Monarchy, Sortition, and Oligarchy.

      – Build a popular mass movement around something like “A Return to Normalcy” that’s appealing to enough kooks to be viable. It’s been done successfully from time to time, but it’s hard to sustain for any length of time: Normalcy is only exciting when compared to unpalatable alternatives, so when it succeeds it becomes boring and the kooks who supported it wander off and look for something else to get excited about.

      • Nornagest says:

        Isn’t there a third option?

        – Pay the participants better. Make a political career attractive for the same reason that a career in medicine or engineering or finance is attractive, i.e. the Benjamins. At the same time, come down extremely hard on graft and patronage. When you get plenty of personal enrichment above board and all the underhanded options are very risky, there’s no incentive to participate in political corruption.

        • AG says:

          How do we prevent a Boeing (McDonnell-Douglas) Bad End? Or is Airbus merely on a delay to a Boeing Bad End?

        • Eric Rall says:

          Yes, “pay the participants better” does seem like a workable option, although we’d probably need to pay them much, much better in order for above-board compensation an effective substitute for patronage and graft.

          One problem is that there are a lot of potential politicians, but very few high-level elected offices and political appointments for them to compete for. That pattern does show up in other fields (professional athletes, musicians, etc), which manage to make it work by paying huge piles of money to those who make it to the top. If we paid Presidents, Cabinet Secretaries, and Governors like top-level professional baseball players ($20-35 million/year), members of Congress like mid-level major-league free agents (maybe $5-10 million/year), and state legislators like top-level minor league players ($100k/year) or rookie major-league players ($550k/year), I expect that would do the trick.

          Another issue is paying for the infrastructure of running a campaign. In the classic spoils system, this was done by appointing your campaign supporters to sinecure positions. In the current system, it’s done by soliciting kooks for donations and volunteer labor and by skirting the legal limits of influence-peddling. I suppose you could publicly finance the campaigns directly (which has its own problems), or you could pay the elected officials even larger salaries with the expectation that candidates will use part of their salary if they win to pay their campaign workers (or pay investors who bought a futures contract from the candidate so the candidate could pay their campaigners cash).

        • Clutzy says:

          Seems to me that not only would it be expensive, it wouldn’t increase the quality of participants much. I know of no Senator who has gone to the poorhouse, I know of many who went from well off, to multimillionaires.

          On top of that, we are compounding the incumbency bias. A huge salary for Senators (one that is actually large enough to run a Senate campaign) plus a crackdown on fundraising = a new monarchy.

        • The Nybbler says:

          We, or at least sports team owners and general managers, can fairly straightforwardly judge the performance of sports players. Someone making a lot of money in sports and doing a bad job is likely to be cut (or occasionally kicked down to the minors) in a season or two. Exceptions exist but are exceptional. The same isn’t true of politicians; we’ve got no easy way of judging. Paying them more just results in better-paid versions of the same people we have now.

      • mtl1882 says:

        To the extent these reform movements have succeeded in taking power away from crooks, they’ve done so by giving it to kooks instead. And the incentives have changed, so the remaining crooks at the higher levels of government (or aspiring to get there) now generally spend a lot of their time pandering to the kooks who dominate the lower levels.

        +1

        As heretical as it sounds, my opinion is that the best option is one of the ones you listed:

        Bit the bullet and accept a certain level of graft, patronage, and machine politics. Let politicians and the party apparatchiks behind them get their beaks wet. One way to think of this is to imagine the parties as two rival contracting firms bidding for the next contract to run the government for a few years, and of course they’re going to try to turn a profit on it, but that’s okay as long as they produce value for their money.

        As for the discussion below, raising salaries fundamentally misses the main dynamic. It isn’t an individual worker thing. While “kooks” may be largely issue-driven, we’re social creatures. Politics is an ecosystem and patronage isn’t mainly about hoarding money for yourself–it’s about gaining, keeping, and controlling your friends and allies. It makes the issues concrete and personal–I get that is the opposite of what many people see as desirable, but most people don’t make good decisions, or often any decisions at all, at an abstract level. The concrete solution might not be the most optimal one you can think of, but how often do we get the optimal one?

        You rarely get everyone on the same page–political machines operate on that assumption, and find a way to make people pull together anyway through pork and all that. It also recognizes that the man or woman who becomes a big shot is often going to have a lot of friends and relative who aren’t rock stars themselves, but who who are trusted, cared for, and needed by this person. If he or she can give them some jobs and perks, that can be a lot more valuable than money, because rock star level people often already have enough of that. They want to be appreciated and powerful. I’m not saying give totally incompetent people jobs that require expertise–that’s an obvious failure mode. But there are a good many jobs that can be done by any reasonably sharp and conscientious person, and it’s not clear that bringing in a stranger is preferable just because it is impartial. A stance of impartiality works if most people are truly invested in the issues themselves, but that just isn’t so. Most people don’t care very much, and the ones that do are labeled “kooks” because of the weirdness of that abstract approach. If you don’t want them to win, you have to appeal to people’s concrete, social nature.

        Honestly, I probably identify more with the kooks, but it is plain as day to me that most people aren’t operating on that system and it is crazy to expect them to. And even if they did become issue-oriented, they’d never agree on many things. Kooks and crooks worked quite well together in the past, and balanced each other out—certainly we made changes for a reason, but while it may be less distasteful to look at, I’m not super impressed with the results.

    • The problem with centrism is that it is often a result of other “extremist” policies “cancelling out.” Libertarians and populists can both appear to be in the same position on a one-dimensional political spectrum. Even on a two-dimensional spectrum there can be often heterodox views, I want higher taxes on the rich and cuts in subsidies to healthcare and education. I’d say the best system would include the following:

      1. Get rid of “checks and balances.” The common belief that checks and balances make it harder for the government to step on you ignores the fact that they also make it harder to get the government to stop stepping on you. Invest most power in a single unicameral legislature.
      2. Elect the legislature through proportional representation.
      3. The legislature doesn’t need to “form a government,” so small parties can’t play kingmaker. Make a rule that every representative has an absolute right to say “shut up and vote” on a certain number of bills every year. Extremists will naturally lose influence, if they introduce an extremist bill they’d know it will be voted down. They could tell their less extreme allies “I won’t vote for your bill unless you make it more extreme,” but then they’ll have to explain to the voters why the less extreme bill didn’t pass.

    • The U.S. model of first past the post elections has some tendency to pressure politicians towards the center, since if the Democrats nominate a far left candidate the Republicans can nominate a centrist or mildly left candidate and win, and similarly with parties and directions exchanged. But, of course, one can be centrist and still unreasonable.

      • Sagar Apte says:

        The problem with that is that both Democrats and Republicans nominate their candidates by voting for them in primaries. Because only registered party members can vote in primaries, the average voter in the Democratic primaries is likely to be left of the average person who votes Democrat in the general election. So while the more centrist of the two candidates might have an advantage in the general election, they are less likely to be nominated for it in the first place. The criteria for being nominated in the Democratic primaries do not include “appeal to some of the other party’s voters,” or anything at all other than, “appeal to the registered Democratic party members,” and the same goes for the Republicans.

        • Depends to what degree the primary voters are thinking about how likely the candidate is, if nominated, to win.

          • meh says:

            Agreed, but this plays out differently depending on how ‘safe’ the seat is. We see moderate politicians from both sides in the close to 50/50 states/districts, but in many elections, anyone with the appropriate letter next to their name will win, so any candidate that comes out of the primary meets the criteria of likely to win if nominated.

            We wind up with something like a Hastert rule but for the electorate.

        • DinoNerd says:

          It’s interesting that Canada leaves how the candidates are chosen up to the political parties. This tends to result in votes, but among those who attend conventions (only) and those people generally actually work on elections etc. – i.e. they have more focus on whether a candidate can actually get elected, and more than average interest in detailed policy platforms rather than sound bites. I think the British system is similar.

          Note that I’m absolutely not saying the Canadian systerm is perfect – just that it moves this knob over slightly, and also (seperately) makes 3rd parties more viable than in the US system.

    • HowardHolmes says:

      Eliminate re-elections.

  33. tossrock says:

    So what’s the base rate for internet death-threat consummation? My intuition is that it’s near zero – the people who issue internet death threats are a disjoint set from actual murderers. Because of this, my response to hearing that someone is “receiving death threats” is typically a hearty yawn. However, I acknowledge I could be wrong about this – are there reported cases of someone issuing a death threat over the internet, and then actually killing the person they threatened? Maybe if we count SWATing as murder-by-cop, and assume the crazed gamer threatened to kill whoever they were SWATing first?

    • GearRatio says:

      There’s even subsets of “death threats”. I would be entirely unsurprised to find out some internet death threats have followed through to consummation, but I’d be shocked as shit to find out any of them were of the “I’m a twitter celebrity and I get death threats you cannot know my hardship” varoetu.

    • Well... says:

      I’d guess it depends whether you separately count internet death threats originating from people who know the person they’re threatening in real life. E.g. psycho exes, gang members, etc.

      Also, I don’t know how often SWATing has actually happened. Could it really be more than a handful of times before SWAT teams figured out a way to detect it? I don’t know and would be interested in learning more.

      If we’re only talking about situations like where a public figure receives a death threat from some anonymous internet rando, then like you my expectation is that followup attempts at murder by said randos are probably extremely rare, enough that “receiving death threats” deserves a yawn (so to speak).

      • GearRatio says:

        There was a commenter here some months back who got swatted, but said the cops were aware from the beginning that this is what it was – something about the format of the call being swattish, or something. I would assume something in the family of “really big threat being reported, but with a blocked number and caller won’t identify themselves, or hangs up” probably fits the bill.

    • Paul Zrimsek says:

      When I hear about an internet death threat it’s nearly always as part of a Chinese-robberish attempt to prove that my ingroup|outgroup has some dreadful people in it. The threats don’t need to be carried out to serve as evidence for that less-than-momentous truth.

      • Well... says:

        Word? When I hear about them it’s nearly always an attempt to prove that the person receiving them is experiencing hardship that’s completely either undeserved or out of proportion to whatever prompted the threats.

        • Paul Zrimsek says:

          I suppose it comes down to what your personal Internet looks like, but in mine, for every first-hand account of receiving a death threat there’s a dozen retweets or whatever bearing the message: look at the sort of thing your people do. Denounce! Denounce! (That death threats are undeserved and out of proportion sort of goes without saying.)

    • imoimo says:

      Well now I wonder: if we assume the goal of death threats is to instill fear, and we imagine a future where common knowledge says “death threats deserve a yawn”… could we end up with a lot more death threats being carried out? You neutralize someone’s weapon, I’d expect them to up the ante with a better one.

      • ARabbiAndAFrog says:

        I do not think instill fear is the cause for most death threats against anyone public. I imagine most threaters are either venting or trolling, and are not interested in violence. That’s assuming death threats are not fabricated entirely by someone playing the victim.

        It might bump it rate from almost nothing to almost nothing and a half, but I dobt it’ll be perceptible.

      • John Schilling says:

        if we assume the goal of death threats is to instill fear

        Then we are in error. The goal of the standard internet death threat is to enable some loser who would would need a size-500 shoehorn to pry his ass out of the couch in his parents’ basement, to feel happy about the great victory he has won over his hated foe. This goal is accomplished when said foe goes to the internet to whine about how terrible it is that they had to go into hiding because of the death threats. Very high cost-benefit ratio because the cost (and risk) is approximately zero.

        If it stops working because of the yawns, there won’t be much in the way of a plan B where the losers go around actually murdering their hated foes, because the cost-benefit ratio is nigh-infinitely lower on account of their actually being a cost to that. Also, nobody actually makes size-500 shoehorns.

      • CatCube says:

        It’s hard to say. A rough equivalent is the bomb threat, especially to schools. I can’t imagine that most of the people who call them in would then proceed to actually plant bombs if they stopped working–mostly, they’re calling them in not because they want to kill anybody, but because they want to leverage the response to get out of a test, or for petty revenge.

        They work, of course, because very, very occasionally somebody does plant a real bomb, and you don’t want to be the guy who blew off a bomb threat That One Time. So if they stopped evacuating for every threat, you’d probably see a drop in false threats as they no longer worked, until a real bomb went off which restarts taking every single one seriously.

  34. Well... says:

    The ten Beatrix Potter books I’ve read, in order from most to least excellent (in my humble opinion) for your review and discussion.

    1. Jeremy Fisher
    2. Tom Kitten
    3. Jemima Puddle-Duck
    4. Samuel Whiskers or The Roly-Poly Pudding
    5. Benjamin Bunny
    6. Peter Rabbit
    7. The Pie and the Patty-Pan
    8. Johnny Town-Mouse
    9. Squirrel Nutkin
    10. Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle

    • JustToSay says:

      The Tale of Two Bad Mice: “Then there was no end to the rage and disappointment of Tom Thumb and Hunca Munca.”

    • Tarpitz says:

      I have not read any of them in I imagine around thirty years, but my favourite when I did was The Tale of Mr. Tod.

    • SamChevre says:

      They are favorites of my younger children, so I read them frequently: I particularly like “Ginger and Pickles” and “The Flopsy Bunnies.”

  35. BBA says:

    Hello again. I see you’re not discussing this already, and it seemed of interest, so here goes: Adam Elkus on Sacha Baron Cohen’s newfound appreciation for objective truth.

    I will add only this much: despite these belated realizations by Baron Cohen and Stewart that there’s something to care about, their cynicism still feels like a more accurate take on the world than the “activist comedy” of their successors. To still claim the mantle of brutal honesty, but to be unwilling or unable to point out the obvious because it’d score points for the enemy… well, you’ve become the very kind of hypocrite you started out rebelling against.

    This is my first comment here since October. One per month seems like a good tempo. See you in December.

    • Paul Zrimsek says:

      Zuckerberg’s in an odd spot. A lot of people on both sides seem convinced that he’s a horrible horrible person, and that he’s not exerting nearly enough influence on people’s political speech.

    • blipnickels says:

      This struck me as almost true and important,

      So then to damn South Park for making it cool not to care about the world is missing the point. People drawn to such media do so because they want to – collectively – use the world as material for continuing the relationship of cynical intimacy they have with both the TV show and each other as fans of it. Therefore it is perfectly appropriate that South Park did not call on its own viewers to change the world, as doing so was entirely besides the point. The world was not there to be changed, the world was there mostly to give people a reason to feel savvy.

      I’m not sure feeling ‘savvy’ is what drives it but I think the insight that South Park/Cohen/Stewart were selected by the audience is important. There’s no lack, then or now, of talented comedians trying to break it big. Jon Stewart is talented, no doubt, but the reason Jon Stewart made is a household name and, say, Patrice O’Neal isn’t has less to do with talent and more to do with Jon Stewart connecting with a need of his audience. People in 200x wanted a funny/semi-informative takedown of Bush and authority. They chose this, they chose him. If they hadn’t wanted it, we’d never have heard of him. It’s hard for me to blame Cohen et al for this because I see them more as passengers than drivers; the only way they could have changed would be to burn their fragile success.

      Same for Facebook, or most social media for that matter. There’s no end of potential rivals for these extremely lucrative markets and Zuckerberg et al have to do what their audience wants, regardless of what Sacha Baron Cohen wants, or even what Zuckerberg himself might want. Google+ became a joke but I’m sure Zuckerberg knows there’s extremely competent competitors willing to spend billions to take a cut of his market. He’s also trapped by his audience but that means the faults in Facebook aren’t Zuckerberg’s, they’re ours. We demanded what Facebook became, in action, if not in word.

      I should walk this back a little, I’m sure Zuckerberg or Stewart have some freedom of action, but I keep coming back to CNN in my head. CNN swung pretty hard against Trump but I have a hard time believing they had much choice in the matter. Trump sold, and CNN coverage of him was extremely profitable from 2015 to at least 2017. But CNN was struggling long before Trump came along and all of sudden they made serious money of attacking Trump and they could see Maddow et al climbing the ratings of similar content. I’m not sure CNN’s current content is really their decision; the only audience interested in watching CNN wanted certain things from the network and they would either provide them or die. I looked through the New York Times financial statements recently and they’re subscription numbers are finally looking like a viable business model but I’m sure a lot of their recent controversial content is driven by what their new subscribers demand.

      • Douglas Knight says:

        There are a lot more comedians and TV shows than social networks or cable networks. Thus the competitive forces on comedians are much stronger and thus your argument is much stronger about Stewart than South Park than CNN than Facebook.

        Maybe Facebook has to pivot to images to compete with Snapchat, but it would be fine abandoning political engagement to Twitter. Maybe that’s because Twitter isn’t competent, but that’s the point: they don’t have competent people at their heels. Actually, it’s a bit mysterious that they don’t have people spending billions chasing them.

    • imoimo says:

      I enjoyed that read but had trouble drawing a clear point out of it. I think he’s saying: Baron Cohen built a career on cynicism and bad faith satire (?), without stating views of his own. His satire potentially spread more confusion or misunderstanding than he realized. Zuckerberg is in charge of a social media platform that’s criticized for spreading confusion or misunderstanding unintentionally. So Baron Cohen is a hypocrite for criticizing Zuckerberg?

      I agree there’s some hypocrisy on the left with avoiding truths that don’t fit the right narrative, while criticizing bad narratives on the right. But not sure Baron Cohen is a particularly strong example.

    • mtl1882 says:

      I read the linked stuff and I’m not sure if I understand all of what went on, but it confuses me that he could think this is controllable by Facebook fact checkers. I’ve always taken his comedy to be making the point that you can’t really outsource trust, because it is surprisingly easy for normal people to just “go along” with bad ideas when they are confused and prodded, and that this must always be remembered. I’ve always thought the idea was not supposed to be “vilify these college students who said these terrible things when I encouraged it,” so much as “remember, you and those around you may be closer to these college kids than you think.” I never thought they were supposed to be seen as exceptional. But, of course, people prefer to take it that way. I simply find those skits too painful to watch, but I can appreciate the idea behind them.

      He may have been swept up in the messed up logic that permeates so many discussions now—Zuckerberg is a bad guy who doesn’t care about the effects of Facebook, *and* he needs to be exercising much more control and judgement over what people say on Facebook. Paul Zrimsek mentions this paradox above, and the sense of desperation that probably drives it. It’s the same question as the Borat one—are the people he “traps” just showing their true beliefs, or have they learned a lesson about how easily they be convinced to promote the beliefs of whoever intimidates or confuses them in certain ways? The latter is probably more correctable. People like to have it both ways because it absolves them of all responsibility–they can denounce the “bad” person as nothing like them, but the “bad” person is somehow responsible for addressing the issue and fixing it. The alternative would be recognizing that if some people just don’t care about doing what is right, or actively want to do wrong, stopping them is on the rest of us. I’ll have to see if I can find more about his remarks.

  36. Le Maistre Chat says:

    What do millennials say when they finish maintenance on a ballistic missile submarine?

    “OK boomer.”

  37. Faza (TCM) says:

    New top level thread for attempting to construct a steelman of communism as a political and economic system.

    Personally, I consider myself in the “anti” camp, for reasons mentioned here, but I would like to consider the best arguments in favour. If you aren’t willing or able to offer such, I would ask you to restrict yourself to asking questions and requesting clarifications, or to pass this one by.

    In an attempt to impose some structure on a monster discussion, I would like to use the Socratic method of questions and answers. Replies to this post should, ideally, be in the form of a question about some aspect of the proposed communist system with replies to those being kept to the relevant sub-thread (and discussions of those answers kept below these). I will seed some posts to show what I mean.

    What is a “communist system” for the purposes of this discussion? The defining features I see are:
    a. Ownership of the means of production by the working class,

    b. Dissolution of class, meaning that the working class comprises the whole of society,

    c. Production and distribution according to the maxim: “From each according to his ability; to each according to his need”.

    Other possible definitions of what “communism” means, may be valid and interesting, but I would like to keep them away from this thread to avoid arguing over definitions. These points are consistent with what Marx considered to be communism.

    A note about “working class” – by this I understand the group of people that earn their income through labour, as opposed to ownership of some asset. We can distinguish the working class from such classes as land owners (rent), capitalists (return on capital), financiers (return on investments/loans), etc.

    The type of work done and amounts received have no bearing on class membership. The working class is not restricted to blue-collar or poorly paid workers. A teacher, programmer or bureaucrat are properly considered to be part of the working class as long as they are paid to perform specific tasks at the direction and under the supervision of somebody else.

    Some ground rules and assumptions to keep discussion on track:
    1. We assume that a communist state exists and that it has come into existence through the democratically expressed will of the people. Yes, I know that Marx advocated violent revolution and, yes, I am aware that this was all too true historically, but the piles of skulls are too tempting a target. Please assume no skulls were involved.

    2. Communism in one country – other states with different political and social systems exist. This is simply to account for the fact that the entire world becoming communist all at once is much less likely than one country. Also, requiring global participation would count as a strike against communism being a viable political and economic system, given that the world is anything but united.

    3. Human nature remains fundamentally unchanged. Our communist state may have come into existence through the will of the people, but we don’t assume that everyone is on board, not that everyone suddenly changes their outlook and behaviour to always be in alignment with the requirements of the system. Not the least convenient world, but not the most convenient one either.

    4. Labour is still necessary for production. We have a different thread for discussing the Fully Automated variant, plus Full Automation is by no means guaranteed. Even if we assume that we will have Full Automation at some point in the future, I think the discussion will be more fruitful if we consider the levels of automation at present-day levels or such that may reasonably be expected within the next decade, at best.

    4. Discussion of the features of capitalism – good and bad – is off topic. Communism needs to be able to stand on its own, otherwise we might find ourselves in the unfortunate situation where we must maintain a capitalist system somewhere in order to justify communism – by way of contrast and comparison.

    5. Discussion of communist countries past and present is also off topic. The problems therewith are (I should hope) known well enough. What I would like to try to determine is whether this is due to some feature of communism or the specific historical details of those countries.

    I have no means of enforcing these, of course, so I am asking you to help me with that.

    • Faza (TCM) says:

      I would encourage all participants to preregister their moral axioms in this sub-thread. This, I hope, may highlight any potential difference in how we respond to agreed upon facts.

      • Faza (TCM) says:

        My basic moral axiom is equality of all people understood as individual autonomy.

        Robinson Crusoe is no less free to decide for himself what he shall think and what he shall do on his desert island than he was in England, so we can see that individual autonomy is not context-dependent.

        From the equality postulate it follows that one cannot morally exercise one’s autonomy at the expense of another’s. To do so would be to claim that you are worth more than the other person.

        Inalienable rights and freedoms under this framework are restricted to such you can enjoy without the need for anyone else involved. Thus, “right to life” is understood to mean that you shall not be killed by another person (equally possible on a desert island and in Kingston upon Hull), but not that you shall not starve or die of disease, old age, etc. Same for everything else.

        Society comes about when autonomous individuals join forces so that they may achieve more together than they could individually. Maintaining the equality and autonomy postulates requires a compromise between the various members, so that working together is seen as a superior choice to going it alone by everyone involved.

        A good society is one that minimises conflict between its members. This will necessarily involve giving up some measure of freedom by everyone – such as freedom to swing a fist, shout “Fire!” in a crowded theatre, etc.

        The purpose of the state, as a high-level organisation, is therefore to serve all citizens equally – because all citizens have equal moral worth as autonomous moral agents. The state should not “play favourites”, deciding that some of its citizens are more important than others – without consent of those who are to be accorded “lesser worth” (such consent would be an exercise of those people’s autonomy).

        The purpose of the state (and society in general) is to serve its members – not people who are not members. This follows from society being a mutual cooperation agreement by equal and autonomous individuals. Imposing obligations on someone who hasn’t agreed to them is a denial of their autonomy.

        I do not consider equality of outcome to follow from the moral equality of everyone as autonomous individuals. If we observe Robinson Crusoe on one desert island and Crabbinson Rusoe on a separate but equal desert island, we may well find that Robinson has better outcomes than Crabbinson – or vice versa – despite the fact that both are equally free to exercise their individual autonomy.

      • Guy in TN says:

        Since I’m participating: I’m a utilitarian who places equal moral value on the well-being of all humans.

    • Faza (TCM) says:

      Question:

      How do economic decisions – what to produce, how to produce it, how to distribute what is produced – get made in a communist system?

      • Faza (TCM) says:

        My answer: given that the working class (which is the whole of society, in light of the dissolution of class) is the owner of the means of production, the working class (society) decides, through a democratic process.

        It is, however, impossible for every individual member to contribute to every individual decision, because there are too many people and too many decisions.

        Therefore, society shall elect representatives – in the form of a government, to organise production and distribution for the benefit of all.

        • broblawsky says:

          Our host reviewed Red Plenty, a narrative describing early (Kruschev-era) Communist attempts at implementing a kind of algorithmic system for controlling industrial production. In the review, he pointed out that we have more than enough processing power today to do the kind of calculations the Soviet Union found impossible in the 1950s. This might be an alternative to direct democratic control of markets in a Communist society: the people decide what they want the algorithm’s utility function to be, and the algorithm directs production to maximize social utility.

          • cassander says:

            no amount of processing power is sufficient, because in the absence of market prices you simply lack the data required to figure out all the relevant trade offs. and if you rely on prices, then at best, your communism is just replicating capitalism with extra steps.

          • Guy in TN says:

            Nowhere in Faza’s criteria does he stipulate that prices must be abolished.

          • cassander says:

            @Guy in TN

            the only way to get meaningful prices is markets.

          • Guy in TN says:

            This debate is going to hinge on how we are defining “prices” and “markets”, isn’t it?

            Going back to what you wrote:

            in the absence of prices you simply lack the data required to figure out all the relevant trade offs.

            So I set up a system where I distribute to each person 10 tokens which I own. I say that if they hand me 1 token, I will hand them a jar of peanut butter. Also if they hand me 1 token, I will hand them a bottle of milk. I allow them to drink the milk and eat the peanut butter.

            Does this system not distribute the peanut butter/milk ratio to each person, proportional to their individual utility function?

            Now, I would call this system a “market”, and I would call the 1-token-per-item the “price”, but I understand why some people would object, since no exchange of ownership is taking place.

          • cassander says:

            Guy in TN says:

            Now, I would call this system a “market”, and I would call the 1-token-per-item the “price”, but I understand why some people would object, since no exchange of ownership is taking place.

            You might have prices, but you don’t have a market, because you’re setting prices, not letting them emerge organically based on supply and demand. So sure, I suppose trivially you can get prices by just making them up, but you can’t run an economy on data based on made up prices, because if you do consumption won’t reflect the cost of production or level of demand and eventually you’ll run out of the stuff that’s under priced and have surpluses of the stuff that’s overpriced.

          • Guy in TN says:

            if you do consumption won’t reflect the cost of production or level of demand

            I can always adjust the token-per-item ratio for changes in the level of “demand” and “supply” (using these terms colloquially, since no exchange of ownership is taking place). The 1-token-per-item isn’t fixed.

          • cassander says:

            @Guy in TN says:

            I can always adjust the token-per-item ratio for changes in the level of “demand” and “supply” (using these terms colloquially, since no exchange of ownership is taking place). The 1-token-per-item isn’t

            Right, and if you do that really well, you’re just mimicking capitalism with extra steps.

          • Guy in TN says:

            There are meaningful differences. I think it would be easier to regulate and redistribute in such a system.

            For instance, if the state thought the milk was tainted with something unhealthy, they could simply reclaim the milk that it had distributed out to people and cease distribution. It’s the state’s milk after all.

            Under the capitalist system, this would run into all sorts of objections:
            “Isn’t the reclaiming of milk theft?
            “What authority do you have to control what someone else puts in their body anyway?”
            “Wouldn’t this cause a loss of economic value?”

            None of which would be applicable if the state owns the milk.

          • Civilis says:

            For instance, if the state thought the milk was tainted with something unhealthy, they could simply reclaim the milk that it had distributed out to people and cease distribution. It’s the state’s milk after all.

            That’s still capitalism with extra steps; you’re making extra work to add ‘features’ the people don’t want. As soon as the people get tokens, those tokens are ‘theirs’ as much as the cash in a capitalist’s wallet belongs to the capitalist. Those tokens, and what they are traded for, are an entitlement. You’re going to need people to do the work of reclaiming the milk from people that consider it theirs. On the other hand, if the milk costs one token, you could offer two tokens back to return the expired milk, and the people will do the work of returning most of the milk for you, without needing the extra effort.

            Any such system will end up reinventing capitalism with extra effort involved. Any capitalist features you don’t provide will be implemented by the people, out of your control, and will require extra effort to stop (and being outside the official system, will be far more corrupt than if they had been implemented officially).

          • Guy in TN says:

            Any such system will end up reinventing capitalism with extra effort involved. Any capitalist features you don’t provide will be implemented by the people, out of your control, and will require extra effort to stop

            As per the criteria laid out by Faza, my proposed system is communism. If you disagree with his criteria and want to call my system “capitalism” that’s fine, I don’t really care about the word so much as the idea.

            You’re going to need people to do the work of reclaiming the milk from people that consider it theirs.

            Incentives to do extra labor will be provided in the form of extra tokens.

          • CatCube says:

            @Guy in TN, @Civilis

            For instance, if the state thought the milk was tainted with something unhealthy, they could simply reclaim the milk that it had distributed out to people and cease distribution. It’s the state’s milk after all.

            et seq.,

            This is, like, the weirdest back-and-forth I’ve ever seen. Have you really never heard of a product recall? They happen all the time. For something like milk or other low-value food product, they’ll put out the word to throw the product away. (BTW, check your romaine lettuce.)

            Something like milk would require an immense amount of labor to try to get back, no matter who technically owned it. For larger end items, you either get a new one by turning the old one in, or for smaller items (like the lanyards on the original Wii remotes) you just write the company and they send you a free replacement. For cars, you bring it to a dealer and they make the fix at the manufacturer’s expense. They can’t force you to do it, but they’ll at least try to reach every known owner by mail to avoid expensive lawsuits over a known issue.

            What to do once a product has been identified as defective is a solved problem, at least for capitalism (I’d be very surprised if a communist government didn’t do something very similar, I just don’t know for sure offhand). The issue is preventing defective products in the first place, or getting whoever is responsible for the defective product to admit there’s a problem, because whether capitalist or communist, it’s cheaper to make defective shit, and admitting that you released defective shit will often result in adverse effects, just different adverse effects.

          • Guy in TN says:

            What to do once a product has been identified as defective is a solved problem, at least for capitalism

            How so? The owner of the milk could disagree with the state’s opinion, creating difficulties in the power of the state to remove the unhealthy product.

            This sort of thing happens all the time: raw milk, cigarettes, alcohol, ect. It gets even more problematic when the person who has the product intends on selling it to another.

          • Civilis says:

            How so? The owner of the milk could disagree with the state’s opinion, creating difficulties in the power of the state to remove the unhealthy product.

            If the person with the milk disagrees with the states opinion, they’re going to be pissed whether or not the milk is owned by the state on paper, because it took time, effort, and tokens to get the milk in the first place. Nothing will change that.

            I’m in Faza’s position. I really want to see a steelman of communism that would actually work, but every time someone proposes one it has obvious flaws, and those flaws are obvious because we see them in real states run by Communists.

            We have a centrally run economy, where we give tokens (we’ll call them ‘rubles’) to the workers that they can trade for items which we’ve assigned a value to. And when we do this, we find that a high percentage of our economic activity takes place outside the purview of our token valuation system in a black market, where the real currency is market valued tokens (we’ll call them ‘dollars’) or even goods that maintain value over time (which we’ll call ‘blue jeans’ or ‘cigarettes’). This makes knowing what to produce to meet everyone’s wants and needs impossible because so much of the valuation occurrs outside of our carefully planned system, and we don’t know how much of the value we see in the system is only because those goods are valuable on the black market. This also breaks the classless aspect of the system, because you have classes of people based on their access to the black market.

          • @Civilis

            The obvious steelman of communism with regards to milk production is that people are fat, and if the government planned everyone’s diets, was able to distribute food cards and set prices, there’d still be some variety, but people wouldn’t be able to overeat and get fat.

          • Guy in TN says:

            If the person with the milk disagrees with the states opinion, they’re going to be pissed whether or not the milk is owned by the state on paper, because it took time, effort, and tokens to get the milk in the first place. Nothing will change that.

            I mean, I didn’t say state ownership removed all difficulties to regulation, only that it makes it less difficult. The same difficulty exists in private ownership- e.g. I could be upset that a landowner governs (in effect, regulates) his property in a way that I feel is unfair.

            We have a centrally run economy, where we give tokens (we’ll call them ‘rubles’) to the workers that they can trade for items which we’ve assigned a value to. And when we do this, we find that a high percentage of our economic activity takes place outside the purview of our token valuation system in a black market, where the real currency is market valued tokens

            The solution is to not have too much central planning, and allow people plenty of leeway to trade the token for items on their own. There could be thousands of mini-distribution centers, each setting their own “prices” to the local supply and demand. If you want to trade tokens for jeans, that’s fine. It’s not a “black market” if it’s legally sanctioned.

          • Clutzy says:

            The solution is to not have too much central planning, and allow people plenty of leeway to trade the token for items on their own. There could be thousands of mini-distribution centers, each setting their own “prices” to the local supply and demand. If you want to trade tokens for jeans, that’s fine. It’s not a “black market” if it’s legally sanctioned.

            This sort of system will also generate a lot of inequality between regions and within them compared to the centrally planning everything one, because it is implementing forms of capitalism. If it doesn’t end up doing that, there will be a black market that instead steps in and created the inequality.

            Also there is the trouble of labor, there are many jobs that are not particularly attractive to most people, like garbageman that will need to offer much more tokens/hour otherwise no one will do them. And finally, probably the hardest thing to replicate is speculative business ventures, and ensuring qualified people are the one’s receiving funding. Your programs in computing are going to have to be mostly based on ripping off designs from richer countries if you don’t know to give your startup money to Larry Ellison and Bill Gates, instead of one of many other people who may look qualified from a very high end view. And you have to make them doing those things actually attractive to your Larry Ellison, who otherwise could easily have a cushy job as a professor.

          • Civilis says:

            The obvious steelman of communism with regards to milk production is that people are fat, and if the government planned everyone’s diets, was able to distribute food cards and set prices, there’d still be some variety, but people wouldn’t be able to overeat and get fat.

            If our goal is a working Communist system meeting the criteria set out by Faza, then this contradicts point b: dissolution of class, meaning that the working class comprises the whole of society. ‘Features’ that empower the central authority over the public breed an authoritarian class. The US could accomplish the same ‘feature’ for the public by repealing or modifying the fifth amendment; there’s a reason ‘nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation‘ is in the bill of rights.

            The solution is to not have too much central planning, and allow people plenty of leeway to trade the token for items on their own. There could be thousands of mini-distribution centers, each setting their own “prices” to the local supply and demand. If you want to trade tokens for jeans, that’s fine. It’s not a “black market” if it’s legally sanctioned.

            If your mini-distribution centers can compete on price, the difference from a supermarket is in the supply end. Obviously, then, the difference is in the central planning side on the supply end. The problem is that unless you replicate the market based token system on the supply end, you end up with the same problem, only with the black market existing between mini-distribution center managers and suppliers.

            Everyone wants a widget. You don’t produce enough widgets to meet demand. Mini-distribution center managers will be bribing the widget production center shipping managers to make sure the widgets made will get to their mini-distribution centers (and then mark up the price of the widgets to pay for the bribes). Again, any difference between your token system and capitalist currency will be made up for on the black market out of your control.

            The question then is why you need central planning at all; what does it add to the picture for the working class? Jeans were valuable in the USSR because they were something the central planning didn’t produce in any significant quantity to meet the demand. The question then becomes how your central planning is going to be more responsive to demand than the USSR’s was, and how it’s better for the working class than a non-centrally planned system.

          • Guy in TN says:

            @Clutzy

            Also there is the trouble of labor, there are many jobs that are not particularly attractive to most people, like garbageman that will need to offer much more tokens/hour otherwise no one will do them.

            The incentive to do unattractive jobs is more reward tokens.

            And finally, probably the hardest thing to replicate is speculative business ventures, and ensuring qualified people are the one’s receiving funding. Your programs in computing are going to have to be mostly based on ripping off designs from richer countries if you don’t know to give your startup money to Larry Ellison and Bill Gates, instead of one of many other people who may look qualified from a very high end view.

            In order to ensure that the most qualified people are in charge of each operation, one of the criteria for maintaining that position is ensuring that you bring in a large amount of tokens from people- this indicates a high level of social satisfaction with the job performance. I mean, isn’t this basically how capitalism decides if someone is effective at their job? There’s no reason it couldn’t easily be replicated.

            This sort of system will also generate a lot of inequality between regions and within them compared to the centrally planning everything one, because it is implementing forms of capitalism. If it doesn’t end up doing that, there will be a black market that instead steps in and created the inequality.

            “A black market will exist” isn’t really a particularly interesting criticism to me. By my understanding, illegal activity has existed in every country and economic system. So just like in capitalism, in my proposed system people will use the power of the state to try to enforce the law the best they can, knowing that that enforcement rate will be less than 100%.

          • Guy in TN says:

            @Civilis

            If our goal is a working Communist system meeting the criteria set out by Faza, then this contradicts point b: dissolution of class, meaning that the working class comprises the whole of society. ‘Features’ that empower the central authority over the public breed an authoritarian class.

            The use of “class” in the OP refers to receiving income through labor instead of capital. It does not refer to the power relationships within the system. I’ll quote Faza:
            “The type of work done and amounts received have no bearing on class membership. The working class is not restricted to blue-collar or poorly paid workers. A teacher, programmer or bureaucrat are properly considered to be part of the working class as long as they are paid to perform specific tasks at the direction and under the supervision of somebody else.”

            The problem is that unless you replicate the market based token system on the supply end, you end up with the same problem,

            Right. This is why there will not only be a thousand mini-distribution centers, but also a thousand mini-suppliers.

            The question then is why you need central planning at all; what does it add to the picture for the working class?

            I guess I’m going to need you to unpack the phrase “central planning” a bit, before I can answer that. My proposal has thousands of small, widely-distributed semi-autonomous suppliers and distributors. People can exchange tokens for most goods and services, without having to seek permission from the state beforehand.

            I mean, not everything will be set up in this way, and not every exchange is allowed, but the same could be said for nominally capitalist countries such as the US, which I don’t think most people would describe as “centrally planned”.

          • broblawsky says:

            no amount of processing power is sufficient, because in the absence of market prices you simply lack the data required to figure out all the relevant trade offs. and if you rely on prices, then at best, your communism is just replicating capitalism with extra steps.

            Only if you assume that markets are already efficient, which is probably untrue for most markets; the market can’t address externalities, after all. But even if an algorithmically controlled price-setting system is less efficient than a market, I think our hypothetical Communists would argue that society gains more than it loses by redistributing the gains from capitalists to the workers, and to industry as well. Less mega-yachts, mansions and Hermes handbags; more food, housing and medical care.

          • cassander says:

            @broblawsky says:

            Only if you assume that markets are already efficient, which is probably untrue for most markets;

            empirical evidence suggests otherwise.

            the market can’t address externalities, after all.

            empirical evidence also suggests that non-market mechanisms aren’t great at dealing with them either.

            But even if an algorithmically controlled price-setting system is less efficient than a market, I think our hypothetical Communists would argue that society gains more than it loses by redistributing the gains from capitalists to the workers, and to industry as well. Less mega-yachts, mansions and Hermes handbags; more food, housing and medical care.

            this argument has certainly been made in the past. but, again, we have the empirical evidence that suggests otherwise. non market societies did not deliver higher standards of living for the average person than market societies did, despite the abundance of yachts.

          • Clutzy says:

            The incentive to do unattractive jobs is more reward tokens.

            In order to ensure that the most qualified people are in charge of each operation, one of the criteria for maintaining that position is ensuring that you bring in a large amount of tokens from people- this indicates a high level of social satisfaction with the job performance. I mean, isn’t this basically how capitalism decides if someone is effective at their job? There’s no reason it couldn’t easily be replicated.

            But why then even have “tokens” instead of “money”? The token accumulator is just a billionaire by another name. He will even be able to get illegal, luxury, goods on the black market. The only advantage of the token system is that if there is a rich token-haver that the President doesn’t like, you can easily raid his home and find some illegal French cheeses and Jeff Koons centerpieces and then send him to prison.

          • Guy in TN says:

            @Clutzy

            The only advantage of the token system is that if there is a rich token-haver that the President doesn’t like, you can easily raid his home and find some illegal French cheeses and Jeff Koons centerpieces and then send him to prison.

            The reason why I call them “tokens” instead of “money”, is that I don’t want people to become confused and start thinking that they own the unit of exchange. This makes implementing the “regulatory” and “tax” system (really, just re-arranging things the state owns) a lot easier, because it undercuts a lot of the main counter-arguments against it.

            For instance:
            1. A “tax” on the tokens can’t be called theft, since its the state’s own property.

            2. Controlling how people interact with items (e.g., drugs, weapons) doesn’t infringe on what could be construed as someone’s “negative liberty” anymore than a private property owner keeping you off his land does, since the state is the owner of all things. You are free to get off the state’s property if you don’t like it.

            3. It severs the idea that “ownership” stems from the fruits of your labor- i.e., that you own things because you work for them. In this society, the distribution of token not explicitly tied to labor. You have tokens because the owner of the tokens lets you have them- that’s it. There’s usually no question of “deservingness” of someone else’s property.

            4. “Taxation” and “regulation” can no longer be said to inherently cause a loss in economic value, since these activities become all internal to the property owner (the state).

            I admit the differences are more psychological that physical, but that doesn’t make its effects any less real. Changing how people view their relationship with property will change how they interact with it; whether something is “yours” or “mine” really does matter at some deep, nearly hard-wired sense.

          • pontifex says:

            1. A “tax” on the tokens can’t be called theft, since its the state’s own property.

            Most people don’t call taxes “theft,” and those who do are unlikely to be placated by changing the name of “money” to “tokens.”

            2. Controlling how people interact with items (e.g., drugs, weapons) doesn’t infringe on what could be construed as someone’s “negative liberty” anymore than a private property owner keeping you off his land does, since the state is the owner of all things. You are free to get off the state’s property if you don’t like it.

            The United States already controls how people “interact” with drugs and weapons. This is just plain old capitalism with paternalistic government controls, which is very old at this point.

            3. It severs the idea that “ownership” stems from the fruits of your labor- i.e., that you own things because you work for them. In this society, ownership is very explicitly unrelated to labor. You have tokens because the owner of the tokens lets you have them- that’s it. There’s usually no question of “deservingness” of someone else’s property.

            You can have capitalism with weak or nonexistent property rights. Think present-day Russia, China, etc. People usually call this “crony capitalism” because the people who are allowed to be rich are the government’s cronies.

            4. “Taxation” and “regulation” can no longer be said to inherently cause a loss in economic value, since these activities become all internal to the property owner (the state).

            A lot of people already believe that the state should control all economic activity in a paternalistic way. This seems to be the main point of Chartalism (some of them are now calling themselves “Modern Monetary Theory”, so watch out, “unmodern” mainstream economists!)

          • Guy in TN says:

            Most people don’t call taxes “theft,” and those who do are unlikely to be placated by changing the name of “money” to “tokens.”

            Are you sure? I think at least a portion of this attitude stems from a naive literalism, e.g. “First the money is mine, and then it isn’t? How come the state can do this but my neighbors can’t?” Surely must be very confusing for people, this charade we play in social democracies where we say people “own their money” but then put all sorts of restrictions on how it can be used, and even take it away.

            This is just plain old capitalism with paternalistic government controls, which is very old at this point.

            I’m not really interested in debating over definitions, but I do want to make it clear that my proposed system fits the criteria for “communism” as described in the OP. If you want to disagree with the criteria that’s fine.

          • Guy in TN says:

            You can have capitalism with weak or nonexistent property rights. Think present-day Russia, China, etc. People usually call this “crony capitalism” because the people who are allowed to be rich are the government’s cronies.

            I think you misunderstand. In my proposed system, property rights are absolute and vigorously protected. My system’s unwavering commitment to protecting the rights of the property owner (in this case the state) actually surpasses that of current day social democracies.

          • Clutzy says:

            I don’t really think there is much more than psychology on your first two points, but these are odd to me.

            3. It severs the idea that “ownership” stems from the fruits of your labor- i.e., that you own things because you work for them. In this society, the distribution of token not explicitly tied to labor. You have tokens because the owner of the tokens lets you have them- that’s it. There’s usually no question of “deservingness” of someone else’s property.

            No, there is still the question of deservingness. Because I did in fact work for the token. Even if I don’t own it, I still worked for it. If you make a habit of overtaxing tokens, or even worse, arbitrarily recalling them no one is going to become a garbageman or entrepreneur.

            4. “Taxation” and “regulation” can no longer be said to inherently cause a loss in economic value, since these activities become all internal to the property owner (the state).

            The loss of economic value is not because people lose money, its because they fail to invest in capital, or fail to perform labor because of them. If Mr. Burns sees that all the other times people started nuclear power plants they lost a bunch of tokens because they couldn’t pay nuclear waste disposers enough tokens to adjust for the radiation risk, and they couldn’t keep enough tokens afterwards to take t he risk of failure (or the state keeps taking away successful plants from founders, or taxes tokens of the rich so much than none can ever accumulate enough to ever start a power plant), then Springfield simply has no power plant. And Homer has no job.

            These are the problems. People don’t magically become altruistic. Like I have said elsewhere, if we presumed the existence of the humans in your system, all of the socialist critiques would also magically disappear.

          • Guy in TN says:

            No, there is still the question of deservingness. Because I did in fact work for the token. Even if I don’t own it, I still worked for it. If you make a habit of overtaxing tokens, or even worse, arbitrarily recalling them no one is going to become a garbageman or entrepreneur.

            I agree with you, really. My point was perhaps a little unclear, and it is a fine needle to thread: I want people to view the tokens as a reward for doing labor, but with the ultimate understanding that the state can do what it wants with its own property. Many people will be receiving tokens who don’t do any labor at all (children, the elderly, ect), and those who amass excess tokens will have a percentage taken away from them, with the rules for this codified in a way such that it is non-arbitrary.

            If Mr. Burns sees that all the other times people started nuclear power plants they lost a bunch of tokens because they couldn’t pay nuclear waste disposers enough tokens to adjust for the radiation risk, and they couldn’t keep enough tokens afterwards to take t he risk of failure (or the state keeps taking away successful plants from founders, or taxes tokens of the rich so much than none can ever accumulate enough to ever start a power plant), then Springfield simply has no power plant. And Homer has no job.

            Okay, but how do we know that this causes a loss in economic value? From the states-eye-view, it could simply view this “taxation” and “regulation” as small parts of a larger system that furthers its goals.

            Typically, the argument is that the property owner is the entity best suited to make decisions about how to best maximize the value of his property.

          • Aapje says:

            @Guy in TN

            I want people to view the tokens as a reward for doing labor, but with the ultimate understanding that the state can do what it wants with its own property. Many people will be receiving tokens who don’t do any labor at all (children, the elderly, ect), and those who amass excess tokens will have a percentage taken away from them, with the rules for this codified in a way such that it is non-arbitrary.

            Welfare and taxes exist in capitalist systems. Their legitimacy is heavily dependent on the extent to which people feel that they are just, which is a hard problem. Democracy is a method to try to increase legitimacy, but there are many examples of democratic or ‘democratic’ countries where the taxing and distributing authority has little legitimacy (often because that authority is corrupt, but the lack of legitimacy tends to feed corruption, causing a feedback loop).

            Note that your fantasy that your welfare and taxes will be non-arbitrary is ridiculous. The level and kind of taxes, as well as the level and kind of welfare, cannot be objectively determined. What people support is heavily value-based, as well as determined by selfish and semi-selfish interest.

            Democracy is a relatively good system for these kinds of issues exactly because it doesn’t posit a universal idea of values and interests, where people who disagree or don’t fit in that model have no voice. At the very least, they always have a vote, so any oppression is never complete.

            Anyway, you seem to desire to reduce the power people have to resist being forced into sacrificing for others, but your proposal actually:
            – allows for more exploitation/oppression, creating incentives for those in power that are hard to resist and/or that lack correcting mechanisms (and your response to any criticisms is just to add on more and more capitalist features, resulting in a system that is broken at the places where you have blind spots that are so big that you don’t understand further criticisms)
            – doesn’t increase people’s level of acceptance, but makes them look for ways to undermine/avoid your oppressive system (like corruption, black markets, etc)

            Avoiding this state of mutual antagonism between the rulers and the ruled is actually a very hard problem, that most ideologues seem to ignore, presumably because of hubris, where they see their solutions as so wonderful that few could object.

            IMO, any system needs to have checks and balances as a key feature, not an afterthought, because it needs to be resistant to ignorant/selfish and thereby oppressive hubris, which is a human trait.

          • Guy in TN says:

            Aapje,

            My purpose of this mental exercise was less to describe an outline of my ideal system (as you note, I increasingly “tacked on” market features), but rather to make a few specific points on issues that seem to be commonly confused in the discourse:

            1. Firstly, that private ownership vs. public ownership, and market distribution vs. economic planning, are two separate concepts that should not be conflated. It seems that most commentator’s arguments against public ownership are actually arguments against economic planning. But as you know, with for example Norway, you can have significant state ownership of capital, with comparatively little change in the scale of economic planning. So arguments against economic planning aren’t actually arguments against state ownership per se.

            I suppose I could have just started off with the reminder that market socialism is an ideology that exists. But I think it is more persuasive to lead people to a conclusion, rather than simply assert it.

            2. Given that de jure capitalist states place many restrictions on private ownership (taxation, regulation), and given that de jure communist states allow great leeway for private individuals to direct the use of capital (Vietnam, China), the actual meaning of a country being “capitalist” or “communist” are largely psychological. The nominal ownership really doesn’t matter that much.

            For example, if I get 70% of the profit from capital and the government gets the other 30%, you can describe it in two different ways with the same effect: I can say “I receive 100% of the value, and have to pay the government 30% in taxation”, or “The government receives 100% of the value, and pays me 70% to manage it”. The first is “capitalism” and the second is “socialism”. But the only difference is how we psychologically relate to the property.

          • Guy in TN says:

            And while I’m half-joking about the positive psychological effects, there does seem to be a major ideological hurdle (along liberal-oriented people in the US, at least) that prevents the implementation of a robust welfare state.

            This belief is that, morally speaking, the property owner ought to receive 100% of the profit from capital, which he then should be able to choose how to distribute as he wishes. Because of this, the scenario in which the government takes 30% via taxation is viewed as morally illegitimate. However, if the scenario was such that the property owner chooses to pay out 70% in wages, while keeping 30% for himself, that would be considered morally legitimate.

            So given that this ideological roadblock exists, my admittedly-trollish response is to just work around it: Make the government the property owner, and describe any profits it doesn’t collect from capital as “wages” it chooses to pay out to the managers of capital. Thus replicating our currently existing taxation system point-for-point, but with the owner of capital (the state) now initially receiving 100% of the value and voluntarily choosing to distribute 70% of it. It’s pretty funny IMO

          • Aapje says:

            @Guy in TN

            I can say “I receive 100% of the value, and have to pay the government 30% in taxation”, or “The government receives 100% of the value, and pays me 70% to manage it”. The first is “capitalism” and the second is “socialism”. But the only difference is how we psychologically relate to the property.

            You ignore that in the latter situation, it is much easier for the government to change the deal, because it is ‘their money’. You can’t change the balance of power and then assume that the outcome will be similar.

            The way things typically work is that value tends to fluctuate and the government is going to want to privatize the losses as much they can, but keep the gains as much as possible. The fluctuations allow for the side with outsized power to ‘reasonably’ do this, by deciding what arguments are reasonable at what time.

            For example, there is a Dutch pension fund that covers all government workers. When the stocks boomed and the interest rates were still fairly high, the government took a lot of money out of this fund, because it was quite unfair to have all this surplus that wasn’t needed for paying out the promised pensions. Now that interest rates are low and stocks are fairly static, there is a deficit compared to promises made, but they didn’t put money back in, nor could pensioners force them to. There is an asymmetry here.

            The government couldn’t as easily and didn’t take money out of the private pension funds, nor did those companies do this, because the checks and balances of those funds were better.

            Socialists tend to understand the consequences of asymmetry in power when it is worker vs business, but less often when it is citizen vs government.

            Note that organizations, whether they be business or governmental, tend to develop harmful behaviors in the absence of sufficient checks and balances. Mere voting is actually a fairly limited form of this and arguably not sufficient by itself, especially when governments manage to arrange the democracy in a way that neuters it (see many of the ‘democratic’ socialist states, as well as the EU), so an elite can do what they want, for ‘the people.’

          • CatCube says:

            @Guy in TN
            What you’re proposing in terms of ownership seems to be rather, well, Neo-Rxnary; under feudalism, the king explicitly owned all property in the kingdom, and was merely letting his subjects use it for beneficial ends (fee simple vs. alloidal title). This didn’t seem to make it less likely for tax revolts to be a thing.

            Also, your proposed framing has to explain why people get so pissy about refusals to renew a lease on an apartment, or demand laws for rent control. I mean, the lessor/lessee relationship is exactly what you describe–one person owns it absolutely free and clear and lets somebody else use it for consideration. If they find a new, better, use for that property (or a more lucrative one), they’ll stop letting their current lessees use it and turn to that better use. People get super-mad about this. We pass rent control laws that may even lock in the current lessee and use as a rental apartment. Heck, under your framing, you’ll have less rights in your apartment than you do with a regular landlord now.

            No matter what the “theory” of ultimate ownership is, people are going to get emotionally attached to something they’ve been using, and will get really, really mad when you take it away. Complaining that theoretically the tokens are the property of the government so they can be seized at any time won’t make them less angry about it.

          • Clutzy says:

            @catcube

            Thanks, now I see why all my posts comparing his framing as neoRX got eaten.

          • Guy in TN says:

            @Aapje

            You ignore that in the latter situation, it is much easier for the government to change the deal, because it is ‘their money’. You can’t change the balance of power and then assume that the outcome will be similar.

            Given that a government in a capitalist system has the power set the tax rate and regulate property usage, I’m not convinced I am changing the balance of power in this scenario, except possibly in a psychological sense.

            The government couldn’t as easily and didn’t take money out of the private pension funds, nor did those companies do this, because the checks and balances of those funds were better.

            Isn’t this just an object-level question of what the best course of action would be regarding the pension funds? If the government had took money out of the pension during the stock-market boom and was successful in investing it in such a manner to re-fund the pension with money leftover, then wouldn’t we be talking about how superior it is to have liquidity between investments? I guess I don’t see the argument for why people who make investment decisions for the government would necessarily be less successful than those who invest on behalf of private entities.

          • Guy in TN says:

            @CatCube

            What you’re proposing in terms of ownership seems to be rather, well, Neo-Rxnary; under feudalism, the king explicitly owned all property in the kingdom, and was merely letting his subjects use it for beneficial ends (fee simple vs. alloidal title). This didn’t seem to make it less likely for tax revolts to be a thing.

            This is true, certainly. One should never underestimate the ability of someone who wants more power to develop an ideology that justifies it. My proposal is best suited for liberal democracies based on Lockean values (e.g., consent of the governed), and particularly in societies who have adopted the neoliberal economic framework of the late 20th century. In other words, it is particularly suited for the United States in 2019. In different contexts it could be ineffective/counter-productive.

            Also, your proposed framing has to explain why people get so pissy about refusals to renew a lease on an apartment, or demand laws for rent control

            People get super-mad about this. We pass rent control laws that may even lock in the current lessee and use as a rental apartment. Heck, under your framing, you’ll have less rights in your apartment than you do with a regular landlord now.

            Well, not everyone buys into the liberal moral framework, sure. But how widespread is rent control really, outside of a few major left-oriented big cities? I certainly don’t have rent control here in Tennessee, and my landlord can cancel the lease any year. I think its an easy case to make that the liberal assumption is the norm, and any exceptions have been rare and hard-fought. Bit I will admit that perhaps I am biased as to how widely adopted the liberal moral framework is, having lived in small-town Kentucky and Tennessee all of my life.

            No matter what the “theory” of ultimate ownership is, people are going to get emotionally attached to something they’ve been using, and will get really, really mad when you take it away. Complaining that theoretically the tokens are the property of the government so they can be seized at any time won’t make them less angry about it.

            Right, but the ability to shift the balance of power is a necessary part of any functioning modern society, whether capitalist or socialist. So there’s no way someone is going to be happy, from a self-interest perspective, that resources (whether tokens or money) once available to them will now be made available to the elderly, the disabled, or children. I think severing the ownership ties to the money, at least under the prevailing ideologies that exist in the US in 2019, would make it a less bitter pill to swallow.

        • CatCube says:

          Wrong place.

      • Guy in TN says:

        Therefore, society shall elect representatives – in the form of a government, to organise production and distribution for the benefit of all.

        But why stop at that level? Isn’t the question of all the production and distribution decisions of a society too big for a group of elected representatives to tackle? They would certainly want to delegate much of the day-to-day responsibility, and focus only on certain big-picture items.

        For questions such as “how many pizzas should this restaurant make on a Tuesday” or “Should we build a barn in this field?” they are going to want thousands, of not millions, of small-decision makers that they could delegate this authority to.

        • Skimming this long thread, I’m not sure if anyone has mentioned the calculation controversy, an extended debate back between WWI and WWII between market economists such as Mises and socialist economists, most notably Lerner and Lange. The issue was whether it was possible to run an economy on socialist lines, and if so how. Lerner and Lange were trying to construct a version of market socialism, essentially a system where the commissar in charge of a factory was instructed to pretend he was a profit maximizing capitalist. As best I can tell, both sides shared essentially the same economic theory. The argument was about its implications.

          My impression is that the socialist side eventually lost the argument, but I haven’t studied the issue in detail and may well have gotten a biased impression. But those arguing the socialist side here might well find the literature worth looking at, since the people arguing it there were smart, competent economists.

          I actually met Abba Lerner–he commented on a presentation I gave on what became my first published economics article. I don’t remember what he said, only that my impression of the comment was positive, and I then discovered who he was. When I mentioned it to my father, his comment was that Abba Lerner had a beautifully clear, logical mind, utterly uninterested in facts.

          An attitude I have some sympathy with. The logic of an argument is something you can examine for yourself inside your head. Facts are messy and uncertain things in the world outside you.

          • sentientbeings says:

            Going from memory of reading some of the socialists’ work ~8 years ago, I think that this:

            As best I can tell, both sides shared essentially the same economic theory.

            might be slightly overstating their common ground, but combined with

            since the people arguing it there were smart, competent economists.

            it relates to a point I often try to express to people about (at least some) socialist economists of the time, which is that were actually trying to construct a workable theory, and properly engaged with arguments against their ideas (as opposed to the behavior of those socialists that decide the best way to deal with economics is to ignore it). Part of how they lost the debate was that as they tried to improve their ideas, responding to the critiques of Mises and others, they ended up re-inventing certain aspects of markets and the price system in a disguised, less efficient form. If you recognize that abolishing money and lacking prices prevents proper calculation, but then invent a pseudo-money and pseudo-prices to solve the problem, you probably end up with something that has the qualities you wanted to avoid anyway and is unappealing to both socialists and capitalists.

      • angularangel says:

        My answer: Is only Capitalism off limits, or are all market economies? Cause while the market has a lot of problems, it has some neat tricks too. If you’re going with a more decentralized Communism, say, where all capital is ultimately owned by society but individual workers enterprises are still free to set their own prices and decide what they’ll produce, or outsource those decisions as they see fit, you could probably make the market play a useful role. Or, you could just rely on some combination of high and low level decision making, discussion, and negotiation. Ultimately, this is one of those systems that’s going to require a great amount of detail and constant revision. Probably, we’d be better off discussing how such a deciding structure would be chosen and amended – I.E. The basics of government.

        On another note, I really wish there was a good way to fold posts. It’d make navigating these comment chains much easier. Or even better, something like what I’ve been working on, see my post above.

        • One problem with the Yugoslav model, which is what you may be thinking of, is that hiring a new worker into a worker’s coop means giving him a share of ownership in the coop. That’s a cost to the other workers, so an incentive not to hire, even if the new worker adds more to productivity than he costs in wages.

          • angularangel says:

            No, I was figuring the ownership of all enterprises would be collective, not held by any specific workers. Of course, this has other challenges, such as capital turnover, and the like. It also means more of a role for government, as government will need to decide whether the managers of any given collective are acting in the interests of the workers collective. So it goes. :/

      • anonymousskimmer says:

        What to produce:
        Each month everyone (or minimally every household) lists what they want and need and ranks it accordingly.

        We can know absolutely the approximate cost in terms of inputs of everything on these lists. Each person’s basket of wants and need is calculated in terms of cost and rank ordered, compared to everyone else’s, the total amount that can be created for next month, and the person’s personal attributes (larger people tend to need more food, for instance), and those items which can be made are made and distributed.

        This system will encourage people to ask for more than will be made, both keeping employment high, and training everyone to accept not having everything they want, while prioritizing their needs and most desired wants.

        What to invent:
        Ideas that inventors (aka members of the general populace who have an idea and the skill to attempt it) have will be listed, and as above interested people would say whether they would be interested, and how much they would be interested, in whichever ideas. This will also have estimated costs from the “wants and needs” bucket, with an understanding that the inventions may never exist. There may be a discount from the “wants and needs” bucket, or there may be a separate “wants and needs” bucket for inventions and ideas, to encourage people to allocate their wants and needs to inventions.

        Inventors whose ideas aren’t sufficiently prioritzed at the moment will have skills that will allow them to assist in production, or on other inventions which did get prioritization. They can always work on their own invention in their free time with the resources gained through their personal “wants and needs” allocations.

        Likewise given that skills and equipment aren’t super fungible, there may be a variety of separate “wants and needs” buckets, with the comparative amount of each bucket (skilled people and dedicated equipment) slowly changing over time as requests vary.

        How to produce and how to distribute:
        People are trained for skills based on natural aptitude and projections of wants and needs categories based on past trends, as well as what they would be happy doing (as happiness is a need, which coincidentally encourages people to work).

        On the margin people are retrained to adjacent fields as necessary.

        It might be a good idea to have the equivalent of minors and dual majors, and also have people occasionally switching jobs to keep their skills up.

        Distribution is just another job.

        Some jobs will have fewer people who want to do them than are necessary for the purpose. People will be as-needed temporarily drafted into these jobs equivalent to the jury system.

        If, after all of this, effort is left over, people can do as they like. Or perhaps society as a whole can propose and vote on what they would like in each category.

        I haven’t thought this through much, but this would be a basis.

    • eyeballfrog says:

      b. Dissolution of class, meaning that the working class comprises the whole of society,

      The type of work done and amounts received have no bearing on class membership. The working class is not restricted to blue-collar or poorly paid workers. A teacher, programmer or bureaucrat are properly considered to be part of the working class as long as they are paid to perform specific tasks at the direction and under the supervision of somebody else.

      This seems underspecified. Who supervises the supervisors? What about the meta-supervisors? If we’re implementing this on a population on the order of 10M, it seems like we’re going to need a lot of them, possibly organized into some sort of hierarchy. You’ve said that at least some of the supervisors have to be elected, which does close the loop if we consider the elections to be a way for the supervisors to be “supervised” by the population. But it raises further questions. Are all the supervisors elected? Does the whole populace vote on all of them or are there local elections for lower-level ones? Are only the high-level ones elected and lower level ones are appointed?

      These questions need to be answered because, while we are for the moment assuming that this system has been put into place, we are not assuming it is stable. As an extreme example, if we choose a system with a single ubersupervisor who has absolute discretion, well, I think we all know where that goes. If our communist system is not resilient to conversion to a non-communist system, it is a failure independent of its morality.

    • albatross11 says:

      ISTM that the basic questions for a communist society are:

      a. How do you get the incentives to work right? “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” doesn’t work worth a damn for giving people incentives to work hard or to work at unpleasant but necessary jobs. Nor is it any good at getting people to minimize their expenses.

      b. How do you solve the socialist calculation problem? That is, markets are amazingly good at getting the information of what everyone values and what resources everything requires to produce to percolate through the economy, so that the relative prices of copper and aluminum guide choices about what to make and how to make it and what to consume and how much. Your communist system will have to find a solution to this problem.

      My guess is that the best thing to do is just use markets in both places as much as possible.

      For labor markets, this is relatively easy, right? Whomever’s looking for coal miners or factory workers or farmers, they offer a wage and maybe a benefits package, and the workers respond to incentives using a market system. I assume the communist society is going to have some kind of welfare scheme, probably kept really minimal to encourage workers, but still not letting anyone starve or freeze to death. This will leave incentives intact for people to work.

      There will be economic inequality from this, as well as probably social classes involving higher status work (doctors have more status than janitors everywhere), but you’ll still see a considerable leveling. Probably you will want to add to that by making it difficult for successful parents to leave their kids a lot of wealth. This doesn’t need to be too draconian–make estate taxes very high, accept that there will be some level of passed-down inequality, but you’re not going to have Rockefellers or anything, just the guy who’s the third generation doctor who has a nicer car and house than most other people.

      Since you’re not remotely a libertarian society, you can ameliorate some of that by having a universal draft and making kids go do some kind of scutwork (military or civilian) for a couple years before going into formal apprenticeships/higher education. Make that relatively egalitarian and even the third-generation doctor will have spent a couple years working on a farm or mine or something before he returned to his easier life.

      Similarly, you’re going to want to use a market for consumer goods and housing and such. Perhaps the housing stock is owned by the state and leased, perhaps it’s owned individually, but whatever is done, the people buying it are paying market prices. That gets you around stupid shortages/gluts/waiting lists/allocation of housing by connections.

      The bigger problem is in capital-owning organizations. You’ve decided you don’t want individual capital accumulation (otherwise we’re just reinventing capitalism with a bearded Marxist face). But you still need several things to work out:

      a. You need capital markets, so that the best uses of capital can beat out the less important uses. This is really important in a world where technology and society changes–it needs to be possible for mainframe companies to lose capital to PC companies and later to cellphone/tablet and cloud-provider companies, or your society will become locked into current allocation patterns forever. (How much capital should be provided next year for the camera film factory?). It needs to be possible for the capital-owning organizations to shut down, or you keep Kodak and your favorite buggywhip company around forever.).

      b. You need managers who know their own business well and can operate within the markets. There need to be incentives to encourage better decisions by managers, and also opportunities for managers to fail and get filtered out (what NNT calls skin in the game).

      c. You need innovation to be possible. That means that sometimes, a real barnburner of a manager or management team gets control of a capital-controlling organization and can rapidly expand and make a ton of money.

      You can prevent this from returning to capitalism by limiting the salaries of the managers (though they’ll still be higher than basically anyone else’s), giving them quite luxurious accomodations while they’re working, but not letting them own capital because no individual does that. Probably try to long-term associate managers with their organization so they have an internal incentive to care about the organization’s long-term success. Probably retired managers get some kind of ongoing position (something like a board of directors slot?) with the organization, both to encourage concern for the organization’s long-term viability and to retain institutional memory.

      Some capital-owning organizations will probably mainly be lending and borrowing, more-or-less mirroring financial companies in capitalist societies. Everyone working there is a worker, albeit with luxurious workplaces and high salary for their society.

      All this looks more like capitalism than most communists would like, but retains the notion that there are no capitalists, inherited wealth is more like the rich family in town having an extra-nice house and less like Bill Gates being richer than the whole state of Montana.

      The capital is ultimately owned by the workers. The workers are everyone, the capital is in the form of stock (or we can call it something else, but really it’s stock) in the capital-owning organizations which is held in a kind of giant mutual fund by all the citizens. This basically funds an UBI, which is the only welfare around. You get more shares in the mutual fund every year you’re alive, and can choose to spend your salary to get still more. But this doesn’t go to your descendants, so we don’t get too much intergenerational transfer of wealth. As the UBI gets more generous, prices will go up, so there will still be incentives to work.

      Government is another problem. The trick is how to get meaningful feedback from the public to the government, so that bad decisionmakers get removed and bad decisions lead to loss of power. I’d go with an elected parliament and a supreme-court-like committee appointed by the party to keep the society acceptably communist.

      • angularangel says:

        a. You need capital markets, so that the best uses of capital can beat out the less important uses. This is really important in a world where technology and society changes–it needs to be possible for mainframe companies to lose capital to PC companies and later to cellphone/tablet and cloud-provider companies, or your society will become locked into current allocation patterns forever. (How much capital should be provided next year for the camera film factory?). It needs to be possible for the capital-owning organizations to shut down, or you keep Kodak and your favorite buggywhip company around forever.).

        Hmm. How does this vary compared to just “A workers enterprise remains profitable”? Is this, like, profitability compared with capital investment? So, if an enterprise has a ton of capital, but is just barely profitable, then it might get broken down for parts anyway, and it’s parts sold off to other workers enterprises that could use them better?

        • albatross11 says:

          Yes. Without this, you don’t get capital going to its most valuable uses, you get capital going to things that it has been used for in the past. That plays really poorly with fast technological change.

    • mtl1882 says:

      Are you essentially defining communism as an entirely top-down system of policy dictates that doesn’t relate to why the citizens made the choice to vote for it? I don’t really understand how this can be approached without reference to some of the things you listed as off-topic. A lot of the feasibility points are going to very much depend on what year it is and what is going on elsewhere–I get what you mean about “standing on its own” as not doing a comparative analysis with other options, but it really does not make sense in a vacuum. Some systems can kind of be steel-manned in a vacuum (for example, where everything is under control of a dictator or where everything is decentralized), but they usually don’t come into being by peaceful vote. If you have to control things across a society and it isn’t at the whim of whatever dictator seized power, a social and practical aspect necessarily comes into it, as in communism, capitalism, republicanism, etc. I think I can give it a try, but does your definition mean that people with some sort of modern western class distribution voted for a communist state, and *then* started abolishing the class system? I know not everyone is perfectly on board, but how much resistance are we dealing with, and what is in place currently? Or am I allowed to create a nation that hasn’t dealt with much centralized government before–one that has stayed relatively behind-the-times in lifestyle, though well aware of other countries’ systems? Like a *realistic* rural, traditional, somewhat tribal community?

      eta: @eyeballfrog raised some other key questions.

    • Erusian says:

      Communism actually follows quite logically if you accept Marx’s premises. Marx believed that production would soon be so large and overwhelming that capitalist profits would start to fall. Capitalists would become tyrannical so as to protect their profit margins in an increasingly inefficient system which would be overtaken by the more efficient system of Communism, which would entail new rights for people. This was supposed to be a mirror image of the transition from feudalism, where capitalism proved more efficient and workers gained new freedoms from participating in this new, superior system. Of course, the problem is the premises. Even hardcore Marxist-Leninists now accept that the Gilded Age was not a time of falling profits for capitalists.

      Anyway, you have a somewhat inaccurate view of Communist theory. And I mean simply theory: I understand there are a lot of Red Trolls who shout ‘not true Communism’ at every example. The idea is to end what they call capitalistic exploitation. Communists believe (for reasons I can get into) that economic value comes from labor and therefore capitalism generates profits by exploiting labor, where exploitation means controlling (unjustly in the Communist’s view) access to capital in order to extract profits. Thus ‘ownership of the means of production’ means ending this exploitation. It also means that everyone will be working class since jobs but not necessarily that those jobs will be equal or all financial jobs will be moot. For example, a Gosbank member who allocates money in order to manage the economy is a worker. They shouldn’t make money off that allocation of capital but they can make money off of the work of allocating it.

      Lastly, in context Marx is arguing against the proposition, “From each according to his means, to each according to his needs.” He argued this could be the case in the far future of true Communism (when, as he believed, work would be hard to come by due to superabundance). In the meantime, he suggested replacing the socialist slogan with “From each according to his means, to each according to his work.” Again, that labor theory of value.

      To steelman this, it’s a vision of a less radically different society than it’s sometimes made out to be. It, of course, has its impossibilities and its problems. But the idea is not that there will be no CEOs, no bosses, or complete equality or that everyone will receive a daily allotment of goods simply based on their value as human beings. Quite the contrary: if you don’t work, you don’t eat can be entirely in line with Communist principles. The idea is simply that profits will instead go to the workers that (according to Marxist economics) generate them instead of to owners of capital. This means all workers will be paid more and have more incentive towards productivity while removing parasites who get rich simply by exploiting other people. It only needs to abolish one market: the market for capital like owning a factory. It could continue to operate a market for consumer goods like milk and even have competition within that market between non-exploitative worker firms.

      Of course, you can disagree on the nature of capitalists as parasitic or profits as purely worker generated. But it’s distinctly not the utopian vision sometimes preached. Marx was an anti-utopian and he mocked the idea that the socialist future would be perfect or heaven on Earth. He simply though it would be better.

      These days, though, I don’t meet too many traditional Communists that aren’t dinosaurs. Communist/socialists seem to have mostly abandoned the critique of capitalism as inefficient or the original vision of a socialist society. In exchange, they mostly try to push ways to redistribute wealth in basically capitalist systems. For example, Guy in TN’s system doesn’t try to subvert the capitalist mode of production at all: it simply tries to control the distribution into something they consider more fair accompanied by a great weakening of property rights in order to achieve their idea of justice. This is fairly typical, so common I’ve got a name for it: redistributing the means of consumption.

    • angularangel says:

      Question:

      How would the government work? Because that’s the main failure point of Communism, IMO. The more power government has, the more important that it function efficiently, effectively, and without corruption, and the harder it is to prevent corruption without sacrificing efficiency or effectiveness.

      • angularangel says:

        My answer: Representative democracy with a robust and thorough set of checks and balances, including appropriate use of electronic technology to make information available to the citizenry, so government may be kept accountable.

  38. Why are Epstein’s lawyers contesting the suicide ruling? Seems pretty clear to me that it was indeed a suicide. What’s in it for them?

    • Doctor Mist says:

      This article in NY Mag suggests four reasons:
      1. They truly doubt the ruling.
      2. They see a natural partnership with victim representatives: the sloppy guarding, loss of video, and other suspicious circumstances raise questions about other prisoners.
      3. Suicide complicates their task: Epstein’s estate is still potentially liable for lots of damages, and his suicide sends the message that he had a guilty conscience.
      4. If he was in fact killed in custody, his estate could sue for damages.

      The last two are mainly about preserving or increasing the size of the estate, which (charitably) is part of their job and (cynically) increases their take. I presume the first reason is not intended to be taken seriously in isolation, but rather to suggest that the other three are not just venal — but then you cast the question as “what’s in it for them?” so I presume you’re not particularly concerned about whether it’s venal or not.

  39. ana53294 says:

    Interesting article on the effect of AI on value investing in public markets.

    The valuation of growth stocks seems to me to be more nuts than the value of value stocks, but it seemed nuts to be 5 years ago too, so who knows… I wouldn’t invest much in private markets, though. The debacle with WeWork shows that private investing can have even more hype than you get in public markets.

    • brad says:

      I would distinguish private investing from private equity. Maybe my understanding is outdated, but I take private equity to be a group that buys a controlling interest or entire company (public or private), generally in some way troubled, with an aim towards fixing it up and selling it off at a higher price.

      The current rescue of WeWork by Softbank proper is arguably PE, but the initial investments by Softbank’s vision fund were not.

      • ana53294 says:

        AFAIU, private means not publicly traded? At least, that’s the meaning they use in the article. Because there is a lot more information in the public markets due to disclusure requirements.

  40. Edward Scizorhands says:

    So I lost my wallet, again. (This time it might be on me and not because someone stole it.)

    In some ways this is a wake-up call that I’m doing too many things and not concentrating on the things that matter. I have a plan for that.

    However, I’m asking here because I’m wondering if there a product that can help me with not losing stuff again. Right now I am looking at Tile, which seems good enough for finding a thing that’s lost.

    But I would really like something that can be programmed to train me on good habits. What I would want is something that, each time my phone (e.g.) goes more than 1000 feet from my house and then returns to within 100 feet of it, it waits a few minutes and then makes sure I left my wallet in some specific place, and beeps at me if I fail in that.

    Can Tile, or a Tile-competitor, do that?

    • sharper13 says:

      Perhaps you’re over-complicating this? I haven’t not known where my wallet was in over 30 years. Might I suggest creating a simpler non-electronic tracking system and then just reinforcing it as a habit? This is based completely on speculation of how you handle your wallet and where you put it, so I’m generalizing and I could be completely wrong.

      For example, my wallet stays in a specific side cargo pocket (I don’t do back pocket because that’s back issues) and if I switch to new shorts in the morning, that’s when I move everything from the previous pair. My wallet is 100% of the time in one location, my shorts, and I rarely leave the house without them. On the random occasion I wear something different, without such a pocket, I pull out the two cards I may need (DL & payment) and leave my wallet in the shorts. I put them back the next time I see my wallet.

      If I tried to leave without my wallet, I’d instantly feel unbalanced, the weight is just always there, counter-balanced by cell phone.

      • Radu Floricica says:

        Yep. “Leaving anywhere” refex is: pat left pocket for phone, pat right pocket for wallet, maybe pat rear pocket for car key. Most fun is the regular moment of mild panic when the phone is missing, before I realize I’m holding it in the other hand.

        • Incurian says:

          Same here, and I’ll add that if I ever take a card out of my wallet and give it to a clerk, I keep my wallet out and open until I get the card back.

        • A1987dM says:

          Glad to find out I’m not the only one.

        • When traveling, I do it by count. Traveling in the U.S. it’s four or five items: Wallet, cell phone, backpack, laptop, and suitcase if it isn’t checked. Abroad one more, passport. From time to time make sure I have all of them.

        • moonfirestorm says:

          Most fun is the regular moment of mild panic when the phone is missing, before I realize I’m holding it in the other hand.

          My favorite variant of this is the moment of panic when I pat my pocket and don’t feel my car keys, while driving.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        I have no problem making sure I have my wallet before I leave somewhere. That is how I knew it was gone.

        I have a problem keeping track of it when I’m out and about on my day, particularly if an emergency interrupts my routine. I need to put it back someplace, and that’s the habit I need to establish, and I’ve repeatedly failed to do it just by sheer willpower, and I cannot just “well try harder.”

        • johan_larson says:

          Might be problem be that you have no specific place to keep your wallet? You generally have it with you, but it could be in any of a number of places.

          You might want to start carrying a shoulder-bag, and always keeping your wallet there. Or always keep in in your left front pants-pocket, if a shoulder-bag is too feminine for you. The point is to have one and only one place to keep your wallet.

          • brad says:

            Yes, this is what I do. Almost all the time my wallet is in one of four places: my hands because I’m using something in it, my front left pocket, my gym locker, or my bedroom nightstand. Occasionally I have to go look in yesterday’s pants because it didn’t make it to the nightstand.

        • Theodoric says:

          I’m going to second the suggestions of designating a specific place for your wallet to live at all times-for example, a specific pants pocket when you’re out, a specific place in your home when you’re at home.

        • John Schilling says:

          I have a problem keeping track of it when I’m out and about on my day, particularly if an emergency interrupts my routine.

          Clarification needed: Is the problem that you,

          A: while away from home, take out your wallet for some purpose and then leave it behind where you were doing business, or

          B: while away from home, take out your wallet for some purpose and put it back in a different pocket or compartment, or

          C: on returning home, put the wallet in a different place and don’t remember where?

          Different solution space for each of these.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            The specific situation was that I was out at a gym, where I make sure not to have my wallet with me, and then got interrupted by an emergency to come home. I packed it up quickly in a bag I don’t normally have with me. I got home and took care of the emergency, and did not realize I hadn’t put my wallet back until 24 hours later, at which point I had completely forgotten the order of events.

            I have a place to put it. But I don’t always put it there. “Just try harder” has not worked, and also does not help when something interrupts my routine.

            (Always carrying it is not an option, since I have contact dermatitis, and something pressing against me all day is bad for my skin.)

        • anonymousskimmer says:

          Have you considered a wallet chain?

          If you forget to put your wallet back someplace the next step you make will result in the wallet swinging and hitting your leg.

          If you put it back in another pocket, you can always find which pocket it’s in by following the chain.

          If someone tries to pick your pocket, there’s a good chance this will pull the chain and attract your attention.

          If you don’t want the chain to be conspicuous, you can push it into your pocket along with the wallet, or make a chain out of nylon or kevlar rope.

          For John Schilling’s C alternative, you can unclip it from your belt and clip it around the handle of your front door when at home. At the very least, the addition of the chain will make it larger: more visible, and fewer places to misplace it.

          https://www.google.com/search?q=wallet+chain

        • sharper13 says:

          I guess I didn’t explain my suggestion very well.

          The idea of having one place for it is that it’s either in that one place (a specific pocket, for instance), or else in your hand while you’re using it.

          If you never put it anywhere else, you literally can’t leave it somewhere else.

    • Paul Brinkley says:

      My solution is similar to David Friedman’s. I remember a phrase: wallet, keys, phone. Wallet, keys, phone. Next, I remember where those usually go: left front pocket, right front pocket, shirt pocket. They go in analogous jacket pockets if I’m wearing one.

      Front pockets, not back, for two reasons: one, they’re uncomfortable to sit on; two, they’re much harder for pickpockets to reach. A true wallet would be uncomfortable in front, too, so I go even further: I don’t carry a wallet. Instead, I take small bills of cash and wrap them around my important cards (credit, DL, subway pass, etc.), creating a very slim deck. That’s my “wallet”.

      Mostly, though, it’s remembering that phrase.

  41. ARabbiAndAFrog says:

    Shower political thought: The main point of democracy is not allowing people to vote agreeable politicians into office, but forcing politicians to periodically beg public for permission to rule, creating power dynamic different from when rulers are divinely appointed or something.

    • People sometimes overestimate how secure historical rulers were. There are a lot of people you usually have to placate. Even during peak “divine right of kings”, they were still assassinated, usurped and undermined. The big thing about democracy is that you have a wider constituency to worry about.

      • ARabbiAndAFrog says:

        Sure, you can rebel or assassinate rulers under any regime, but democracy is the only one where wanting them out is acceptable and not high treason.

        • Rulership, like possession, is usually ninth-tenths of the law. If you assassinate the king and take control of the reins power fast enough while placating the nobles, you can often legitimize your actions. During the Roman Crisis of the Third Century, they actually had more turnover then the US has had.

          Usually it is harder to boot off a king than a President, so you’re not wrong in that respect. But in non-democracies, they manage to keep their position not only because of the their “rightful” status, but because they are actively working to legitimize their actions to their essential supporters. If you’ve never read it, the Dictators Handbook talks about this coalition politics.

          There’s a good example of this with a Chinese emperor during the Song Dynasty. China has historically had a strong monarchy. During this dynasty, there was only one emperor who was deposed. Emperor Guangzong had some kind of mental illness, was manipulated by his wife and had an antagonistic relationship with his father. But what really did him in was not doing the proper funeral rites after his fathers death. He was forced to abdicate the throne to his son and sent away from the palace. No one was punished for this treasonous act.

          • John Schilling says:

            Rulership, like possession, is usually ninth-tenths of the law. If you assassinate the king and take control of the reins power fast enough while placating the nobles,

            “Placating the nobles” is almost always the hardest part of this, and if you can pull it off the “assassinate the king” part may be redundant. Helpful, to be sure, but in a pinch whatever excuse you come up with for “and that’s why we had to kill him” may do just as well for “and that’s why we had to send him into exile”.

            Valkyrie is recommended as a reasonably modern and reasonably entertaining example of this. Killing Adolf Hitler, the boring straightforward 25% of the problem. Arranging for someone sensible to rule Germany in the aftermath, the interesting 75% of the problem. Take note, time travelers.

          • @John

            Of course the question of legitimacy is massively complicated. Sometimes, any popular general can take his army, march to the capital and proclaim himself emperor, while the nobles are really helpless to do much. Sometimes, you need a particularly weak emperor, impeccable credentials and promises to give out goodies to supporters while making significant signs of submission to the nobles so they can accept you. And often it’s easier to let the emperor be a figurehead while you retain real power. The one thing that’s pretty consistent is that you need to be active to maintain power.

          • albatross11 says:

            Democracy has regime change as a normal part of the operation of the system, rather than as an exceptional case that’s taken when it turns out the king is stupid or crazy or captured by some ideology that will lead to disaster. Whatever alternatives to democracy we might end up with need to retain this property–the change of the people at the top is a normal operation that happens every so often, so everyone is used to it and expects it and you lose legitimacy by trying to refuse it.

            If the monarch has limited powers, you can get that by allowing his advisors to be replaced. At the extreme end of this, you get modern constitutional monarchies. The queen is still the queen whether Theresa May or Boris Johnson is prime minister.

    • pancrea says:

      Related thought: the main point of democracy is providing everyone with a way to burn off their frustration constructively. If you’re angry about something, you can channel that energy into going door-to-door reminding people to vote for your candidate; nobody has to get more and more frustrated and eventually have a violent revolution.

      • Doctor Mist says:

        M*ldbug said, “Just as pornography can stimulate the human sex drive without providing any actual sex, democracy can stimulate the human power drive without providing any actual power.”

        • Le Maistre Chat says:

          Yeah, but he meant that as a bad thing.
          Here we’re talking about jacking off to political change as a violence-minimizing feature.

      • anonymousskimmer says:

        The main reason for democracy* is that various people didn’t have a say in their government, got angry enough to successfully form a new government because of this, and were righteous enough to ensure that this wouldn’t happen again in their new government (for people like them, at least).

        Try not to attribute to crass ends that which can be better explained by noble ends.

        * – possibly not in parliamentary monarchies, where it seems to be for reasons more along the lines raised here.

  42. soreff says:

    Triangle Shirtwaist company motto:
    “It is better to plummet than to burn”

    • anonymousskimmer says:

      https://slatestarcodex.com/comments/

      Slate Star Codex has lower standards than either ancient Sufis or preachy Victorians, and so we only require you to pass at least two of those three gates.

      If you make a comment here, it had better be either true and necessary, true and kind, or kind and necessary.

  43. johan_larson says:

    If you’re a fan of military history, you might enjoy Netflix’s new series, Greatest Events of WWII in Color. The pictures are nice of course, but the best part is the interviews with authors and scholars, including some from Germany. I came away with a better understanding of why the Japanese were so keen on seizing territory in Asia, and how pervasive use of methamphetamine by German infantrymen contributed to the vigor of their early campaigns.

    The discussion of stimulants got me thinking. Our society features pervasive use of one stimulant, caffeine, by much of the adult population, and basically no one seems to have a problem with that. If we wanted to turn that up a notch, what chemical would be be the next step up in potency?

    • metacelsus says:

      Our society features pervasive use of one stimulant, caffeine, by much of the adult population, and basically no one seems to have a problem with that. If we wanted to turn that up a notch, what chemical would be be the next step up in potency?

      Probably modafinil.

    • The Nybbler says:

      Cocaine, unironically. Coca leaf is chewed and brewed in several South American countries, and used to be present in Coca-Cola.

      Amphetamine (though not meth, which would be at least another notch beyond) would be another possibility; one could argue it’s already in wide use by a particular segment of the adult population.

    • John Schilling says:

      Our society features pervasive use of one stimulant, caffeine, by much of the adult population

      One and three quarters, I should say. Half a point for nicotine, whose widespread use and social acceptability we haven’t quite been able to eradicate – though we might get there if the moral panic around vaping gets dialed up another notch. Quarter point for adderall, off-label and off-prescription use thereof within certain subcultures.

      I’m not sure if nicotine would count as a step up from caffeine, or just an equivalent alternative. Adderall, would definitely be a step up.

      • Cliff says:

        I have read that nicotine is a non-addictive wonder drug that improves focus and reduces Parkinson’s risk…

  44. angularangel says:

    Going to post another link to the project I’ve been working on for a while, cause I mentioned it below. I haven’t actually worked on this any lately, but I still have a partiall-functional demo website up, and you can find links to the repos and the like, if you’re interested.

    To give you the short version, it’s supposed to be a new kind of internet forum. The idea being that each post can be in response to any number of other posts, and can have any number of other posts in response to it, and these are all displayed in a fancy graph, so people can navigate easily. (Opinions may vary on the easy navigation part, but, I’ll work on it. XD)

    agoraforum.website

    • Nancy Lebovitz says:

      The idea sounds promising– I’ve been wanting trn for the web for a long time, and it had that style of navigation though just for a tree structure.

      Your “about” page is black on dark blue.

    • Incurian says:

      Really neat concept!

      ETA: I don’t know much about Git, but I suspect there is a lot of similarity.

  45. brad says:

    This article doesn’t inform or educate in any way, but I found it poignant: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/22/world/asia/the-jungle-prince-of-delhi.html

    • Le Maistre Chat says:

      Ideal headline: Indian Royalty Out of Lucknow

      It’s all so atypical. I don’t know what percent of Muslim Princely States had Shi’a princes, but I assume they were a minority. The uncanny combination of normalcy and assertive strangeness (the “princess” dressing like any other Indian… with a handgun in her sari, in a railway station, for a decade). The way their home in the middle of Delhi has been reclaimed by nature, in the form of an invasive tree species.

      And now, finally, there were some facts.

      They were, or had been, an ordinary family.

      Their father had been the registrar of Lucknow University, Inayatullah Butt.

      My friend’s name was not Prince Cyrus, or Prince Ali Raza, or Prince anything.

      He was plain old Mickey Butt.

  46. EchoChaos says:

    This is a short reply to Atlas’s long post above, but I do want to at least address it.

    About the war in Yemen. Wars are nasty and brutal affairs. Always have been, always will be. We are arming an ally participating in a particularly nasty one. This sucks. However, being pro-war is completely different from being pro ethnic cleansing.

    They are on different moral levels entirely, in my opinion. You can feel free to disagree. But one can support or oppose a war (any war) based on many things, but just war exists in my mind, and once war has begun, efforts to win that war can often come at the expense of civilians.

    Most of those examples you include are supports of wartime campaigns that were believed to be necessary to win. Would you have said that FDR shouldn’t have blockaded Germany and Japan in World War II because German and Japanese citizens were starving and suffering? Obviously not. The moral imperative to victory was more important than the suffering of enemy citizens. Much as I as a Southerner resent him, Sherman’s actions were wartime and not ethnic cleansing.

    Jackson IS rightly condemned, and was even at the time. His actions were far closer to what we would call ethnic cleansing. Imagine the fury if that was the example that Shapiro had used and I think you’ll understand pretty easily my sentiment.

    In short, my view is that war is different than peace, and what is justified at war can never be justified at peace. We obviously have a different viewpoint here, and I respect that. But using war as your point of argument dramatically undercuts your counter in my view, because war is something I view as acceptable and certain actions unacceptable in peace to be acceptable in war, such as civilian casualties.

    • Nick says:

      At a tangent: Elizabeth Anscombe famously wrote a pamphlet condemning her university’s giving Harry Truman a degree, on account of his being a war criminal. Most would disagree with Anscombe’s argument, but she says a lot of other interesting things along the way, and has some amazing polemics:

      I have long been puzzled by the common cant about President Truman’s courage in making this decision. Of course, I know that you can be cowardly without having reason to think you are in danger. But how can you be courageous? Light has come to me lately: the term is an acknowledgement of the truth. Mr. Truman was brave because, and only because, what he did was so bad. But I think the judgement unsound. Given the right circumstances (e.g. that no one whose opinion matters will disapprove), a quite mediocre person can do spectacularly wicked things without thereby becoming impressive.